by Judith Curry
Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week.
From the warm side
Michael Mann’s new book is out: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Here are some of the editorial reviews cited at amazon.com:
Very few people have sounded more important alarms about our climate future, and very few people have paid a higher price for doing so. Michael Mann is a hero, and this book is a remarkable account of the science and politics of the defining issue of our time. (Bill McKibben, author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet 1/20/2012)
The brilliant and courageous climatologist Michael Mann knows what it’s like to be viciously attacked by the well-funded deniers of scientific evidence and how critical it is to respond. In this gripping, personal, front-lines account of climate politics, Mann tells the “hockey stick” story, exposing the forces behind the denialist rhetoric, refuting the charges of disinformation campaigns, and eloquently conveying the importance of both doing great science and communicating its societal implications to a wider public. (Paul R. Ehrlich, co-author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment and Humanity on a Tightrope )
Although not initially of his own choosing, Michael Mann has been the most important, resilient, and outspoken warrior in the climate battle–responding to threats and persecution with courage and resolve every step of the way. Anyone who cares about the climate issue must read his fascinating–and enraging–story.(Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future )
In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Michael Mann presents his conviction that climate change is real and potentially deadly, and defends his now famous “Hockey Stick Graph.” A truly readable book on a topic that will remain evergreen.(James Lovelock, author of A New Look at Life on Earth and The Revenge of Gaia )
A must read to appreciate the endless disinformation campaign by climate change deniers at the highest levels of government and corporate America…and the chilling, but serious implications of the crusade to discredit distinguished scientists like Michael Mann. (Sherwood Boehlert, Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives 1983-2007, former chairman of the House Science Committee )
As one of the nation’s leading climate researchers, no one has felt the brunt of the attacks from politicians and the fossil fuel industry more than Michael Mann. This is his personal account from the center of the maelstrom, documenting the lies and distortions about his work and his heroic efforts to stand up for scientific truth. (Henry Waxman, Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee )
Scott Mandia has posted an extensive review on amazon.com, which is reproduced at planet3.0.
The book is available on kindle, $9.99 (USD). I plan to buy a copy and read it, then reread Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion. Should be an interesting exercise.
—
A new video has hit the streets Why climate change makes the world suck. It is targeted at the younger audiences. Greg Craven, eat dust.
From the cold side
1) Earth’s Polar Ice Melting Less Than Thought
Better technology yields better data. The bad news is the extra water from 2003-2010 would fill Lake Erie eight times
(2) The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
Meltwater from Asia’s peaks is much less then previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern
Latif says that half of the 0.8°C of global warming we’ve seen since 1850 is due to natural causes. Marotzke says that ocean cycles stopped the warming over the last 12 years.
It was not just a mistake that Himalayan glaciers were said to melt by 2035, rather than by 2350. Richard North has documented that the same alarmist had repeated the 2035 date for years. The claim about a misreading of 2350 was just spin, with no basis in facts.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/glacier-show-comedy-in-many-parts.html
In view of clear evidence that:
1. Astronomer Piers Corbyn is better able to forecast long term weather and climate changes than government agencies
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No7.pdf
2. Mutual corruption of politics/science over my 50 year research career http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Summary_of_Career.pdf
3. The GWPF Report on “The Royal Society and Climate Change”
http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/montford-royal_society.pdf
4. Information here and elsewhere documenting continued intransigence and unwillingness of the US NAS, the UK RS and the UN IPCC to openly consider all high quality experimental observations and measurements
http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/10/nullius-in-verba/
5. Questions in Australia and Germany over government reports about “The Clean Energy Future” http://barnabyisright.com/2012/02/11/an-oscar-for-the-clean-energy-future/
https://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/germany-in-skeptical-turmoil-on-both-climate-and-solarwindfarms/
6. The impending release of a new book, “Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution” by co-founders and national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots: Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin
Citizens of all member nations of the formerly “Free West” may be forced to join in a “United revolution to restore public control of government.”
That would be a disaster for government science in the West, but it may be the only way that leaders of the US NAS, the UK RS, and the UN IPCC will awaken to reality.
A friend requested this one-page summary of The Sun: The nuclear furnace that made our elements and sustains our lives:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/The_Sun.pdf
If hyperlinks in the document don’t work, try
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/The_Sun.doc
Questions/comments would be appreciated
The Congressional endorsements of Mann help explain why research funding is heavily biased toward internal AGW issues and away from natural variability.
BTW Lake Erie is shallow, hence small.
“The bad news is the extra water from 2003-2010 would fill Lake Erie eight times.”
Eight times over eight(?) years? Hocus-pocus. A great way to inflate a rate to make it seem large. Why stop there? “Or Lake Ontario in 27 years”. “Or Lake Superior in 200 years”.
Verily, verily, a drop in the bucket. Except for Dr. Curry (who is duty-bound to read it), keep your hand on your wallet.
Following the link, a commenter mentioned this paper:
Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming
Michael Beenstock1 and Yaniv Reingewertz1
http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf
So if the statisticians haven’t, the economists will refute AGW.
blouis79:
Michael Beenstock1 and Yaniv Reingewertz1
Has the paper been published yet? I downloaded it long ago, and I wrote the authors to ask for more information, but they never wrote back.
Sorry for the double post. It belongs here.
I can only presume it was submitted to Nature and got rejected. Hard to know if it was rejected for scientific or political reasons.
This one is similar and includes oceans and has been published.
http://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeecsdana/v_3A51_3Ay_3A2006_3Ai_3A2_3Ap_3A1330-1346.htm
Commentary by author:
http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/polynomial-cointegration-and-global.html
blouis79, thank you for the links.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide has had no significant effect on average global temperature as demonstrated in detail in the pdf made public 11/24/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true This also shows what did cause the 20th century warm up and accurately predicted the measured average global temperatures since 1990.
“Latif says that half of the 0.8°C of global warming we’ve seen since 1850 is due to natural causes”
Is there a trend amongst climate scientists to tip-toe away from Thermogeddon?
From 2009:
From 2010:
“Latif said his research suggested that up to half the warming seen over the 20th century was down to this natural ocean effect, … “No climate specialist would ever say that 100% of the warming we have seen is down to greenhouse gas emissions.””
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/11/climate-change-global-warming-mojib-latif
What’s interesting to me is that anyone who self-identifies as a “skeptic” would need to have that explained to them.
Now, I wonder if anyone has explained it to Latif – because you know, in the article that Judith linked, they say that he doesn’t even realize the meaning of what he said.
Sheece.
This is the kind of total garbage that I often find among “skeptics.” Again, the question is why skeptics would not try to differentiate their views from this nonsense.
Joshua –
Are you sure you’re not Holly in disguise?
My best interpretation is that you’re exceedingly cranky at the moment because you battered one of your thumbs with a hammer, and it isn’t something you’ve done for 20 years.
Anteros –
Did you read that article that Judith linked? Seriously? They think that Latif “probably” didn’t realize what he said?
Seriously?
OK I think I see the possible source of the confusion.is a misprint in my first post,, for which many apologies.
Can we all agree that if I repost it as
‘ So of all of the huge (0.7K) warming over the last 100 years, only about 0.35K (of a total temperature of about 288K) is down to the Killer Gas! About one third of a whole degree in nearly three hundred!
Colour me unfazed by the future prospects of another third of a degree in four more human generations.’
I will not be misleading about the sums.
My error was to look at 50 years, not 100. Sorry
Pekka: “Do you seriously propose that your example has any slightest relevance on the issue.”
Yes.
Do you seriously propose that the capability of natural warming drops to less than half of what it was capable of doing in the 1910-1940 time frame.
By what mechanism do you propose this occurred?
Unless you have perfect understanding of the natural warming in the first half of the 20th century, then it MUST be assumed that only warming ABOVE the pre-1950 rate is non-natural (and even then thats a big assumption).
If it warmed by .2C per decade 1910 to 1940 and then warmed at .4C per decade 1970 to 2000 then I you could argue CO2 was responsible for .2C of the .4C/
But the the post-1950 RATE of warming is no different than pre-1950 and therefore we must assume CO2 is capable of ZERO warming.
Latimer (that was you, wasn’t it Latimer? –
That’s quite a duck we have there.
Here is what is clear, we have some smart people who are interpreting (or at least claiming to interpret) his statement in different ways. You are entirely correct that English is a flexible language – and that is precisely why it become relevant how we honestly think he intended his statement to be interpreted.
Now – your interpretation of his intended meaning could, I suppose, be correct. However, if your interpretation was correct, it would mean one or both of the following:
1) As suggested by the article Judith linked, his statement was, apparently, a refutation of what he has stated in the past. That it would be in contrast to earlier statements of his is reflected in his earlier comment that:
2) As suggested by the article Judith linked, he didn’t “realize” what he was saying.
Now the article indicated that both (1) and (2) are true. It seems highly unlikely to me that (1) would be true and absolutely ridiculous that (2) is true. So, that’s the reason for my question. My guess is that you’ll duck once again, but I’ll still ask again.
I know how you want to interpret his meaning (because of your partisan outlook on the climate debate), but you must have some opinion on whether your interpretation is really in line with how he views the science of the matter.
Which is it? Do you believe that your interpretation of his freakin’ words is in line with his view of the science, or not?
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, Latimer.
@joshua
I have no idea what is interpretation of the universe is. I have never considered looking into his mind and trying to understand it. No doubt when he feels that he wants to tell us all about it, he will be perfectly able to do so. If you are really interested, write to him and frigging well ask him.what he thinks. If you think he is being inconsistent, I’m sure he’ll be delighted (or not) for you to point it out to him.
But where he *has* chosen to tell us something is in his perfectly understandable quantitative description:
‘up to half the warming seen over the 20th century was down to this natural ocean effect’
Leaving the other (0.35C) to come from all other causes, including CO2 driven AGW.
Do let us know how he replies to your missive. If its printable in a family newspaper.
Josh you are proud of your brothers, the other liars. They were saying that planet is warming by 0,2C degrees. When I pointed on few blogs that: GLOBAL warming is ZERO B] it’s theoretically impossible to be precise to 0,2 degrees even if GLOBAL warming was for real – they started into ”decadel” Well multiply zero by 10, it’s still zero. Multiply by 100, still zero! Joshua, it’s time to get you into the confession box. You are all running out of inspirations – you are all starting to sound more and more silly. Stop telling silly things to the fake Skeptics; they have enough of their own
Bruce, you missed out a chunk of that paragraph:
“Latif said his research suggested that up to half the warming seen over the 20th century was down to this natural ocean effect, but said that was consistent with the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “No climate specialist would ever say that 100% of the warming we have seen is down to greenhouse gas emissions.” ”
I followed the link and read the whole thing. Nothing in there could be seen to support the ‘skeptical’ position.
So of all of the huge (0.7K) warming over the last 50 years, only about 0.35K (of a total temperature of about 288K) is down to the Killer Gas! About one third of a whole degree in nearly three hundred!
Colour me unfazed by the future prospects of another third of a degree in two more human generations.
And in other news, meteorologists confirm that the annual temperature range within the UK is about 50K (+/- 5K) from summer to winter. And always has been. In less temperate climes it is much wider.
Cripes..altering that by one third of a degree is bound to bring the End of Civilisation As We Know It
[And according to J Hansen, ‘all life on earth’]
That’s not what Latif said. His statement was about the whole century. As the first part was almost 100% natural, the share of anthropogenic must be well beyond 50% for the rest.
Actually I think that many scientists would say that the athropogenic contribution may well be more than 100% over the latest 50 years, i.e. the natural change may well be negative, although a positive natural contribution is perhaps more likely or at least was for a period ending 2000. Now the likelihood of negative natural contribution has grown as the overall change as been flat after 2000.
@anteros
But just looking at my local weather station, the temperature has already gone down 7K in five hours, and the mass extermination doesn’t seem to have started yet.
So why will it happen for an average change of 0.3K in 5 years? Which is about 1/1,750,000 times slower than it has already been this afternoon?
And if the garden birdies can survive tonight’s -10C bless their little hearts, why will their great (xn) granchildren snuff it for an imperceptible rise in 50 years?
I am confused by this, but I know that there are lots of clever people out there who can explain it so simply that I can tell all my mates in the Dog and Duck.
@pekka
Total warming = 0.7K
Half of 0.7K = 0.35K
When it occurs is irrelevant.
Example.
You gave me 50 cents yesterday. Louise gave me 50 cents today.
I now have 100 cents, 50% from you, 50% from Louise.
But if
Louise gave me 50 cents yesterday you gave me 50 cents today, I also have 100 cents, 50 from you and 50 from her. Arithmetic is time-independent.
That’s your statement, not Latif’s.
Louise, I didn’t leave anything important out. But tell me, where does the IPCC claim half the warming is natural? Where do the quantify it?
@pekka
So please explain , in simple terms, eg with an example similar to mine, where my statement and what Latif said are different.
Pekka: “As the first part was almost 100% natural, the share of anthropogenic must be well beyond 50% for the rest.”
What is the defining signature of natural versus anthropogenic?
Why would there NO natural warming past 1950? How is that possible?
Would not a logical position be:
100% natural until 1950. Post 1950: the same amount of natural plus whatever extra CO2 caused.
And since pre-1950 warming was 1C from 1920 to 1943, then only warming above 1C post 1950 could be CO2. (I think that works out to a negative value for CO2)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/to:1943/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1977/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1943/to:1977/trend
Latimer Adler:
I said it very clearly in my first message. If you don’t understand that then I cannot help.
Bruce:
I’m not commenting on relative signs but on absolute signs. CO2 has certainly a warming influence, but the natural variability is expected to be variability. Variability results sometimes in positive and sometimes in negative effects. Presently there are no theories that could predict, how natural variability develops, but from historical data we can make attributions with some justification.
We can attribute essentially everything up to 1950 to natural variability, but after 1950 anthropogenic may be an essential part. The rapid rise of temperature from 1970 to 2000 is very likely to be a combination of anthropogenic and natural variability that was positive, but before 1970 and after 1998 the natural variability may have been negative. Over the whole 50 year period 1961-2011 the overall sign of the natural variability is impossible to tell with confidence. Thus the anthropogenic part may be more or less than the observed one.
Sorry Pekka. There is zero justification in assuming that post-1950 natural warming is less than pre-1950 natural warming.
Therefore Co2 warming (using the false assumption that no other variables have changed) can only be the amount of warming above what was seen pre-1950.
Clearly Co2 warming is miniscule and possibly negative.
Three times in the last century and a half the rate of temperature rise has been the same, and for the same reason, the oceanic oscillations. Only the last of these rises co-incided with a rise in CO2, suggesting an absent or minimal CO2 effect. It is only suggested so because we don’t know for sure, only suspect, that the similarity of the three rises was from the same causes.
Pekka,
That is how I understand the dynamic. So how can we look at the relative influence of natural and anthropogenic effects?
This comes from Wong et al (2006)
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
Reexamination of the Observed Decadal Variability of the Earth Radiation Budget Using Altitude-Corrected ERBE/ERBS Nonscanner WFOV Data
As the trend in IR was positive in the period – more IR out – it suggests SW changes were relatively important. It is the same in the CERES record by the way – in that the big change was in SW.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Bruce,
I’m discussing natural variability, which by definition includes ups and downs. You propose persistent natural warming. There’s most certainly much evidence against this strong persistent natural warming as that contradicts with what we know about history. There remains the intermedidate possibility of slower variability with periods of 200-300 years or so. There’s not much evidence to support strong variability on such time scales, but I don’t think that we can firmly exclude that possibility.
The easiest way to explain the temperature history is, however, that which combines natural variability with periods up to about 60 years and significant AGW. As long as all other explanations lack any real support I stick to that.
Pekka
If the global warming we observed from around 1910 to around 1940 was caused principally by (not well understood or identified) “natural forcing factors and variability” (as you say) , then there is no sound reason to believe that the statistically indistinguishable warming we witnessed the last 30 years of the 20th century could not also have been caused by the same natural factors, right?
To argue otherwise would be to fall into the logic trap of:
1. Our models cannot explain the early 20th century warming
2. We know that the (statistically indistinguishable) late 20th century warming was caused principally by CO2.
3. How do we know this?
4. Because our models cannot explain it any other way.
This is a logical fallacy.
An “argument from ignorance” relies on the lack of knowledge to prove a point. It ignores that there could be as yet unidentified or improperly quantified factors or mechanisms, which could be the root cause of the observed phenomenon.
It is clear (as I’m sure you will agree) that we do not know everything there is to know about all the possible root causes for changes in our planet’s climate, and we have no empirical data, based on real-time physical observations or reproducible experimentation, to clearly implicate one or another factor.
So we are left with a guessing game based on theoretical deliberations and using model simulations.
This is all well and good, as long as we do not delude ourselves into thinking we really know what has caused past climate changes by myopically fixating on human GHGs (principally CO2) as the universal “climate control knob”.
If “natural factors” were strong enough to cause the early 20th century warming cycle, there is no compelling reason that they could not also have been strong enough to cause the statistically indistinguishable late 20th century warming cycle.
And that is the basic problem for the “CO2 climate control knob” hypothesis upon which the CAGW premise rests.
Max
Max,
The difference is in the starting temperature. What little we know from the earlier temperature history tells that it’s more likely to have a strong warming period, when we start at a lower temperature. That’s not a moot point, but very relevant for the issue.
@pekka
‘I said it very clearly in my first message’
Here’s what you said
‘As the first part was almost 100% natural, the share of anthropogenic must be well beyond 50% for the rest.’
…with which I have no disagreement. It is exactly the same as my ’50 cents from you and 50 cents from Louise’ example.
Why not do the decent thing and agree that my analysis of 50% of 0.7C being 0.35C is entirely correct? Jesus, this is not anything beyond simple fractions that I learnt at about age 6.
‘
Looks like most of my regular garden visitors have managed to survive the last two very cold nights (-8C, -9C) that we’ve had in Surrey, UK.
For which we should all give thanks. But it makes me even more puzzled than usual about why some think that a small increase in average temperature will brong about a mass extinction of the goldfinches and robins and nuthatches and woodpeckers that grace my garden.
And I get even more puzzled when I look in my bird book and see that these species are already widely known in parts of Southern Europe where the average temperature has always been a lot warmer than it will be here, even in the most lurid of alarmist fantasises.
So how can this be? An individual bird only loves within its local climate and knows nothing of ‘global average temperature’. How come they’re all gonna die if it gets a wee bit warmer at the North Pole or somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away?
LA
PS: Answers involving ‘teleconnections’ or some variant thereof will be declared invalid unless there is a convincing experimental demonstration of a physical mechanism also attached.
Pekka:
Do you have a plausible explanation for this phenomenon?
Peter317 | February 12, 2012 at 5:50 am |
That’s natural, if the average temperature is largely determined by forcings over periods of a couple of hundreds years or so. If that’s the case then the natural variability will cause deviations form the average, but returning to the average is always more likely than deviating further of it.
There are many alternatives for the average. It may be a true well defined average for fixed forcings, but it may also be the average for an attractor that is typically stable over periods of few hundreds of years, but may change over longer periods. The Earth system is complex enough for allowing many alternative basic bahaviors, but appears to behave regularly enough for making some kind of averages useful concepts.
You appear to be assuming that ‘natural’ deviations are always in the direction of cooling.
Besides which, once any particular event has happened, its probability has already, by definition, become unity – so its prior likelihood of occurring is no longer meaningful.
“Peter317 | February 12, 2012 at 6:49 am |
You appear to be assuming that ‘natural’ deviations are always in the direction of cooling. Besides which, once any particular event has happened, its probability has already, by definition, become unity – so its prior likelihood of occurring is no longer meaningful.”
Increasing isolation has reduced cloud cover. Earth has warmed a total of 1.2K in 360 years. Of isolation 99.6% accounts for temperature, natural forcing of .04% being the increase in the Suns isolation. Happy Days.
No, I certainly don’t assume that but “variability” means that it’s sometimes up and somtimes down. When the variability has lead to an upwards deviation, it’s more likely that the next change is down and vice versa.
Pekka,
That doesn’t explain, “…it’s more likely to have a strong warming period, when we start at a lower temperature”
It does.
Change up is the more likely the lower the starting point is – and vice versa. That invloves the assumption that the average has not changed during the period, but that’s what I have already given as an assumption.
Peter –
I believe that Pekka is working from the assumption that “lower temperatures” = below “average.”
Is this really so complicated?
Latimer –
The discussion here is w/r/t what Latif said.
Do you believe that Latif thinks that the ACO2 influence on post mid-century warming is bounded at 50%?
Before you answer, consider that he has also previously said:
Or perhaps you agree with the author of the article Judith linked, and that Latif doesn’t realize what it is that he says?
Pekka, a simple analogy.
You have a pot of liquid on the stove. You turn the burner to 3. The pot is slowly warming at .02C per minute. The heat source is the gas flame or electric element.
30 minutes later the pot is .6C warmer. Thats OldTemp.
You do not adjust the burner.
You put on a lid.
30 minutes later you measure the temperature of the liquid again and it is NewTemp.
The effect of the lid = NewTemp – .6C
The lid is CO2 and in the 20th century NewTemp – OldTemp is pretty much zero.
The warming in 1910 to 1940 is just as much (if not slightly more per year) than the post 1950 warming spurt that really didn’t get going until 1980.
CO2 has Zero effect.
Bruce,
Do you seriously propose that your example has any slightest relevance on the issue.
Anybody can invent any number of irrelevant parallels. Only those analogies have any relevanse that can be quantitatively shown to agree with the basic issue being considered, but at that point even those are useless, because the validity had to be checked by analysing the actual case.
@joshy
You ask whether I
‘Do you believe that Latif thinks that the ACO2 influence on post mid-century warming is bounded at 50%?’
Don’t know, care less. I am not able to read anybody else’s mind.
But what he said was that
‘his research suggested that up to half the warming seen over the 20th century was down to this natural ocean effect’
So, if half the warming comes from this cause, then only another half can be caused by other factors like AGW or whatever else it may be.
Unless he has invented a magic mathematics machine where 1-(1/2)¬=(1/2) anymore.
And before you pile in with your convoluted and bizarre explanations of what he really meant by this usage, ponder that English is a very flexible language. It is possible to say almost anything you want with some verbal precision.
And he chose this very simple and direct construction to make his point, Had he meant to say something different he was perfectly at liberty to do so. But he didn’t.
First: Latif said up to half. That means to me 50% or less.
Second. The first and second halfs are different. Everybody agrees that the first half is almost totally natural. As the first half represents a sizable factor of the whole increase Latif’s statement does not allow for 50% natural for the second half.
Pekka,
The argument was about the strong warming event in the early part of the 20th century.
Just because such an event might have been statistically more likely before the event, says nothing about how strong the event would be, neither does it explain anything about how or why that event happened.
And once the event happened, and it did, the prior likelihood of it happening became meaningless.
Yes, we know that the warming occurred in 1910-40. That did not provide reason to expect rapid warming in 1970-2000.
Yes, but without explaining why the warming occurred in 1910-1940 (presumably some sort of natural climate variation), our explanations of the warming 1970-2000 as anthropogenically forced are less convincing. What is the argument that whatever caused the warming in 1910-1940 is not a major (or even dominant) contributing factor to causing the warming 1970-2000?
We can separate to possible classes of mechanisms for the change of temperature since 1970.
One class is formed by mechanisms that are not excluded, but which lack all specific evidence of being influential over that period.
The second class is formed by mechanisms that are known to exist at some level and to have essentially the right timing. The expected strength of this class may, however, be largely open.
According to the rules of Bayesian inference the empirical observations support rather strongly the second class while the importance of the first class cannot be excluded.
(I don’t claim that natural variation is not likely have a role in the development. On the contrary I believe that it’s also important, but I have discussed above specific points and arguments for which this belief is of secondary significance.)
We can separate two possible classes ..
Although the combination of factors responsible for warming in the first half of the twentieth century can’t be estimated as accurately as the post-1950 factors, the general outlines are fairly well known for both halves of the century. An example of the natural and anthropogenic forcings is found in Gregory and Forster 2008 (see for example Fig. 5), and other sources cite similar values, although there is some disagreement about the trajectory of cooling anthropogenic aerosols after 1990 (declining vs flat aerosol trends).
Basically, pre-1950 warming involved anthropogenic GHGs (mainly CO2), as well as declining volcanic aerosols, with solar changes playing a minor role from 1900 to 1950. After 1950, the GHGs dominated. Unforced internal climate fluctuations are poorly known pre-1950 because ocean heat data were not available, but can have played only a minor role post-1950 because ocean heat uptake demonstrates that almost all the net warming was a forced response when averaged over the entire interval, although internal mode fluctuations may have exerted large effects during sub-intervals..
For an additional look at GHG warming estimates taken in isolation, see GHG warming. Note that this includes methane and other anthropogenic GHGs, although CO2 exerts most of the effect.
“Assumptions,” “estimates,” “Bayesian inferences.” Such is the stuff that “climate science” is made of, and on which we are supposed to decarbonize the world.
I think we can agree that attempt by warmers to explain away pre-1950 warming are big failures.
But the idea that solar changes stopped after 1050 are absurd.
In the UK bright sunshine rose 8% at the same time as the CO2 warming supposedly occurred. And yet it is ignored.
http://i40.tinypic.com/xgfyok.jpg
As for volcanoes … how does that theory work again?
Katmai in 1912 ejected more material than Pinatubo. Yet the post 1910 warming really took off. There were a lot of VEI4 , 5 and 6 eruptions during 1910 to 1940.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_volcanic_eruptions_of_the_20th_Century
Latimer –
Looks like I misplaced my previous post. Just because I wouldn’t want you to miss it, I’ll repost:
Latimer (that was you, wasn’t it Latimer? –
That’s quite a duck we have there.
Here is what is clear, we have some smart people who are interpreting (or at least claiming to interpret) Latif’s statement in different ways. You are entirely correct that English is a flexible language – and that is precisely why it become relevant how we honestly think he intended his statement to be interpreted.
Now – your interpretation of his intended meaning could, I suppose, be correct. However, if your interpretation was correct, it would mean one or both of the following:
1) As suggested by the article Judith linked, his statement was, apparently, a refutation of what he has stated in the past. That it would be in contrast to earlier statements of his is reflected in his earlier comment that:
2) As suggested by the article Judith linked, he didn’t “realize” what he was saying.
Now the article indicated that both (1) and (2) are true. It seems highly unlikely to me that (1) would be true and absolutely ridiculous that (2) is true. So, that’s the reason for my question. My guess is that you’ll duck once again, but I’ll still ask again.
I know how you want to interpret his meaning (because of your partisan outlook on the climate debate), but you must have some opinion on whether your interpretation is really in line with how he views the science of the matter.
Which is it? Do you believe that your interpretation of his freakin’ words is in line with his view of the science, or not?
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, Latimer.
Judith –
Indeed – this is what some people here want to debate. It’s a good debate to have.
But this starts with the claims being made, in an article that you linked, about Latif’s statement.
Do you think that Latif is taking the “skeptic” position here, and “tip-toeing” away from his previous statements? Or, do you think that his statement is being willfully misinterpreted?
What do you think about this laughable assertion, Judith?:
Here’s the thing about that: This has happened before with Latif’s statements. How can you seriously want to foster reasoned debate about climate change when you refuse to call out dishonest and misleading demagoguing of what climate scientists say.
Which is it, Judith? Was Latif saying that the influence of ACO2 mid-century warming was bounded by 50%? Is that how you interpret his comment about the warming over the entire century?
Are you not sure what he meant? If you are not sure about what he meant, then how do you explain not only the article, but the long list of your “denizens” who have expressed certainty?
Or, do you think, as indicated in that article that you linked, that Latif “probably [does] not even realise {sic}” the “admission” he has made?
Ok, Latimer –
I guess that since you can’t find your way to answering a simple question, I’ll have to consider your latest response as a half duck.
I think it is now clear that you interpret his statement to mean that he is asserting that the ACO2 influence on post mid-century warming is, at most, bounded by 50%.
It will be interesting to see whether or not he clarifies more forcefully.
He has been on record in the past as correcting “skeptics” for grossly, and quite unscientifically, distorting his statements to falsely assert that it matches their own perspective.
It will also be interesting to see, if he does clarify, and if he clarifies that your certainty about what surely he must mean has been wrong, how you will respond.
I’m not putting my money on the possibility that you will admit your error.
@joshua
I too have had trouble with wordpress getting things misplaced.
Here is my interpretation
‘So of all of the huge (0.7K) warming over the last 100 years, only about 0.35K (of a total temperature of about 288K) is down to the Killer Gas! About one third of a whole degree in nearly three hundred!
Colour me unfazed by the future prospects of another third of a degree in four more human generations.’
Is that clear enough for you?
Latimer –
Yeah, it gets particularly hard when there are so many posts at one level of the hierarchy. I think that Judith has modified the blog in that sense – I believe that there used to be three levels possible – a change that I think is for the worse.
OK, – now I’m really confused. Your latest posts suggests to me that you think that Latif’s statement can only be considered to reference the entire century, and it isn’t possible to determine from that statement how he might quantify the ACO2 influence on post mid-century climate change.
That seems to me to be in contrast to what you were arguing earlier.
Maybe you could clarify?
(The seriousness of the impact of various levels of warming is a separate issue.)
@joshua
See my misplaced correction post of about 6 hours ago. I had carelessly misprinted 50 years for 100 in my original post.
Latif of course makes no statement at all about any 50 year period…either the first or the second half of the 20th century.
Latimer, GLOBAL warming is ZERO. Half of that zero is by ”natural causes, the other half of the ZERO is from other witchcraft…
Pekka
BOTH warming cycles (early and late 20th century) started AFTER a period of cooling (which is also not satisfactorily explained by the models).
But the REAL issue here is simply Judith’s point that you cannot attribute the late 20th century period primarily to AGW when you neither know what caused the indistinguishable early 20th century warming period nor whether or not this factor may have caused the later warming, as well.
It is a real quandary, and – so far – you have been unable to refute her point.
Max.
@ Bruce & Pekka; on 99,999999% of the surface area on the planet temperature is NOT MONITORED. Where is monitored, they only monitor for the hottest minutes of the day; but ignore the other 1439 minutes; in which temperature changes at different rate every day – it’s just as important as the hottest minute. If you guys can believe that anybody can tell correctly by 0,234C, or any variation…. straight jacket is highly recommended. Psychiatrists cost a lot; but if you two get together, plus take Louise and WebHub, you will most probably get discount. Or sent the bill to Al Gore and Hansen. It’s their fault, grown up people to believe that they know the temperature for the whole planet precisely… even for the last century… If you take Al Gore, Hansen in a ”class action” for brains degradation, I will be your witness, I promise. They should pay even for your straight jackets, buy the heavy duty ones, on IPCC’s expense.
While wanting to read Mann’s book (if only to have a good seeth) this involves a transfer of money from myself to Mann. This is unconscionable!
The story that shocked me the most during the week was one saying that the entire AGW radiative forcing could be countered by a reduction in average global cloud height of 62 feet, assuming constant cloud cover.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050506.shtml
Just 60 feet or so? This seems bizarre! All the frying and the flooding and the Venusian warming caused by CO2 undone by clouds moving down 60 feet? Is this true? If so, how well do climate models deal with cloud cover / heights?
It seems there is much we still don’t know about climate, and therefore AGW is built on epicycles of sand.
Don’t public libraries exist where you live?
In the UK, they’re closing faster than the Red Sea after the pedestrians made it across.
Why has Arctic been behaving badly?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EAA.htm
Likely cause may be volcanic ash deposits in the Arctic ice.
Re Mann’s book, the interesting reviews we expect to see will be authored by McIntyre, Montford, McKitrick and Laframboise.
As an aside, three of these luminaries are Canadian.
Go Canada, go!
If you go to the Mandia review’s comments, you will see one by John McLean (of Carter, McLean & de Freitas) who rebuts Mann’s account of their paper.
You should add another book to your reading list.
“CLIMATE OF CORRUPTION, Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” by Larry Bell with a Forword by S. Fred Singer.
I have started reading it and it is excellent so far.
Here in the USA we also have the draft (daft?) National Climate Adaptation Strategy.
According to the AAAS announcement: “In 2009 Congress directed that the Council on Environmental Quality and the Interior Department develop a national climate adaptation strategy to improve the resilience of natural ecosystems. The draft strategy offers current and projected impacts of climate change on fish, wildlife, and plant species; plus actions that agriculture, energy, transportation, and other sectors might take to reduce impacts; and a framework for implementing the national strategy across all levels of government.” I wonder what model they propose to use?
Comments are invited through March 5. See
http://www.wildlifeadaptationstrategy.gov/public-comments.php
Supposedly they are gong to post the comments online, as they are received (and moderated). That should be interesting to watch. So far 26 comments are posted.
The reviewers of Mann’s book sound earnest. But they overlook (as does Mann) the facts as summarized by William Hayden Smith at Climateaudit (in response to a comment there, not Mann’s book or its reviewers specifically …
The Council on Environmental Quality and the Interior Department develop a national climate adaptation strategy to improve the resilience of natural ecosystems…
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2012-01-14/volcano-water-electricity/52553902/1
Another ‘Junk’ shot for Big Science and at a cost that is just a drop in the bucket.
I posted the link to this strategy above. They are taking and posting comments. Enjoy.
http://www.wildlifeadaptationstrategy.gov/public-comments.php
This week, the sun on one day, had only one numbered sunspot group. During the minima between Schwab cycles, it is not unusual for the sun to be devoid of sunspots for weeks on end. This is one of the two ways in which the expression “sunspot minimum” is used. However, Schwab cycles are 11 year events, and cannot be expected to influence climate. They may influence weather; sunspots have been correlated with the price of wheat.
However, low sunspot numbers as the sun gets close to the maximum of the current Schwab cycle, SC 24, are far more unusual. Each Schwab cycle produces what is called the Wolf Number, Rz, which is the maximum smoothed sunspot number during the whole 11 year cycle. We should know what Rz is for SC 24 in a few years when the maximum has passed. When we look at the Rz values for the whole series of Schwab cycles, we detect periods when these numbers are consistenly high, and periods when they are consistently low. High values are associated with a warm climate on earth, and low numbers with a cold climate. The reason for this is not clear.
I just want to illustrate that there are two uses for the term “solar activity”, which get confused. There are the solar maxima and minima associated within any Schwab cycle, and solar magnetic maxima and minima associated with values of Rz.
Dr. Curry comes across well in this report;
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/02/10/the_galileo_of_global_warming_113090.html
Dr Curry always comes across well. When the article said” As part of his team, he drafted Judith Curry, a scientist with a history of sympathy for global warming skeptics.” A more accurate description is that she is a scientist with a history of sympathy for the truth. Too bad other scientists dont always follow her lead.
“Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character”
~ Joseph Goebbels
More from the cold side:
The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf
Cycle 23 was very weak (scl = 12.2 – 12.5 years, f = ~8 cycles/century). If the global climate responds similarly as in the past, we will be in negative anomalies very soon. Low solar cycle frequency (and it remains low – sc24 seems even longer than sc23) means COOLING. That’s the obsevation and it shouldn’t be denied.
This is interesting, but we are already most of the way into cycle 24 and have not seen much of the predicted decrease. They are taking a running mean of 11 years, so the current years will contribute to it up to the middle of cycle 24 in the next few years. They remark that the northern hemisphere temperature does not seem to be cooling fast enough for this correlation even if northern Europe is.
My understanding is that this cycle is expected to be elongated. However, citing northern temperature cooling is cherry picking. Since 1997 the Southern Hemisphere has been cooling. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vsh/from:1997/plot/hadcrut3vsh/from:1997/trend
The peak is predicted for next year? and then it starts declining for the rest of the decade. We are near the peak.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
With this new information, there is now possible explanation for my global mean temperature graph => http://bit.ly/Aei4Nd
1) The uniform global warming since 1850 is due to the uniform decrease in the length of solar cycle => http://bit.ly/ww4hWd
2) The oscillation in global mean temperature is due to ocean cycles => http://bit.ly/xsDETW and http://bit.ly/nfQr92
The correlation between global temperatures and solar cycle frequency is surprisingly good, considering that there must be other factors affecting the temperatures. When I first learned about this correlation and how it was “debunked” by the consensus (and even many skeptics), I knew there was something to it.
Girma – the shorter timescale oscillation correlates with the solar frequency too.
Examples of New Age Math: massaging numbers, cooking data, advanced tree ring counting, diddling digits and model-making with supercomputers.
One of the big problems is that skeptical commenters that I read on this blog don’t tend to rely on empirical data to understand global climate mechanisms. They just hand-wave at complexity and chaos and suggest that nothing can be done about it. That approach has long been known to be a evolutionary dead-end, as doing nothing amounts to giving up. Instead, one can apply simple math to model what are seemingly complex systems.
So I wanted to respond to a direct challenge that a commenter posted to me last month. A guy who has likely disappeared from commenting, P.E., dared me to analyze data from a MET archive, saying “This scold coming from someone who refuses to download wind data from the Bonneville Power Authority because it’s too much like work.”. Well here are the results, P.E.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/02/wind-speeds-of-world.html
This is what happens when you spend time actually understanding the empirical data. As usual, if you actually take the initiative and apply some logic, you just might end up moving the yardstick which measures scientific progress.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf
Simple empirical data (scl) and a surprisingly good correlation, considering only one influencing factor.
Edim, Did you look at Table 1 in that paper showing correlation coefficients? The r2 values are all around 0.5.
Compare that against my ft, which has a complexity of around 1 and it has a correlation coefficient of above 0.999, mapped over 3 orders of magnitude in energy. I also have only one adjustable parameter, the mean wind energy, which I calculated separately from the data.
In terms of a quality of fit, my model in comparison to whatever you dredged up looks like gold.
If I can analogize, the fit is a kind of Planck’s response for wind energy. This is a universal model of wind energy distribution that may just hold planet-wide. Instead of Planck’s response for a photonic spectrum of radiation emanating from a black-body, we have a similar entropic response of wind energies contained with a kinetic atmosphere. In other words, it is a black-body response of wind energies.
That’s what these informational entropy models give us, a way to characterize all this disorder in the environment via a simple probability measure.
Web, Speaking of Planck response,I have a energy balance model set up that does pretty good by comparing Ideal black body to what I consider ideal gray body response. That is were the ideal gray body would have an emissivity of 0.5 offset by the thermal conductive flux in the atmosphere.
Nothing particularly Earth shattering, but it looks like a fairly effective model kernal that could be used to locate anomalies such as internal circulation impacts.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/02/comparing-perfection.html
Just in case you would like to look at it :)
Captain, What you did, frankly, is make a mess out of the situation. You haven’t apparently studied radiative physics, otherwise you would realize that you can’t characterize the empirical data unless you include the radiation frequency spectrum.
I have been keeping track of what you are trying to do, and no where have you ever made the argument as to why you can completely eliminate the frequency response, which is at the heart of the Planck model. Make that argument in a few lines, and I may go further with your approach. But as it is, it looks like you are completely ignoring a significant element of the characterization.
In other words, it looks your attempt is one of a model made by a practicing HVAC engineer, but I would rather see a statistical physicist do the modeling.
Perhaps the difference between a real skeptic like myself, and fake skeptics like you and Edim is that I actually analyze what other people are trying to do. You guys just change the topic to your own narrow-minded myopic interests.
Web, you are misinterpreting what the model is intended to do. It is only intended to determine the average interaction of surface flux with the atmosphere. It is a baseline.
To break down the individual frequencies, you would have to include a separate line by line or a bulk spectrum for each molecule and concentration.
What it does do, is indicate that thermal conductivity change is not negligible and possibly could be estimated. My focus has been more on the potential of the change in thermal conductivity with the addition of CO2 and CH4, which both are a small, but not insignificant, negative feed back.
It is simple Web, but it is potentially useful
Separate out the effects of diffusion and convection in your conductivity formulation. If you are telling me that diffusion has a huge impact, I would be suspicious. At altitude, no convention above where water vapor crystalizes out, and little diffusive conductivity because of the low concentrations.
Web, that is the next step, scaling the conductive, convection and the latent impacts, which are all interrelated with changing degrees.
The R-value curve just gives an estimate of the combined interaction of all flux.
This is up/down only though, but by isolating atmospheric layers, I should be able to include circulation impacts. That is the reason for the multi-layer approach. Which is where your diffusion work would come in handy.
Still trying to Tom Sawyer ya on that point :)
WHT, your wind speed -> energy PDF calculator is pretty cool. I like the way you did that, however, I think you missed P.E.’s point entirely. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say I am in the business of providing a service where my customers give me their widgets and I put a special coating on them. After I perform my coating process, I return the widgets to my customer where they move them further down their manufacturing process. I am able to coat 3 widgets per day. My customer asks me to quote on coating 600 widgets for one years worth of production. Am I safe taking on this job? or do I need to ask a few more questions? (Assume no other work will get in the way of me being able to process the widgets and I can reliably produce 3 per day. Assume I opperate 250 working days out of the year.)
Should I take this job?
Should I ask a few more question?
Carpenter, Thanks but P.E. didn’t understand what random means in this case. P.E. said: “power output is essentially random”. Then I challenged him on this statement, knowing full well that wind speeds are not random but follow a certain probability distribution. This allows one to characterize the speeds the way I did. He also obviously did not realize that wind speeds are not random from one moment of time to the next but are correlated (curves that I have but did not show).
The analogy to this is if some dumb cluck said that blackbody radiation is essentially random. Well of course BB radiation isn’t completely random either (which would make it like 1/f noise) but instead follows a Planck’s response distribution.
BTW, also consider the greater concept of the smart grid. The kinetic energy of the atmosphere is largely constant over time, which means that somewhere on earth the wind is blowing. That derives directly from the model — that an average stationary wind energy does exist. That places wind energy into a category of constant energy sources; so if you have a method of moving the energy around you can hypothetically stabilize the output levels. So wind speed is not random in the aggregate, but our view of it tends to make it look random due to our limited perspective. It follows that it is a predictably unpredictable energy source. Of course, even if we could absorb all the wind energy on earth, that would only provide like a quarter of the power that mankind requires (see Axel Kleidon’s work or this site).
Of course, what I did has more of an impact on doing applied physics than trying to engineer a solution.
“…also consider the greater concept of the smart grid. The kinetic energy of the atmosphere is largely constant over time, which means that somewhere on earth the wind is blowing.”
WHT, ok… I have to admit, I gotta give you props for thinking big…
“Of course, what I did has more of an impact on doing applied physics than trying to engineer a solution.”
Engineering a solution is more useful.
This is the spreadsheet function (Excel, OpenOffice, etc) to estimate the probability that a wind speed of at least S is blowing at an arbitrary time:
=2*BESSELK(2*S/A;1)*S/A
For Bonneville Power, you input 12.4 MPH for the average speed A and you will be within about 1% of the historically recorded value for wind speeds below gale force. (The stronger the wind the fewer the empirical data points there are to test against)
This is the kind of simple formula that engineers find incredibly useful for designing vehicles, calculating thermal cooling needs, and doing testing and verification analysis. It’s also derived from first principles so you can actually teach this stuff.
Advancing knowledge and reducing uncertainty is what it’s all about.
WebHubTelescope: One of the big problems is that skeptical commenters that I read on this blog don’t tend to rely on empirical data to understand global climate mechanisms. They just hand-wave at complexity and chaos and suggest that nothing can be done about it.
I read the analysis that you linked to. You fit a model to the distribution of wind speeds. So far so good. It isn’t everyday I read about Bessel functions, and I did not know that they were standard in Excel. But I have two comments related to the quote from your post here.
1. Fitting the distribution does nothing to help us understand global climate mechanisms. You fit a nice distribution function to the empirical distribution of wind speeds in a small part of the U.S.
2. “[N]othing can be done about it” is not the claim of anyone. The claim is that a chaotic model fit (even very well) to a time series of data can not be relied upon to make an accurate forecast of what will happen in the future.
In my opinion, anti-renewable-energy advocates seem to crawl out of the woodwork, and tend to spread their misery however they can. This commenter was named P.E. (possibly the professional engineer moniker), and what set me off was his assertion that wind “power output is essentially random”:
Your model fitting assumed the independence of the many wind speeds in the data, or at least the independence of departures from some trend. You provided no evidence at all that the occurrence of wind at a particular speed in a particular place is non-random. What you showed is that the distribution over a large region and time is knowable. I agree that the opponents of wind overstate their case, but you should at least note that your analysis does not disprove the case that wind is essentially random.
MattStat, I provided an example for WHT to ponder. You picked up on the key element of what is missing from his ‘model’. His analysis is not too helpful in telling us when the wind is going to blow and how hard. I believe PE was after that type of chaotic knowledge. If the model only tells a probability of what the energy is likely to be over a long time period, we still have no predictive idea of when or how much it will be. From an energy planning perspective, that is not too helpful. This is what I believe PE was after in his original comment. Instead WHT assumed PE meant something else…. he did not ask enough questions before replying and then proceeded to answer a question that was not asked.
Whether it works for a larger region, a have nice surprise for you. I knew this model was going to work, because I had done a similar analysis over a year ago where I characterized the distribution of terrain slopes over every 100 meter square of the lower 48 of the USA.
This was over like a couple of billion data points, and what do you know but this also fit that same BesselK function to a tee. Here is a plot of the fit, which also exists in a published text, and some forthcoming research articles.
Bottom-line is that this a maximum entropy energy characterization that is interesting in its broad generality.
Autocorrelation is a different topic, and I have plots of that as well. At the few percent level, the correlations from day to day in a single location are clearly observable. This is an example from the Roosevelt site, and besides the obvious daily correlation, notice that there is also perhaps a 4 day period
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/9378/rooseveltac.gif
The shorter term fall-off is definitely a first-order Markov correlation, which means it isn’t completely random. (Nothing new there as that is intuiitive — if the wind is blowing, it will likely continue to blow for the near term)
The problem is in the attitude that random is normally associated with uniform randomness, and this is clearly stochastic in that it shows a well-characterized probability of occurence over the energy spectrum. For a single location, scientists have long known that the distribution follows the Rayleigh model (see wikipedia), but what I did was to generalize this for larger areas, with a first principles derivation to boot. This is analogous to a Planck’s response law where the equivalent black-body is the entire planet’s atmosphere.
If you want to show that this is not a general result for the planet, you are welcome to knock yourself out. I am happy to have figured this out for myself, and like your typical theorist, I can wait for someone else to double check it.
His analysis is not too helpful in telling us when the wind is going to blow and how hard. I believe PE was after that type of chaotic knowledge.
Two parts of this. There is clearly a model of determining the probability of encountering a given wind speed at any arbitrary time. This is a stationary model that it is quite important and what I derived, and what other people have empirically established over localized regions (i.e. the Rayleigh distribution). There is also a correlation model which looks at probabilities given that a certain time has elapsed from the last measurement taken. I already showed an example of that elsewhere in this thread. This is a Markov, semi-Markov, or autoregressive model based on the shape of the fall-off.
No one ever said that you can deterministically fit the data. Everyone realizes this is foolish, but not everyone realizes how far you can go with a stochastic analysis. I don’t think P.E. did either, no matter how much you think that you can speak for what was in his head at the time.
This is heading in the direction of the typical fallacious arguments of “raising the bar”. Find something wrong with what I did, instead of challenging on stuff that you want done. That was my problem with P.E. He ended up taunting me with his statement: “This scold coming from someone who refuses to download wind data from the Bonneville Power Authority because it’s too much like work.”
Carpenter, Maybe you want to consider lifting a finger and helping with the analysis?
One last thing, you said:
I told P.E. he could take a look at my blog, and I clearly had cases of the probability of accumulating energy over a given period of time.
P.E.’s stinking problem was that he was pouting over the fact that I had already done this for some multi-year Ontario and Germany data sets, but didn’t do that for his beloved Bonneville Power sites, in which he claimed was “different” in some way.
In the end, I have to thank P.E. for being obnoxious, because otherwise I wouldn’t have looked at a larger agggregated set and had a chance to apply the superstaistical BesselL distribution that I have used elsewhere.
WebHubTelescope: The problem is in the attitude that random is normally associated with uniform randomness, and this is clearly stochastic in that it shows a well-characterized probability of occurence over the energy spectrum.
You mean your only point was that the distribution of the random wind speeds was not uniform?
Sure, why not?
So someone long ago noticed that blackbody radiation was not uniform in the photon wavelengths it emitted. Eventually we came to understand the mechanism behind Planck’s response, which modeled that empirical wavelength distribution quite well. This model is a necessary ingredient to understanding how blackbody radiation can apply to other phenomenon.
With localized wind speed data, the distribution is known to be close to Rayleigh, but no one has tried to look at it over a greater region, as far as I can tell. I applied another level of uncertainty analysis by invoking a maximum entropy argument and that 0.999 correlation fit came out.
Nothing wrong with simplicity. I always have stated as my goal to deconstruct seeming complexity into a simple entropy-based model.
Now again ask your question, first to blackbody radiation, and then to wind distribution of the planet. If you get that point, I think I have succeeded.
WebHubTelescope: If you get that point, I think I have succeeded.
at what?
One of the big problems is that skeptical commenters that I read on this blog don’t tend to rely on empirical data to understand global climate mechanisms.
What did you show us about the global climate mechanisms?
“This is heading in the direction of the typical fallacious arguments of “raising the bar”. Find something wrong with what I did, instead of challenging on stuff that you want done.”
WHT, fair enough… I can see how you would think that based on my comment, however that really was not my point.
“Carpenter, Maybe you want to consider lifting a finger and helping with the analysis?”
Yeah, thanks… would love to… really… but not my bag of tricks. I know enough statistical analysis to get by in the work I do, but I’m not too proud to admit it’s not my strong point.
MattStat,
Since you are a stats guy, I was looking into agricultural impact on climate. Since Tonyb did his long slow thaw thing, I am using the Central England Temperature and a Taymyr Peninsular tree ring proxy compiled by Jacoby and gang. Since PCA was brought up, I decided to include the GISS global average just to see what it would look like. To me, it looks like what average is, as far as the northern hemisphere goes, has up to 0.4 degrees of uncertainty. Anyway, my splicing is not all that frightening :)
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/02/comparing-imperfection.html
So would you think that comparing the longest term averages is a reasonable check for combining time series with different potential influences?
capt dallas: So would you think that comparing the longest term averages is a reasonable check for combining time series with different potential influences?
You have 3 time series: a tree-ring series, giss global temps, and central england temps, and that’s all? I don’t think I understand what you are asking.
#1. The context was of P.E. challenging me to look at the Bonneville wind data
#2. I postulated how the aggregate would fit into a mean atmospheric kinetic energy
#3. Ask Curry why she works on this stuff. The name of the blog is Climate Etc.
MattStat said, “Three series, tree ring CET and Global, that’s all?”
LOL, yep, I’m a little slow :) That is just the three I am comparing to try and figure out what “average” really is. CET is not a bad temperature series to match to global because of the Gulf stream impact on temperature. The tree ring is, well, a tree ring series, it has some periods that appear to have a temperature response and some that obviously don’t. When I find the mean for all three, then shift so that all are on the same mean for the total length of each record there is a good correlation. When I average all three over the length of the shortest series, the GMT, that has a fair correlation. But there is 4 tenths of a degree difference in the shift required for the GMT between the two. The better, adjusting to the mean of the full length of each series, indicates to me that 1910 to 1941 or 1945, is the better global average mean temperature.
So it kinda looks to me that if you attempt to splice the global mean temperature to the end of any proxy, you get a hockey stick. I thought that was just an artifact of PCA with not enough principal components, it seems to be because the LIA was pretty long instead, so there is just going to be a hockey stick.
In any case, it looks like Russian Siberia has been warming at twice the global average rate since 1800. I just am not sure what is the best method to combine the series.
Webby is an absurd obsessive who uses the a curve fitting process to fit everything from slope, populations, oil wells, wind, economies – many different things to a frequency distribution. It is neither new nor interesting and in no way advances understanding of the Earth’s climate system. The r factor is neither here nor there – as you are fitting the curve to the data so a low correlation simply means that you are not very good at curve fitting. Cross correlation between data sets is a different thing entirely.
It has been done for flood estimation for a long time – here is a tutorial – http://streamflow.engr.oregonstate.edu/analysis/floodfreq/index.htm – for anyone interested in the methods. The return period is the inverse of the probability of occurence. It is just a simple power function such as is used in estimating heavy tailed distributions everywhere.
But there are well known flood regimes in Australia and this is where I wave my arms and say there is nothing we can do?
‘One of the assumptions of flood frequency analysis is that annual maximum flood peaks are independently and identically distributed. Recent work has shown there exist persistent climate modes that modulate regional climates over multiyear timescales around the globe. Such persistence raises the question whether annual maximum floods are indeed independently and identically distributed. This study revisits this assumption. Noting that a significant shift in Pacific and Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures and other atmospheric variables occurred in the mid-1940s, 41 flood records in New South Wales, Australia, were stratified into pre-1945 and post-1945 records. It was found that the two-parameter lognormal distribution adequately fitted the stratified samples, and in many cases the stratified distributions were significantly different. In fact, the ratio of the post-1945 to the pre-1945 20-year flood exceeded one for 37 of the 41 sites. The evidence that the flood probability model is climate dependent for the case study region is strong. This has implications for flood risk assessment requiring inter alia the need to distinguish between short- and long-term flood risk. In the presence of long-term climate persistence, traditional flood frequency analysis can at best only provide estimates of long-term or unconditional flood risk. The estimation of short-term flood risks will require improved mechanistic understanding of multidecadal climate variability and the development of stochastic models that explicitly recognize such secular variations.’ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2001WR000232.shtml
The regimes are critical in flood and water resources forcasting. If you have 20 years of drought and 20 years of floods – you can’t really take an average and decide that on average everything evens out. It’s a shibboleth I say.
Rather you try to understand the physical processes – a mechanical understanding – and develop different stochastic models. Deterministic chaos isn’t solely an abstract model applied theoretically to climate. It is a matter of real data – these things happen in the real world and they behave like this bit of theoretical physics. We have tools in the real world – but then we have other tools the emerge from the recognition that this systems fits within the broad class of deterministically chaotic systems. This expands our ability to understand and react to the reality of the world.
Webby is very much the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp. The method doesn’t have much value – but this is the only tool he has.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Interesting that you would get worked up over that. That particular process is the bread-and-butter of scientific investigation. The process is one of
1. Observation
2. Characterization
3. Modeling
At some point everyone draws a chart, at the very least to convey the significance to a colleague or management. I was trained in the semiconductor industry, so this is second-nature to me.
Curiously, what you find obsessive, also happens to be the theme of this ClimateEtc blog — that of applying uncertainty analysis. What you clearly don’t understand is that to evaluate uncertainty, you require underlying probability distributions. These can be either subjective Bayesian, or empirically fit to a model, or at the very least, a heuristic.
The king of the fallacious arguments: an argument of baseless authority brought on by petty jealousy.
The low correlation was with Edim’s paper that he threw in there. My correlation coefficient was over 0.999 and I didn’t do curve fitting, in case you didn’t notice. I plugged the mean value into my formula and that number was the result.
You follow that with a discussion of flood occurrences, which are clearly a different physical mechanism than wind. What is with this obsessiveness over floods that you have?
Yes, I started from the basics, kinetic energy is 1/2 m v^2 and went from there.
Certainly, I have all of applied physics at my disposal, but I am looking at uncertainty, so you eventually have to go the probability route at some point.
WHT
When we were kids, and I could complete crosswords better than my brother, he used to go out the back paddock and spin around on his dirt bike too.
“In my opinion, anti-renewable-energy advocates seem to crawl out of the woodwork, and tend to spread their misery however they can. This commenter was named P.E. (possibly the professional engineer moniker), and what set me off was his assertion that wind “power output is essentially random”:
In the UK, we can check national generating stats real-time online at:
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/
Just glancing – today (the coldest of the winter so far) peak wind generation was 445 MW out of a total capacity of 4006 MW. Tomorrow they’re predicting 2561 MW out of the 4006 MW.
The current 4MW is supposed to climb (with massive help from we poor billpayers) to 32MW by 2020. 445/4006 = 11.1%. 11.1% of 32MW = 3.56MW.
Heaven help us in 8 years time.
Webby – there is nothing new in stochastic analysis for pdf’s. It is used all the time in many applications including flooding and winds. There is no difference in the process with floods than wind. Do I doubt that your curve fits? Why should I? The point of curve fitting is fitting the curve.
The frequency distribution doesn’t tell us anything fundamental about winds or floods – is only useful when designing flood structures or buildings. Both of the studies I quoted make that clear. The flood study specifically talks about stochastic models. Yet you treat it like some new and startling discovery – I think it is just a bizarre and mad obsession with which you waste everyone’s time and are rude, sel aggrandising and obnoxious to boot. Such as in this comment – http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/11/week-in-review-21112/#comment-168031 – and this one – http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/11/week-in-review-21112/#comment-168031 – and many others.
You are also wrong and arrogant on so many so many levels. ‘Captain, What you did, frankly, is make a mess out of the situation. You haven’t apparently studied radiative physics, otherwise you would realize that you can’t characterize the empirical data unless you include the radiation frequency spectrum.’
We all know the about the intensity of light emitted by a black body at any given frequency. I presume you mean only that the LW and SW components should be considered separately – but everything emitted (as opposed to reflected) is in the LW. The model by Dallas uses only SB at the surface and at some point in the atmosphere. Your comment was just pointless grandstanding to show how clever you are. What empirical data and what the hell is the application of Planck in any of this.
I don’t think you’re clever. I think you are an obnoxious and deluded fool with nothing of any significance to offer.
Chief is very upset that I have reduced his “irreducible complexity” to a simple stochastic behavior characterized by a single parameter — the mean value. You see, all that chaos and complexity that Chief keeps on harping about is just information entropy, and we can use all the techniques from information theory to help us understand the statistical physics. I showed how one can simplify the analysis in one case, and obviously it doesn’t sit well with him.
One of applied math’s grand challenges is to reduce complexity by applying innovative stochastic methods. I am applying some of these ideas to climate science and other areas, and evidently he doesn’t like my approach. The ultimate goal is to use the statistics at the aggregated macro-level to help solve problems and deal with uncertainty without having to rely on simulations at the micro-level. That was the heritage of the physics disciple known as statistical mechanics.
Again, you come across as a defeatist Luddite that thinks we have reached the dead-end of irreducible complexity. I tend to not think that way and therefore push stuff that is at odds with your view. Lots of trash-talking ensues, largely because I am making progress and you are not. Perhaps some find this entertaining. I do get some ideas from this antagonism, as I wouldn’t have looked at the Bonneville data if P.E. hadn’t goaded me into looking at it.
Thanks for playing. I have to defend this stuff, so this is a good way to keep my dialectical knives sharp.
Webby,
Lucky it is a Sunday afternoon, Australia is playing India in a one dayer and the scoring is a bit ordinary.
Now the term is ‘irreducible imprecision’, is from James McWilliams and relates to climate models. The 3-D Navier-Stokes partial differential differential equations are the same ones used in Lorenz’s 1960’s convection model – to rediscover chaos theory. The ‘irreducible imprecision’ of McWilliams is the result of ‘sensitive dependence’ and ‘structural instability’. ‘Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable. They echo other famous limitations on scientist’s expectations, namely the undecidability of some propositions within axiomatic mathematical systems (Gödel’s theorem) and the uncomputability of some algorithms due to excessive size of the calculation.’
‘Atmospheric and oceanic forcings are strongest at global equilibrium scales of 107 m and seasons to millennia. Fluid mixing and dissipation occur at microscales of 10−3 m and 10−3 s, and cloud particulate transformations happen at 10−6 m or smaller. Observed intrinsic variability is spectrally broad band across all intermediate scales. A full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology. No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
I have quoted this to you before. I have quoted hydrologists on the practical issues where we have climate regime shifts. This doesn’t involve not progressing but stratifying data based on our understanding of the physical system and then doing stochastic analysis. This might help with better estimations of extreme floods and better water resource planning. I have quoted an economist on how extreme events at bifurcations – ‘dragon-kings’ – might not obey power function rules.
I have suggested that stochastic models of probability distributions are used in many fields – including hydrology – and are very well understood. You are suggesting that this is something novel and of great value. I am scratching my wondering why a probability analysis of wind speed means much at all or provides some fundamental approach to climate. James McWilliams suggests above that ‘no fundamentally reliable reduction … is yet envisioned’ in climate physics. We have on the one hand a simple technique for developing probability estimates for floods, wind, etc – power functions – and on the other we have all the complexities of climate. Do we have a plausible model of climate change from you? No we have a probability distribution for wind speed at a location.
There is a huge asymmetry here I quote science and you misquote it back to me. I offered to be friends but was called a poseur for my patient explanations. I have done with playing Webby – but I will continue to list your errors. You drop misleading terms like ‘information entropy’ and suggest that you can apply the methods of ‘information theory’. You have no clue about information theory or how it might be applied to climate and I suggest that no-one else does either. Your use of vaguely mathematical or physical terms seems gleamed from wikipedia but your overweening arrogance serves to intimidate. I won’t have it. This is not about a pointless function for wind speed – a curve fitting exercise – it about building understanding. It is not about your self aggrandizing nonsense – and I saw your obnoxiously pathetic performance with PE – this is a cyber community of knowledge. So I suggest you just piss off because you are not up to it.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Australia are all out for 269 – a competitive total. Aussie Aussie Aussie – Oi Oi Oi.
I have Didier Sornette’s book and it is useful. Howver, you don’t seem to understand the role of power functions. They aren’t magical. Take a gander at Planck’s Law blackbody distribution. If you look at it from the perspective of photon frequencies, it’s a thin-tail distribution. But if you look at it from the wavelength angle, it turns into a fatter-tail. Wow, how can that be? Well, its just a reciprocal relation between frequency and wavelength, and the conditional probabilities can get thin or fat depending on what one is characterizing.
The BesselK function I derived is not a power-law, nor is it anywhere near a true fat-tail. (It can’t because the mean is well established for a BesselK) It is just what comes out from a statistical physics model of the wind energy.
Wind is not a power function. Again, you have not been paying attention, and just run off at the mouth based on reading some quotations from people you are impressed with.
Well, I would say it is more of a comeback to P.E., who challenged me to analyze the Bonneville Power data and dared me to find anything but complete randomness. I then made the assertion that this was a more general approach because Bonneville Power is spread out among more than 20 spatially dispersed locations.
You bluff, just like a lot of the poker-playing commenters on this blog.
Yea, sure. You betcha. I give a full mathematical derivation, and you claim that it comes from Wikipedia. Well buddy, here is a challenge to you. Show me someone who has done the same derivation that I finished and also applied it to over 2 million data points to justify that derivation. You can’t do it. That’s why I considered you a poseur, and why elsewhere in this thread you will find retired poker-players looking to get their jollies by bluffing their way through the physics just like you are doing. It’s actually quite humorous and interesting to find myself immersed in this sea of crackpots and gaming addicts.
I don’t think you are the go-to guy for knowledge, motivation, or inspiration. The dead-end attitude that comes about from invoking chaos and complexity arguments is as frustrating as watching a team punt on first-down. I am exploring some possibly simpler routes, while the climate scientists can build their own models. You can continue to comment from the sidelines.
‘A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event (e.g. its size), the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary as a power of the size of the population, and hence follows a power law. There is evidence that the distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena follow a power law, including the sizes of earthquakes, craters on the moon and of solar flares,[1] the foraging pattern of various species,[2] the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations,[3] the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the sizes of power outages and wars,[4] and many other quantities,’
Go back to wikipedia Webby – you are a freakin’ idiot if you think that your one parameter function is anything other than a power law. You are a lyin’, freakin’ idiot living some autoerotic fantasy of your own freakin’ genius. You have done nothing but a stochastic frequency distribution that has been done a million times before and is utterly pointless unless you have a reason for calculating a 10,000 year flood. Do you have a new formula? OK – I’ll believe you. I don’t give a freakin’ rat’s arse. There are thousands of them. You are a freakin’ maniac – you have as much chance of contributing to science with a probability distribution of climate as a freakin’ monkey has of getting a Nobel prize. You are one of those insane theorist infesting the blogosphere with their pointless rants. You are a step above Doug because at least you have a freakin’ frequency distribution.
WebHubTelescope: You follow that with a discussion of flood occurrences, which are clearly a different physical mechanism than wind. What is with this obsessiveness over floods that you have?
The mathematical model that is fitted to the empirical distribution function of random variates almost never reveals anything about the mechanisms generating the random variates. Process with very different mechanisms can have the same distribution. The flood distribution is an example of this general point, because the flood distribution and wind speed distribution have the same functional form. The derivation of laws of radiation from the distribution of random variates is the exception rather than the rule.
The other answer to your question, naturally enough, is that warnings of catastrophic global warming from CO2 accumulation include warnings that catastrophic floods and catastrophic droughts will increase in frequency: that the distribution of flows will become heavier in both tails. With the functional model of the flow distributions, assuming it is accurate enough, detecting such a change should be easier than without it. Statistically, the effect of good-fitting models is to concentrate the information in a small number of parameter estimates, and to increase the statistical power to detect small changes. You can sometimes reason from mechanisms to pdfs, but almost never in the reverse direction.
WebHubTelescope: Chief is very upset that I have reduced his “irreducible complexity” to a simple stochastic behavior characterized by a single parameter — the mean value. You see, all that chaos and complexity that Chief keeps on harping about is just information entropy, and we can use all the techniques from information theory to help us understand the statistical physics. I showed how one can simplify the analysis in one case, and obviously it doesn’t sit well with him.
One of applied math’s grand challenges is to reduce complexity by applying innovative stochastic methods. I am applying some of these ideas to climate science and other areas, and evidently he doesn’t like my approach. The ultimate goal is to use the statistics at the aggregated macro-level to help solve problems and deal with uncertainty without having to rely on simulations at the micro-level. That was the heritage of the physics disciple known as statistical mechanics.
One of the goals in the modeling is to understand the role of CO2 in the single realization of the process over the last 150 years. The other goal is to predict the value of this single realization (the multidimensional value) over the next 50 to 100 years. Your modeling to date does not advance us toward achieving either goal. At best it might aid us to earlier detection of changes as they occur.
Webbie quote:
“One of the big problems is that skeptical commenters that I read on this blog don’t tend to rely on empirical data to understand global climate mechanisms. They just hand-wave at complexity and chaos and suggest that nothing can be done about it. That approach has long been known to be a evolutionary dead-end, as doing nothing amounts to giving up …”
That’s utter rubbish. CH (who has been posting on chaos, much to your irritation) has linked to plenty of hard data reports. I’m essentially an empiricist with over 50 years of healthy scepticism for unfalsifiable theory. I’m looking hard at the Harvard Uni Mathematics of Chaos course now since it makes more sense to me than Dessler-type linear feedback notions
Oh, and from The Bible:
Paragraph 5 section 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 TAR report says:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible …”
This goes on to say (paraphrased) that “we shouldn’t give up trying though” – even I agree with that
Bluntly, Webbie, you’re way too young and inexperienced to try and play word politics like this – you just make a fool of yourself. Stick to hard technical posts please to try to keep some interest in those
You are actually the fool. Somebody cut and pasted that section from my blog. I can write anything I want there, and know enough not to soil someone else’s comment section with opinion.
“The brilliant and courageous climatologist Michael Mann knows what it’s like to be viciously attacked by the well-funded deniers of scientific evidence and how critical it is to respond. ”
Somebody forgot to tell the other members of the hockey team. Judging from what they wrote to each other about Mann, they look like the best-funded deniers of his ‘brilliance’.
I think Mann’s publication of this book may be the biggest mistake of his career. “Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Judging from some of the quotes, he’s got some serious “issues”.
It could turn out to be the last wheel falling off his career, or the final stake being driven through his career’s heart (after many other final stakes), or perhaps the final nail being driven into his career’s coffin (after many other nails having been driven in).
You’re trying Joshua, and I respect that. But I’m guessing it’s getting harder and harder…
Joshua, you are making a great effort today to write much without making a single debatable point.
Nope, PCA on non-stationary time series was his biggest mistake. A gift that keeps on giving :(
Worse seems to be the overwhelming desire to continue to lie in the perishable wooden structure he’s constructed for himself.
==================
capt. dallas: Nope, PCA on non-stationary time series was his biggest mistake. A gift that keeps on giving
PCA does not require that the data vectors, even if time series, be stationary. Consult for example T. W. Anderson “An Introduction to Multivariate Statistics”, 2nd edition, Wiley, 1984.
MattStat, I am just going by Ian Jollife says, ” But equally, if both are OK, why be perverse and choose the technique whose results are hard to interpret? Of course, given that the data appear to be non-stationary, it’s arguable whether you should be using any type of PCA.”
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
My stats experience is pretty limited, but the results in both paleo time series and the Antarctic data “imputting”, were not all that impressive to me.
capt. dallas: , I am just going by Ian Jollife
Then go by T. W. Anderson instead.
Brave and courageous Mann takes on and destroys all the evil Big Oil shrill denier scum….
I’ll just wait for the movie.
I will look into Anderson when I get a chance. I believe that Jollife’s issue was with using PCA on non-stationary times series where the individual times series have different responses to the individual components. Basically, PCA is applicable to non-stationary times series but not applicable to all non-stationary time series as Mann used the method. So my original comment was pretty vague, sorry.
I am curious about methods for getting more information out of paleo series though. The biggest problem I saw with tree rings was that trees like stable conditions not fluctuations. So the best growth rate would be for normal conditions, not good for warmer and bad for colder, just an indication of just right. So divergence from warmer than normal temperatures should be expected.
Here is Ian Jolliffe in his own words. Mann said Jolliffe aproved of Mann using decentered PCA. He doesn’t.
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
Ian Jolliffe commented at Tamino’s ‘Open Mind’, when Grant Foster used IJ’s name and authority to defend the Piltdown Mann’s use of the statistical tool in his Crook’t Hockey Stick.
I believe it went down the memory hole. That post defending Mann was garbage. Thanks for the memories, JeanS.
========================
Sure enough, follow Bob Koss’s link to ClimateAudit @ 10:05 above and the link to Tamino’s is now dead. I certainly hope that whole thread is preserved someplace because it is a hoot. One of the funniest anecdotes in the whole epic climate blog war.
================
Thanks to the wayback machine the missing Tamino thread can be found here. It has 559 comments.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100116040618/http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/open-thread-5-2/
Searching that page for the term “Ian Jolliffe” you can find a sprinkling of comments by him among the other mentions. His first comment is on Sep 8 and his last comment appears on Sep. 17.
I agree with Stan. It seems as if Mann’s book has very little scientific content say compared to Montford’s book on the hockey stick. That just means that Mann is entering the political arena earlier in his career than most and accelerating his descent into scientific irrelevance.
Mann launches his Vasa, constructed of hockey sticks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
They are going to change hadcrut3 with hadcrut4 in order to replace “no warming for 14 years” with “no warming for 2 years!”
…since 2010 was warmer than 1998 in GISTEMP, NCDC and in the forthcoming HadCRUT4, I don’t think I need to worry too much. – gavin
http://bit.ly/wVqUOR
How sad.
How very sad.
It’s not sad you’re losing your beloved CRUtch.
GisTemp is the BEST so far, and Andy Lacis saw no reason why it will lose ground when the oceans are finished. Why so sure of himself? He’s already done the work. As have many others.
And now the keepers of the skeptic CRUtch have too.
I look forward to the the “fudge factor” addition of an arbitrary value.
I can see it now.
“HADCRUT4 insists central Europe if 123C warmer than the long term average even as the Danube freezes over for the 12th time in 25 years.”
We laugh at them now … imagine the guffaws soon!
Girma, it is well known that HADCRUT3 lacks data for northern lattitudes. HADCRUT4 will include data that has so far not been available, eg from Russia. Do you think it is ‘very sad’ to improve the amount of data and coverage of this data?
How sad
How very sad
At least, unlike gistemp, it doesn’t pretend to include Arctic data by extrapolation
Besides, as warmists always take pains to point out, coverage – or lack of – doesn’t affect the trend.
I thought HADCRUT3 was missing the extrapolated fictional data GISS makes up to infill where there are no thermometers above 80N.
So Hadcrut4 adds data from Russia, and suddenly 2010 is warmer?
Anyone remember the Great Russian Heatwave, which was a blocking high and nothing to do with AGW?
Louise said, “Do you think it is ‘very sad’ to improve the amount of data and coverage of this data?”
It is fine improving the data as long as the original data record is maintained for comparison. That was the problem with CRU, they revised to HADCRU 3 but lost the station list for HADCRU 2 if I remember correctly. Both GISS and HADCRU should maintain the original programs and stations the projections were based on until they revise the projections to match the current data. Moving targets are challenging :)
Al Gore, Michael Mann, Jim Jones — “Bo and Peep” and “Do and Ti” of Heaven’s Gate — used car salesmen and those behind the Piltdown Man hoax all examples of flimflamer sociopaths with charismatic personalities.
Linked to by Judith
“The brilliant and courageous climatologist Michael Mann knows what it’s like to be viciously attacked by the well-funded deniers of scientific evidence and how critical it is to respond.”
Who are these well funded deniers and how do I join their ranks please?
tonyb
There was a time Exxon et al would have paid you, but it does not even cost two bits to sate their desire. The milk is free.
Exxon et al are on the AGW bandwagon.
Careful. It might be conspiracy.
No conspiracy, conflict of interest.
So explain to me how it works. Exxon funds researchers and scientists who conduct analyses. Said analysts determine that AGW is invalid, yet Exxon continues hide that research and to plan and promote AGW from the bandwagon as if climate warming were real? How do they keep the scientists from exposing the fraud?
And why would it be more in Exxon’s interests to promote AGW than to refute AGW?
(BTW, I tend to reject conspiracy theories from either side of the climate divide.)
And you are promoting a conspiracy theory. You are saying that they are participating in colluding to promote an invalid theory. Self-interest and conspiracies are certainly not mutually exclusive. In fact, if anything, they would fit together quite nicely.
It’s been an ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusion and Madness of the Crowd’. In his dotage, a certain frequent commenter will realize that the impetus was a marvelously grand example of motivated thinking.
=====================
You couldn’t be talking about me (you have told me more than once, as have a number of other commenters – ironically more than once in response to my posts – that you never read my posts), but I am curious to know who you’re referring to.
Oh. Right. You didn’t read that. Sorry.
Joshua, I don’t know exactly how it works, all I know is that Exxon et al are big proponents of AGW. In climategate emails we see that the Team is asking and getting money from Shell, BP, Exxon…
The thing is, when something is hyped, it’s because the big players want it that way. AGW hype is a goose that lays golden eggs for anybody who is after golden eggs. You just have to jump on.
http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/1398
Simple. They know everyone is going to need their oil whatever happens – so no worries. Then the government comes along with huge subsidies for renewables, so they start programs on that.
Double gain: (1) Money (2) Greenwash
Joshua
No “conspiracy” required.
Obscene sums of taxpayer funding are potentially at stake – if only a global carbon tax could be levied to fund it all.
Any corporate CEO that would be stupid enough not to line up at the trough should be fired (and they have all realized that).
So look for more BPs, GEs, etc. jumping on the gravy train as long as it lasts.
Besides it is sooooo PC: “doing well by doing good”.
“Going green” makes great PR if you happen to have had an offshore drilling mishap or have been exposed as a 0 tax rate corporation.
But they better hurry, because the wheels are wobbly and the gravy train may soon end up in the ditch.
Max
Actually, most people don’t realize how susceptible to scientific experts corporate managers are. They are just like anyone else in this regard and tend to be intelligent and well informed. In any case, they recognize how easy it is to position themselves to make money from climate alarmism. When government subsidies and contracts talk, corporate types listen.
Many corporations are simply rent seeking. However, in about 2005 it became politically untenable to oppose the CAGW meme. To do so was to ensure you were not at the table where the future of your company was being decided………….or so it seemed. Things are slowly changing now IMO.
Buy the book; it’s a classic.
====================
Like a trout in the milk?
It’s the water, stupid. In all of its treacherous phases.
=================
kim
You say:
I think I’ll wait for the movie.
Max
Has nobody here actually shelled out a few quid and read Mann’s book enough to give us a quick review?
Bookseller is over the horizon but the smoke signals read sacrificial immolation.
=============
LA –
You really don’t want to give him the cash do you!
You can borrow my copy of Dire Predictions if you like – I bet it’s at least as funny as the new one :)
Anteros – This is off-topic, but I think Chris Ho-Stuart may not have answered your questions about climate sensitivity in a previous thread, presumably because he didn’t see them. In the interim, you might want to review a very interesting Draft Paper by Hansen et al that discusses the different sensitivity concepts in detail in Section 2. (The paper was later published in abbreviated form in Atmos. Chem. Phys., but with much of this section truncated.)
Hansen discusses multiple different concepts of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and some of them appear to be unique to him. However, there is probably general agreement on the existence of a conventional ECS based on “fast” (Charney) feedbacks, and a much longer term ECS that incorporates “slow feedbacks”, with respective typical mid-range values of 3C and 6C per doubled CO2. The latter ECS is sometimes referred to as “Earth System Sensitivity”. The main difference is that the conventional ECS utilizes ice sheets and stored GHGs as fixed boundary conditions, whereas the Earth System ECS estimates the temperature change that would result when the ice sheets respond to the forcing (e.g., melting or freezing with warming or cooling respectively), and the GHGs also respond, with a CO2 efflux for example in a warming climate and an increase in carbon sink uptake in a cooling one.
The obvious reason why the Earth System ECS receives relatively little attention is that it entails multi-millennial timesales to evolve, whereas the conventional ECS requires “only” a few centuries to closely approach equilibrium. These days, there is even a tendency to focus more on transient climate responses (TCRs) than ECS, because of their greater relevance to timescales of immediate interest.
If the above link doesn’t work, try Hansen et al
Fred Moolten | February 11, 2012 at 3:24 pm |
Thanks for a link to the draft. This jumped out at me but I’m still skimming the draft.
“A singular merit of the (all) fast-feedback climate sensitivity is that it can be evaluated empirically from paleoclimate data with an accuracy far exceeding the potential accuracy of climate models in any foreseeable time frame.”
I thought paleoclimate data is highly questionable and why do they claim the “missing heat” is in the deep oceans?
Hi John – To say that paleoclimatologic data gives us a more accurate handle on climate responses than future projections from climate models probably isn’t saying much, but it’s a strange statement that appears to be comparing apples and oranges.
The more serious question was in regard to “missing heat”. There was a recent post on this that you might want to visit, but I think the answer is that there’s evidence for heat influx to the deep oceans that might partly close the energy budget, as well as evidence that the some of the disparity perceived by Trenberth may have been illusory due to an overestimate of the magnitude of the recent energy imbalance. I recommend that further discussion of this should go into that thread.
I should add that another reason why Earth System type ECS estimates are less relevant is that estimates derived from a time when ice sheets were far more extensive (e.g., the Last Glacial Maximum about 25,000 years ago), will overestimate climate responses during current times, when there is less ice to melt and thus less change in temperature from the albedo change. Furthermore, I note from reviewing Hansen’s draft that the ECS estimates depend on whether to include ice sheets alone or ice sheets plus GHG responses in calculating their value – we get different values for those different scenarios. In that sense, these estimates beyond the conventional values are useful exercises in helping to interpret climate behavior over very long intervals, but of rather little practical importance.
Fred –
Thanks you. That’s just the kind of answer I was looking for. I do have the links to the Hansen papers, but was never really sure how much of them translated to ‘common perspectives’, which you’ve clarified for me.
“”Hi Fred, I found your insight into the missing heat? intriguing.
The more serious question was in regard to “missing heat”. I think the answer is that there’s evidence for heat influx to the deep oceans that might partly close the energy budget,””
For mine, missing heat in the oceans is akin to missing cold in the atmosphere. For, the coldest particles, or rather those whose density is the greatest, are continually tending downwards.
Trenberths’ claims of heat from atmosphere missing in oceans, is the same as suggesting cold from oceans can go missing in the atmosphere.
Go figure.
A flashback to the early 1981 paper by Hansen where he clearly includes the thermal mass of the ocean.
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/6623/hansen1981gis.gif
The blue square contains the gistemp record.
WHT, this 1981 Hansen paper is one I have always liked. I especially like how he labeled the right axis with Mesozoic to show the last time we had such CO2 levels. It makes a subtle point, and his prediction with the simple model of that day is holding up well. He knew all the major factors already by then.
Jim, That’s what I thought as well. He didn’t have a lot of historical data to work with, and Hansen made it very comprehensive.
For example, he picked out the notion of synfuels, which is effectively what the tar sands are providing.
Hansen also already had the notion of the heat in the pipeline back then. The unrealized heat is a tricky idea to explain. In the short term, the land+atmospheric temperature/heat outpaces the ocean temperature/heat, but in the longer term the ocean catches up. I am still experimenting with how best to convey this, and this is the way I see it evolving according to Hansen’s explanation.
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/7967/thermaldiffusionbestgis.gif
This is the way that an effective diffusion works.
Web,
I don’t know if this will help at all but the annual cycle of global average temperature can be explained by the same processes. Despite the observed fact we receive more energy from the Sun during the Southern Hemisphere Summer, global average temperatures are warmest during NH Summer.
This is well-explained by the simple fact that there is much more land in the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, on these timescales the oceans don’t have enough time to catch up.
Web said, “Hansen also already had the notion of the heat in the pipeline back then. The unrealized heat is a tricky idea to explain.”
There are two things about the in the pipeline I am trying to figure out. First is what impact the Antarctic not warming will have on it, it should reduce the amount. Second is what was average before the start of the instrumental period?
From Hansen’s starting point, he should be close IF the Antarctic warmed as much as he predicted. Since the LIA appears to be mainly due to heavy volcanic activity, how much were we below average to begin with?
I see a parallel between adjustment time for excess heat and adjustment time for excess CO2.
Like atmospheric CO2, it takes time for excess heat to find a sink (or sequestering site in the case of CO2). Obviously the time span is shorter for heat, but the dispersive diffusion curves have the same general shape.
The dispersion is in the variation of the effective diffusion coefficients. I think we can make headway in applying these simple representations for reasoning. That’s essentially what I showed with the curves, and what I think Motll’s (not Motley, sorry for the error) point is.
Web, I don’t disagree on the adjustment time of the atmosphere and upper oceans. The conductive impact of CO2 though is not negligible and has a long time constant. So once you have the heat diffusion in, the heat diffusion out from the 4C boundary layer needs to be considered sooner or later.
Wrong context. Adjustment time for CO2 in sequestering, not in terms of conductive properties. I don’t even know what that means.
@anteros
I have absolutely no intention of giving out my hard-earned cash to Mann and his crew. And anyway , he’d only spend it on lawyers in a futile attempt to evade his legal FoI responsibilities.
But others – presumably all those of you funded by the Big Oil Scum Well-Funded Anti-Science Forum (incorporating Deniers Anonymous and Conspiracy Theory Weekly)) – can surely blag it on your expenses for gathering ‘intelligence’?
WHT
What 30 year period is your anomaly period based on? Also, are those rapidly escalating figures on the right theoretical or observed? Thanks
tonyb
It’s an explanation for Hansen’s model, adapted from this 1985 figure:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GsKQMH4GiXc/TyAKYiitI4I/AAAAAAAAA0U/0vCAB5jY6p0/s400/hansen_comparison.gif
For refs, see:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/01/thermal-diffusion-and-missing-heat.html
In short, Mann and the 10 Yamal saw a light that wouldn’t go out — day or night — that burned the sky and caused rivers to run red, ice caps to melt, glaciers to recede, city-sized bergs you could give a name to calve off continents, birds to die and mosquitoes to live and polar bears to drown like helpless children… and, if all that wasn’t bad enough, They watched George Bush stand up and say Nyet! to the UN. That was when They truly understood for the first time that their dreams of liberal utopianism might become reality and was certainly worth a try and they knew in their heart of hearts that the means justified the ends and with the ends in mind they determined that They would — and only They could — kill Americanism to save the world.
Tried to buy it at the local book store, but they didn’t have it (apparently it was sold out).
I wonder if on Amazon it mentions similar books like, “If You Believed Global Warming Was Not A Hoax And Scare Tacic To Prove You Were A Scientis You Now Must Now Believe AGW Theory Has Been Falsified To Prove You’re Not An Idiot.”
yes.
Mann’s first sentence of the prologue is factually incorrect. His reconstruction of Nov 17th to Nov 19th of 2009, is wrong.
His command of the facts surrounding climategate is appalling.
There is not much science in the book.
That editorial review of Saint Michael was enough to make me puke. Entirely typical of the laughable propaganda required to prop up the warmist case these days. Judith, I don’t know how you have the stomach to read such self-serving claptrap.
A story caught my eye this week on Jón Frímann’s blog.
New hot springs in Greenland after an earthquake (swarm?)
source: http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/
excerpts:
According to the Greeland Radio new hot springs opened up in the village of Kangersuatsiaq of the west coast of Greenland. After an what appears to be swarm of earthquakes, with the largest one somewhere around ML2.9 to ML3.? (enough to sake people pictures on the wall). A new hot springs did open up following this earthquakes. The water seems to be around 20C to up 36C. It might be warmer, as details on this are few and little.
Best to my knowledge there is no known volcanoes in this area and have not been in the past ~65 million years or longer.
From the same site, EL Hierro has kicked up again:
EL Hierro web cams: http://hierroendirecto.movistar.es/
Google ‘sunspot “time integral”‘ and follow the links to find an analysis that resulted in a simple equation that calculates average global temperatures since 1895 with 88% accuracy and, when calibrated to measurements prior to 1990, accurately (std dev less than 0.1C) predicts temperatures since 1990.
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2012/02/10/wow-best-video-explaining-why-climate-change-makes-the-world-suck/
Sick Extreme Alarmist BS – Now you know why I fight from the other side!
HAP
The video you posted is a satire, right? What age group is this nonsense aimed at?
If its not a joke not perhaps you can produce it the next time that Holly Stick appears. Its just the sort of stuff she seems to fervently believe in.
tonyb
tonyb –
I watched it all the way though and was OK with it. I think because it was so irrational and alarmist it wasn’t at all believable. Some children might fall for it, but I think the majority would receive it like they do Tom and Jerry. And of course, when they’re a bit older and the world appears just as it did when they were shown the video, they’ll react with some displeasure at being duped [if they fell for it in the first place]
The reaction might be stronger than the initial alarm.
But you’re spot on about Holly :)
I did not post this, I copied the link from above.
This one is also new fun in the category climate forecasting and climate models.
New WUWT Feature – Scafetta’s forecast -vs- the IPCC forecast
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/10/new-wuwt-feature-scafettas-forecast-vs-the-ipcc-forecast/
“So far it is already beating the pants off the highly upwards IPCC forecast model, but like any forecast model, isn’t perfect.”
“It looks to me like the prediction has already failed. It predicted a rise in 2005 but it looks flat through there. In 2008 it predicted about average temps for the period, yet there was a huge drop. In 2010 it predicted a drop, yet temps were nearly at their highest. It looks like all that can be said good about the prediction is that it predicted roughly steady temps and the temps have been roughly steady. That doesn’t seem like much of a feat of prediction to me. Could easily have been a lucky guess. The IPCC picked “up”, he picked “steady”, and we probably won’t hear from whoever picked “down”. If the wiggles of the prediction seemed to show any relationship to the wiggles of the temp record, then I might give a little more credit than a one in three lucky guess.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/scafettas-solar-lunar-cycle-forecast-vs-global-temperature/#comment-889953?tw_p=twt
Great comment Louise!
“one in three lucky guess” is a great way to look at all the model rule sets given a climate system that is so poorly understood.
The reason I give credence to the notion the system is poorly understood is the number of 2011 research proposals focused on “a better understanding” of the water cycle, carbon cycle, the role of salinity in the various cycles, AR5 inclusion of formerly undefined aspects like clouds, etc…
Scafetta’s rule set includes natural cycles and places the deviations in context thus giving a more accurate representation of the induced impact of AGW. It’s very logical from my perspective and gives a cleaner view of the AGW implications within a chaotic system that seeks but will thankfully never achieve equilibrium.
The implication of the new monthly update on WUWT presents the IPCC projects as a run away projection which may no longer be true. In fact, it may have never been the case?
blouis79:
Michael Beenstock1 and Yaniv Reingewertz1
Has the paper been published yet? I downloaded it long ago, and I wrote the authors to ask for more information, but they never wrote back.
Latif says that half of the 0.8°C of global warming we’ve seen since 1850 is due to natural causes.
This is not anything new for Latif, as others above me have pointed out. Latif’s model was published in Nature a few years ago, and it forecast 2 – 3 decades of much reduced warming (possibly cooling) before a resumption of warming such as the 3 warming periods since 1850.
The important distinction, as regards Latif and many others, is not between warmists and denialists, but among alarmists (Hansen, et al), warmists/lukewarmists (Pielke, Latif), skeptics (me), and alternative theorists (solar theorists, Willis Eschenbach.)
Matt,
The Keenleyside et al paper suugested a cooling influence from oceans for a decade more based on their model but is silent beyond that.
Cheers
ChiefHydrologist: The Keenleyside et al paper suugested a cooling influence from oceans for a decade more based on their model but is silent beyond that.
Ah, you are right. The wrote about multiple decades, but they wrote about overlapping decades rather than consecutive decades.
Well – all over the place. Webby with his power function obsession – and just adorable conviction in his own unrecognised genius. Well it would be adorable in a precocious 7 year old. Fred with his obsession with equilibrium climate sensitivity in his 1-D universe. Joshua with his usual vacuous pop in. Not that I’ve read them. Let me know if he says anything sensible and I’ll faint. Pekka way outside his comfort zone – ‘a scientist outside his field is just as dumb as the next guy.’
We don’t really give a rat’s arse. The underlying warming trend since 1945 (since the increase in emissions) is …? The rate of not warming for the next decade or three is…? The future for realistic forecasts is…? Is it time to say we told you so yet? Is it time to dismantle the current generation of intergovernmental climate org’s.? Is it time to laugh at the noxious, no nothings who have been so unctuously confident in their silly little ideas over so long?
HADCRUT3
Natural : 1911 to 1944 = .703C = .021C / year
Natural + CO2: 1956 to 1998 = .896 = .028C/ year
CO2 = .007C per year
And that warming is only for half of the time. The rest of the time the temperature is flat line or dropping.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/to:1943/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1977/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1943/to:1977/trend
Ooops. My bad.
Natural : 1911 to 1944 = .703C = .021C / year
Natural + CO2: 1956 to 1998 = .896 = .021333C/ year
CO2 = .000333C per year
I’ll leave it to the skeptics to point out the fallacy here.
Go ahead Jim D. Take a run at it.
Why would anyone think 1910/1940 type natural warming never occurred after 1950?
Chief says:
Wow, one moment I am declared to be a Peak Oil obsessive, then suddenly I turn into power function freak. I am sure it will be something else in a few days.
I really appreciate (NOT) the way that Chief goes after the people that I consider the most sincerely thoughtful and introspective commenters, Fred, Joshua, and Pekka. Why go after them and not all the crackpots — I don’t understand this at all.
Wow
‘Thoughtful and introspective’
I guess that is one possible description of you and your chums.
Not the one I would have chosen though. Which needs to have the prefix ‘EGO’ writ large on at least three out of four.
There’s you with your endless obsession of telling us all just how clever you think you are, Fred really needing to tell us (in the most long-winded way possible) just how much reading he has done on every subject you can possibly imagine and Joshua’s continual need for attention and to know that somebody reads his stuff……
‘A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event (e.g. its size), the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary as a power of the size of the population, and hence follows a power law. There is evidence that the distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena follow a power law, including the sizes of earthquakes, craters on the moon and of solar flares,[1] the foraging pattern of various species,[2] the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations,[3] the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the sizes of power outages and wars,[4] and many other quantities.’ gleamed from wikipedia
peak oil is one of your major obsessions – but it is all power laws – Webby – stop dissembling.
No I stand by my characterisations. It all seems quite innocous by my really inventive invective. I have a great deal of regard for Pekka – but the others not so much. Joshua as thoughtful and introspective – now that’s funny. You are doing better Webby.
Chief says:
No, you have it wrong. Dispersion, disorder, and uncertainty are my main mathematical interests. I do think that the attitudes that many scientists have concerning power laws are quite misplaced. You say a power-law is just an attribute of an event, and I respond by saying the reciprocal of an event is an attribute of an event (i.e., a power of -1). Voila, we have a power-law. See how easy this is, and there is no need to get obsessive over this idea.
Yet, there has always been this huge undercurrent in the physics research field to be on the watch for odd power-law behaviors at critical regions and phase transitions. That is what drives Sornette’s interest, which is of discovering perhaps some radical new physics. I don’t necessarily share that interest and would rather look for the mundane statistical explanation such as dispersion or uncertainty levels. Jeez, in graduate school, I remember constantly being reminded by my advisor to carefully track measurements during phase transition experiments so that we might just find some curious power-law behavior (code for being in the running for the Nobel Prize, as I now joke about).
The other thing that you don’t seem to understand is that the data I am usually interested in has a dynamic range that is over several orders of magnitude. There aren’t too many mathematical models apart from exponentials, power-laws, and other transcendental functions to accommodate that kind of range. Wow, did you know that a Taylor’s series expansion is a sequence of power-law terms? Applied math is built around these and if you want to accuse me of being a math geek, I plead guilty.
BTW, Latimer, Sockpuppetry is not what I consider thoughtful and introspective and therefore you are not a candidate.
Webby,
So give us your one parameter power law for climate.
I am not here intersted in power laws for wind, oil, slopes, birds or whatever else you interests encompass – everything but floods it seems. The field must be too crowded. It am not interested in rambling accounts of your failed post graduate efforts. I am not intersted in cliams that I don’t understand a power law. I am not going to bother defining what a power law is for you again. Your frequency distribution is a power law. I don’t want to talk with you. I think you make up stuff that might ne plausible for the lessor beings. I think you act in bad faith and hide behind verbiage that is wrong or meaningless. But that’s just me.
I want a stochastic model for climate. I will probably laugh – but it is time to ante up as the poker players would say. I want a power law for the frequency distribution of climate. Any time next week will be fine.
Oh did you know that a Taylors series is a solution to a function? It has nothing to do with probability distribution and so is not remotely a power law. It does have exponentials – is that close enough for a maths geek?
Curious power law behaviour? The power laws are just a relationship – the frequency varies according to the power of some attribute. No wonder you failed.
@Web Hub Telescope
I am sure it will come as no surprise to you that your not considering me as a candidate for you approbation will not cause me any anxiety or sleepless nights.
In fact, rather than needing to read Fred M’s endless windbagging to cure my occasional insomnia, I will bask in the knowledge that I am not on your Christmas card list – and sleep the sleep of the just.
Chief, Bottom line it looks like you are against the idea of people finding patterns in nature.
Not in the form I came up with. Math is about precise definitions and you are not being precise. Sure, I am interested in scaling properties, and that’s why a log-log plot is so useful. A BesselK function can slide along a log-log plot and thus show scaling, which is great IMO.
I mentioned before that we can look at something like Planck’s law or Wien’s displacement law for similarities. For Wien’s displacement law, the location of the peak depends on whether it is per frequency or per wavelength, since the power law in front of Planck’s law differs depending on the parameter view. So the power law in this case serves to scale the peak in the black-body spectrum.
Again, there is no power law in the distribution I came up with. It is a BesselK function, which is not a power law, unless you go to the absurd level of taking the Taylor’s series expansion and idiotically pointing out that power terms appear.
WebHubTelescope: I really appreciate (NOT) the way that Chief goes after the people that I consider the most sincerely thoughtful and introspective commenters, Fred, Joshua, and Pekka.
OK on Fred and Pekka, though I sometimes dispute them on particular points. I am astonished that you find merit in Joshua’s posts.
Well now. I don’t know about other folks, but I have realized that I really need to reconsider my behavior at Climate Etc.
When someone who constantly calls people “pissants,” can’t seem to type a post without speaking about rats’ “arses,” and posts on a public blog about why he has to wipe down his laptop (yup, he really did post about that), says that my posts are not sufficiently “thoughtful and introspective” I realize that it certainly is time for me to make some adjustments.
Clearly, I need to post more like Chief: it’s time for me to be less thoughtful and introspective in my posts.
Rest assured, from here on out I will change my participation at Climate Etc. accordingly.
Amazing. ‘When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event (e.g. its size), the frequency is said to follow a power law.’ We have probability vs wind energy in your frequency distribution chart – which is not a straight line.
Weins law retains the power distribution of Planck but shifts the frequency of the peak with temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiens_law.svg The intensity of emissions doesn’t vary if you graph it as frequency or wavelength. Assuming a sinusoidal wave moving at a fixed wave speed, wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency. So what? It doesn’t change either Planck’s law or Wein’s displacement law.
It was you who said that the Taylors series was a power law – it is not.
Nothing you say makes any sense – you freely bring in concepts that are not real or valid to anyone who has any familiarity with the concepts. It is just verbiage.
Again – you have a frequency distribution of wind speed. So what? It has been done many, many times before.
‘Atmospheric and oceanic forcings are strongest at global equilibrium scales of 107 m and seasons to millennia. Fluid mixing and dissipation occur at microscales of 10−3 m and 10−3 s, and cloud particulate transformations happen at 10−6 m or smaller. Observed intrinsic variability is spectrally broad band across all intermediate scales. A full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology. No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
Show me a fundamentally reliable reduction in the size of AOS dynamical systems – I won’t be impressed. I will just think it is more rubbish.
Which is a typical baseless assertion. So find me someone that has suggested the BesselK distribution for a heterogeneous mix of average wind energies. Until you find that reference, you are just demonstrating your petty jealousy.
That said, I will probably continue searching the literature. One of the references I pulled up was this one “The Probability Distribution of Land Surface Wind Speeds” by ADAM H. MONAHAN AND YANPING HE of NCAR. This was just from August of last year and it has a reference to a submitted paper by Curry to Climate Dynamics (same Curry? can’t tell). Read the intro, as it has some interesting relevance.
Webby,
Do I doudt that you have a derivation for a power law for wind speed, slopes, oil wells, whatever? I don’t give a rat’s arse. If we were friends I might say – hey cool – show me how that works. But we aren’t friends – and well I just can’t be bothered because at the end of the day it is just a power law relating probability of occurrence to wind speed. Big woop. It is just not worth the effort in traversing your nonsense to get to whatever it is.
I am an engineer – you have to figure that I have some math and physics – some computer modelling – math is one of the great things in the world. I often ponder the great mathematical puzzles of the world as I amble along on my blue horse Cogitate out of Reflection. – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=blue_horse.jpg – Like if 42 is the answer to life, death the universe and everthing – what is the question? If 512 is the answer to string theory – ditto? If 69…well for the sake of Judith’s delicate sensibilities we won’t go there.
I said we could be friends but in your very next post you called me a poseur. Well OK. But friends don’t out each other. It is just the unspoken rules of civilised behaviour. It’s a shibboleth I know – and you really should learn the meaning. It’s like lonesome is essential in the iconic nature of being a cowboy – it’s just part of the weft of life.
I don’t do petty jealousy very well – I’m more an untold vicissitudes of the soul kind of guy. Hence the poetry.
‘Oh it’s lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night where the wild dingoes call
But there’s nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer.’
Giddy up there Cogitate.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
Sick Extreme Alarmist BS – Now you know why I fight for the other side!
Easy choice. I’ll take lost of personal liberty Adolf — who wouldn’t?
There is a basic logic fallacy in the analysis presented in “the most terrifying video”
First of all, the climate debate has been oversimplified into four boxes.
A similar analysis could have been made at the height of the Cold War regarding “taking action”, i.e. carrying through a “preemptive thermonuclear strike” against the USSR, in order to avoid a possible (but not certain) direct thermonuclear attack from the USSR.
Here the threat was REAL (not a virtual computer-generated one). The USSR had thermonuclear weapons with ICBMs that could easily destroy several of the key US cities along with the federal government and paralyze the whole nation.
But then came the “black swan” (which a few very insightful economists had predicted, but nobody really believed): the USSR imploded and ceased to exist – poof!
This is the problem with such silly “four box” analyses – they are intended to terrify the viewer into doing something very stupid to avoid an imagined horrific catastrophe (that really doesn’t exist at all).
Mencken said it best of all.
This video clip is pure fear mongering at its worst.
And so silly that one would have to be pretty stupid to fall for it.
Max
That guy melted down at an AGU conference just when he was up to be a paid schill like Mooney.
I’ve lost count of the desters this week. here is another one.
Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner
I hereby resign as expert-reviewer of Chapter 13: Sea Level Changes. I do this for two reasons:
(1) TIME:
A few days ago I noted that the deadline is set at February 10, instead of Mach 10 that I had noted by mistake.
(2) QUALITY:
Having glanced through Chapter 13, I find it to be of such low quality that a serious review would require very much extra work. At previous expert-reviews of mine (2000, 2006), all comments and corrections were neglected, despite their firm anchoring in facts.
The so-called authors of Chapter 13 seem to be a collection of all those who have written anything about sea level changes that agrees with the concept of IPCC, despite that fact that many of those papers were of a very low quality.
To this group is added some persons who have absolutely no insight to sea level changes. It is an insult that such persons are named “authors”.
– Rune Grand Graversen (Sweden) is a Ph.D. student in meteorology
– Gunnar Myhre (Norway) seems to be fully limited to meteorology
– Ruth Mottram (Denmark) is post.doc. in meteorology (glaciology)
Just to check my Nordic country fellows are all “non-specialists” who have nothing to contribute in sea level. Why are they there? But so typical!
All the debate and questioning has been shamelessly left out; not even referred to. And still, there is most probably within that material, the reality is to be found.
Today, the President of the Maldives had to resign. Finally, reality caught up with his illusions about sea level changes.
So should most of the Chapter 13 authors do, too – for the benefit of science. And by this I resign as expert reviewer
Stockholm, February 7, 2012
Nils-Axel Mörner
Sea Level Expert
Pachauri Jones you better watch your Mock Ten speed.
=============
What’s next — the Executive branch will just resign and walk away from giving us their expert opinion on what each of us should be and what we shall do and how we all shall live?
Thank you,
1. Markus for reproducing Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner’s message resigning as IPCC expert-reviewer of Chapter 13: ‘”Sea Level Changes”
2. Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner for continuing to defend basic principles of science against abuse by those who control research funds.
I too struggled to understand why government scientists avoided or hid evidence Earth’s heat source is the nuclear furnace that produced our elements until Climategate emails and documents were released in Nov 2009. Then I listened to former President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning and understood why this happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLld5PR4ts
Moral: Government scientists were trained with research funds as Pavlov’s dogs were trained with dog biscuits.
Judith Curry
Thanks for some more good stuff.
OK. The Mann book may be interesting, but it is difficult to get past the “hero worship” reviews once you’ve read Montford’s book. Lots of luck reading the two books “in series”.
The Latif and Marotzke stuff is a bit more interesting to me, in that it seems to reconfirm what several solar scientists have suggested, namely that around half of the past warming can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity (highest in several thousand years).
[The recent Lean presentation you cited also goes in this direction.]
It appears to me to raise serious questions regarding the IPCC AR4 claim that only around 7% of the past warming can be attributed to solar forcing, which in turn raises serious questions regarding the IPCC model-based estimates of 2xCO2 climate sensitivity, upon which the future projections are based.
Since IPCC AR4 has conceded a “low level of scientific understanding” of “natural (solar) forcing” these new studies are a welcome thing. Hopefully the “LOSU” will improve as new data are presented.
The data that the Chief has cited on the impact of [possibly solar related] ocean oscillations are another piece that could help improve the IPCC’s “low LOSU” of natural climate forcing factors (provided, of course, that the IPCC gatekeepers, authors, reviewers, editors, etc. really want to improve their low LOSU).
Max
“I’ve lost count of the desters this week. here is another one.”
The trickle may soon become a flood. The establishment warmists are so well insulated from outside attacks, that the only way this nonsense will crumble is from the inside. I have an increasing sense that things are finally moving in that direction. It seems like every week now another insider is jumping ship. What’s going on in Germany is particularly encouraging.
I’m also noticing a new and conspicuous silence on the part of the MSM. Mann and co. were furious that the NYT’s et al had nothing to say about global warming during this current so far mild winter…. in the U.S. anyway. What was it Mann called it “journalistic malpractice?”
Almost all the Agw news from a skeptics perspective, is good these days.
What is important is what observations show vs models.
btw- do you actually play poker. i used to play full time
I’ve been playing poker for over 40 years, Rob. Hardly a big time professional, but I’ve made a decent side income since taking early retirement from business about ten years ago. I also write about the game, although that market’s pretty much dried up. I’m 60 now and no longer have the stomach for live action, so I play mostly online these days.l was a regular at Foxwoods up until a few years ago.
What the heck. I have been arguing with people that are professional bluffers. Good to know, as I will now assign you both to the round filing bin.
So now you tell me, Web, which was a bigger bluff, CO2 as a climate control knob or water vapor as a large positive feedback?
=========================
It will never crumble from the inside because all of those on the inside know it’s easier to collect rent on a hotel in a game of Monopoly than to run a real business. For example, do you imagine that schoolteachers will ever suggest term limits? Of course not. Just the reverse.
When an insider turns apostate, he’s no longer an insider. But as a former believer, his for her dissent now carries undeniable weight. When Judith Curry began to question the received wisdom, why do you suppose the warmists were so upset? Like all of life’s endeavors, this is a matter of iself-interest. At a certain point, there’s going to be a rush for the exits.
Muller (falsely) claiming to be a climate sceptic understood his words would carry more weight, when he said there was now no need to be sceptical.
Having firmly grasped the elephant’s tail, Muller understood that there was no longer any need to be skeptical that the elephant was a ropey beast.
====================
Here is a simple proof in 10 easy steps why the Greenhouse Effect is a physical impossibility.
(1) The IPCC claim that radiation from a cooler atmosphere slows the rate of cooling of the (warmer) surface, thus leading to a greenhouse effect.
(2) The “rate of cooling” is a 24 hour worldwide mean, so wherever the Sun is warming the surface (any sunny morning) the rate of warming would have to be increased by whatever process is slowing the rate of cooling.
(3) Thus extra thermal energy must be added to the surface by such radiation in order to increase the warming rate in the morning and slow the mean rate of cooling calculated from both day and night rates.
(4) Now the Second Law of Thermodynamics relates to heat transfer which is not the same as energy transfer. Radiated energy can be two-way, but heat transfer between two points is always one way and it is invalid to split such heat transfer into two opposite components and try to apply the Second Law to each. Physics doesn’t work that way.
(5) Hence, the surface cannot warm faster in the mornings due to such an imaginary heat transfer, because that would be clearly breaking the Second Law no matter what. Nor can it slow the rate of cooling because of (4). And in general you would expect the same process to happen whether the surface is warming or cooling.
(6) So, those photons from the cooler atmosphere are not being converted to thermal energy in the warmer surface, as Prof Claes Johnson proved in Computational Blackbody Radiation.
(7) Hence the effect of the photons being either reflected or scattered is that there is no impact on the surface at all.
(8) It is also clear that there is no significant transfer by diffusion or conduction from the atmosphere to the surface because the surface absorbs more solar insolation than the lower atmosphere, and we observe that the atmosphere is generally cooler and even cools faster at night than the surface.
(9) So it really does not matter even if extra thermal energy is trapped higher up in the atmosphere because it does not affect what we call climate, and any such energy cannot make its way back to the surface, except possibly an insignificant additional amount in precipitation.
(10) Hence there is no valid physical way in which backradiation or absorption by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause a significant atmospheric greenhouse effect.
If I haven’t convinced you, read this paper Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
BZZZZNT.
before you prove a theory wrong, you first have to understand it.
you dont
Poor ol’ Jeff Dog,
The dog what had four eyes.
================
I haven’t seen a warmist consensus on the physical mechanism thought to underpin the “greenhouse”, be it:
1. radiative “insulation”
2. “backradiation”
3. something else
It is impossible to prove a theory wrong if there is no coherent theory.
How do you disprove an invalid theory Steven?
How can I understand greenhouse absorption of energy (or a delay) principle that is outside universal physics of things?
How can I disprove a theocracy?
I can’t.
I can but offer observational reasoning which realists do.
Max,
The first thing that came to my mind is, how would Vaughan Pratt grade your way of playing with numbers. How would you fare in comparison with Girmas graphs?
Seriously: Any simplification of the kind you present is of zero evidential value. A few numbers can always be picked in a way that ends in totally misleading results. Picking single numbers separated by a long interval of nonlinear development and using them as if everything were linear is just cheating.
When did the AGW hypothesis become a theory??
There’s no AGW hypothesis nor AGW theory, but we have physical theories that apply to atmosphere and they tell that additional CO2 will add to the surface temperature of the Earth.
Fair enough. But that raises the question of whether additional CO2 created by humans has any significant (and that is the key adverb) impact on the earth’s atmospheric temperature given all of the other factors (some which we know of and maybe many which we haven’t yet discovered or understood) which simultaneously impact the earth’s atmospheric temperature. I mean, really ,does anyone truly believe that the ONLY thermostatic switch to the earth’s atmospheric temperature is human created CO2?? If so, where is the proof?
Allen,
I don’t think that anybody considers CO2 to be the only contributing factor or that no natural processes contribute.
The question, whether CO2 has any significant impact is not precise enough. My interpretation of significant is such that it most certainly has a signfican effect, but by that I don’t mean that the effect would necessarily be so large that strong urgent action is required or justified to combat it.
Anyway to me it’s essential that the discussion concentrates on the strength of the warming and on it’s potential consequences as well as available options with their costs and potential benefits. Sticking with simple yes and no will not bring us anywhere.
The bottom line for climate is the energy balance to space. CO2 has a direct effect on that which is why it is at the top of the climate-change factors.
Pekka: “additional CO2 will add to the surface temperature of the Earth”
You mean CO2 may add to the natural rate of warming.
What is that rate. And how much warming above that rate has occurred.
Please start with the assumption that 1910 to 1940 the earth warmed at .2C per decade for 30 years and it was not caused by CO2.
Which decades post-1950 warmed at a higher rate than .2C?
Jim D: “The bottom line for climate is the energy balance to space.”
In 1910 to 1940 the balance was off because of natural variability and the earth warmed by .7C.
Why did that natural variability totally stop working post-1950. Was there a magic off button somewhere?
Still waiting for a proper description of a theory by which trace amounts of CO2 are supposed to prevent escape of IR to space.
Quantification of absorption/reemission/warming in a lab would be useful.
In the meantime, it is just as likely that real heat generated from potential energy sources on earth adds to warming in an undeniable physical manner.
People may disagree with Nordell’s calculations, but the physics is absolutely real.
Bruce, another part of that energy balance is the sun. Since the sunspot frequency tripled in the 1910-1950 period, it is reasonable to suppose the sun had something to do with at least 0.2 degrees of that increase. Since 1950, the sun hasn’t been changing much until the very recent fade which might take it back to 1910 values.
Jim D, you are saying sunspots during the 1980 to 1998 warming were as high as they were at the end of the 1910-1940 warming period?
Don’t think so.
Cycle 14,15,16,17 were not higher than 20,21,22 and 23.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg.
Bruce, exactly the point. Solar activity was lower before 1940 than it has been since. You confirmed this. The increase up to 1940 goes with the temperature increase in the same period.
So Jim you are arguing that an increase in sunspots caused the 1980-1998 warming?
Jim D: ” Since the sunspot frequency tripled in the 1910-1950 period”
Which planet? From 1917 to 1928 sunspot peak fell 25%.
The biggest peak was around 1958.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles
Pekka Pirilä
IPCC tells us (AR4 SPM) that only 7% of the climate forcing since pre-industrial times has come from natural (i.e. solar) factors, conceding that its ”level of scientific understanding” of ”solar (natural) forcing factors” is ”low”.
Let us assume that Latif (not IPCC) is correct and that Latif contributes a higher ”level of scientific understanding” of these factors today than IPCC had back in 2006..
IPCC also tells us that all anthropogenic factors other than CO2 (other GHGs, aerosols, etc.) cancelled one another out, so that the forcing from CO2 = the total anthropogenic forcing.
Let’s accept this IPCC estimate, since IPCC has stated that its ”level of scientific understanding” of these anthropogenic forcing factors is ”medium to high”.
Atmospheric CO2 is estimated to have been around 290 ppmv in 1850 and is 390 ppmv today as measured at Mauna Loa.
If CO2 caused half of the warming, this equals 0.4°C.
We then have a CO2/temperature response for 2xCO2 of:
dT(2xCO2) = dT(290-390) * ln(2) / ln (390/290) = 0.4 * 0.693 / 0.296 = 0.94°C.
This is the temperature response we would expect to see if CO2 doubled from today’s 390 ppmv to a future 780 ppmv (the second-highest IPCC “model scenario and storyline A2”).
Yet IPCC projects a warming by the end of the 21st century for this scenario of 3.4°C above the end of the 20th century (or 3.6 times the observed warming).
Obviouisly, IPCC will have to revise their assumptions and estimates downward drastically if Latif is correct, right?
I suspect, however, that IPCC will not let the findings of Latif disturb them, but will instead continue to sell the same message in AR5 as they tried to sell in AR4, with exaggerated assumptions on CO2 climate sensitivity and temperature response, in order to frighten the readers.
What do you think?
Max
Jim D and Bruce
The record tells us that average number of sunspots (Wolf Number) increased by almost 70% from Solar Cycles 10-14 (1855-1902) to Solar Cycles 19-23 (1955-2008)
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/3/6
The peak was reached in SC19 (1955-1965) with two slightly lower peaks in SC 21 and 22 (1975-1996).
At this point, solar activity was at a high level for several thousand years, according to several solar studies.
Activity during SC 23 was lower (but still much higher than during the late 19th century) and SC 24 has started off very low.
Some attempts have been made to link this with global temperature. The long-term correlation looks quite good.
Mechanisms have been proposed, but these have essentially been discounted by IPCC in AR4 and are still being validated (CLOUD experiment at CERN). Initial CLOUD results have experimentally corroborated the cosmic ray cloud nucleation hypothesis, but the magnitude of the effect is still being worked out. Hopefully these will be incorporated into AR5.
IMO it is too early to tell whether or not the CERN work will present a serious challenge to current conventional hypotheses regarding AGW as the principal driver of mid to late 20th century climate warming, but this could very well turn out to be the case.
Max
Forgot to add this link to study comparing Wolf number and sunspot cycle length with global temperature.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SolarCycleLengthandGlobalTemperatureAnomalies1.pdf
http://bbc.in/zrUe1l
Oh Boy, what a week it’s been, a few things that caught my eye.
UK: Well, it’s all happening over there. Royal Society on the skids looking for a bit of redemption. Lord Lawson cracked it and equated the consenus scientists to pack of hienas. Wind turbines look like being dumped, as is the DECC.
AU: Lord Monkton deceided to put the wind up the greenies and leffties by suggesting Gina Rinehart should buy the lefties rag and stranggle their propaganda. They went off like a bomb.
EU: Anybody left on board the IPCC train? Not many. How many more reputable physicists have to denounce AGW in Europe before the next big wall comes down.
COM: Well, you know. The biggest casualty would have to be Michael Mann. Not to mention the rather large rift in the consensus community. How much longer before the dam breaks? Oh and Chief Hydro, killed ’em this week, so did Latimer. Chris Ho-Stuart, tried and tried and tried.
FOR DISCUSSION
Until we understand the reasons for the amazing planetary temperature stability, we have no hope of understanding the slight variations in that stability.
Does the reason reside in the deep cold waters beyond freezing by the force of pressure. A cold bath will attract heat from the warmer atmosphere of the bathroom.
The oceans have a exponential density of mass to the atmosphere, It is the oceans that takes heat from the atmosphere, the atmosphere doesn’t give heat to the oceans. The oceans are the largest threshold-based thermostatic mechanism in climate.
Climate science looks from above to below, whereas, the major thermostat is the Oceans. The internal motion of Earth derives a cold, as does space. The harmonic balance of Earths climate systems lies beneath the surface of the Earth and her Oceans, not in her atmosphere, not in her Sun.
It is the the force of gravitational pressure on mass, that has the general effect to render the distribution of heat more uniform. In the ocean and in the lakes, the coldest particles, or rather those whose density is the greatest, are continually tending downwards, it is this mechanism that prevents the internal heat of the globe and the external heat of the Sun from becoming sensible in deep waters.
Climate above is derived from below. The internal motion of Earth is the forcing for the stability of Earths coupled climatic systems.
Idiot humans looking towards the sky for a God, yet he remains in dust.
It’s mendacious to claim that somehow Jochem Marotzke is turning sceptic (without realising it) when in the first part of the Der Spiegel interview he says:
“The strongest driver of climate change is clearly the CO2 increase. In addition, an increase of other greenhouse gases such as methane or nitrous oxide. A large role is played by aerosols, ie particles that float in the atmosphere. But the dominant effect comes from the CO2. And because CO2 remains in the atmosphere, this gas will also affect the climate significantly in the future. Unless we reduce the emissions of CO2.”
He then re-emphasises the need to take radical action to avoid 2C of warming and finally states “the scientific quality of the arguments in this book leaves much to be desired.”
(courtesy of Google translate of
http://nachrichten.t-online.de/klimawandel-abgesagt-die-kalte-sonne-im-experten-check/id_53915584/index
)
Steve, it’s all got to do with the medium through which the signal is being transmitted. The frog in his tonic croaks hoarsely.
=================
After reading a bunch of climate science blogs and the comments thereon, I think I have figured out what is bothering me about climate science: Climate Science, per se, isn’t science. Not to say that there is not a lot of scientists in the climate science field collecting data and writing reports, maybe even most of them honest, scientific, and without an agenda. Our host, for example. But the field as now constituted is not science.
If Climate Science were an actual science, it would have developed roughly (and obvious simplistically) along these lines:
a. The climate and how it works is very interesting from a scientific perspective and is important to a lot different areas of our civilization.
b. It has changed wildly during all of recorded history, and even more wildly over geological periods.
c. Considering our complex society and its reliance on a benign climate to maintain itself, it would be a good idea to try to figure out ‘what makes climate tick’ and see if there are any potential unpleasant surprises in store for us, climatewise.
d. Lets establish a robust, accurate, climate measuring system, identify every factor that we can think of that may influence climate, collect data for awhile, or, where records exist, analyze the records, and look for correlations between variations in the potential stimulus and variations in climate.
e. Try to determine the coupling mechanism between the external influence and observed climate.
f. Attempt to develop models that incorporate those factors, predict observed variations in climate when run against historical data, and successfully predict future climate for some relatively short period.
g. Provide the climate predictions, with a confidence factor, to the policy makers and let them, with assistance from experts in a plethora of other fields, determine if the changes pose a threat or would on balance be beneficial.
h. If it is determined that observed and predicted climate changes pose a threat or threats that outweigh potential benefits, work with scientists in other fields to identify means of ameliorating the threats.
h. Continue to look for phenomena that may influence climate, incorporate them into the climate models, and iterate.
As near as I can figure Climate Science really came about like this:
a. Come up with an existential crisis that is planet wide and can be used to justify massive increases in government power.
b. Observe that cheap, plentiful energy is the key to freedom and prosperity, that most of our energy comes from the combustion of various forms of hydrocarbons, a primary byproduct of which is the introduction of large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that governmental control over energy would allow government control over every aspect of our technical civilization.
c. Establish a new field, ‘Climate Science’, in which it is axiomatic that:
1. The ‘Temperature of the Earth’ is rising at an unprecedented rate.
2. The increase in the ‘Temperature of the Earth’ is non-linear and concave upward.
3. The increase is the direct effect of CO2 being introduced into the atmosphere as a byproduct of our civilization producing most of its energy through the combustion of carbon based fuels.
4. The effects of rising temperature are already being felt throughout the biosphere and they range from bad to catastrophic.
5. The only possible amelioration is to reduce or eliminate anthropogenic CO2 by giving government essentially unlimited authority over all aspects of energy production and consumption.
d. Establish a symbiosis among government, environmental organizations, and the climate science community in which the government sponsors environmental organizations and the climate scientists, the environmental organizations provide government with doomsday predictions (and political donations) and sponsor climate science, and the climate scientists provide ‘settled science’ to the government and environmental organizations to justify the doomsday predictions of the environmentalists and the massive expansion of government power necessary to stave off the otherwise inevitable catastrophe.
e. Only scientists who accept 1 through 5 as axiomatic are authentic ‘Climate Scientists’.
f. Promulgate Axioms 1 through 5 throughout the education system and all forms of public discourse until they are accepted as axiomatic by the population at large.
g. With the backing of a grateful populace, ameliorate climate catastrophe, per Axiom 5 (well under way).
The point being that Climate Science, as a field, began with 1 through 5 as axioms, with the central axiom being that the Temperature of the Earth is a function of the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere and that anthropogenic CO2 was driving atmospheric CO2, and by extension, the temperature of the earth, upward catastrophically, and with the announcement that ‘the science is settled’. It is the only scientific field that I know of that is axiomatic. Subsequent to its inception, it has concentrated on defending its axiomatic foundations against all challenges, political and scientific. Data is collected and reports are written for the express purpose of validating the axioms. Scientists who collect data and write reports in conflict with the axioms are drummed out of the climate science corps, with some prominent climate scientists saying that climate apostasy should be criminalized. Read the book reviews that started this discussion and the commentary on any climate blog, including Dr. Curry’s, for confirmation.
There is a lot of self-projection by skeptics on this issue. Just because skeptics often come to their view starting with politics does not mean that is how scientists come to their view. Science comes from the scientific foundations set by Arrhenius and Tyndall, and politics has no say in how physics, chemistry and later geosciences have developed into current theories and conceptual models.
Tyndall has been misinterpreted for 150 years. Try reading what he actually wrote and have a good hard think about it. “Failure to transmit” IR waves through a long thin tube does NOT equal “absorption of heat energy”. Tyndall said nothing about heating.
One day, someone in physics will repeat tyndall’s experiments and properly quantify the (probably small if any) proportion of energy retained as heat, since it is just as likely to be remitted instantaneously. Even if it shared by conduction with other non-IR absorber/emitters, CO2 will get it back and re-radiate it.
“Just because skeptics often come to their view starting with politics does not mean that is how scientists come to their view.”
Common grade b dogma of the warming community who wish to avoid political examination……..in the broad context that is required. Climate science is a subset of “enviornmental studies” and as far as the nucleus of leaders an enclave of the hard eco-left following in the traditions Paul Ehrlich and others.
I’m pointing out your delusion Jim D, not endorsing what you are responding to. When there are millions involved of course there are people who approach the topic from many views. Nothing is absolute but argument of a science high ground without politics is a joke.
blouis79, if you are saying that absorption of IR is not the same as absorption of radiated heat, you are probably quite confused.
cwon14, you may be surprised that most of science including climate science is done without politics in mind. It is the study of the earth system and quantifying what can change it. This study is just as detached from politics as string theory in physics. Just because some scientists choose to be political activists, it should not be seen as representative of all scientists who just do their research work.
It is delusional to believe in historical physics instead of current physics.
David Goodstein of CalTech puts it best:
In the end, who really cares what Tyndall and Arrhenius figured out. That was a place and time that established the initial foundation. Other scientists built from this and improved on the understanding. This still evolves as we speak. Give the scientists credit and move on is what Goodstein says.
The skeptical view that what early scientists such as Arrhenius and Tyndall said is somehow gospel frankly astonishes me.
Jim D: Postulating for a moment that my skepticism DID start with politics and not addressing at all how any or all other skeptics came to be skeptical, how, exactly, would that invalidate anything I said above?
Were my axioms NOT the accepted position of the climate science community when ‘Climate Change’, nee ‘Global Warming’ seemingly came out of nowhere to become an existential threat and was not ‘The science is settled.’ proclaimed from the start?
Which of my proposed axioms are NOT defended vigorously against challenges from outside the ‘team’?
Does the political, environmental, climate change symbiosis I described NOT exist?
Are scientists, even world famous ones, who challenge or even question the axioms treated with the deference and respect that they were accorded before their challenges?
Has it NOT been proposed by the most prominent climate scientists that apostasy against the climate science axioms be prosecuted criminally?
Have governments around the world, particularly in the West, NOT been taking control of energy production and consumption per Axiom 5?
Have the mass media and the education system from K through grad school NOT promulgated all five axioms AS axiomatic and have they not presented those who question them as ignorant, evil, or both?
WHT….”The skeptical view that what early scientists such as Arrhenius and Tyndall said is somehow gospel frankly astonishes me.”
It’s not only skeptics that take that position my friend.
If you think it is delusional to believe in historical physics and just go with current physics, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out and alert you when you can use that little axiom of wisdom to the all warmists who like to throw out the Tyndall and Arrhenius theories on this blog when making their points…..
Yeah… I know, that comment was a little Joshua like… wasn’t it :)
Jim D
As a rational skeptic of the science supporting the IPCC CAGW premise, I find your rather flowery and starry-eyed explanation of “how scientists come to their view” (i.e. “from the scientific foundations…etc,”) while “skeptics” do so “starting with politics” both absurd and arrogant.
There are many “scientists” who are also “skeptics”. Do they “start with science or with politics”?
Such rubbish, Jim.
Stick to discussing the “science” and forget these silly rationalizations of why who does what.
Max.
Climate science is in a special position of predicting outcomes that affect everyone in a very direct sense, so it is no surprise that local and national government agencies take an interest. However, this interest has now in the last few decades become political with some interested agencies making strong attempts to affect the science when they don’t like the majority view of scientists. Thankfully most scientists are not swayed by what these agencies want to hear, and just want to speak truth to power. I have said here before, there is nothing worse for a scientist than to state a view that is later proved wrong, so they make quite sure before they come down on one side of an issue, and AGW is an issue where they don’t need much persuading because the basic ideas fit the basic facts.
Hi Jim. How come your so smart about the nature of things, but you have a really small vocabulary.
Jim D, you don’t have highend cognitive functioning, maybe you should consider leaving it off.
Both Arrhenious & Tyndall had a limited understanding of macroclimatology and their work should never have been accept at face value by NASA or Jim Hansen.
I’m sorry if you can’t read what everybody else is trying to communicate to you.
I am interested if any of those who call themselves skeptics here are 100% convinced that the IPCC WG1 projections are wrong and this century won’t in fact warm anything like 3 C from 2000 to 2100, or do they give AGW some credence because it has worked well enough so far?
@Webhubtelescope “The skeptical view that what early scientists such as Arrhenius and Tyndall said is somehow gospel frankly astonishes me.”
Nobody said it was gospel. But there are a lot of people who think CO2 absorbs IR to cause warming, without experimental demonstration of such significant effect.
Judith has said here she bases her belief in CO2’s warming effect on the incontrovertibility of the “Tyndall Effect”.
It’s incredible that this kind of total crap is repeated forever.
There is an infinity od strong experimental evidence for the warming effect. It has been collected following same kind of methodes and approaches that are used in essentially all experimental physics. It’s so clear and extensive that it’s by now difficult to even say, where to start. Only thing that’s needed is a little basic understanding of physics and how empirical evidence is collected in physics.
Pekka: “There is an infinity od strong experimental evidence for the warming effect. ”
Which papers test CO2 warming on a large scale?
Two huge jars. One with 290ppm one with 390ppm. Show the difference.
Physics applies at all scales. Physical phenomena are tested using arrangements that suit best for the purpose.
There are, of course, great uncertainties concerning the strength of the feedbacks and therefore of the actual strength of the warming effect for the full Earth system, but that’s a very different thing from knowing, how the basic warming influence of CO2 operates. The latter has been thoroughly analysed in great detail, the former remains rather poorly known.
We no longer use Tyndall’s arguments and laboratory equipment. Do you not see, Louis, that science actually advances over time?
Pekka, you said there was a lot of experimental evidence.
Where is it? I really am interested. Anything done recently comparing 290ppm to 290ppm?
The evidence is so old and so extensive that it fills standard text books of physics. It has been collected for at least 150 years and it has long been so strong that only details and applications have been published in recent decades.
What’s needed to appreciate the evidence is some understanding of basic physics, not specific publications.
Pekka: No recent experiments.
Got it. Zero experiments.
Pekka, youn write “That’s the problem with you and several others. You don’t accept all knowledge but make up your rules on what’s acceptable and what’s not.”
Nonsense. I dont make up any “rules” at all. This is what I was taught in Physics 101 at Cavendish Labs Cambridge. This is what my mentor, Prof Sir Gordon Sutherland hammered into my head. This is the fundamental basis of all physics.
The shoe is on the other foot. The proponents of CAGW have bastardized physics by claiming that things other than hard measured data can be used to established what is and what is not true.
Sorry, I am on the side of the angels. And in the end, the hard measured data will prove that I am right.
Certainly looks like a reasonable analysis to me.
And, whatever Jim D may think, I arrived at climate science because I wanted to learn about the really neat experiments that I thought they they must have done to be confident in saying ‘The Science is Settled’.
That there aren’t any such experiments is a major reason that I am a sceptic. And Climategate showed me that – whatever the motivations of the footsoldiers – the ‘leaders’ had much more interest in maintaining their own power and status than anything to do with ‘science’.
‘Trust Me, I’m a Climatologist’, now ranks alongside the other great myths: ‘The cheque’s in the post’, ‘I’m from Head Office, I’m here to help you’ and ‘Of course I’ll still love you in the morning’
LA, You sound quite political to me. What about your science views? You look for proof of climate change when temperature measurements will reveal it was right as the future unfolds, and surely better satellite and ocean measurements will constrain it to AGW being the only explanation left standing in the near future.
@jim d
Your argument appears to be:
‘The temperature will continue to rise in the future and we won’t be able to think of anything else, so it must be AGW’
…which might get to the starting line as a plausible hypothesis(amonf plenty of others), but ain’t nowhere near a proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Not least of which because it none of it has happened yet and existing climatology’s record on predictions coming true is just about zero. .
There’s an old saying ‘if we had ham and we had eggs, we could have a cooked breakfast. But we haven’t so we can’t’.
We have neither ham nor eggs at the moment. Maybe one day we might have, but I’m not betting the farm on it quite yet. Those rentseekers who try to bluff us with ‘The Science is Settled’ or ‘Five years to save the planet’ or other such tosh are either charlatans themeselves or have agendas of their own. I have little but contempt for them, and no respect for their views.
And even if today’s theory were one day shown to be 100% true, I am still unconvinced that all the dire consequences that are predicted would happen and/or be as dreadful as suggested.
The sea level may rise a bit…but it already goes up and down 14 feet every six hours in the centre of London every day. sticking another couple of bricks on the top of the sea wall doesn’t sound like its impossible to me.
And there would undoubtedly be some upsides as well. In general plants and animals and people grow and live better in warmer rather than colder climates…look at the difference between the abundant tropical rain forests and the tundra. The people of Northern Europe and North America head south to the warmth for their holidays…not the other way round.
If you think those views are ‘political’, then so be it. They seem pretty unremarkable to me. I’d suggest that the really political ones are those who take the flimsiest of cases and try to bounce the rest of us into huge political actions based upon their misrepresentations of ‘science’.
Latimer Adler
It is easy to see how Jim D avoids discussing the “science” (or lack thereof) supporting the IPCC CAGW hypothesis by getting posters to fall into his trap of discussing motives rather than data (which are not working in his direction).
Max.
I like discussing the science too. Here is data I like to post for people who are convinced the warming has stopped. The trend is 0.15 degrees per decade for the last 40 years, and it can be accounted for by AGW. Trying to visualize any unusual pause in there is just wishful thinking.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1970/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1970/trend
@jimd
Sorry, I don’t find ‘can be accounted for by AGW’ to be compelling proof.
The reason that I didn’t hand in any History homework one day in November 1971 ‘could be accounted for’ by the dog eating it. Or that I forgot. Or that I was mounting a silent one boy protest against the history master who wanted me to join his toy army (Combined Cadet Force).
It ‘could be accounted for’ by lots of things. But being a plausible explanation doesn’t make it actually so. To really get to ‘The Science is Settled’ you need something far more definite than ‘can be accounted for’. The same is true of ‘is consistent with’
I came to climatology expecting to find those concrete proofs..and to look in awe at the clever experiments they had constructed to do them. And found none. There are still none.
LA, let’s see a list of other things that can account for the warming that also fit the physics and observations and we can have a checklist of what works and what doesn’t versus AGW. I really have trouble understanding the skeptical mindset on this issue. Is it because CO2 is somehow inconvenient as the culprit? I say this because we see the so-called skeptics pushing any idea (recently Postma, Jelbring, Nikolov and Zeller, Scafetta, Miskolczi) as long as CO2 is not to blame even if these ideas have major flaws in thinking or no basis in science. This gives skepticism a bad name because of the lack of due diligence in accepting those ideas.
Two things that would explain all warming
Sunshine
http://i40.tinypic.com/xgfyok.jpg
Albedo
http://i39.tinypic.com/34oc184.jpg
@jim d
‘LA, let’s see a list of other things that can account for the warming that also fit the physics and observations and we can have a checklist of what works and what doesn’t versus AGW’
Here’s the way it would go in a courtroom. You are trying to get carbon dioxide convicted as the villain of the crime of global warming.
Remember that the courtroom standard of proof is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and you have to prove your case. The defence does not have to prove anything.
Prosecution case:
1. You have some circumstantial evidence that Mr CO2 is involved.
2. You cannot think of anybody else it might be.
3. His involvement fits your theories
4. ===> He is guilty.
Defence case:
1. No actual evidence better than circumstantial
2. Prosecutors do not think of anything other than guilt of Mr CO2
3. Theories not much good. Every time they are tested the observations (‘experiments’) do not match the theories’ predictions
4. Thirty years to work on case and no further forward on finding evidence
5. ===> Defendant cannot be found guilty ‘beyond reasonable doubt’
But this is not a criminal court case. Science is about figuring out the truth symmetrically, not based on the asymmetrical setting of court room, where it’s worse that an innosent is convicted than that a guilty gets released.
Science is not either about proofs but about balance of evidence, where evidence of various strength has its role.
The use of scientific knowledge in support of policy is neither a court room case. The decision makers should also use all evidence available and base their decsions on that. Advocates of no side need to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.
@pekka
‘Science is not either about proofs but about balance of evidence, where evidence of various strength has its role’
Seems to me that science is finding out about what is really going on. And that involves delving as deep into a problem as you can. Not just getting to the handwaving stage and saying ‘that’s good enough’
The crucial test of one’s understanding is that one can make testable predictions and that they will come true.
Example. Using only Newtonian mechanics it is possible to predict the positions of all the planets in the Solar System thousands of years out, And those predictions will come true, Newtonian mechanics is a very well understood, well tested system and – for those things to which it applies, it is ‘true’. It has been ‘proved’ beyond reasonable doubt. We can trust it in engineering, in astronomy, in flight, in every aspect of our lives. Newton got it right.
But compare this with climatology. The systems are not well understood. It does not make testable predictions that come true. At every stage, the climatologists have got no further than arriving at a plausible hypothesis that agrees with their views and then say ‘and so it must be true’. They haven’t done the next bit ..all the work that goes into making a case watertight and really really shows understanding.
Physicists of the late 19C did the same. They had convinced themselves that they had got it all finished and tied up. There were just a few pesky details that weren’t clear, but otherwise everything was complete. And, of course, one of those pesky details was the photoelectric effect. Einstein studied this problem, discovered the quantisation of radiation and so was born quantum theory and just about a century of investigation of that and related effects.
Had he just settled for the fuzzy ‘balance of probabilities’ argument he might never have looked.
So I disagree fundamentally. Science is not about the balance of probabilities. It is about really really understanding the nature of the porblemand its casues. It needs testable evidence and testable predictions to be thorough and trustworthy. It needs to be proved well beyond reasonable doubt.
And climatology has very few of these things.
Science studies very different problems. For some it produces accurate answers that can be also tested very precisely, for others the results are much less accurate and tests less definitive. Good science may be done in both cases. The basic attitude must be the same: searching for better knowledge about the real world, but the practical criteria may be very different.
@pekka
OK .Let’s compromise that ‘useful’ science makes testable predictions that come true.
And for climatology that is really all that we want.
If it weren’t for the possibility that there might be some climate-related nastiness ahead, we wouldn’t have spent north of $100 billion on it and spawned this huge sciency-type academic industry.
It would have stayed as a quiet backwater for those who found day-to-day weather forecasting too stressful- or who didn’t have the maths.
But we asked them to come up with definite answers to the questions.
a) Are we in the s**t?
b). If so, how deep?, And how bad is it going to get?
c) What can we do about it?
d) Prove all of the above
And after 25 years of effort we are not really any further forward on answering any of those questions. We don’t know anything now that we didn’t know back in 1985. We’ve had lots of scare stories and giga giga giga bytes of data has been tortured to show hosts of ‘connections’ between ‘climate change’ and every bad thing the human brain can imagine.
But we still can’t say with any certainty what the climate will be like 20 years away. We’ve never made a testable climate prediction that has come true. Whether along the way some ‘good science’ (by your definition) is a matter of opinion. But it doesn’t seem to me that we have doen any ‘useful science’ at all.
Maybe it is inherent in the nature of the system that it iwll be forever unpredictable. If so, we should all pack up and go home. There is no point in spending good money after bad on a futile wild goose chase. Or maybe it just needs that extra little push or just one more supercomputer and everything will become clear (though this seems an increasingly unbelieveable bit of special pleading).
But climatologists had better make their mind up soon. However distressing it may be, the general publoc are losing faith in you bigtime. And since they (in the end) pay for your grants and salaries and computers and confrences and propagnda blogs, when they lost faith your budgets being cut are only a few years behind. The recent dreadful cold over much of Europe was bad enough as a counter-example to the idea of permanently increasing temperatures (for the third year in a row). T opublish simultaneously a daft climatological paper saying that the reason ot was cold is bcasue the planet has warmed up took you from general indifference to ridicule.
Time to start worrying about the usefulness of your science..
My science?
I’m a (theoretical) physicist and engineer by education. Later fields include systems analysis and energy economics. What I know about climate science is partly based on my knowledge of physics and partly on interest that I have had on the issues.
From the fact that my own areas of specialty are largely in the more precisely understiid and tested fields of science does not follow that I could not appreciate the difficulties that a field like climate science can not avoid or that I would claim that climate science is worthless. it’s just very difficult and complex and therefore progresses slowly.
The results are less reliable and precise, but they are not worthless. I would like to understand better the status of climate science and I’m somewhat disappointed in the difficulties in getting unbiased inside knowledge, but still I trust some results more and some others less.
Pekka you write “searching for better knowledge about the real world”
Here we come to a discussion we have had before. What do we mean by “knowledge”? In physics, so far as I am concerned, knowledge can mean only one thing; namely hard, measured, independently replicated, data. Nothing else will do. Specifically, the output of non-validated models never was, is not now, and never will be “knowledge”.
Jim,
That’s the problem with you and several others. You don’t accept all knowledge but make up your rules on what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Mostly you do that in a way that serves in perpetuating your prejudices and in supporting, what you wish to support.
It’s not possible to give precise definitions for what’s knowledge or scientific knowledge. Somewhat vaguely everything that has been found out by sincere and honest attempt to learn about the real world may be included. An essential component in doing scientific work is self-criticism, but again: no fixed rules can tell, what that must be in practice.
@pekka
‘my science’.
Clumsy wording – for which I apologise. I meant ‘the ‘science’ of climatology’. But I hope that the general sense still comes through.
Sorry
You are much more eloquent in saying exactly what I have thought since I came to this issue as an agnostic being as far from any scientific field as you can get. I do have a good BS meter, however, which has helped me to ferret out what is good science and logic and what is not. The reason I like Dr Curry’s blog so much is that I can always count on her to be an objective observer and someone who adheres to sound science even when some on this blog dont. If I were a ringside judge, I would have it 5 to 4 skeptics with 6 rounds to go. The scientific studies just keep piling up on the skeptics side. I say this in spite of assertions such as those by Jim D which have no merit that I can see.
Bob Ludwick: If Climate Science were an actual science, it would have developed roughly (and obvious simplistically) along these lines:
I am sympathetic to your analysis, but no real science has developed the right way. There are always exaggerated or premature claims of public utility (warnings of threats, promises of cure), false leads followed too long, opportunities postponed or missed completely until later, requests for government funds and public school indoctrination. All the problems and prospects loom larger with climate science because the topic is so vast and involves everyone. Smaller scale examples of the problems can be seen in the work of Lavoisier and others discovering the elements H, O, and the compound CO2; the early uses of radium; the science of retroviruses and discovery of HIV.
What we observe are the normal workings of imperfect scientists with complex problems, but writ large because of the size of the system that is studied, and the number of researchers.
The list of authors of the ‘editorial reviews’ of Mann’s book is an insider joke –> a literal who’s-who of [often alleged] co-conspirators.
It would be funny were it not so nauseating.
It’s a real tell. We should feel sorry for him; no one independent would write a blurb for him. Not one damn little tout, but from the Team.
=======================
Kip
It (the list of authors of the ‘editorial reviews’ of Mann’s book) is a peer reviewed list of the peer reviewers.
Max
It’s funny you should say that Kim however tongue in cheek, because I actually do feel sorry for these guys sometimes. I think Mann must live in a kind of hell. He’s a smart guy, he knows deep down this thing is beginning to blow up. Was it Jones who actually admitted to thinking about suicide?
I have no doubt the team started out with the best of intentions. No one aspires to being a fraud. And during the 90’s and early 2000’s they were riding high. Skeptics were few and far between, there was no Internet to speak of, and the climate was breaking their way. Mann and his fellow climate scientists were the new heroes, almost in the way astronauts used to be. They were courageous and brilliant and they were going to save the world.
But now? Makes me think of E. E Cummings:
Michael Mann’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
The issue regarding Latif’s paper were succinctly summarized by our host in her post of February 12, 2012 at 1:49 pm, as follows:
This is an extremely compelling argument.
Pekka Pirilä has attempted to rebut it (unsuccessfully, however, as he has neither been able to explain the causes of the early warming nor to demonstrate that these causes were not present during the second warming).
In effect, we have IPCC telling us:
1. Our computers cannot explain the early 20th century warming
2. We know that the (statistically indistinguishable) late 20th century warming was caused principally by CO2.
3. How do we know this?
4. Because our computers cannot explain it any other way.
Until a) the cause of the early warming cycle can be clearly identified and b) it can be shown that this cause did not exist during the late warming cycle, the claims of anthropogenic forcing are not supported by any observational data, but only on greenhouse hypothesis and flawed logic.
That (in a nutshell) is the dilemma that Latif poses.
Max
@manacker
Steve Milesworthy tried also to answer this point back in the ‘Trends, change points & hypotheses’ thread.
Basically did a lot of hand-waving and then said ‘well it was all a long time ago and we have better thermometers now so its all too difficult’.
And buggered off.
Using no more and no less cherry picking than Judith Curry’s choice, the warming from 1900 to 1945 is 0.15C (looking at 5-year means of GISTEMP) or 0.03C per decade.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
For the more recent period it never gets anywhere near that low (0.08C-0.14C) until you start to cherry pick very short periods.
So the sensitivity to the choice of end-points (as compared with the last 50 years) means that the 1910-40 period is more easily explainable by “AGW natural variability”. Which was the discussion in the other thread.
I’ll b***r off for a bit now to let Latimer get in the last word.
Steve, the earth cooled, warmed and paused from 1890 to 1945.
But natural variations were capable of a .7C warming over 30 years from 1911 to 1944
.23C per decade.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1890/to:1941/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1911/to:1941/trend
Or Steve, we could cherry pick
Jan 1893 -0.956 to Jan 1944 0.245
1.2C over 51 years. .235 per decade.
Bruce,
My figure was based on 5-year means, not individual months.
Your figures are wrong. Your plot shows 0.5C warming over that period (1911-1941): 0.16C per decade, not 0.23C. And if you extend the period back to 1901 you get 0.13C per decade, or forward to 1951 and you get 0.11C per decade.
For 1981-2011 the trend is about the same as your 30 year trend (0.17C per decade), but now if you add another 10 years you get the same trend (1971-2011) of 0.17C per decade.
So the trend for the early period is not so sustained as it is sensitive to your choice of endpoints. The trend for the later period goes on for longer, and is less sensitive to choice of end-points.
Therefore it is wrong to equate the first period of warming with the current warming.
@steve milesworthy
I’ve looked at the graph you presented earlier. The gradient of the warming periods are just about identical. They may vary in exact detail, but (since we are talking about general trends here), they are to all intents and purposes the same.(0.13C per decade vs 0.16C per decade)
So remind me again how the first can only be ‘natural variation’ and the second is definitely ‘anthropogenic global warming’.
I’d like to be able to present the argument in the Dog and Duck without ridicule that I am making a distinction without a difference, or arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin.
Latimer,
The 45 year trend on GISTEMP (1900-45) is only 0.03C not 0.13C per decade over the period that covers the period in question. That is a much lower trend than any 45 year period in the last 50-odd years.
The Dog and Duck discussion is that your mate is crowing about a good couple of months on the horses, when you with your more skilful eye and a more diligent read of the Racing Post tends to do better than him. You know that prior to his good spell he lost a few quid, and expect he’ll blow it all next month. You on the other hand will continue to do nicely thank you very much (barring El Nino taking a big fall at the Cheltenham Gold Cup next month). You are the last 50 years, he has arrived at 1940 and will hit 1945 (cooling) next month.
Latimer,
Aside from the points made by Steve there is the rather obvious fact that CO2 emissions were much higher in the latter part of the century than in the earlier part. Given the known radiative properties of CO2 wouldn’t you agree that this would be strong evidence that the anthropogenic influence was greater in the latter part of the century? Then we can look at the factors which were believed to be in play in the early 20C warming. It is harder to make confident attributions for that period than for more recent years because we don’t have such high quality data but high solar activity and low volcanic activity are thought to have been a significant factor, neither of which apply in recent years.
You might find the following of interest –
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3C3721%3ACONAAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2
I don’t doubt that you may be right if you look at 45 years. And you’ll get a different answer than over 75 or 150 or 10 or 274. I don’t disagree. But 45 years is not more the ‘right’ length of time to observe than any or all of the above.
But you are using these plots to attempt to tell us something about the causes of warming. And if you look at the time when such warming was actually occurring (1910 – 1940 and 1975 to 2000), you;ll see that they have very similar gradients. You don’t need a deep-seated statistical analysis to do this…you can see it be eye.
And since the gradient tells us about the rate of warming we are left with something about the cause of that warming that still needs to be explained.
You propose that in the 1910 to 1940 timeframe, the warming at the rate of 0.12C per decade can just be explained away as ‘natural variation’. And yet over a similar period (1975-2000) a similar rate of warming (0.16C per decade) it must be attributed to carbon dioxide. Why? What makes these two periods so different that the explanation for one is not the explanation for the other? What evidence do you have that these are totally separate mechanisms?
It seems that you also do not know what caused the start and stop of the 1910-1940 period, nor the end of the 1975-2000 period. But you are convinced that the beginning of the 1975 period was unequivocally casued by carbon dioxide.
So, sorry, but I earlier described your explanations of the graph you have choesn to bring to our attention as ‘handwaving’. Nothing you have said so far causes me to change that view one iota. Indeed arguing endpoints about the shape of a graph that is obvious by visual inspection only reinforces my view that you are so deep in the wood as to have entirely lost track of the trees.
Show me that you really understand both causes of warming (for there may be such) and I’ll believe you more.
.
Sorry – my last post was addressed primarily to Steve M.
There is also the even more obvious factor known as the land-sea warming contrast. Since land surface temperatures respond faster to a change in forcing a large land-sea warming contrast is indicative of a forced cause. A small land-sea warming contrast is indicative of warming induced by internal variability, or of “pipeline” warming after a forcing has stopped increasing.
The 1910-1940 period exhibits slightly more warming over the oceans than land (though not significantly so, close to a 1:1 relationship). From 1970-2011 the land surface has warmed by about twice as much as the ocean surface.
Latimer, we know that the 1910 period was preceded by cooling and the 1940 period was followed by cooling. So it is reasonable to consider that some of the warming related to natural variation away from a lower trend of warming (ie. the trend you get if you look a little beyond the 1910 minumum and 1940 maximum.
The current warming period is much longer than 30 years and it has not yet ended. Some of the warming may be due to natural variation.
As I said repeatedly and as Paul S states less hand-wavingly you also have to look at evidence from other temperature measuring systems. The “similar trend” argument is reduced or irrelevant in many of the temperature metrics.
Trying to equate the two periods and say they are the same so if you can’t explain one you can’t explain the other is vastly over-simplified thinking.
@steve m
I think that you are making distinctions without differences.
1. 1910-1940 was preceded by cooling.
Fine. Look at the period around 1960. There was a pronounced cooling period between 1960 and 1965 with just about the identical shape as 1905-1910. If you think that a receding cooling period is important (though I find it hard to do so myself), then we’ll start the clock for warming period 2 at 1965, not 1975. You get +0.05C more warming but in ten more years. Brings down the gradient a bit, making the rate of period 2 even closer to that of period 1.
2. Period 2 hasn’t stopped yet.
Debatable at best. Your graph shows that there has been no pronounced rise in temperature since 1998. We of course cannot tell yet what will happen in the future, but even if there were to be a further warming, it would be arguable whether this was a continuation of period 2 or whether t was the beginning of a whole new period 3.
3. I don’t say that you necessarily need to come up with the same cause for both periods of warming. But you do need to show a pretty cast iron reason why there are two separate causes, not just the one repeating itself. And you need to be able to argue both causes with equal rigour.
For if period 1 is indeed ‘natural variation’ (or other weasel words), then I am very, very, very hard pushed indeed to explain to my Dog and Duck mates exactly why period 2 isn’t the same ‘natural variation’ as well. Even the least numerate of them can look at a graph, see two lines of similar length and of similar gradient and conclude that they are most likely the same effect occurring twice.
The remarkable thing would be if they are indeed different things, And that needs a remarkable explanation.
And I take slight umbrage at you accusing me of over-simplified thinking. In return, I would suggest that you are needing to get yourself into quite a lot of convoluted thinking to avoid admitting the truth that any denizen of the D&D would appreciate in a few seconds from your helpful graph.
Amusing to watch the skeptics chasing phantoms. Natural fluctuations have some interesting properties. First, since they tend to go positive and negative from the steady-state, they demonstrate pseudo-strength as they make transitions. Second, the rate of transition scales with frequency; take the derivative of a sine wave to verify this.
A steady monotonic warming signal is no match to the phantom signals when naive sleuths put their determined little heads to the data. They will find all sorts of spurious signals that they think are significant. Only time will cure the phantom chaser’s affliction.
It is probably fitting that as I try to clearly point this out, it will get drowned out by a skeptical sea of noise. :)
Latimer,
Firstly, if your Dog and Duck mates are looking at a graph, seeing two similar looking trends occurring at different times and assuming that the cause must be the same then maybe you should be explaining to them about the dangers of jumping to such conclusions without having the necessary underlying knowledge of the subject in question instead of arguing with us about it.
Secondly, Paul S and I have both given specific examples of differences between the 1910-40 and 1970-present periods.
Bruce said, “Steve, the earth cooled, warmed and paused from 1890 to 1945.” What you mean paused?
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/westernsiberiadendrorecon.png
The only way to get a pause is to smooth out the signal. Siberia appears to have a huge impact on global temperature. Russia opened up Siberia with the railway if the late 1800s to farming and again in the late 1950s.
There was a sharp short-lived dip in the temperature around 1910 and the maximum around 1940 was also relatively sharp. Using a little longer averages the whole temperature rise was about 0.3 C, not 0.5 C. In contrast the recent rise started from a plateau of about 30 years and the ending level has been maintained already for about 15 years. Thus the more real comparison is between a 0.3 C rise and a 0.5 C rise. Furthermore there’s no doubt that the first rise started at a temperature that was rather low in comparison with what is known about the earlier centuries, while the latter has ended at a level that has not been met for a long time, certainly not after the MWP, if even then.
The first rise appears to be similar to earlier variations of the last millennium, while the second is in its own class. More or less everybody seems to agree that the most recent rise is likely to be to some extent the result of natural variability, but its agreement with the expected consequences of increased CO2 is very unlikely to be accidental.
All this leaves a lot of freedom for speculating on the relative share of AGW in the recent rise. If we pick only the steeply rising part from 1975 to 2008, it’s likely that a fair part is natural variability, but extending the period to the 50 years 1961-2011 it’s quite possible that the change is about 100% AGW, perhaps a bit less or a bit more.
Paused. 1943 to 1979. 1998 to 2012.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1909/to:1943/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1977/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1943/to:1977/trend
Pekka: “Using a little longer averages the whole temperature rise was about 0.3 C, not 0.5 C.”
No. It was .673C bottom to top. 1911 -.573 to 1944 .100
30 years. 3 decades. About the length of a PDO.
And then we go 1968 to 1998. .689.
But we could go 50 years.
Jan 1893 -0.956 to Jan 1944 .245 = 1.201
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt
By trying to minimize the capability of natural warming, you are trying to mislead people. For shame.
Steve, I am using HADCRUT. .673C over 30 years.
The most honest way of doing this is to compare fastest rise in temperature over a reasonable period from before 1950 and then after 1950.
I chose 30 years and found .673C from 1911 to 1944.
You would prefer to include some cooling periods to be dishonest. That makes me sad that you are a denier about the capabilities of natural warming.
@andrew adams
Occam’s Razor.
‘We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes’
Good enough for Isaac Newton to say. Good enough for me to agree. UNLESS you can show compelling reasons why it is more complex in this case. And so far, you can’t. You can wave your hands about and do simulations, but you there are no compelling reasons to believe any of them.
You, Andrew, keep returning to the known properties of CO2. And then by assuming that the graph period 2 is driven by CO2 prove to your own satisfaction that it is driven by CO2. Well zippedoodah. You have just – via a graph – proved your starting assumption. I believe that this is called a circular argument.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a minute.
We are all agreed I think that period 1 shows a time of warming driven by natural variation. Without making any assumptions at all about anything else, i.e just from the temperature graph, why would you conclude that period 2 *must* be driven by something else? What is it about the graph itself that forces you into the 2 causes position?
Steve Mielsworthy: “The current warming period is much longer than 30 years and it has not yet ended. ”
Actually it was about 22 years long. 1976 to 1998. No year was warmer in HADCRUT3 than 1998. And none colder in the 30 years before that.
OTOH, to be fair, the natural warming could be 1911 to 1998.
87 years of natural warming. It never ended.
Considering the “claims” of the warmists and their attempts to change periods to try and minimize natural warmings capability to warm over 30 years, I think I will try a new position.
1911 to 1998 was all natural warming. It started in 1911, took a pause around 1944 to 1979 when pollution started to occlude the sun, and then continued on as the clean air legislation took effect.
Since warming clearly started in 1911, it must have continued past 1950.
Prove otherwise.
Bruce,
Mentioning the real extremes is totally pointless. Therefore I looket at 5 year moving average to start with. Anything less cannot be considerd climate by any standards.
Latimer,
We are all agreed I think that period 1 shows a time of warming driven by natural variation. Without making any assumptions at all about anything else, i.e just from the temperature graph, why would you conclude that period 2 *must* be driven by something else? What is it about the graph itself that forces you into the 2 causes position?
From merely looking at the graph we would not be able to conclude that the causes of the two warming periods were either the same OR different, because there are various different factors which can influence climate. Even if we assumed that they were both due to “natural variability” (which we can’t because we are not making assumptions) that does not mean the same particular factors were in play on each occasion.
So we don’t make judgements by just looking at the graphs, we look at what physical factors are/were in play which could provide an explanation. And we can clearly see that the latter period has coincided with an increase in the level of CO2 and other GHGs ino the atmosphere. And given that the known physical properties of GHGs dictate that increased levels in the atmosphere must cause warming over the long term we have no choice but to conclude that it is highly likely they have made a contribution to the warming trend during that time. And given that GHG levels were increasing at a much lower rate in the earlier part of the century they must have played a smaller part in the earlier warming trend. You seem to object to my referring to the “known properties of CO2”, well if so what exactly is not proven to your satisfaction? Are we going to have to go back to the “dragonslayer” threads?
And when we look again at the earlier period we can see high solar activity and low volcanic activity which would both tend to cause warming and both of which have been absent in recent decades. And then we can look at the pattern of the observed warming as mentioned by Paul S and see differences between the two periods.
So I would dispute that there is any prima facie reason to assume that the causes of the two warming periods must be the same (or indeed different)
and have provided (with assistance from others) several reasons to conclude they are not.
Bruce, Look at 5 year averages, or something like that. If you want to work out whether a dice is loaded, does getting two sixes in your first two throws tell you it is loaded? AGW does allow for year to year variation – that was the point of the Trend thread.
Latimer, the point you perhaps are not getting is that you should not just pick one period, you should see whether your trend is sensitive to your choice of period by repeating your analysis with years each side of your initial choice.
Yes if you go back to the 1960s there is cooling (related to Agung). But not as much cooling, and as I didn’t go back as far as this period I didn’t benefit from this cooling dip.
But if you go back to the 60s you are also going back to a time when the CO2 forcing estimate was not that different from the other forcing estimates (for solar, aerosols etc).
Five year averages are garbage for climate. They tell you nothing about pivot points or changes in cycles.
I consider you to have surrendered on this one and we can all agree that temperatures rises that started in 1911 continue to this day and are all natural.
@andrew adams
Thank you for your post.
Lots of interesting stuff to digest, Especially since you appear to be moving quite a long way from the foolishly simplistic ‘it is all caused by carbon dioxide’ idea so popular even three years ago.
You mention ‘CO2 and other GHGs’, and so admit that it is not the only ‘culprit’. And that it is ‘highly likely to have made a contribution’ allows for there to be possible other causes….’natural variation’ to name but one.
We are away from the simplistic idea that since 1975 CO2 has been the one and only ‘control knob’ on global temperature. Which given the complexity of the atmosphere and its interactions has always seemed to be hopelessly naive to me. Clearly such a revised and nuanced understanding has political implications, but those are for another time and another thread.
Lets turn instead to the question of volcanic activity as a driver (or not) of climate. You suggest that the 1910-1940 warming was – in part at least – accounted for by ‘low volcanic’. That there were few volcanic eruptions during that period and so clearer skies, more radiation reaching the earth and so warmer atmosphere.
So lets go look. I found the following very interesting graph. It shows the cleanliness (or clarity) of the atmosphere as measured at Mauna Loa since 1958.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_atmospheric_transmission.png
And what it shows is that the basic transmission remains pretty constant at about 93 (+/-1) % throughout the forty four years from 1958 to 2002. When there are big volcanic eruptions (el Chichon 1977 , Pinatubo 1991), these clearly affect the transmission with a big downward spike (falling to 77% and 82% respectively) before returning to 93% within three years. These were significnat events and we can see the effect in your temperature plots. 1977 was noticeably cooler than its neighbours. and 1991 and 1992 the same. It is a plausible hypothesis that volcanic eruptions do have some effect on the temperature and e have two independent events showing similar phenomena.
But if the 1910-1940 warming period was in part caused by ‘low volcanic’, how low did it have to go to to be different from the 1958-2002 period? It is a shame that I can’t track down any measurements before 1958 that would tell us exactly. But the current background rate is stuck at a consistent 93%. And we can see that over the whole period there were only two really significant volcanic eruptions in the data. in between, when there
were no eruptions, the data doesn’t change.
So, unless we can invent the concept of the ‘negative volcano’ that sort of sucks all the pre-existing dust and grunge from the air, I am struggling to conceive of what ‘low volcanic’ might mean.
Here’s a record of volcanic activity over time.
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=06
Look carefully at the green chart which shows the bigger events – those most likely to affect the climate. You’ll see that there is a surge of activity from about 1895 to 1910. And 1910, the starting point of period 1 warming is in fact equal second of the highest activity years recorded in the 200 years 1790-1990. The years between 1910 and 1940 do not show any exceptionally low activity compared with other similar periods.
So I’m finding it difficult to accept ‘low volcanic’ as a convincing reason for the 1910-1940 warming. Please clarify which data is being used that really does show ‘low volcanic’ to be in effect.
And that such a period is truly exceptional.
Bruce, you’ve called me dishonest and a denier. I can understand your point about “pivot points” but don’t accept it is relevant to climate unless you have a reasonable theory for a cause of such a pivot point, preferably supported by the scientific literature.
You *can’t* understand the points I, Pekka, WHT, Paul S. and Andrew Adams are making, and have resorted to forbidden insults, so I think we are one (or two) up on you.
Latimer,
You said
“You’ll see that there is a surge of [volcanic] activity from about 1895 to 1910.”
You are helping me make my point. A surge of volcanic activity can lead to relatively rapid cooling. Eg. Pinatubo notably and predictably affected the next year or two’s temperatures.
So putting it simply to illustrate, a surge of activity followed by an abatement of activity could have caused a dip and then a rise in temperatures. Then your 1910-1940 warming is really just a 1915-1940 rise preceded by a volcano induced dip.
Note, though, that not all volcanoes are the same. Some quite small volcanoes can have a much bigger effect than say Mt St Helens eruption due to the amount of sulphur released.
Another question I would ask would be whether the Mauna Loa data is sufficiently well resolved. +/-1% is a difference of 5 W/m^2. Also some of this would relate to absorption within the atmosphere (so the radiation is still heating the atmosphere). Measurements of aerosol optical depth or pan evaporation are alternative ways of understanding the effect it seems.
If you do not accept pivot points in climate science then you do not accept El Nino and La Nina and PDO and AMO.
They are all cyclic, some with short up and down periods, some with 20-30 periods.
You keep insisting I use a different period to demonstrate natural warming than the one I chose because you know my 30 year period demolishes your hopeless argument that “It must be CO2 because we say it is”.
You don’t like the fact it warmed .7C in 30 years before Co2 started working its magic. Tough
You don’t like the fact that you can’t convince anyone natural warming disappeared in 1950. Tough.
CO2 is a bit player in climate until you can prove no natural warming occurred post-1950.
Steve Milesworthy, there was a lot of Volcanic Activity 1911 to 1941. Novarupta/Katmai was the largest eruption in terms of ejecta – 1912. Lots more VEi5 etc.
Yet natural warming managed to go up .7C in 30 years.
http://geology.com/novarupta/
@steve milesworthy
H’mm
It’d be nice if you guys could actually agree on what you think the explanation for 1910-1940 is.
Andrew says its ‘low volcanic’, but when we go and look we see nothing unusual to make volcanic activity particularly low.
Now you say that it is effectively a rebound from an earlier period of high volcanic activity. Maybe. But the low point of the dip post the volcanoes at 1908 almost exactly matches the previous low point in 1889 – before the activity started. So the effect of the volcanoes appears to have been to increase the temperature temporarily rather than decrease it as we see in the more recent events.
Even more h’mm. Something here doesn’t add up.
You also make the point that all volcanoes are different – and that some have more effect than others depending on their gas and dust composition. Which sounds pretty plausible. So where can I read up on the work that has been done to classify all the eruptions of the last 100 years and really show that there was a volcanic lull in 1910-1940 and give more credence to your explanation?
This is not difficult stuff. A talented A level science should be capable of asking these questions. Where I am surprised is that the answers aren’t easily available and widely known – even in the climaological community. For surely they are the bedrock of everything else to do with climate in the last 100 years.
Latimer,
I’m not sure why you think there is a contradiction between my comment above and anything I’ve said before,my position hasn’t changed.
But anyway, re volcanoes, “low volcanic activity” just means fewer eruptions or less powerful ones, so that the cooling effect of volcanic activity is less pronounced than at other times. There are links to some papers here which discuss the link between volcanoes and early 20C warming and a nice diagram from the Zielinski paper. It’s certainly not a complete explanation of for the 1910-1940 warming trend, it’s just one factor that made a contribution, but as I said before it hels make a distinction between early and late 20C warming.
Latimer, I’ve been consistent throughout in saying that the 1910 period could be explained by a temporary cooling blip. The volcanic activity you cite is a plausible cause of such a dip.
I can’t give you chapter and verse on it because my view is only informed by me looking closely at the data following Judith’s statement that the 1910-40 period needed to be explained. You are perhaps beginning to see why I (and apparently others here) think that there *is* a qualitative difference between that period of warming and the current warming.
Bruce, El Nino is not a pivot point.
Novarupta looks (from Wikipedia, I’ll admit) like it did not issue significant sulphur, so perhaps may not have had much of a cooling effect. I guess one ought to check the 1895-1910 eruptions to see which ones may have emitted sulphur or not.
Max
The only objective evidence for AGW in the future (there is none so far) would be a global warming rate significantly ABOVE the 0.15 deg C per decade observed for the 30-year period from 1910 to 1940. This result demonstrates a global warming rate of about 0.15 deg C per decade in a 30-year period is normal as this was observed before increased human emission of CO2.
What if half of that was solar, and TSI measurement show none of this one is solar. Would you be more convinced?
@jim d
I’m not really convinced by any argument that effectively says
‘component size x remains unaccounted for, so must be AGW because we can’t think of anything else’.
especially in a system that we understand so poorly as climate.
If were able to really accurately run today’s models form scratch in say 1000 AD and show that we really conclusively could reproduce all the climate ups and downs between then and say 1900, then we might reasonably state that we thoroughly understood all the factors of ‘non-AGW variation’ and that there were no holes at all in the models.
Then we might (or might not)be able to show – using the smae model – that at around about the right time in 1950 or whenever a sudden completely new and very large element was introduced, that it was unequivocally experimentally due to carbon dioxide and that by introducing it we could still reproduce the known instrumental readings post 1950ish then such a ‘proof’ would be getting a lot closer to something I’d rely on.
And if the model could then project five, ten and twenty years ahead…near enough to be tested within a generation and was still successful in closely matching the observations, then we’d be really cooking with gas. And we’d be moving from hypothesis much nearer a compelling proof.
But you’re nowhere even near that level. Maybe just seeing the faint glimmerings on the horizon of beginning to think about how a prototype design of such a proof might be designed.and the first ideas of how it might be constructed. As to an actual working model, forget it. Of the three stages shown above no existing model does very well at any of them – especially the predictions part. And a truly comprehensive one is a very very long time away.
So it seems to me that you guys have long ago put the cart before the horse in putting all your eggs in the carbon dioxide basket. You’ve leapt to endorse the conclusion without doing nearly enough of the grunt work to back it up first.
The reasons why so many who like to call themsleves ‘scientists’ were so willing to do so in favour of an untested hypothesis would likely stray into politics, and should be the subject for another discussion. But Bob Ludwick’s discussion above seems to give some very good pointers
LA, obviously we don’t have sufficient observations to verify or force any model for 1000 years to the present, and even the last century’s forcing is by no means accounted for. The good thing is that now improved ocean and satellite observations will be used to constrain the forcing and energy balance, and it won’t be long before the last couple of W/m2 are accounted for with nowhere to hide. This kind of full accounting would be the proof that is needed.
@jim d
Well even if it all did turn out as you expect (and I think you may be in danger of prejudging your data) and it conclusively showed what you would like it to show today, then you still need to show that you understand the processes that are going on in some depth. A snapshot at today is only one data point, and you;’ really need quite a few spread over quite a while to show that your claim of AGW as a process of warming is correct. Then you’d still need to do the predictions stuff and be proven right.
So, sorry, but to really prove your case needs an awful lot more than just a few more measurements at t=today.
FYI general relativity as a theory is able to make predictions of measurements to 12 significant figures I believe. And the predictions come true each and every time (so far :-) ). At that level of proof, I have no arguments. It is, to all intents and purposes, ‘true’.
You guys just sort of handwave about correlations and ‘consistent with’ . Pretty mediocre and tame stuff by comparison…….
Jim D
Before mid-20th century, before huge increase in human emission of CO2, a global warming rate of 0.15 deg C in a 30 year period from 1910 to 1940 was observed. We don’t need to know the cause of that warming rate. We can assume it to be natural. Unless the global warming rate for any 30-year period after mid-20th century is significantly greater than 0.15 deg C per decade, there is no evidence of manmade global warming.
The expected CO2 warming was 0.05 degrees per decade back then, and plausibly the other half could be solar up to 1940. Unless solar variations occurred again to explain the later warming, which they didn’t, you are left with the increasing CO2 effect that became 0.15 degrees per decade at the end of the century.
Solar did change.
AN 8% increase in sunshine in the UK from 1979 on.
http://i40.tinypic.com/xgfyok.jpg
Steve: “Bruce, El Nino is not a pivot point.”
The change to El Nino and La Nina conditions has a tremendous short term affect on climate. Temperature can go up and down as much as 1C.
Your recommendation of only studying climate data using 5 year smoothing would rob us of understanding the natural variations in climate — which I guess is your point.
The main hole in AGW:
http://bit.ly/bUZsBe
The cause of the warming from 1909 until 1941, the cooling from 1941 until 1973, the warming from 1973 until 2005 and the cooling that started in 2005 and will continue until about 2037 are all explained and demonstrated in detail in the pdf made public 11/24/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true
First of all, planet is NOT WARMER by 0,8degrees. Nobody knows the temperature for the last year; how can somebody know for year 1850, when temperature was monitored on few places; how can one compare. Saying that the planet is warmer by 0.8 degrees, doesn’t say about the temperature, but about the person.
2] As long as India and S/E Asia have rise paddies, to produce raw material for the glaciers on the Himalayas, to replenish their ice – they will have ice forever. If they drain the rice paddies and plant eucalyptus trees – the glaciers will melt in 10 years. Dry land produces dry heat. ICE CAN EVAPORATE WITHOUT TURNING INTO LIQUID WATER FIRST!!! 3] Glaciers melt from below, constantly; by the geothermal heat, needs replenishing the deficit every season. IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE RAW MATERIAL (h2o) FOR REPLENISHING AVAILABLE, not on CO2,
Pekka Pirilä | February 12, 2012 at 12:23 pm wrote
quote
Second. The first and second halfs are different. Everybody agrees that the first half is almost totally natural.
unquote
Not entirely. I can give you a scenario where a large part of the warming from around1900 was anthropogenic, it just wasn’t CO2 mediated. And I can give you scenarios where the light C isotope signal; was anthropogenic but not caused by fossil fuel burning. Then you could go out and test those hypotheses by e.g. spreading oil on your rice paddy.
The ‘it must be CO2 because we can’t think of anythng else’ logic used by some warmists is obviously flawed. What they mean is ‘it must be CO2 or it’s something we haven’t thought of yet.’ They would add, were they blessed with the brains God gave them, ‘anyone got any ideas?’
JF
No. I’m not arguing that it must be CO2, because we can’t think of anything else. The only thing that I was commenting was the basic way we are accumulating knowledge in science. Every new observation gives additional support to some theories, less support to other theories and some contrary evidence against further theories.
We have one definite theory that predicted warming for late 20th century: the AGW. We have other theories that don’t exclude such warming, but haven’t predicted it. Observing warming as predicted by AGW is evidence for AGW. It’s not a proof, but it’s support for the theory. As all other proposed explanations can at best allow for the warming, not predict it, the observation gives support for AGW in comparison to other explanations.
The CERES and SORCE TSI data for the ARGO period suggests that SW changes were significant.
We have earlier satellite evidence for other factors. ‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’ http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/projects/browse_fc.html
These latter are the 2006 and 2007 versions of ERBE and ISCCP respectively. But the CERES shows that clouds change – since when does theory trump data?
Pekka: “We have one definite theory that predicted warming for late 20th century: the AGW”
And that theory pretends (for no reasons) that the faster stronger warming from 1910 to 1943 stopped dead in 1950 as if mother nature herself threw a switch.
The “Mother Nature is Sleeping” theory of AGW is kind of sad.
Pekka Pirila: Observing warming as predicted by AGW is evidence for AGW.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? Is the observed warming “as predicted”? Has the stair-step pattern of increased observed since the prediction was made confirmed or disconfirmed the prediction?
Pekka said, “No. I’m not arguing that it must be CO2, because we can’t think of anything else.”
Can’t think of nothing else? 7 billion people on the planet transforming over 3% of the Earth’s surface into farmland, homes and roadways is not exactly low impact aerobics. 0.6 percent is irrigated and 1.04% used just for the basic grain crops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albedo-e_hg.svg
I’d say that the old broad Mother Earth is hanging in there pretty well.
“Quite evident in Fig. 3 is the fairly steady
decrease in reconstructed reflectance from
the late 1980s to the late 1990s.”
Albedo dropped by an amount equivalent to 5W/m^2.
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2004_Science.pdf
Anyone know what is happening with Tamsins ‘All models are wrong’ Blog?
There seems to have been no new threads for many days and its lost momentum. Or is my ‘refresh’ button not working?
tonyb
I’m not sure.
One possibility is that the wave of enthusiasm has worried her into thinking that her first major post has to be the blog-defining, Tamsin-describing, final word on models and uncertainty. The paralysis of perfectionism.
I’m only guessing – It’s something that sometimes prevents me from doing quite mundane things, and also Tamsin said she only made one post on her first blog…
I think also there’s the possibility of feeling with a new venture that she’s wholly responsible for everything to do with it – like a party host unable to relax because they feel responsible for everyone’s enjoyment.
Judith’s policy is a good antidote to that – put an eclectic selection of things in front of the readership and let them get on with it. There’s a kind of ‘letting go’ required which sometimes isn’t easy.
Yes – I’m just guessing!
One thought I’d like to see is a very easygoing introduction to her ice2sea project. Give out the link to the ice2sea homepage, and ask for a) observations b) questions c) criticisms.
Because I have some of all three..
Anteros, quit guessing. Time for you to start your own blog! TonyB, you too. If you’ve already got ’em going, about time to tell us about them.
Whatever Tamsin’s motives and intentions might have been, I think she got off to a good start.
But I agree that it will not be an easy task to keep the momentum going.
I am definitely keeping “tuned in” for her next installment.
Looks like Joshua is also becoming a regular “customer”.
Max
PS And, yes, hats off to our host here for such informative topics and interesting viewpoints.
I have a climate modeling post coming soon (giving a presentation on Fri, so probably for Sun or Mon), will bring up Tamsin’s first post on that thread
She’s a busy full-time working scientist with lots of pressures on her time, so we can’t expect new posts every day or 2. (How Judith manages it I don’t know!)
Anteros and Paul
I agree that I don’t know how Judith finds time for all her activities either. Its just that Tamsin started with a bang and promised a new post several days ago. It is very easy to lose momentum which would be a shame. As has been said, perhaps it is felt that a definitive defining article is needed and that takes time to do.
tonyb
Thank you for understanding this! this is a particularly busy week, i will try to get a new post up by tonite. Re Tamsin, as a general rule, I think it is better to wait until you are ready to post something new, Steve McIntyre works this way to great effect. But in Tamsin’s case and starting a new blog, I might have waited until I had a few substantive posts already prepared before getting the blog rolling. I will highlight her first substantive post here at Climate Etc.
Hi all,
It’s nice to be missed, thanks! Just posted…
Tamsin
P.S. Anteros, request noted.
Another snippet of news is that NOAA has cut funding for the 20th century reanalysis project.
It always seemed a strange idea of dubious value to me.
Thos on the gravy train are unhappy of course.
Judith,
Would you class Mann as a “hero”?
To be more interested in self preservation and scape goats than looking for actual understanding of this planet.
‘Stay tuned for the next update (by March 10th, or earlier – ICOADS appears to be less threatened for now) to see where the MEI will be heading next. La Niña has staged a comeback similar to 2008-09, and consistent with expectations formulated right here well over a year ago: big La Niña events have a strong tendency to re-emerge after ‘taking time off’ during northern hemispheric summer. Based on current atmosphere-ocean conditions, I believe the odds for this La Niña event to continue right through early summer (June-July 2012) are just about 50%. Beyond that, it is worth noting that four of the ten two-year La Niña events between 1900 and 2009 ended up as a three-year event, so I would put the odds for this to occur in 2012-13 at 40% right now. The remaining six cases all switched to El Niño, leaving not a single ENSO-neutral case. The year 2012 promises to remain “interesting”. If and when something new transpires on the fate of ICOADS and the MEI, I will communicate it right on this webpage.’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
kim is a dragon queen
An ironic flutterby.
============
In a gadda da vida ;-)
Judith –
I know that (at least in the past) you have expressed some concern about tribalism in the climate debate.
For that reason, I think you might find the following interesting:
The other day you linked to “notrickzone” w/r/t statements made by Mojib Latif. In an internally inconsistent logic, “notrickzone” thought it important to point to a statement from Latif with the implicit implication that his opinions, as a leading climate scientist, are of some import – even as the article also said that Latif probably “did not even realize [the admission he] had made”
But the hypocrisy of how Latif’s comments were being used by “skeptics” to advance a tribal agenda at “notrickzone” wasn’t limited just to that article. In a previous article at “notrickzone,” we can find the following comments w/r/t Latif:
and, even more amusingly:
Any comment?
another example of the tribal agenda and dishonesty of “skeptics”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJSA0iZ_xeA
Plus another one that bugs me: How they pour scorn and uncertainty on anything CRU and temperature station based, but go specifically straight for CRU station temperature data anyway when they want to draw a trend line and claim definite statements about how warming stopped N years ago/models are wrong.
reposted with embedded video.
another example of the tribal agenda and dishonesty of “skeptics”:
http://tinyurl.com/7k2vbwl
Plus another one that bugs me: How they pour scorn and uncertainty on anything CRU and temperature station based, but go specifically straight for CRU station temperature data anyway when they want to draw a trend line and claim definite statements about how warming stopped N years ago/models are wrong.
We use HADCRUT because we enjoy using your own propaganda against you.
Why do you distrust HADCRUT so much?
No Bruce, you go for hadcrut because it’s the record that gives you your cooling trend. Don’t pretend to be honest now.
HADCRUT is cooling? Who knew. I bet that was front page article somewhere.
Joe@7.20.
Mann a hero, you mean a TRAGIC hero? I dunno, Joe,… can we compare his exploits to the Greeks? Well yes, there is that hubris that’s TOO much over the top, ‘for I am no ordinary mortal,’ and like those old Greek heroes he’s a pain in the neck. Just think of all that collateral damage!
Ajax: ‘I will do whatever… ‘Medea:’Do not mess with me…’
Mann: ‘Repent and change your ways…. w / out delay.’
And what about the Bard, what drives his characters and gets them into trouble? Delusional behavior, that’s what. Hamlet carried away by his own soliloquys when he should be focusing on the real world, say, that rings a bell, or Macbeth getting in with the wrong company, plotting mayhem behind the scenes. And while Macbeth was steeped in blood, Mann’s hands are not exactly lily white, Think about it, ‘tales of Climategate:’
‘Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air.’
So, Joe, Mann a hero….perhaps? But isn’t something lacking, a ‘ je ne sais quoi’…grandeur maybe? Fiddling with a hockey stick just doesn’t seem to do it for me. How about you?
The fundamental equations describing weather and climate are the Navier-Stokes partial differential equations of fluid motion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
These are solved in computer models over a finite grid by approximate numerical methods. The equations are non-linear. Small changes in initial conditions cause the solution to diverge. Changes in boundary conditions change the probability distributions – the probability of the occurrence of one state or another – they shift either metrically or topologically. The numerical values change or the shape of the distribution changes.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=sensitivedependence.gif
On the left hand side the solutions diverge exponentially to the limits of intrinsic variability. On the right hand side the metrical and topological changes in frequency distribution are shown.
Fluid motion – both atmosphere and oceans – is the essence of weather and climate. There are 2 great systems driving both weather and climate. The first is at the polar vortices pushing turbulent eddies in atmosphere and ocean into lower latitudes. The second involves the upwelling of cold water in the eastern Pacific and the resultant feedback in wind, currents and cloud.
Perhaps as interesting in the longer term is the dynamics governing thermohaline circulation and the potential for runaway ice and snow feedbacks. We have a few very theoretical ideas for what has driven the glaciations of the past 2.58 million years – but are worryingly clueless as to what might cause the next and when it will be.
The Obama budget proposal makes their priorities clear. Climate research gets a 5.6% boost, while defense research gets a 1.5% cut.
David – just out of curiosity – climate change is increasing from what % of the overall budget to what % of the overall budget? And defense research is decreasing from what % of the overall budget to what % of the overall budget? What are the total numbers?
Rich people get a 25% increase in subsidies for overpriced electric cars.
Since Obamas goal is to put 1,000,000 electric vehicles on the road, he is planning on give rich people a 10 billion dollar gift.
Interesting article “Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine” at: http://bit.ly/yBuePN
DeMelle is one of RFK Jr’s researchers. It looks like he has a whole stack of documents.
They were tentatively proposing to offer David Wojick about $100K for developing K-12 educational modules on climate science. I notice him complaining one comment upthread about funding. This is getting too weird.
Actually, according to the document, they want to pay David to create curricula that will “dissuade teachers from teaching science.”
Hopefully, he will drop by to explain that there was some kind of a typo, or alternately drop by to tell us what he did to make it clear that he would have no part in such an effort. Some documentation of his efforts in that regard would be nice.
A couple points.
1. its THEIR description of david’s work. Not necessarily how he sees it.
2. Nobody has complained about the personell information released.
some of it negative.
3. Otherwise I have no issue with the release of the documents.
4. Its unproven that it is a whistleblower, but doesnt matter.
a couple of points:
1. David has been asked to clarify.
2. If that’s, actually, how they see his work, then it remains indefensible. If it is, actually, how they see his work and he knows that’s how they see his work, then it is indefensible for him to take their money.
3. Given those conditions, in addition to refusing to take their money, it would be indefensible for him not to have challenged them on their intention to “dissuade teachers from teaching science.” Hopefully, if those conditions are true, he will provide us with evidence of him having done so.
There’s actually very little to explain. The intentions of the Heartland Institute were blatantly obvious to anyone who actually reads it with, say, 2% objectivity. But, to be clear,
– Of course, this has nothing to do with the the central theory behind AGW or any scientific argument for that matter, nor does it even relate to whether “skeptics” (in general) have made any good arguments. But it does expose one of the greatest, organized denial institutions in existence (as if we didn’t already know this).
– There is no inherent issue with being funded to do science. That’s why NSF gives grants, or why NASA has funds. However, this typically involves a project proposal that describes in detail what you specifically plan to study (and in real science, this is something very specific, like “I want to drill a particular sediment core off the coast of South America and we’re looking to analyze changes in this climate variable over this particular timeframe, etc…..it is not “we want to study natural causes of global warming”); it requires a planned allocation of funds to resources required to complete the project (data acquisition, travel, equipment, graduate student funding for their education, etc). It needs to be approved as a worthwhile endeavor for advancing science.
– The outline of the Heartland Institute is nothing like this, and is incomparable to funding you’d see, for example, in a project that a scientist at GISS or NCAR or a university would submit a proposal to. The aim of Heartland is not even to do a scientific project or advance understanding, it is specifically to act in opposition to “warmists.” They even said “it’s important to keep opposing voices out”! (so much for the “debate” we always here they want). Their aim is to infiltrate education with propaganda.
– I’d love to see people who have read Heartland or material from David on this blog try to actually pretend their might be some hope of objective education in this. It will be funny.
It will be interesting to see how people rationalize and defend this. I suspect it will be defended by predictable fingerpointing to Michael Mann or something, the same stuff we’ve seen the last decade, whether it is even relevant or not. I just hope our humble host doesn’t give in to the temptation when Heartland approaches her.
Unfortunately, I am reasonably sure that will get lost in the discussion over this.
If only skeptics would use this as an opportunity to denounce “skeptics” and move on to reasoned debate. Maybe Judith will seize upon this as an opportunity to do so. I doubt it, but there’s always a chance.
Chris Colose says:
The aim of Heartland is not even to do a scientific project or advance understanding, it is specifically to act in opposition to “warmists.”
Is there anyone really claiming that Heartland is a research organization ? This seems very much a straw man to me. I don’t see it being comparable to GISS or NCAR at all. For one thing, it lacks both a scientific mission and the absolutely massive amount of government funding.
Pure and simple, Heartland is an activist organization. If you really want to compare it to something, it is more comparable to RealClimate, SkepticalScience or the activist efforts of the WWF. Knowing little about it, I would expect its ethics and general “truthiness” to be essentially equivalent to those organizations and not comparable to a scientific organization.
OMG it is a conspiracy!! AGW must be true since the Heartland Institute is always wrong.
This definitely is the strongest argument yet in support of AGW I have ever seen! No need to continue the research.
/sarc
It’s always good to see “skeptics” standing up to protest tribalism in the climate debate, scientists being paid to produce science that aligns with only one perspective, and politically oriented advocates using their money to influence climate policies.
I’m sorry….
What?….
Never mind.
Isn’t Greenpeace’s budget 300 Million? Tides is 400 million. WWF is 500 million.
“Mommy, mommy, they do it toooouuuu.”
Never seen that before.
Funny this coming out a day after the release of internal documents showing Media Matters coordinating with the White House and major media outlets. No idea if the documents are genuine, haven’t seen a response from Heartland or others involved. But it’s an amazing coincidence.
Oh, and the “Inside Media Matters” was reported starting Sunday evening on the Daily Caller website.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/12/inside-media-matters-sources-memos-reveal-erratic-behavior-close-coordination-with-white-house-and-news-organizations/
Assuming the Heartland docs are genuine, and I would have expected denials by now, they are no where near the smoking gun that the Media Matters docs are. It will be interesting to see how the competing stories are handled in the MSM, They have tried to ignore the MM story to death. Let’s see what their response is top the Heartland story.
Oh, and if the Heartland docs are legit, whoever wrote the “dissuade teachers from teaching science” line probably meant “climate science” in the sense CAGW advocates used it. But if it isn’t a typo, then whoever wrote it is an idiot. But it is probably as good idea to wait for Heartland’s response before handing out torches to the villagers.
“Mommy, mommy, they do it toouuuu.”
Never seen that before.
Joshua,
Would you prefer if I wrote that you and the other CAGW sycophants were attempting to portray an false asymetry on this issue?
Yeah, I know, that;s Joshua speak for “Mommy, mommy, they do it toouuuu.”
You’ve not only seen it, you write it more often than any other commenter on the blog.
Dr Curry, the Heartland Institute seem to think highly of you:
“Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators such as Romm, Trenberth, and Hansen) or Curry (who has become popular with our supporters).”
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/2012%20Climate%20Strategy.pdf
I’m also interested in your view of this
“Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow highprofile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”
Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and
uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor. http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/2012%20Climate%20Strategy.pdf
Sorry for the double post, but the original got pu in the wrong place.
Pekka, you write “That’s the problem with you and several others. You don’t accept all knowledge but make up your rules on what’s acceptable and what’s not.”
Nonsense. I dont make up any “rules” at all. This is what I was taught in Physics 101 at Cavendish Labs Cambridge. This is what my mentor, Prof Sir Gordon Sutherland hammered into my head. This is the fundamental basis of all physics.
The shoe is on the other foot. The proponents of CAGW have bastardized physics by claiming that things other than hard measured data can be used to established what is and what is not true.
Sorry, I am on the side of the angels. And in the end, the hard measured data will prove that I am right.
Agree. What will it take to get someone somewhere to do some proper physics experiments and try to settle this argument??
I am happy with the Spectralcalc computation using the mountains of hard radiative transfer data and the 0.2degC /CO2 doubling warming effect.
BLouis79 writes “I am happy with the Spectralcalc computation using the mountains of hard radiative transfer data and the 0.2degC /CO2 doubling warming effect.”
You say you agree, but then what I have quoted. Yes, there is some data to suggest that something like radiative forcing exists, but no measured numerical value. There is NO measured data WHATSOEVER to support ANY numeric value associated with the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2. Zero, zilch, nada, nothing at all. No-one has any idea if the number is 0.0001 C or 10 C. In theory, it is possible to measure total climate sensitivity, but the temperature/time graph shows absolutely no CO2 signal whatsoever. No-feedback climate sensitivity numbers are completely meaningless, hypothetical numbers. Feedback is equally lacking in measured data. What little measured data we have, to me, suggests that the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is so small that it cannot be detected against the backgrpound of natural noise.
What do you refer to by “Spetralcalc computation”.
The only one that know about is an amateurish attempt that’s totally wrong in many ways and has no connection to anything done right.
Some may not like it, but it is based on the hard radiative transfer data which is the only evidence that exists of IR absorption causing warming of a gas.
http://climateclash.com/2011/01/31/g4-a-subscriber-paper-request-for-review/
That’s exactly the paper that I have once looked at. That’s all wrong. I have told here earlier more about the errors and do not plan to repeat that.
Crap remains crap how ever often it gets repeated.