by Judith Curry
The MSM and blogosphere are still roiling over David Rose’s article last Sunday, here is the latest, including a new article by David Rose.
Carbon Brief
The Carbon Brief has an article: This weeks top six rebuttals of David Rose’s warming has stopped claims. One of these is of interest:
Number 5. An article yesterday by Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, dug deeper into the Met Office’s Hadcrut4 dataset and suggests Rose manipulated it to create a false graph. The article also describes Rose’s track record for producing similar pieces for the Mail on Sunday.
The key excerpt from Ward’s article is this:
These data define a warming trend of 0.047°C per decade. Applying simple linear regression using ordinary least squares to the data shows that this trend is statistically significant at the 95 per cent level. It should be noted simple linear regression using ordinary least squares is not really the best method for assessing these data as it depends on assumptions which are violated by global temperature measurements. Nevertheless, it can be used to show that Rose’s claim that “from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures” is entirely false.
It is also worth noting that this plot differs from the fake graph that accompanied the article by Rose – for instance, in the HadCRUT4 dataset, January 2007 is the warmest month ever recorded, whereas Rose’s graph suggests that it was much cooler.
Now this is worth investigating/discussing — auditors, have at it.
The Guardian
The Guardian’s latest response to Rose: Climate change: journalism’s never ending fight for facts. Subtitle: An Australian DJ must undergo ‘accuracy’ training after saying falsehoods about climate change. But will this improve journalism? Excerpts:
What, for example, can realistically be done about David Rose and his periodic articles in the Mail on Sunday purporting to cast doubt on climate science? The Press Complaints Commission has confirmed to me that it has received complaints about the latest article’s accuracy. But it adds that it takes, on average, 35 working days for it to investigate and adjudicate on such cases. How could that ever correct the fact that the story was picked up and repeated all around the world within hours? Will all those outlets publish any adjudication if, indeed, it rules against the Mail on Sunday? I think we already know the answer.
Perhaps the scientists interviewed for the article should have smelt a rat,given Rose’s form? After all, Professor Judith Curry complained that she had been misattributed not just for this week’s article (she claims she never said climate models were “deeply flawed” despite the article attributing this comment to her), but for the Mail on Sunday article last year where he also quoted her. Why would she trust him second time round? Warning bells must have been sounding inside her head, surely? The result was that she spent the rest of the week posting ever-longer articles on her blog trying to clarify and better explaining the “facts” within the original article.
But, ignoring for a moment that she had already been stung by Rose once before, what measures could she realistically have taken to ensure the article printed was an accurate portrayal of the basic facts, as well as her own views? This is a dilemma that faces all climate scientists when they are approached by journalists. The last thing we want is for scientists to retreat back up into their ivory towers.
One of the best forms of rapid rebuttal we now have to counter misinformation is the fact that an increasing number of scientists are taking to Twitter meaning they can react instantly if they spot mistakes in the media. And they can also directly and publicly field questions via Twitter, not just from journalists but from the wider interested public. Sure, a very small section of society actually use Twitter, but it is closely followed by most journalists so you would hope comments posted by scientists crying foul would be picked up, absorbed and disseminated.
What about “punishing” the journalists who persistently mislead on climate change? Is exposing their mistakes and wilful misinformation enough? Or do they need to face some kind of tougher sanction? If so, who would act as the judge, jury and prosecutor? Are ombudsmen a powerful enough deterrent?
I certainly have mixed views about the training course that Alan Jones has been ordered to undergo. On the one hand, it has the benefit of shaming him – and his associates – very publicly. But, equally, is it really likely to make much of a difference to his “journalism”? As a professional controversialist, he knows the prejudices of his audience intimately and he plays up to them relentlessly. His “martyrdom” might even improve his standing with his supporters, such is their logic.
Sunday Mail
David Rose’s response to the controversy is published today in the Sunday Mail, entitled The really inconvenient truths about global warming. The subtitle of the article is “Last week we explosively revealed a 16-year ‘pause’ in rising temperatures – triggering a bitter debate. You decide what the real facts are…”
The excerpts surrounding my quotes are appended below:
Another critic said that climate expert Professor Judith Curry had protested at the way she was represented in our report. However, Professor Curry, a former US National Research Council Climate Research Committee member and the author of more than 190 peer-reviewed papers, responded: ‘A note to defenders of the idea that the planet has been warming for the past 16 years. Raise the level of your game. Nothing in the Met Office’s statement . . . effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past 16 years.
‘Use this as an opportunity to communicate honestly with the public about what we know and what we don’t know about climate change. Take a lesson from other scientists who acknowledge the “pause”.’
The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’
The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: ‘For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade is projected for a range of emission scenarios’ – a prediction it said was solid because this rate of increase was already being observed.
But while CO2 levels have continued to rise since 1997, warming has paused. This leads Prof Curry to say the IPCC’s models are ‘incomplete’, because they do not adequately account for natural factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and a decline in solar output, which have suppressed the warming effects of CO2.
Other experts point out one of the biggest natural factors behind the plateau is the fact that in 2008 the temperature cycle in the Pacific flipped from ‘warm mode’, in which it had been locked for the previous 40 years, to ‘cold mode’, meaning surface water temperatures fell. A cold Pacific cycle causes fewer and weaker El Ninos, and more, stronger La Ninas.
Prof Curry said that stripping out these phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau.
According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997 – some say at least half of it.
When will the warming start again?
The truth is no one knows. It is likely that in the 2020s, the Atlantic cycle – currently in warm mode – will also flip to cold, so that for some years both the Pacific and Atlantic cycles will be cold at the same time. When this happens, world temperatures may decline, as they did in the Forties.
Prof Curry said: ‘If we are currently in a plateau and possibly headed for cooling, then sometime in the middle of the century we would likely see another period with a large warming trend.’
She added: ‘Because of natural variability, it is impossible to pinpoint what 2100 would look like. The climate sensitivity to greenhouse warming is still pretty uncertain, and it is not clear whether or to what extent man-made factors will dominate the climate of this period.’
For the world to be two degrees warmer in 2100 than it is now – as the IPCC has predicted – warming would not only have to restart but also proceed much faster than it has before.
Since 1880, temperatures have risen by around 0.75 degrees.
JC comments: I think that David Rose’s 2nd article is well done. He lays out the arguments that the other ‘side’ is making, and provides his response. It is a reasonable portrayal of the debate surrounding this issue. (no gripes about my picture this time :) )
This whole situation is a very interesting example of the interplay betweeen the MSM, the blogosphere and twitter. The MSM goes with a provocative headline. There is more detailed analysis and broader discussion in the blogs. And there is a cacophony of barking tweets from both sides.
The ‘facts’, such as they exist, are the data; in this case the latest release of HADCRUT4. This is new data, so people haven’t yet had much time to analyze and interpret it. However these data end up being analyzed, the trend since 1997 is very small, much smaller than the decadal trend of 0.2C that we have been led to expect by the IPCC for the early part of the 21st century. The whole issue of cherry picking start and end dates is a red herring, as I’ve argued in my previous post Trends, change points and hypotheses. It depends on what hypothesis you are trying to test. If you are using data to evaluate the IPCC’s projection of 0.2C/decade warming in the first two decades of the 21st century, with plateaus or pauses at most of 15-17 yrs duration, well then you can pick whatever start date you want. It will be very interesting to see what Press Complaints Commission comes up with regarding Rose’s article.
The Guardian makes the point that they don’t want scientists to go back into the ivory tower if their views are misrepresented. In fact, that is exactly what I did after the infamous brain fossilization incident. Which scientists do reporters choose to talk to, and why? The answers to this are probably all over the map, varying with the story and with the reporter. For better or worse, I’ve put myself out there as being willing to talk to reporters (after brain fossilization and heretic, I now have the hide of an armadillo). I’m prepared to work with reporters on their articles. This time, David Rose sent me my quotes in advance, along with the content surrounding them; I made a few minor changes to make the message more clear and more accurate and he incorporated these changes verbatim in the article.
The bottom line for me is that David Rose’s article has stimulated an interesting debate on an important and controversial topic. These exchanges in the MSM, blogosphere and twitosphere have hopefully enlightened and provoked critical thinking amongst the group that pays most attention to these things. Of course both sides are using this exchange in the MSM to ‘keep score’ in the climate wars, where the casualty tends to be honest debate.
“Honest debate”? I’m not familiar with that term. Please elaborate.
If honest debate is one where everyone says what they believe then the climate debate is as honest as it gets. If it is something else I do not know what that might be.
+10
Well, the problem is that we get a consensus, and not what individual scientists believe. And talking about uncertainty is viewed as a political statement
If David Rose had published, for example, articles asserting vaccinations caused autism, would anyone be defending his stance?
He’s lying, and he’s doing harm. What more need we know or say, except why isn’t he in public office?
I would defend his right to publish such articles.
Edim | October 21, 2012 at 10:26 am |
You can defend a right to free speech without defending the content of the speech itself; further, you can’t defend unfettered right to publish lies as a right of free speech. David Rose omits that he’s taking his marching orders from the GWPF, obscuring their involvement in his campaign as part of their overall strategy. That’s hardly free speech. He’s waging a mass media manipulation that uses every possible subterfuge without identifying the interests involved. That’s hardly free speech. He’s been caught time and again lying and mischaracterising and misquoting, which we don’t defend as free speech when it does real harm. He implicitly promotes hatred of a specific class of people — scientists — in his articles. How is that defensible free speech?
I don’t care where he’s simply wrong on facts because he’s mathematically incompetent, or ill-read, or finds logic a challenge. That’s the human condition, and entirely defensible. I object to abuses of the priviledge publishers enjoy dressed up as free speech when they’re anything but.
Absolutely, some of the precepts David Rose pays lip-service to — such as vigorous public debate and not leaving matters to politicians — are true; however just dressing up a turd in the flag doesn’t turn it into a patriot. The first principle of the defense of free speech is eternal vigilance is the price of freedom: readers who accept David Rose’s false misuses of the press as protected speech demonstrate insufficient skepticism.
He’s lying. He’s doing harm. He’s acting on behalf of unidentified other parties. Normally, you’d see that in someone standing for election.
Easy tiger. You make it appear that you are emotionally invested in this AGW nonsense
Bart, I don’t know much about him and I don’t care. I think the consensus is doing harm, especially to science. The convinced scientists are not honest and only want to protect the paradigm. The paradigm was unscientific from the beginning, IMO.
Your comments are entirely predictable and tedious. The only issue is whether the graph is correct. I have heard no scientist taking exception to the graph. It is a pretty simple picture. Gnaw at the edges if you will but a 5 year old can get the message from simply looking at the graph. It is nearly flat. End of story.
Bart R,
1. Never say “lie”. Say “misrepresentation”. For instance:
> David Rose is a serial misrepresenter.
would be easier to substantiate, and it makes you sound like an auditor.
2. Never assert any network analysis. Dogwhistle is your friend here. For instance:
> David Rose’s misrepresentations always seem to align themselves with those of Nigel Lawson’s GWPF. Wonder why?
The weaponry that provides the auditing sciences are made for the kind of discussion you’re trying to have right now. Use them. For more examples, cf.
http://climateaudit.org
God I miss bender.
***
I guess you were wrong the other day about the coherence of my presence here… A shame, really. I wish you were right.
where does he promote hatred of scientists,.. this is just your own activist rhetoric. he may criticise scientists, which is not the same thing, or are all scientists above criticism.. He quotes Judith’s scientific opinion favourably (or is she not a ‘proper scientist’ anymore?)
Bart R: He’s lying.
I think you’d be more effective if you would quote, exactly, one such “identified lie”, and tell us how you know it is a “lie”.
The one dubious asserting is that the starting date was not “cherry picked”. In fact, dates near there have been identified as change points in change-point algorithms, though such change-point algorithms are not without their own problems. So, …, dubious though the assertion may be, it can not be shown to be a “lie”.
Barry Woods,
You’re right: criticizing scientists is not the same thing as promoting hatred. But you have to admit that there are ways to criticize scientists that can promote hatred. In other words, your distinction cuts no ice.
We should also distinguish attacking scientists and attacking science:
> Since the Iraq debacle, Rose has latterly been writing articles attacking climate science for the Daily Mail. [David Rose] has distinguished himself by the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused his catastrophic mistakes about Iraq.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/08/david-rose-climate-science
We could then say that David Rose does seem to promote dodgy sources.
***
I’m not sure if David Rose promotes hatred. The claim would deserve due diligence. We would need to read his articles. Just by reading this quote, we might surmise that his fumble (?) on the Irak Occupation does seem to show that he promotes something.
What exactly? It tough to know. Take for instance:
> British intelligence has long used clandestine “deniable briefings” to release information real and false to tame hacks including David Rose… “It is my honest belief that the way Britain’s spooks deal with the media has simply become untenable, gravely damaging journalists and spies alike.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Rose
Since you seem to be a reader of the Daily Sunday Mail (DSM), would you tell me what you think it promotes?
Many thanks!
Bart R
Your outrage is misdirected.
Instead of fuming about what one journalist in the Daily Mail wrote, direct your (feigned) outrage at Al Gore, whose film, “An Inconvenient Truth” was full of lies, scientific misrepresentations, exaggerations, etc. YET received an Oscar (a Nobel Peace Prize?) and was even selected for brainwashing school children, before the UK Court stopped this.
Max
> Instead of fuming about what one journalist in the Daily Mail wrote, direct your (feigned) outrage at Al Gore, […]
Look! A fat squirrel!
The court didn’t stop AIT being shown in British schools.
who’s parsing.
Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change alarmists such as Michael Mann, James Hansen, Bill McGibben and more have been caught lying repeatedly. Erasing empirical temperature records, attributing extreme weather events to global warming without any data,yet you probably find their actions to be fine, regardless of the harm they have done. We have the data to support that vaccines don’t cause autism. We don’t have the data to support cataclysmic events as a result of some mild warming.
Whether or not Rose is taking “marching orders,” and what person or organization he gets those supposed orders from, is irrelevant. He presented data. He made a case for the data. The case is sound.
I reject your claim that he’s “doing harm”. His article is a benefit and a service to the citizens of the world and to the standing of science.
Great harm has already been done to the scientific enterprise in the AGW debate, largely by a small cadre of horribly misguided scientists. Because they massively and zealously overstated claims of AGW, the careers of these scientists – most notably Hansen, Mann and Trenberth – are now irrevocably staked on a single outcome in the debate, whether that outcome is right or wrong.
Science – all science – should be challenged. It should be challenged relentlessly. It is the failure or success of the challenges to theories and hypotheses, not the theories or hypotheses themselves, that convince us of the truth.
Dolphinlegs | October 21, 2012 at 10:59 am |
Where in my reply did I refer to AGW at all?
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Screwing with the free press is an attack on basic liberty; subverting the media to run a covert campaign is just such an attack. When CRU did the same thing denying access to information, I said as much about them.
This isn’t about a bad actor in AGW. This is about a bad actor.
“Screwing with the free press is an attack on basic liberty” Well, no in point of fact. The “free press” has been “screwed with” by governments, editors, owners, movie stars and yea verily, even scientists.
For example, Q: Why does Lady Gaga don a meat dress? A: To “screw” with the press in such a way that they will ask her why and she will get to tell them. They will report. Internet eyeballs will flick to the headline. Some percentage will subsequently buy the detergent advertised there. All the while, the world turns…while presumably displaying a surface temp that falls far short of dire prediction.
You project on to free press a lofty ideal that it neither seeks nor achieves.
dennis adams | October 21, 2012 at 11:31 am |
Gnosiophobia is hardly an argument. What you claim you haven’t heard of is hardly persuasive, given the substantial body you ought have heard of by this point.
The graph is ‘nearly flat’ is a trick of the eye, exploited by Rose in his article to make false claims and mislead readers.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/from:1996.67/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/offset:-0.07/from:1996.67/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/offset:0.07/from:1996.67/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/to:1865.92/offset:-0.07/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/to:1865.92/offset:0.07/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:79/mean:85/to:1865.92/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/offset:-0.27/from:2005.83/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/offset:0.27/from:2005.83/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/from:2005.83/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/to:1856.75/offset:-0.27/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/to:1856.75/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/to:1856.75/offset:0.27
Up to 2006, global warming without pause is unequivocal on the strongest available evidence using 32 year smoothing and parameterizing on 17 year smoothing. Asserting on weaker data a pause is a fundamental error. This error has been pointed out to David Rose, in writing, and he is a professional so is held to a higher standard of truth than an ordinary speaker. Therefore we are correct in identifying what David Rose does as lying, not mere misrepresentation; we can call him a professional liar, without fear of overstating the case.
Also, David Rose’s relationship with Nigel Lawson’s GWPF is well-known and well-established from public statements David Rose himself has made; either we can call this relationship established, or he’s an even bigger liar.
There _might_ be a pause in the rise of GMT. However, that pause is, given the state of all available observations less than 1/6th likely to exist at all. Not David Rose’s “stopped” global warming, which is so unlikely as to be utterly invalid to assert, but any pause on a decadal or longer scale at all. Those are mathematical truths. Allowing a known liar like David Rose to attempt to frame the debate is ludicrous, so any point in his transparently bloviating follow-up is automatically deprecated.
Let someone who isn’t an established liar frame the terms of the debate. One recommends the Black Hat Marketer, Mosher as superbly qualified. He knows far more about liars than most; his familiarity with climate issues is pretty fair, too.
The Met Office itself has confirmed what I am saying. That is all I need to know.
Bart R,
Perhaps you might be interested to remind your critics of this inconvenient fact:
> The Daily Mail has given more than five times as much space to the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s views in its recent coverage of climate change and ‘green taxes’ than to any other source.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/07/daily-mail-and-the-global-warming-policy-foundation
An infographic:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/media/62281/sheet1.png.jpg
Perhaps Judy should appear on this graphic, if we consider her as a source.
Lying with data is the most pernicious form of falsehood.
because people can just look and see.. hey the data shows no slope.. the math required to unseat this frame is beyond the ken of those fooled by their eye.
lying with data is also effective because you dont have to say anything. just show the image..every bit of that image is true..but you know the cropping creates a lie.
once you find a journalist who will carry your sand you never pay them. that is not how it works. never pay them.
Nice charts Bart.
The other thing people should realize is that CRUTEMP, is biased cold for periods when the arctic is warming faster than the rest of globe.
A diligent data analyst would check his result ( no warming) against all known data sets. I suspect Rose didnt do that. why ask yourself the tough questions?
When the warming resumes, as it must, this pause will be dropped from the playbook. Other pauses await. There will always be pauses.. there will always be bits and pieces of the science that dont look how we expect them to look.
Currently the team is relying on employing rapid reaction forces. However, the bell is never un rung. They need to get ahead of the game.
Must say I’m lost here. ” … 32 year smoothing and parameterizing on 17 year smoothing … ” rather means you are assuming that this series has an underlying structure that a prion sets limits on the any detectable pause.
You might be squabbling over the model that’s been assumed, but it doesn’t make either of you liars for doing so.
moshe, ‘when the warming returns, as it must’, gives you hopelessly away as a man of faith rather than of science.
===========
HADCRUT4 is definitely biased.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/hadcrut4-the-scammers-are-getting-shameless/
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/hadcrut4-hates-1998/
> [T]he bell is never un rung. They need to get ahead of the game.
+1
Dear kim
“kim | October 22, 2012 at 1:22 am |
moshe, ‘when the warming returns, as it must’, gives you hopelessly away as a man of faith rather than of science.”
I admit you are correct. I am a man of faith.
I put my faith in the best explanation we have.
We reason properly when we reason to the best evidence.
So, yes I put my faith in science.
diabolically yours,
moshpit
will,
I have, which is why I suggested it over sour pies.
I’ve been contemplating buying a still and experimenting with brandy making. Oregon and Washington are great fruit producers.
dennis adams | October 21, 2012 at 1:01 pm |
You’re saying you believe every word out of the Met Office?
Or only the ones you cherry-pick?
Those that are germane to the issue.
I thought german cherry pies were sour.
willard,
stick to the cherry brandy and forget their pies.
Try both, timg56. If you like kirsch, you won’t regret it.
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 2:00 pm |
As referenced by Dr. Curry above, we see a record of David Rose’s previous published articles on virtually the identical claim.
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/Media/Commentary/2012/october/myth-that-global-warming-stopped-in-mid-1990s.aspx
The mere furor of any one of these prior articles ought have advantaged Mr. Rose with clear understanding of the manifest errors in his claims.
‘Published’ is not the same as ‘wrote’. It’s a generally professional, traditional level of access to the public via the press that enjoys many privileges and has the support of press lawyers and professional editors and institutions. Anyone who publishes is held to a higher duty, or standard, of truth, than a layman.
For example, a blogger who opines on someone else’s blogs in comments is just a layman. While he might take advantage — as I try to — of every opportunity to assure the truth of his remarks, he’s not under the same burdens to be truthful as a published writer with his own byline.
Every time David Rose publishes the same error and is publicly corrected in responses to his articles, he benefits from and is obliged by these corrections. If he fails to acknowledge them when he repeats false statements knowingly, he’s lying. Period.
Barry Woods | October 21, 2012 at 1:16 pm |
A sustained campaign of intolerance, falsehood, and calumny targetting a specific identifiable group is, to my understanding, hate speech. Do you have a different understsanding of David Rose’s actions?
Bart R: publicly corrected in responses to his articles
Surely you are aware that some published corrections are themselves in error. Without your providing specific, accurately quoted lies, and how you infer them to be lies, you are just wasting time.
I point to the end of the first sentence:
> [S]ome published corrections are themselves in error.
I also point to the beginning of the second one:
> Without your providing specific, […]
That is all.
jbmckim | October 21, 2012 at 2:36 pm |
So, you see no difference between being screwed with by Lady Gaga and being screwed with by Nigel Lawson and a secretive group of cronies?
So much for your eternal vigilence.
willard (@nevaudit) | October 21, 2012 at 5:05 pm |
I greatly prefer what is called here “German Black Forest Cake”.
http://www.europeancuisines.com/German-Schwarzwalder-Kirschtorte-Recipe-Black-Forest-Cake-Cherry-Kirsch
I prefer the Schwarzwaldtårta.
Speaking of German cuisine, I once made a Christstollen. Die Warheit ist, es war perfeckt.
manacker | October 21, 2012 at 3:57 pm |
To be precise, the UK Courts found no lies, three unsubstantiated (at the time, since substantiated) claims, and six apparent or ambiguous misrepresentations or exaggerations. It required a statement of clarification on these points prior to showing the video, and even endorsed the use of the video for education in the UK.
As I haven’t seen the piece of work in question, I can’t really comment much on whether the court might have had a different decision if it were up to me.
However, I’m told over 300 claims were made, of which the courts were asked by plaintiffs (funded by Nigel Lawson?) to examine only 42 (which would be a moderate 14% error rate — pretty good by Hollywood standards); the courts rejected 33 of the assertions of error, and we (even those who like me have never seen it) that the maximum error rate of AIT is 2%. Which is like the logical compliment of your error rate here.
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 5:21 pm |
One notes your post fails to adhere to its own standards.
Which corrections err? Cite? Explanation?
Also, you appear to be gnosiophobic: we’re in a topic at Climate Etc. (one of four) where the misrepresentations of David Rose have been made plentifully clear (some of them) by Dr. Curry and many diligent commenters; I merely point out that, as a sophisticated party the writer has transgressed so far that the deceptions he puts out are lies, due his greater duty of care as a published journalist in press.
See, you’re going after the wrong party. If you feel Dr. Curry and all commenters who have demonstrated misrepresentations by David Rose are wrong, you have to take them on, not me.
If you feel David Rose is not a sophisticated party with a heightened duty of care due the privileges the press enjoy, by all means speak to that.
HAS | October 22, 2012 at 1:14 am |
Must say I’m lost here. ” … 32 year smoothing and parameterizing on 17 year smoothing … ” rather means you are assuming that this series has an underlying structure that a prion[sic] sets limits on the any detectable pause.
You make a good point, but a (very slightly) incorrect surmise.
I use 32 year smoothing as the standard because on 32 year spans we produce a curve that we can actually call a graph of climate; it is reliable to well over 99% confidence, and is good enough to compare tangents as meaningful climate trends with the only priors the beliefs that there is such a thing as global climate, and that the GMT of climates are comparable on this span of time. We achieve over 99% confidence of those priors, too, on the observations, and can by comparing the results to results from disjoint data arrive at consilience.
From there, we can use 17 year smoothing and bounds to produce a 95% reliable predictor of climate, again on the prior belief that we are able to compare the present to the past in this way. Here, we’re aided by the above consilience.
Can we go further? Yes, but only tentatively and only on the belief that what applied before still applies now. (This, by the way, is argued by Newton in Principia, as the principle of universality. It is the default position of Science absent new evidence showing it does not apply.)
We can, in going further, use consilient sources of information to dismiss claims relying on the current year to be significantly colder than 2005. Which, considering we know 2005 was part of a rise we cannot meaningfully distinguish from the trend up to 1997, means we cannot accept a claim of a flat or zero climate change to the current date, and we can estimate the odds that the rate of rise in GMT has slowed to be less than 1/6th.
I did this using graphical methods. You can do it with statistics and Bayes’ Theorem as well.
So cutting to the quick and putting aside any questions of the validity of the model you are assuming, you really don’t understand that the model you are using means you can’t detect within it a flattening off of temp since c. 1997?
The spell checker here isn’t very good at Latin.
HAS | October 22, 2012 at 11:57 pm |
“So cutting to the quick and putting aside any questions of the validity of the model you are assuming, you really don’t understand that the model you are using means you can’t detect within it a flattening off of temp since c. 1997?
See, that’s an example of begging the question right there, isn’t it?
A) Not assuming. ab initio logic proceeds from first principles. I can start with cogito ergo sum, and get to my position with no assumptions (unless you refer to the Peano Postulates as assumptions, which is barely arguable). No assumptions intrude between the start of the logic and this logical conclusion. Period.
B) All models are wrong; merely, some are also useful. As the construction of this logic is ab initio (from first principles), it is accurate or very nearly true to conclude this model is valid. As this model (among a full half dozen other independent demonstrations that do likewise) destroys the credibility of David Rose’s fictitious model, it is useful.
C) We can clearly detect the trend of GMT from 1997 to 2005 to 95% confidence; using graphical methods, we can demonstrate bounds that expand slightly the range of the GMT curve while increasing the confidence to above 99.95% (or any sigma level you wish). At such levels, we see the likelihood of a flattening off of GMT in the climate is vanishingly small.
D) Notice that 2005 is significantly warmer than 1997 in climate terms, as part of an accumulation of temperatures that form part of the climate curve. For the period since 2005 to be part of a flat or falling GMT trend would require at least most years since 2005 to be substantially cooler than the trend from 1997 to 2005, which we know from multiple independent sources to not be so (or, 2012 must be very cold compared to 2005).
E) Is there a flattening off of temperatures?
Sure. Absolutely. But every small child and their dog understands a rising tide no matter the differences of the crests and troughs of the waves in the surf. How bad would we have to be at understanding trends to do worse than a small child’s dog?
F) We don’t know what 2013 will bring. We can’t speak to what trend line we might be in, very much, for the period strictly since 2005. But we can reject as vanishingly unlikely David Rose’s claims, and even Dr. Curry’s claims of slowing of GMT warming trend is only 1/6th likely.
In other words I am right, you don’t understand why your model will find it difficult to detect a pause since 1997.
@bart r
I have discussed the matter with my small dog and he denies any knowledge of the rising tide phenomenon you describe. He says that he just likes splashing about and barking. And a bit of icecream afterwards.
But its worth pointing out that a rising tide eventually comes to high water when the waves are there but there is no underlying motion…and thence to a falling tide. where the ups and downs of the waves are superimposed on a falling sea level.
You chose an unfortunate analogy.
jimmy | October 23, 2012 at 12:28 am |
An ironic defense.
So what if he’s hiding data; he’s also presenting data.
So what if he’s doing harm, there’s good that could be gotten out of it.
You can reject all the reality you want and substitute your own fantasy world for it.. doesn’t mean the rest of us will join you in it.
tonyb,
Here’s what’s on the table:
> No pause can be at this time detected on a valid model.
Put up or shut up.
Willard
Your comment has suddenly gone to the top of the thread.Here is my reply to your comment at the other end
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/#comment-259215
Surely if the models can’t see what our eyes can see its time to change the models?
tonyb
tonyb,
Sometimes, you do have to modify the models, no doubt about that. You always do, really. That’s one reason to have models: scrapping them costs less than throwing out theories. But you need to come up with better models.
On the other hand, eyeballing is never enough. If what you see is not what you get, you can’t decide that what you get is always wrong. More so when it’s the only valid way to talk about what you see. Statistical reasoning is the bane of scientific communication.
There are many things we can say about plateaux. We could say delicious things about them, for instance if we think knowledge in biblical terms. We could build an whole industry based on plateaux. Just think how these debates could interest the most important half of the Internet readership. We should put some black hat marketers on that project.
More seriously, there are many things we should not say about plateaux in good conscience. I believe that some of them are being told, retold, recycled, and retold some more by David Rose and the right-wing populist outlets. I’m not sure this matters less than your “YesButData” argument.
And even more generally, holism wins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism
There are no such thing as an experimentum crucis.
HAS | October 23, 2012 at 4:51 am |
A valid climate model won’t find a pause there because there isn’t one there, at least not yet.
A string of powerful volcanoes, shifting of the Earth’s orbit, outlandish changes in solar output, increases in aerosol emission to the point of triggering death fogs, or other actions impossible to predict could well cause a sudden drop that means the 30 years since 1997 (which won’t end until 2026 — 14 years from now) might have a pause.
But as we have no way of predicting these yet-to-be events, no. No pause can be at this time detected on a valid model.
@bart r
‘No pause can be at this time detected on a valid model’
Yep. It’s only when you look at the pesky data you see that the temperature today is pretty much the same as it was in 1997. And the last time there was any detectable nett warming was in the last century.
But I guess that if the models don’t show it, then it doesn’t really exist…what use are bloody thermometers anyway? And no doubt somebody will be having very stern words with the CRU for their abysmal failure to correctly ‘adjust’ the observations to give the right answer. Can’t see Phil Jones getting the Nobel for this appalling cockup.
> It’s only when you look at the pesky data […]
To look at data, you need a model, Latimer.
Even a graphic is a model, Latimer.
Latimer
Both BartR and Willard seem to be playing semantics. Here are the three Hadley global records from 1850 to 2011. All appear to show a cooling or at least a pause this century. Rose would have seen these
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
In the real world of individual data sets, many of these also show distinct recent cooling according to BEST-albeit their statistical significance varies. These are best exemplified by CET, also kept by the Met office, which appear also to have some relevance as a proxy for global temperatures. There has been a noticeable fall throughout this century (albeit they remain at a high level)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
It would be nice to either get a straightforward agreement or a rebuttal of these Met office figures from Willard or BartR. They appear to be showing a cooling or stasis as Rose asserted. If they do NOT show that-despite the apparent evidence of our eyes-I would like to know -in straightforward language-exactly what it does show.
Where it goes from here as regards cooling warming or a neutral state I don’t know.
tonyb
@willard
‘Even a graphic is a model, Latimer’
Whatever.
tonyb,
First, I already conceded:
> They appear to be showing a cooling or stasis […]
If David Rose only wanted to convey this appearance, I would mind even less than I do right now. That’s not the point, and your misdirections about the MET data provides me evidence that you’re aware of this.
David Rose’s serial misrepresentations (which for Bart R are lies) go a bit beyond that.
***
Second, I need to get this one off my chest once and for all:
I never really understood that “playing semantics” reflex as soon as we take care of what people mean.
Semantics is studied by a kernel of disciplines that are formal, or at the very least quite sturdy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
The notion of model has its own theory:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/model-theory/
***
To return to a recent caricature by our Can’t Get No Satisfaction engine (i.e. Latimer Adler, Soclates’ denizens) a diagram is a representation device that has a formal specification:
> A diagram is a two-dimensional geometric symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Sometimes, the technique uses a three-dimensional visualization which is then projected onto the two-dimensional surface. The word graph is sometimes used as a synonym for diagram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagram
Diagrams can be formalized even furthermore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagram_(category_theory)
@climatereason
You are right. I too detected just a tiny hintette of semantic game playing in recent contributions from the esteemed Bart R and his faithful Tonto – Willard.
And I was shocked – shocked to the core – to see such things
sarc/
But you ask a very good question.
‘If they do NOT show that-despite the apparent evidence of our eyes-I would like to know -in straightforward language-exactly what it does show? ‘
For me it shows that anyone who tries to claim that (C)AGW is an urgent and important problem which needs to have lots of resources thrown at it right now is completely away with the fairies. And is likely to end up in the nearest midden if he tries to preach his nonsense in The Dog and Duck.
Willard said
“If David Rose only wanted to convey this appearance, I would mind even less than I do right now. That’s not the point, and your misdirections about the MET data provides me evidence that you’re aware of this.”
Please clarify my ‘misdirection. ‘ I posted graphs from the Met office, I wasn’t aware I had done anythng else,.
tonyb
Tony
careful he’s hunting squirrels
Mosh
When I was a child I was told there was a bounty for every grey squirrel hunted if you gave the police the tail. Dont know if that was ever true.
Tonyb
tonyb,
Your misdirection is there:
> It would be nice to either get a straightforward agreement or a rebuttal of these Met office figures […]
I’ll let Bart R, but I don’t believe that you have any ground to believe that I have anything to say about the Met office figures. In other words: Look! A numerical squirrel!
The Met office figures is not responsible for David Rose serial misrepresentations.
PS: Nice video, Mosphit!
Willard quoted me
“It would be nice to either get a straightforward agreement or a rebuttal of these Met office figures […]”
In what universe is that a misdirection Willard? Its simply asking people to tell us what they believe -in simple terms- what the figures show,
I believe the figures tell us a certain thing and we need to acknowledge this . I have no idea as to whether the globe will continue to warm or cool or bump around at the current temperatures
tonyb
tonyb,
I don’t care about the Met data.
I am quite agnostic regarding climate science.
I care about the silly games being played down here.
I care about proper reading.
Does that answer your question?
@willard
I’m sure that if Judith feels that a Nitpicker in Chief and Witchfinder-General is needed to help her run her blog, she will be perfectly capable of appointing a competent practitioner.
Until then there doesn’t seem to be much demand for your services…unless there is an unheeded public clamour for them that has gone as undetected as the post 1997 ‘warming’.
Latimer Adler,
Your compliment and your lack of due diligence to your escalation of claims are duly noted.
@willard
Please rest assured that, following your revelation that you don’t care about the subject of this blog I am treating your remarks about my ‘due dilgence’ with exactly the seriousness and urgency they deserve.
Don’t wait up.
Latimer Adler,
Thank you again for your illuminating comment.
I see that you are talking about the subject of this blog.
Could you tell us what this is in your own words and in sentences of the kind “David Rose lies on the mat”?
Many thanks!
@willard
I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/#comment-259250
You can assume that they equally apply to any other remarks you wish
to direct to me
Carry on Don’t Wait Upping.
Bart R way back at October 23, 2012 at 10:49 am
“A valid climate model won’t find a pause there because there isn’t one there, at least not yet.”
I assume this is a definition of “a valid climate model” i.e. if it can detect a pause it isn’t valid?
On a housekeeping note, are some of the links broken? Particularly http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/10/this-weeks-top-six-rebuttals-of-david-roses-warming-has-stopped-claims ?
Please provide evidence of
a. where he is ‘lying’
and
b. if you believe a particular statement or statements is ‘lying’, what harm is being done…to whom or what? How do you propose to demonstrate that harm?
Latimer Alder | October 21, 2012 at 10:51 am |
I believe our hostess had provided sufficient testimony of and links to evidence of lying.
Harms re patent in this case. The reasonable person test suffices.
Bart R: The reasonable person test suffices.
I am a reasonable person (I know this because I was chosen for jury duty, and to referee articles for publication), and I assert that you have not made a case.
@bart r
I didn’t see those. Please guide me directly and specifically to at least three of those links and for each explain concisely and clearly why you consider them to be evidence of lying.
‘Harms re patent in this case. The reasonable person test suffices.’
I have no idea what these two sentences mean. Please translate into English.
Example
The cat sat on the mat.
V.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/#comment-258400
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 2:03 pm |
Yeah, and you’re unbiased, too. Don’t forget to assert that.
Latimer Alder | October 21, 2012 at 2:27 pm |
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/#comment-258076
There are, I believe, the explanation and in excess of the three cites you epistemophobically demand if you drill down and look around.
Sorry, I dropped a letter when typing earlier.
‘Harms are patent in this case. The reasonable person test suffices.’
Hope that clears it up for you. If not, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Reasonable+Person+Test
@bart r
Sorry Bart
Not going to just follow an endless stream of links.
You accuse him to be lying. You need to explain why.
You could take the format below as a template.
Mr Rose says abc
the truth is def (and we know this because……)
We know that Mr Rose knew his remarks were untrue because….
Therefore he was lying..
@bart r
The reasonable person reading the Daily Mail would be struggling to find exactly what ‘harms’ Mr Rose’s article might bring about. So am I.
Please explain.
@bart r
Gotta say that for one so ready to exclaim that Rose is ‘lying’ and ‘doing harm’ right up front. you’ve suddenly become remarkably coy and indefinite when asked to present the evidence to support your allegations.
They seem about as substantial as the ‘global warming induced’ fog that is enveloping SW London right now
You’re not usually so bashful……..
Bart R Yeah, and you’re unbiased, too
You didn’t mention unbiased, you only mentioned reasonable. I would not assert that I am unbiased, but I won’t deny being unbiased.
Meanwhile, you have not identified even one lie and made a case that it is actually a lie.
Latimer Adler,
Here’s BartR’s link, in about the same form than “The cat is on the mat”.
***
On the 2010-12-05, David Rose told his readers that AGW has stopped in the 1990s.
On the 2011-10-30, David Rose told his readers that “there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties”.
Three months later, David Rose recycled the same story.
On 2012-10-14, David Rose told his readers that “there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties”.
In these articles, David Rose omitted the fact that 12 of the 13 warmest years on record have all occurred since the end of 2000.
David Rose admitted to cherrypicking the end points of his graph.
Even by granting him this cherry-pick, David Rose’s claim is false.
With his last article, David Rose used a fake graph.
***
Considering these facts, do you think that David Rose is honest?
Many thanks!
Hey, Willard
Let’s go through your points with a simple “lie detector test”.
The HadCRUT3 record confirms that the period 1998 to 2005 shows a very slight (but statistically insignificant) warming trend, so Rose’s statement was technically not correct.
The same HadCRUT3 record shows that from 1998 through 2011 there was indeed a very slight (but statistically insignificant) cooling trend, so Rose’s statement was technically correct.
manacker,
Your comment is unreadable. Please retry with the proper coding.
And fon’t forget: sentences like
> David Rose lies on the mat.
Many thanks!
OK. Re-posted as requested
Hey, Willard
Let’s go through your points with a simple “lie detector test”.
The HadCRUT3 record confirms that the period 1998 to 2005 shows a very slight (but statistically insignificant) warming trend, so Rose’s statement was technically not correct.
The same HadCRUT3 record shows that from 1998 through 2011 there was indeed a very slight (but statistically insignificant) cooling trend, so
Rose’s statement was technically correct.
Still correct, according to HadCRUT3
Still correct, according to HadCRUT3
This has NOTHING to do with the trend since 1998, which continued to be one of slight (if statistically insignificant) cooling, or “lack of warming” in Trenberth/Willis parlance.
“Cherry picking” data series is what ALL scientists do. One has to limit the time scope of any study for practical reasons. Important is that the end point is always today, so the data represent the latest trend. This changes, of course, with each later report. (IPCC does exactly this in its reports.)
So Rose got 3 out of 4 correct. That’s pretty good (in baseball, reporting or “climate science”).
Let’s see.
I believe IPCC’s “hit rate” is lower than that.
Don’t you?
Max
Latimer Alder | October 21, 2012 at 3:05 pm |
This is the internet.
Literacy here includes ability to follow links.
If you’re going to assert a right to ignorance, there’s really no point to anyone attempting to elevate you above that.
@bart r
So no actual evidence you’d like to present then?
Bart R – Latimer loves playing Whack-a-Mole when he plays the role of the mole.
@bart r
Despite knowing that I should know better I followed your link
But lo! Your ‘evidence’ of ‘lying and doing harm’ comes down to no more than paid eco-warrior Bob Ward disagreeing with him. It is my experience that if Bob Ward disagrees with you it is a sure sign that you are on the right track.
‘Hardly substantial charges m’lud’
‘Case dismissed. The accuser must do a great deal better next time if he is not to waste our time again. Actual evidence is needed not an opinion piece’
@Bart R:
You are a liar when you refer to Mr. Rose as a lying. I reference your own posts as my proof.
There you go:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/#comment-258400
You own the claim so you own the proof of your claim. The buck stops with you. Where is it?
WisconsinitesForGlobalWarming | October 21, 2012 at 3:35 pm |
Did you spend all morning coming up with that?
Well, at least you tried.
Latimer Alder | October 21, 2012 at 3:34 pm |
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 5:24 pm |
A reasonable person test no more relies only on a person being reasonable than a blood test relies only on a person having blood.
Let’s start with the lie Dr. Curry called out David Rose on. He claimed Dr. Curry, “..told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.”
Dr. Curry said this was untrue. That’s good enough for me.
If it’s he-said/she-said, David Rose loses every time.
> The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed […]
It would be nice to have the word “predict” corrected.
Perhaps journalists for large media outfits should be required by law to be licensed and those licenses can be revoked by the press complaints commission if the journalist is found to repeatedly make inaccurate statements.
Thats the end of the BBC then!
We can but hope.
lolwot: Perhaps journalists for large media outfits should be required by law to be licensed and those licenses can be revoked by the press complaints commission if the journalist is found to repeatedly make inaccurate statements.
This produces the “who guards the Guardians?” problem: such commissions always protect the incumbents in power. There is no better judge than the unfettered public, imperfect though we are.
sure but we accept licensing with professions like medicine and finance
Bye bye Monbiot. Bye bye Bob Ward, Bye bye Geoffrey Lean and Louise Gray. Bye bye Guardian (oops – its going anyway!)
Bye bye alarmist journos everywhere…..
Yes, just what we need. The government determining who can and can’t publish in “large media outfits.” Licenses, after all.\, depend on government enforcement to stop and punish those who engage in the activity without a license.
Their fondness for totalitarianism is never far below the surface when progressives are not getting their way in the free market of ideas.
The ‘facts’, such as they exist, are the data;
The one he altered in his first graph?
This is new data, so people haven’t yet had much time to analyze and interpret it. However these data end up being analyzed, the trend since 1997
I’m sure the “heretic” fantasy is comforting in terms of self-image, but this kind of egregious cherry-pick is the real reason why numerate people tend to shun you. That’s something you would expect from Watts, but not from someone with a PhD in a quantitative field.
When the first outburst of similar nonsense erupted (“no significant warming since 1995!”) , I wondered how long it would take for the Neo-Galilei to move the starting point to the 1998 peak. Looks like they (including, apparently, you) were right on time.
> The one he altered in his first graph?
Altered state crickets.
Absolutely no evidence has ever been provided data was altered. The x-axis is wrong in the graph, and it begins 15 years ago, not at the start of 1997, but those are mistakes in describing the data. They are not alterations to the data itself.
The only “evidence” data was altered is the unsubstantiated claim of one person who, when confronted with evidence contradicting his claim, had no answer.
In other words, you are mindlessly repeating a baseless accusation of dishonesty while accusing others of dishonesty.
> The x-axis is wrong in the graph.
I’m sure there are ways to minimize this error even more.
But let’s focus on toto’s metonymy instead.
Look! A metonymic squirrel!
vaccinations? stay on topic. I know it’s hard for your type.
MrE | October 21, 2012 at 11:45 am |
My ‘type’?
You don’t know me.
Lies about vacinations is quite relevant to the topic at hand.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fear-MMR-link-autism.html
The Daily Mail was — and to this day remains — in the eyes of many one of the chief proponents of the scandalous vaccine-autism fraud and related attacks on vaccination.
Or do you think vaccination causes autism?
Your type is the type that uses straw men.
Of course I know you, your’e Bart R. …Duh!
MrE | October 22, 2012 at 12:04 am |
Perhaps you’re unaware, but David Rose wrote a group of articles on Andrew Wakefield’s vaccination-autism scandal, where Wakefield was caught lying about science.
Perhaps also, you might look up the definition of ‘straw man’.
No, I didn’t know. Your explanation is still incomplete though. You still need to show how this is relevant.
MrE | October 22, 2012 at 3:07 pm |
I also don’t fetch your pipe and slippers.
I’ve already brought you your newspaper; you’ll have to fill in the crossword puzzle for yourself.
Bart R -“and he’s doing harm” Anyone who uses such a phrase obviously is not a scientist and obviously does not understand the scientific method.
dennis adams | October 21, 2012 at 12:11 pm |
Where have I ever claimed to be any sort of scientist?
It doesn’t take the scientific method to apply the reasonable person test.
Not applying irrelevant methods shows greater, not lesser, understanding.
How much application of the scientific method do you use for example while being beaten about the head and having your lunch money stolen by your schoolmates on the playground, dennis?
Bart R: How much application of the scientific method do you use for example while being beaten about the head and having your lunch money stolen by your schoolmates on the playground,
Is this an analogy for the taxing power of government, say the proposed taxing power of the UN?
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 2:07 pm |
There’s a proposal to give the UN the power to tax? Fiendish. Cite, please?
That’s something that has to be nipped in the bud.
This isn’t another one of your made-up things, is it?
Bart R: This isn’t another one of your made-up things, is it?
Were you but competent to use the internet, a requirement that you invoke for someone else, you’d already know the answer. There is a proposal that the UN be permitted to tax international financial transactions.
“another” presupposes a first. To my knowledge I have not made anything up. Is this another of your charges that we can all verify for ourselves by surfing the web?
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 5:32 pm |
Yeah. But that was in the context of internet literacy, having provided the link. You’re asking me to find something on the search term “UN tax”.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=un+tax
About 352,000,000 results: which one do you mean? Which one are you standing up and defending as accurate or very nearly true? One from Foxnews? This one from wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_taxation_system) that talks about proposals coming out of the 2009 bank collapse? The ones that claim the USA is so far behind on its payments to the UN that they started to talk about directly taxing US business to recover the difference in the 1990’s?
It’s a huge topic full of whackadoodles that’s been around for decades. Or didn’t you know that? You could’ve used the internet to look it up.
Or to go to Mosher’s and comment on his work on UHI.
Bart R: This one from wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_taxation_system) that talks about proposals coming out of the 2009 bank collapse?
See? There are lots of such proposals.
Bart R,
you answered your own question in the affirmative, the question being There’s a proposal to give the UN the power to tax?
And you answered in the disconfirmative your question as to whether it was one of the things that I had made up.
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 8:00 pm |
Whew.
So, just more alarmism about the power of the UN boogeyman.
For a minute you had me worried you meant something serious or real.
Bart R: For a minute you had me worried you meant something serious or real.
Not at all. I was mocking your playground bully analogy.
MattStat/MatthewRMarler | October 21, 2012 at 9:48 pm |
Oh. You still think I meant it as an analogy?
Bart R: You still think I meant it as an analogy?
In review, I don’t think your writing has any meaning.
Bart R , you’re really good at intellectual Twister. It’s pointless, but it’s a skill nonetheless.
James Evans | October 21, 2012 at 1:53 pm |
One could scarcely be a Denizen here absent a fascination with the pointless. I’ve discussed this lately with willard. He believes I err.
Bart R,
So I just disagree about the pointlessness. It always depends upon what you want to convey. Just imagine you were to promote your services with these comments.
In other words, do you want to suggest that Judy’s is pointless to Judy?
Not that I want to temp you to trade your intellectual freedom in exchange for a business card, mind you. I only want to make a point.
Bart R: One could scarcely be a Denizen here absent a fascination with the pointless.
I think you are wrong about that. It is possible, in my opinion, to be a denizen here because of interest in climate, and to learn to skip the pointless. I have not made this judgment in haste, but there are certain writers whose posts I always skip. I expect that there are readers who always skip mine.
I think lying about January 2007 is pretty bad. There is no reason why HADCRUT4 has it .2C warmer than HADCRUT3.
HAD4 = 0.818
HAD3 = 0.610
Bart,
To paraphrase Robert Duvall “Them’s bold words for a one-eyed fat man.”
If you are going to call someone a liar, you better back it up.
As for the “doing harm”, perhaps so. To the cause. Any other harm he may be doing would require that you provide evidence. Got any?
timg56 | October 22, 2012 at 8:32 pm |
I refer you again to Dr. Curry’s own assertion that David Rose misquoted her. See, there’s four full topics here at Climate Etc. that furnish plentiful examples of David Rose’s whoopsies.
What I do it point out that David Rose is in such a position that his whoopsies are not mere misrepresentation, cannot be casually dismissed as error, are not protected speech, and in sum and in total qualify by virtue of his profession, his being published, his prior bad acts and plentiful opportunities to correct errors that David Rose must be considered to be lying.
There’s no way around that.
It’s a pity, too, because David Rose is a capable journalist and other than this particular string of unfortunate events gives every appearance of being of better character than to carry on such a campaign.
The harm he does — beside what I believe now goes so far as to constitute hate speech against the identifiable group known as scientists — is to the public’s comprehension of issues; therefore he harms democracy.
You remember the idea of the defense of democracy, right?
Or do you believe Dr. Curry to have lied about being misquoted? The MET Office to have lied about correcting David Rose’s misinterpretations? Is everyone involved in this except him the liar?
Bart,
I could pick out any number of journalists who arguably the same would apply to. As I’m sure you could as well. I was standing in line at the supermarket a few weeks back and there was a special issue by Time Magazine of climate change. I picked it up and started flipping through the pages. It made claims in the form of statements of fact for all sorts of disasters that climate change will bring about. It was mind blowing what they were representing. Did I get upset? No, because for one I don’t get upset over stuff I can’t control and two, I don’t have very high expectations for media and journalism today.
As for the harm to democracy, I recommend you take under consideration the old adage of believing only half of what you see and none of what you hear or read. When it comes to threats to democracy, David Rose doesn’t even make the top 1000. I’d be more concerned with the never ending increase in the reach of government into our lives than I would any single journalist.
timg56,
I have some sympathies with errare humanum est that underlies your claim:
> I could pick out any number of journalists who arguably the same would apply to.
It reminds what Dan0 was saying the other day to the Auditor:
> There are plenty of opportunities to find errors in, say, medicine. We could have a, say, “Vioxx audit” website where we analyze the results of tests to the lil’ bunnies and the human subjects, and then the tests the FDA saw and didn’t act on. Or you could look at, oh, chemistry. Or crash test results. Or the percentage of times economists are right yet we act on their output anyway.
http://climateaudit.org/2005/08/23/more-on-mbh98-cross-validation-r2/#comment-36216
Note that this comment was made in August 2005.
Would you agree with Dan0?
NB. To be clear, this is not a rhetorical question.
willard,
I tried the link and it put me into the middle of a thread. I could not figure out who Dano is, let alone see his comment(s). So I am a bit at a loss to reply. Sorry.
tim,
I think that Dan0’s point is quite obvious.
In fact, it’s the same as yours.
You should take the time to read the thread.
It’s a good one, and if you don’t read it,
I might be tempted to read it for you.
The auditing sciences are waiting for you to step up your game.
timg56 | October 22, 2012 at 10:18 pm |
The other 1,000 didn’t use a photo of our host that upset her.
Bart,
Pardon me, but this seems a bit inane as a point of argument. While I do not follow this piece of advice my mom gave me often enough, it is still an extremely good one. “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Granted I may be getting an errorenious picture, but you seem to be getting worked up over something fairly minor.
At least you do not have to worry about sticking out from the crowd. Lots of people here do the same.
Since it is blindingly obvious that Rose is telling the truth, Bart R’s claim that Rose is lying, is itself an obvious lie.
No surprise really, it’s the basic modus operandi of his politically-motivated alarmism.
Tomcat | October 23, 2012 at 1:07 am |
So.. you’re saying Dr. Curry lied about being misquoted? How is that blindingly obvious again?
@bart r
From JC’s intro to this thread:
‘David Rose sent me my quotes in advance, along with the content surrounding them; I made a few minor changes to make the message more clear and more accurate and he incorporated these changes verbatim in the article’
Doesn’t look like she says she was misquoted here. Quite the opposite.
Latimer Alder, Bart R is referring to something Judith Curry said in another post. In it, she said:
Curry does not make any claim of dishonesty. She thinks he was wrong to quote her as saying that, not that she didn’t say it. In other words, it could have been a matter of context. Or, it could have been a careless mistake (those happen all the time in articles). Either way, there is nothing to indicate Rose did anything dishonest with regard to that quote.
As for what you refer to, that does speak to Rose’s credibility. After seeing Curry take issue with how he quoted her, he chose to put forth the effort to ensure she was satisfied with how she was quoted for his next article. That’s a good thing.
> Curry does not make any claim of dishonesty.
How to introduce a strawwoman in one sentence.
Bart, In your defining dishonest style, you again duck the central point here, which is that Rose’s comments about the temperature were on the money, contrary to your conscious lies suggesting otherwise.
He has made errors, but these seem to be in hand now.
> Rose’s comments about the temperature were on the money […]
How to beg the question in one simple step.
@willard
Which question do you imagine is being ‘begged’ and why do you think that it is important?
Latimer Adler,
The question begged does seem to belong to what has been described by Judy “an important and controversial topic”. To presume that the question is “settled” in any way does beg the question. More so considering that your only defense so far of David Rose’s claim rests on a analysis that is far from clear.
My turn to ask a question. Would you consider perpetuating a misrepresentation over and over again after being proven wrong over and over again evidence enough of a pattern of lying?
Many thanks!
PS: I note that you forgot to tell me if you think that water is wet by itself. I’ve asked many times.
@willard
Baffled me, pal.
Which f….g question are you ‘talking’ about?
‘Riddlespeak – Nein Danke!’
Latimer,
The question is in the quote I underlined:
> Rose’s comments about the temperature were on the money.
The question is thus:
> Are Rose’s comments about the temperature on the money?
I recalled Judy’s position on this: David Rose’s comments are on a “controversial” topic. Acting as if the question has been settled is begging it.
Do you have any other questions?
In any case, please take time to answer mine.
Many thanks!
@willard
I looked at Rose’s graph, It pretty much showed what he said it did. Good enough for me.
Lots of others have tried lots of ways to wriggle and twist and push water uphill and every other diversionary technique they can manage.
But none of it changes the simple truth…the global temperature today is much the same as it was fifteen years ago. It is not hotter now than it was then. There is no detectable nett ‘warming’ since 1997. The warming that could be seen in the second half of the last century has stopped.
And whatever you may or may not think of Rose as a journalist or his connections does nothing to change the above….and your tactic of pretending that somehow it does sheds an unflattering light upon your methods.
The real villain of the piece from the alarmist PoV is Mother Nature who is not cooperating with your predictions. And even if Rose were never to have been born, that won’t change.
It’s the message, not the messenger that is your problem.
I’ll answer your riddle about water if and when you can show it to be directly relevant to this discussion. Parlour games have never really appealed to me.
willard the waffler
Water itself is “wet” between 0C and 100C normally.
Max
Fergit the temp trend, the Earth’s climate is flat and there’s an edge around here somewhere over which to fall, and fall.
========
manacker’s answer might help understand Latimer’s trick over there, which rests on the possibility to talk about CO2 by itself:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/08/whats-the-best-climate-question-to-debate/#comment-253375
Being thick as a brick does seem to serve its “ecological function”, as might say Shub.
The central point of Rose’s article was the 16-year temperature plateau, and this was indeed on the money. No amount of smokescreen waffling by Willard, Joshua & co changes that, Rose’s erroneous comment on the side-issue of Judith’s view on models notwithstanding.
Latimer Adler,
You forgot to acknowledge my answer to your question. It was a pleasure for me to turn an assertion into a question. The difficulty you were having deciphering this question made you sweared. I’m glad this is settled.
You’re welcome.
***
I note this escalation of claims you just made:
> [T]he global temperature today is much the same as it was fifteen years ago. It is not hotter now than it was then. There is no detectable nett ‘warming’ since 1997. The warming that could be seen in the second half of the last century has stopped.
The first sentence contains a weasel expression, emphasized.
The second one extrapolates to something that sounds way more general than the global temperature: something called it. What’s that?
The third sentence does not mention the reason what “being detectable” means or entails, which helps confuse issues related to the features of the detectors with what is to be detected.
The fourt sentence also contains a weasel expression, emphasized.
All this is in stark contrast with the categorical:
> The warming has stopped.
Not that we know exactly what this means.
You were using an equation with T1 and T2 the other day. Would you mind restate what you meant in a way that even Joe Sixpack and Stirling English can understand?
Many thanks!
***
Speaking of Joe and Stirling, please note that they may resent what you just said:
> Parlour games have never really appealed to me.
They might feel victimized by this claim.
> The central point of Rose’s article was the 16-year temperature plateau […]
A point is a claim.
The emphasized bit is not.
@willard
Look children..a squirrel a long long way away with Latimer. Run over there and don’t look here again. I Don’t want you to have to see ‘grown-up’ alarmists cry as they realise their position is suffering continuous severe damage and they have no defences.
But lo! here’s a morale boosting speech from Mr Gore
Rose’s main point is the 16-year temperature plateau, denied only by the crankiest of the alarmist cranks here.
(Though heaven knows why. Do these nuts actually want/need to deny there are factors other than man acting on temperatures?).
@willard
I’m sure that Mr Gore won’t be best pleased with you calling him a ‘Fat Nazi’. You’re supposed to be his friend. &deity. knows he needs some.
And his remarks are well worth reviewing in the light of recent events…….
@willard
Wiggle, wriggle, squeak, squeal…………
And all your nitpicking ain’t gonna make any difference. The dirty secret is out there in the public’s consciousness. And you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Latimer Adler,
You seemed to wonder about what was right-wing populism the other day. Consider what you mean by “dirty secret”, this would be a good example of it:
> The dirty secret is out there in the public’s consciousness.
Usually, the Bandwagon technique is not far from this:
> Bandwagon is an appeal to the subject to follow the crowd, to join in because others are doing so as well. Bandwagon propaganda is, essentially, trying to convince the subject that one side is the winning side, because more people have joined it. The subject is meant to believe that since so many people have joined, that victory is inevitable and defeat impossible. Since the average person always wants to be on the winning side, he or she is compelled to join in.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/proptech.htm
Your numbers about the DSM and your prophecies about media outlets you do not appreciate much show this technique in action.
Please do continue.
Many thanks!
Latimer Adler,
I note that you have not defended my criticism of your escalation of claims.
Must we presume that you have no more cards in your hand?
Many thanks!
Bart R,
Please note this sentence:
> I note that you have not defended my criticism of your escalation of claims.
The mistake it contains might inspire Soclates to return with something else than “Whatever”.
What color would you give to this pseudo-lapsus?
(Or would it be a Poe?)
Many thanks!
PS: I personnally believe it fits a green hat.
@willard
1. It has been widely publicised that the Grauniad is considering closing its print edition. It is only kept afloat at al y a massive subsidy from its owners whose main business is in motor (auto) trading magazines. It is quite reasonable to expect that there will be big job cuts soon.
2. No ‘bandwagon’ here. No need for one, since the case is self-evident..
But the fact that you bring up the subject suggests that – like Mr Gore in the video you realise that ‘der Krieg ist verloren’
3. Nit picking
Still whatever.
If you can come up with sensible substantive points to discuss, I’m happy to. But if its a childish semantic game you’re after then you’re on your own. Go and play with yourself….
Erica,
Do you have a quote for what you claim is David Rose’s point?
Many thanks!
Latimer Adler,
Here’s a nice example of Bandwagon:
Do you recall who wrote this and in what context?
Many thanks!
PS: I observe you still have nothing to show for your weasily worded claims. Please think about Professor Unwin.
> Since it is blindingly obvious that Rose is telling the truth […]
I thought it DSM’s readers decided upon the facts.
A smile rose in the East. Or did it come in the Mail?
=============
Such articles and responses are healthy and should have been happening all along. If scientists are not skeptics, they are not scientists. If the climate establishment wants more trust from the public, they should be more forthcoming about all the things they dont know rather than continually trying to overwhelm us with their certitude.
I think what we’re seeing is an extremely healthy move past and away from the “denier” template and onto the much more rational debate. The debate is now where it should be. How much warming is happening? Not much. How much is it caused by human activity? Not sure. How dire is our future going to be? Not nearly as bad as anyone predicted/scared us; except if it gets really cold. Well done everyone!
patrioticduo, you write “How much warming is happening? Not much”
With all due respect, this is the wrong question. The evidence is that the earth has been warming ever since the LIA. This waming trend of around 0.06 C per decade does not appear to have anything to do with adding CO2 to the atmosphere. See http://bit.ly/V19Im8. There is no resason to believe that this warming trend has stopped…..yet.
The correct question is “How much additional warming has the increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere caused?” And the answer to this question is not much, and probably nothing at all.
Good post.
The quality of the debate certainly has improved. Less personal attacks and more focus on the issue. The last few threads have therefore been most interesting and informative.
Warmists are abandoning the global temperature anomaly flagship. It’s sinking and they need a new ship. Ocean heat content? Arctic sea ice? Maybe they can ride it for a while.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/15/1014151/ten-charts-that-make-clear-the-planet-just-keeps-warming/?mobile=nc
strange. First you say we are abandoning global temperature anomalies then you post a link to “10 charts that make clear the planet just keeps warming” that shows global temperature anomalies for its first 5 charts.
Yes, that first graph is stupid (a plateau will of course have the highest temperatures, hell even a cooing weaker than the cooling before the plateau will have highest temperatures), the rest is decadal averages (another lifeboat), highest La Nina (lifeboat and stupid too ) and 10-year moving average of the BEST land temperature. They hope the lifeboats will save them before warming starts again.
I would like to see warmer ocean heat content.
It would be very nice to be able to swim off Scotland in the summer without dying of hypothermia. And to have the warm waters of the Mediterranean in Bournemouth.
And I do not believe that the planet will collapse if one day it gets to be as warm in Torquay as it currently is in Biarritz.
Latimer
In the 30’s people went swimming in the sea at Torquay during the winter…
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/britain-is-staying-at-home/query/torquay+winter+swimming
tonyb
Do you think ARGO popped out of the blue in the 2000s? Climate scientists wanted a more reliable way to measure OHC. The literature goes way back.
They had a way to measure the surface air temperature. It had been in place for a long time. They did not have as good of way to measure OHC. So they built one. When it went online, they started using it.
Edim said:
“Warmists are abandoning the global temperature anomaly flagship. It’s sinking and they need a new ship. Ocean heat content? Arctic sea ice? Maybe they can ride it for a while.”
——-
What a very odd perspective. Anthropogenic warming has always been thought of in terms of an imbalance in Earth’s energy systems, which has been known to include the full atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. In this regard there have always been multiple ways in which the energy imbalance would be seen (according to models and theory). These include everything from reduction in sea ice (with the Arctic preceding the Antarctic by several decades), rising ocean heat content, melting permafrost, species migration, cooling stratosphere, weather pattern shifts, etc. Warming near surface temperatures were thus only one of a whole group of corroborating evidence. To suggest that because near surface temperatures have flattened at or near the highest on record requires “abandoning” a sinking ship is to be grossly underinformed about the full scope and scale of the multiple changes going on and the confidence that anthropogenic climate continues unabated as it will so long as humans continue to increase greenhouse gas concentrations.
This is a curious comment.
The earth’s energy system is always in “imbalance” in this sense – otherwise it would be static (and we’d be dead). Being a complex system gives ample opportunity to find corroborating evidence, but its existence doesn’t get you to you last sentence. Particularly when the best attempts to codify this complex system (in climate models) suggest we shouldn’t be seeing what we are.
Jury’s still out on my score (at least in terms of your last phrase).
R. Gates,
I said flagship. Without the rising global temperature indices, no story.
Energy imbalances have not been measured/calculated with sufficient accuracy. The heat transfer at the interface between surface (land/ocean and freshwaters) and atmosphere/space is very complex and dominated by latent heat transfer surface->atmosphere.
Now we are at ~15 years without significant warming. I expect this:
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/30yrLR.jpg
to continue, more or less. The 30-year trend will drop very fast IMO.
Bart R | October 21, 2012 at 10:23 am |
“He’s lying, and he’s doing harm. What more need we know or say, except why isn’t he in public office?”
You seem confused about truth, lies and conjecture.
Here is a test to check your understanding. Please answer whether the following statements are truth, lies or conjecture.
a: The 21st Century will experience an accelerated global temperature rise at least three to four times that of the 20th Century.
b: The Global temperature is rising much slower in the 21st Century than the 20th Century.
c: There has not been any statistical significant global warning in the 21st Century.
d: The IPCC models will be falsified at the 95% level if there is not a new unambiguous yearly Global temperature record set by 2016.
e: You are an idiot.
Alan
Alan Millar | October 21, 2012 at 10:43 am |
Y’know, no matter how someone says please, the line “You ae an idiot” comes off as impolite. Please answer what could possibly convince me to take up an exchange with on obviously manipulative boor?
Conjecture: a & b
Lie: c, d & e.
The probability that conjecture (b) is untrue exceeds 5/6ths.
The statement (d) is technically inaccurate as the IPCC models are not hypotheses, so the term ‘falsified’ is simply inapplicable to them. All models are wrong.
Since I’ve posted about these topics lately, I feel no special need to demonstrate the details in this comment.
Conjecture: a, d, and e (though e could also be shown to be a lie)
Truth: b & c
Alan,
you could have left e off the list. Why be insulting?
To be a bit fair to Alan, his insult was so mild that it still elevates a discussion with me.
Still, too much name calling. There are times I think you’ve stepped off the deep end, but so what. I don’t have to agree with you to show at least a modicum of civility and respect.
That said, there are a few here who have surrendered any respect, or never desired it in the first place.
The total warming from 1970 to 2012 is higher than the total warming from 1970 to 1997. The extra warming must have occurred since 1997. Therefore the answer to the question “has there been warming from 1997 to 2012″ must be yes.
In any case the real question being asked is “has warming stopped since 1997?”.
When people plot an OLS trend from 1997 to 2012 they might imagine they are answering that question, but they are not. Inherent in the question is that it’s a test of whether a pre-1997 warming trend has continued past 1997. A proper test therefore must include the pre-1997 warming as part of the test. An OLS trend from 1997 to 2012 ignores the prior warming and so cannot get the right answer.
The simplest method would be to define the warming up to the end of 1997 and then define the test in context of that. The test being:
Does the data since 1997 follow an extrapolation of the 1970-1997 trend.
With the result being It appears to. Indeed the longterm trend remains a good match
Contrast this with the common and I argue flawed test of simply drawing an OLS line from 1997 to 2012. The OLS slope since 1997 is taken as being low so a conclusion is made that there has been a pause in warming since 1997. Yet how can that be when the data since 1997 is compatible with a continuation of the 1970-1997 trend?
Furthermore lets examine what the data would have to look like to pass the 1997-2012 OLS test. I have trended up the hadcrut4 data since 1997 so it has a trend of 0.14C/decade. Is that really the goal being demanded for a “continuation of warming since 1997″?
The test demands far more than a continuation of warming since 1997, it demands average temperatures since 1997 to be on average 0.1C higher still. The test demands the overall trend from 1970-2012 to be higher than the trend from 1970-1997. how can that be right? It can’t. The 1997-2012 OLS test is flawed.
As a newbie, can you please explain something to me? I looked at the graph you linked to when you said “With the result being It appears to.” What I don’t understand is:
a) Why you are using 1998 in that plot, instead of 1997 which is the date the discussion appears to be about, and
b) Why you apply a detrend and offset amount the plot line from 1998?
Here is the graph without the detrend and offset, and it seems to illustrate the point that the trend from 1998 (as you’ve selected) is lower than the trend before 1998.
I can see a reason to apply an offset so the lines can be ‘joined’ up, but I don’t understand the logic for the detrend. I’m sure there is one and I’d like to understand it.
There’s no real difference when changing the 1998 to 1997 so that’s not really that important, though I tend to raise my eyebrows when people invoke 1998 as a starting or ending point in these sort of discussions, because it was an exceptional year.
Thanks in anticipation :)
I think the logic of the detrend is simple. Without the detrend the slopes wouldn’t line up. Since the truth is that the warming has continued the data must be tortured until it tells the truth.
Judith Curry and David Rose – heroes of the counter-establishment. Who’d a thunk it.
Keep up the good work JC
Because Nigel Lawson & the British Conservative Party are counter-establishment?
In a way, yes.
How they succeed in playing the populist card escapes me. We should ask Latimer. He might have had contacts with the Tatcherite intelligentsia when he was busy outsourcing IT jobs.
Perhaps this has something to do with being unsatisfied.
@willard
Nope. Not me. Never did much business with central government. Nearest I got was a couple of district level projects with the NHS. Fine technical projects but dreadful internal politics. A couple of mates used to work on technical stuff in No 10. but they were far more emollient than me.
Don’t think I ever outsourced any IT jobs either. Outsourcing has typically been for help desk and grunt-programming work. Not really my end of the business, which was more operations, project management and infrastructure. I didn’t have much to do with program development and any time I ran a help desk I wanted it up close and personal so that I knew what was going on with my systems day by day. Outsourcing for that function might have been penny wise in some cases but IMO it was always pound foolish. So I didn’t do it.
@willard
I’ll confess that I once saw the back of Nigel Lawson’s head at an excellent lecture Steve McIntyre gave in London. Mrs Thatcher once came to our Cricket Club to watch a charity game (but I was at work at the time so did not see her). I have been in the same room as George Monbiot and Bob Watson. Jimmy Savile once gave me a tip for filling up his Roller. And I once went to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party where I met Chuck and Camilla and was surprisingly impressed by both of them.
That’s about the limit of my political depravities. If you were hoping for more, you’ll be disappointed.
I’m not sure that they are succeeding in playing the populist card these days. It was always a bit of a stretch ;-)
Latimer Adler,
I stand corrected. Glad also to learn that IT excludes desk work and programming. I should also confide that I had in mind the outsourcing job you did yourself, i.e. the Government hiring cheaper labor from outside the gov.
I had something like this in mind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/16/thatcher-outsourcing-fantasy-fails-reality
Please note that this surmise was related to the populist card, which
> Hayek told Fisher to set up what he called a “scholarly institute” that would operate as a dealer in second-hand ideas. It’s sole aim should be to persuade journalists and opinion-formers that state planning was leading to a totalitarian nightmare, and that the only way to rescue Britain was by bringing back the free market. If they did this successfully – that would put pressure on the politicians, and Fisher would change the course of history.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html
So my question relates to the secret ingredient that binds populism to these theorical ideas developed by the Thatcherite intelligentsia.
Since you are one of the masters I know of the populist gambit, and considering your possibilities that your background might have had offered you, I still think you are the best placed to tell us how the magic trick works.
Many (think) tanks!
Latimer Adler,
I stand corrected. Glad also to learn that IT excludes desk work and programming. I should also confide that I had in mind the outsourcing job you did yourself, i.e. the Government hiring cheaper labor from outside the gov.
I had something like this in mind:
> The outsourcing of individual council services to large private corporate companies such as Capita, Serco and BT has been common practice across local government for four decades. But the past two years have seen the emergence of a series of grandiose mega-schemes which aim to privatise most, if not all, of a council’s services at a stroke.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/16/thatcher-outsourcing-fantasy-fails-reality
Please note that this surmise was related to the populist card, which is a bit strange considering the origins of think tanks:
> Hayek told Fisher to set up what he called a “scholarly institute” that would operate as a dealer in second-hand ideas. It’s sole aim should be to persuade journalists and opinion-formers that state planning was leading to a totalitarian nightmare, and that the only way to rescue Britain was by bringing back the free market. If they did this successfully – that would put pressure on the politicians, and Fisher would change the course of history.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html
So my question relates to the secret ingredient that binds populism to these theorical ideas developed by the Thatcherite intelligentsia.
Since you are one of the masters I know of the populist gambit, and considering your possibilities that your background might have had offered you, I still think you are the best placed to tell us how the magic trick works.
Many (think) tanks!
@willard
I don’t think that ‘IT excludes desk work and programming’. Its a big big area employing millions around the world. And it is just not possible for any one individual to be master of all of it. Doesn’t mean programming isn’t important. Way back when I began with a strong programming background but (unlike views sometimes presented here) it is not all there is to professional IT. There’s a huge amount of other stuff as well. Nor is being a defence attorney is all there is in the whole field of lawyerdom. Or being a tree ring diviner the only possible career in climatology.
From an IT perspective, since all UK local councils are so tightly regulated by central government that they must run all their services in just about identical ways, then joining together in some way makes a lot of sense. Not much point in having 400 IT separate IT departments all doing the same automated things and re-inventing the wheels..any more than a UK retail bank has a separate IT staff for each of its 3000 High Street branches. But whether this is politically acceptable is not an IT question.
As to ‘the populist card’…it strikes me as a strange from of abuse. Doing what ‘the people’ want, rather than some self-selecting bunch of ‘elite thinkers’ would like them to do always strikes me as rather a good idea in a democracy. (from demos – people, kratos – power). Perhaps you disagree?
Dear Latimer,
By the populist gambit, I was referring to this:
> Right-wing populism is a political ideology that rejects existing political consensus and usually combines laissez-faire liberalism and anti-elitism. It is considered populism because of its appeal to the “common man” as opposed to the elites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_populism
I’m not sure this is the same thing as democracy. If that were, we’d have to consider that we, the people, decide what the facts are.
Wait. That’s exactly what David Rose (or his editors) told the DSM readers! I never thought a right-wing populist outlet could be so post-modern.
Do you believe that facts are settled in a democratic manner?
***
Another way to see that it is only a gambit is to see this other comment you made:
> From an IT perspective, since all UK local councils are so tightly regulated by central government that they must run all their services in just about identical ways, then joining together in some way makes a lot of sense. […] But whether this is politically acceptable is not an IT question.
I’m not sure what you mean by “politically acceptable”, but this argument does sount a bit elitist to me, which is surprising since it’s the paragraph just before the one where you do seem to say that it is the people that decides what makes sense. I’m not sure who’s right on this issue: Joe and Stirling, or those like you who have a perspicuous “IT perspective” like yourself?
Finally, you must admit that this IT perspective might not run against the professional interests of private IT companies. Incidentally, I note that you have you offered no comments on the way I meant my remark about “outsourcing”. Let me repeat it:
> I should also confide that I had in mind the outsourcing job you did yourself, i.e. the Government hiring cheaper labor from outside.
Does the UK Government ever outsourced its IT jobs to you, Latimer?
Many thanks!
@willard
I’ll try to unpick the bits of your remarks that I understood.
1. Did the UK government ever outsource it’s IT to me (or my employers)
Nope. And from the few long ago times we tendered for some government business (not outsourcing) we learnt that the best strategy is to let our competitors take the hassle and the pain. Dealing with governments is a personal and professional nightmare and there are much easier ways to earn a crust without those pressures.
2. ‘ But whether this is politically acceptable is not an IT question.’
Any decision that alters the relationships with or between government agencies…central or local will always be just about completely ‘political’. Parties of the first part will be trying to shaft the parties of the second part and vice versa. Individual politicians and ‘public servants’ will be trying to make or break their careers. Departments will jostle with other departments (see remarks under 1. above). The technical aspect of ‘does this make sense from an IT perspective’ will be so far low down the list of things for the participants to worry about as to be immaterial. The internal politics will always be the overriding force – hence ‘politically acceptable’. If this ain’t apparent to you in spades, you’ve never dealt with government.
3, re ‘Populism’
You seem to be ‘crediting?’ me with a far greater knowledge of political theory than I claim. Still no idea what you’re really on about by ‘right-wing populism’. Not sure you do either, nor even the authors of the wikepedia article you link to since they are obliged to write
‘Classification of right-wing populism into a single political family has proved difficult, and it is not certain whether a meaningful category exists, or merely a cluster of categories, since the parties differ in ideology, organization, and leadership rhetoric. Also, unlike traditional parties, they do not belong to international organizations of like-minded parties, and they do not use similar terms to describe themselves’
Sounds like a pretty meaningless term to me and about as substantial as Scotch mist. which may be why I haven’t heard it before. But I guess it sounds good when pontificating over the port in the SCR or in the letters page of the graunaid. One don’t expect there to be much real content in either of those environments……
@willard
A final thought on IT and government.
IT projects nowadays rarely go wrong because of technical problems. We know enough about what the technology can do and how to do it that we can usually get that bit right (analogy…commercial airliners don’t often ‘just fall out of the sky’ any more – we know how to build them).
The hard and difficult bit is introducing those systems into pre-existing environments. Inevitably they will require people to change the way they do things (wouldn’t need a new system if that wasn’t the case), and my anecdotal experience is that – in UK at least – government employees are the most resistant to any change of any group I know of.
The contrast with retail where ‘new and exciting’ is a way of life and a selling point is quite marked. Once convinced of the benefits retailers embrace change with urgency, while government workers are positively hostile to it and will delay anything as long as they can. A culture of sham democracy and sham ‘consultations’ doesn’t help either. Rarely do they change anything and they certainly don’t speed things up.
Much much better business to get on with doing three good projects in a year with congenial clients and a culture of success than struggle with one awful government one for three years and an inevitable years long legal case at the end. Life’s too short.
Latimer Adler,
Thank you for your thoughts.
You tell us that you stay away from IT outsourcing from the government because of this:
> Dealing with governments is a personal and professional nightmare and there are much easier ways to earn a crust without those pressures.
But then you say that IT outsourcing makes sense:
> From an IT perspective, since all UK local councils are so tightly regulated by central government that they must run all their services in just about identical ways, then joining together in some way makes a lot of sense.
It does seem to entail that it makes sense to create a personal and professional nightmare for IT companies who would profit from this outsourcing.
From your own perspective, I can understand that: just imagine if all your IT competitors were busy living personal and professional nightmares dealing with government outsourcing contracts…
But as a general principle, I must admit it escapes me. For instance, I’m not sure how you can reconcile your belief that a centralized corporation is nightmarish with the idea that joining together services makes lots of sense. The government seems to have a magical property that a private corporation does not seem to have. I never understood how the right-wing populist rhetoric could solve this tension. Perhaps it simply does not, and is being ignored, like you just ignored the characterization of right-wing populism.
If you do not recognize that this looks a lot to what you’re selling here day in day out, perhaps it’s because you fell into the cauldron of dissatisfaction when you were young, like Obélix and the magic potion. Would you like me to tell you when what you say echoes reactionary talking points? It would be my honor to do so.
Many thanks!
@willard
I replied at length earlier, but my contribution seems to have disappeared.
To summarise.
1. Does centralisation for local authority services make IT sense? .Yes.
2. Would such a project be one I’d be interested in undertaking? No
3. Why not? History of large government projects show that they generally end in tears and lawsuits. Government has very limited continuity of leadership (elections and politics) and a pretty ‘conservative’ mindset. Difficult and frustrating environment to work in. Not for me. I can do other things with less hassle and more fun. Life’s too short.
BTW You can call me any names you like. WHT has already called me ‘Repellently Vulgar’, Neo – lots of things – none of them meant to be complimentary, and a ‘severe impediment to progress’. That’s just today.
I’m confident in my own skin. Insult away……but you may find that I take them as compliments.
Warmists of IPCC 2007 claimed/continue claiming a 0.2 C increase per
decade…. Now Warmist Bob Ward voluntarily reduced it to a miniscule 0.047 C per 16 years, about 0.03 C per decade…..Multiplying this value
with 10 decades to 2100 makes 0.3 C of global warming for 100 years.
….Warmists will claim in the year 2100: Thanks to OUR good work,
temperatures have kept below our 2.0 C aim at only 0.3 C…JS
This is great. Now some of the public know that the whole AGW has at the very least been over egged and at worst it was deceitful activism. The activism has as its objective the reduction in economic growth and industrial output but not all alarmists are activists are they?
Better picture of you, too. Looks like you just slammed a shot of Cuervo and looked straight into the camera.
Data since 1997 have increased the warming trend since 1970, not decreased it.. The data is compatible with a continuation of linear warming since 1970 plus (largely ENSO) residuals.
The only reason people imagine there’s been a slowdown or plateau in warming since 1997 is because they are applying an invalid test. They think plotting a trend from 1997 answers the question. It doesn’t.
Plotting a trend from a time of positive residual (above trend, 1997-2005) to a time of negative residual (below trend 2008-2012) only tells you about the trend of the residuals. It doesn’t tell you if the longterm warming has continued.
According to the longterm trend warming from 1970 is running at 0.16C/decade. That is indeed close to the IPCC prediction of 0.2C/decade.
lolwot highlights the fact the calculated trend from 1970 to current times is higher than the calculated trend from 1970 to 1998. That’s true. However, it is not true that this point proves anything. This issue is related to something I discussed on another page, and you can see the silliness of the argument in this graph.
That graph shows when you have a period that is warmer than previous ones, you can get increasing temperature trends even if temperatures don’t continue increasing. If your results show increased warming while temperatures remain constant, your approach doesn’t work.
Amusingly, lolwot promotes this method that is demonstrably faulty while condemning the simple and effective approach of just calculating the trends of the period we’re interested in. The position displayed seems to be if a method gives answers we don’t like, it shouldn’t be used.
Yes Brandon has successfully shown my 1-2-3-4 method is faulty and I won’t be using it any more.
However I still argue the technique of using OLS since 1997 to conclude the warming has stopped is faulty, based on:
1) The trend from 1970-2012 is greater than the trend from 1970-1997
2) the overlap in trend uncertainty
lolwot, nothing I just said dealt with the stupid and bizarre approach you now acknowledge is unusable. Everything I said had to do with what you just labeled as your 1. That’s why I explicitly stated:
In other words, both approaches are shown to be faulty by that graph.
As for your 2, you should first not use GISS data when that isn’t the data in question. Also, despite what you say, increased uncertainty does not falsify claims that warming has stopped. More uncertainty does not make us more certain!
That said, it is wrong to conclude warming has stopped by using OLS. It’d be just as wrong to use it to conclude warming hasn’t stopped. That didn’t stop Bob Ward from doing so.
What isn’t wrong is saying we haven’t seen warming in the last ~15 years. The reason we haven’t seen warming may not be because the warming has stopped, but there is no doubt we haven’t seen any.
There is an admission by all (including Rose) that the world warmed up to 1997. We can only conclude that warming has ended, or slowed down, if that can be established with statistical significance.
It doesn’t matter that warming since 1997 isn’t statistically significant. That could just be because it’s too short a time period to get a statistically significant trend.
After-all as I pointed out elsewhere, back in 1997 someone could have argued warming had stopped since 1987.
——
As for my 1) argument I disagree. If we accept the trend from 0 to 31 represents a “warming trend”, and we are asking whether the warming stops after 31, we should be asking whether the data after 31 is compatible with a continuation of the 0-31 trend. If the 0-31+N trend is equal or greater to the 0-31 trend then I think it’s always going to be the case that the warming trend cannot be said to have ended. Only if the 0-31+N trend was lower than the 0-31 trend would it be possible that the warming trend has stopped.
The only error I acknowledge was in my use of multiplying the period by the trend to get “total warming” (which was part of what I describe as my now debunked 1-2-3-4 method). Comparing and testing the trends themselves still seems valid.
lolwot, I demonstrated the method you’re using is faulty as it can show an increase in warming trends even when there is no increase in temperature. Your response is to… say you disagree. I provided a graph that demonstrates a clear problem with your approach, and rather than address it or even attempt to show its results are wrong, you ignored it.
Go Team?
No I promise I didn’t ignore it, I learned from it. I understand what you are saying and you are right: a trend can remain steady (or increase) even if the temperature doesn’t increase anymore.
But then I realized the consequence of that: A continued warming trend doesn’t require the temperature to keep increasing.
When we ask whether 1970-1997 warming has continued past 1997 we should be asking whether the 1970-1997 trend has continued, not whether temperature has increased since 1997.
After-all as you have pointed out, the trend can continue even if temperature doesn’t increase at all. So I started thinking about why that happens and realized it happens when the temperature data gets ahead of the trend. Being ahead of the trend means the temperature data can stop increasing and yet the warming trend continues until it “catches up” with the data. It’s not until the temperature data falls below the trend that the trend starts to substantially drop that AGW has a problem.
In 1997 temperature rose far ahead of trend thanks to the 1997-1998 El Nino. Temperature has not needed to increase any higher in order to remain “ahead of trend”.
Another way to look at it is that there are multiple ways of achieving 0.16C/decade from 1970-2012 given 0.16C/decade from 1970-1997. One way would be for temperature to gradually increase from a low level in 1997 to a high level in 2012. Under this scenario 1997-2012 OLS would show 0.16C/decade trend.
The method that actually took place was that temperature jumped up high 1997 and remained high, such that an OLS trend from 1997-2012 shows little trend. The effect is the same though. The trend from 1970-2012 comes out at 0.16C/decade.
In terms of expectations of global warming it doesn’t matter which happened. Certainly it’s not a part of AGW to claim to understand climate well enough to be able to predict the exact trajectory of temperatures from 1997-2012. The best that can be done is to expect a roughly continued warming trend (in this case 0.16C/decade).
So the 1997-2012 OLS being flat doesn’t mean warming stopped, it means warming took an odd path. Why did continued warming manifest as a step change is the question, rather than a conclusion that warming didn’t continue.
To amuse myself, I decided to implement lolwot’s proposed method for deciding if global warming has stopped. When I did, I found trends don’t drop below the first line in my graph’s trend until N = 90. That’s right. His approach can’t find a lack of warming in that data until 60 points after it stops.
But I decided to take it a step further. I took the temperature record in question, then I modified it so it was completely flat all the way to 2020. I then calculated the trends from 1970 to every month to see when they’d fall below the 1970-1998 trend. The result? 2018.
That’s right. The method lolwot now promotes says if we had measured completely flat temperatures for the last ~15 years, we still couldn’t say global warming has stopped. We would still need another five years of completely flat temperatures to do so.
It’s a wonderful method if you want to ensure you never find global warming has stopped.
I’ve decided not to bother explaining why the approach lolwot now promotes is bizarre and stupid. Instead, I’m going to just show what happens when we implement it.
That’s the temperature series with the data examined in the Daily Mail article replaced with a linear trend of approximately -.01 degrees per decade. The vertical line shows when lolwot’s approach would decide global warming has stopped. That’s at about 2011.
In other words, we could have measured decreasing temperatures from 1998 to last year, and lolwot’s approach would just barely conclude global warming had stopped.
Lolwot is right. Something can “warm up” in the sense of absorbing tremendous amounts of heat without measurably changing temperature. All it takes is a high thermal conductivity material placed along a conductive path. The issue is that this does not spontaneously appear unless it is something as simple as cooler upwelling ocean flows providing a steeper concentration gradient for excess heat to flow down.
If that path disappears, then the excess heat will continue on with its fluctuating random walk, hopping into and out of thermally conductive sites. That is what the classical heat equation describes, a purely diffusive system.
What is interesting about this description is how it aligns with basic time-series analysis. The simplest analysis of any time series is to assume a random walk. However, this does not have a reversion-to-the-mean (RTTM) property, so you pick a random-walk model that does, such as a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. As with any RTTM random-walk, if the fluctuations get to far away from the actual mean, it will takes it’s time in reverting back to that mean.
Lo and behold, we look at what Kyle Swanson says, as quoted by lolwot further down in this thread:
The terms “overshoot” and “radiatively dissipating” is used to describe that a particular year of excess heat was just that, excess thermal energy that is above the mean energy trajectory.
This fluctuating behavior, when placed in the hands of goofs like Chief Hydrologist, is made to look like some astounding “climate paradigm shift”. Sadly not, as this is most parsimoniously explained (as with many other aleatory natural phenomena ) by RTTM statistics, which is also known as red noise. Take an elevation profile along an average terrain path and it will show up as red noise with characteristic Gauss-Markov properties. This noise model is used by engineers as input to sophisticated Kalman filtering applications. No remarkable paradigm shifts to see for miles within that particular discipline, just the application of stochastic analysis approaches as described in textbooks by authors such as C.W. Gardiner.
What I find odd is how the skeptics use entropy and randomness as a convenience crutch, whereby they will invoke it when it serves their agenda, but dismiss it and gravitate toward some esoteric path when it doesn’t.
I don’t engage in the trendology unless I can work with an adequate data set because I understand the nature of noise and know where it can trip you up.
WebHubTelescope the problem is that if you do fit one of those fancy ARIMA models to the data the trend (aka warming) gets to be marginal.
Brandon you write: “His approach can’t find a lack of warming in that data until 60 points after it stops.”
Of course that data is completely artificial so “60 year” pause in that data could be no more significant for a lack of warming than a 1 year pause in hadcrut4 would be.
Your method also produces seeming silly results. For example taken literally your method wrongly concludes temperature has stopped rising whenever a pause occurs in the data of any length.
Take a staircase plot for example: your method would wrong conclude the staircase had ended at the end of each step. That’s *every* step your method would tell you the wrong answer. My method would only conclude the staircase had ended once the trend substantially lowered, which it wouldn’t do until after a sufficient amount of data after the top of the staircase had actually been reached. You argue that the method doesn’t catch the end of the staircase right away (ie “His approach can’t find a lack of warming in that data until 60 points after it stops.”) but that’s only because the method is rightly cautious! Sufficient data to establish the warming has stopped is required before concluding it.
To see why take actual temperature data like this, every time a blue flat line is encountered your method concludes warming has stopped. I count 5 times your method would have led to the wrong conclusion that warming had stopped since 1970. If it’s already been wrong several times why should we accept it this time when it claims warming has stopped since 1997?
The point is you can’t assume warming has stopped just because the OLS goes flat since N. As you yourself have pointed out the longterm warming trend can continue, or even increase, despite a flat OLS for some period. Therefore doesn’t it make sense to require the longterm warming trend to substantially change?
In the case of the data you’ve drawn here I really don’t think you can conclude the warming has stopped. It could be the warming has stopped, OR it could be that the jump upwards and slope down is merely variation around the longterm trend. If the 1970-1997 trend is the same as the 1970-2012 trend (which I assume it is in that data) I disagree you can conclude the warming has ended. Surely it’s the longterm trend that defines whether warming continues, not the specific path temperature took.
to lolwot ….”. Surely it’s the longterm trend that defines whether warming continues, not the specific path temperature took.” Exactly…now we are making progress. Best thing you have said all day.
And now, unable to dispute what I say, lolwot resorts to making things up about me:
I’ve never promoted any approach as being right. I’ve simply pointed out lolwot uses stupid and bizarre approaches. Even if that weren’t true, it is not a defense of a methodology to say other methodologies suck too. And even if it were, nothing about looking at the OLS trend of a period does what lolwot claims unless the data has no variance at all, something which could never happen in temperatures.
Put bluntly, lolwot isn’t responding to anything I’ve said, he’s making things up about what I have said, he’s making things up about simple calculations, and he’s not even being amusing anymore. As such, it isn’t worth spending my time responding to him. Anyone who is interested in an honest examination of the data would quickly see lolwot’s approaches are stupid, bizarre, and deceptive. They’d also quickly see his conclusions are insane (such as claiming increased uncertainty falsifies the idea of global warming having stopped).
I hope the reason most people don’t call him out on it is they are just ignoring him. Anything else would be depressing.
@web hub telescope
You state:
‘Something can “warm up” in the sense of absorbing tremendous amounts of heat without measurably changing temperature’
Please give a concrete physical example where I can see this phenomenon occurring.
The experimental apparatus will be a quantity of ‘something’, a heat source applied to that something (eg a bunsen burner) and a sensitive means of measuring the temperature of the something.
Please describe your method , especially the nature and design of ‘something’ and the results you expect to see that will justify your claim..Diagrams will be very helpful.
We will then (if it seems sensible) do our best to procure the experimental equipment and conduct the test in reality. .
Brandon you wrote: “His approach can’t find a lack of warming in that data until 60 points after it stops.”
My point is that if by “lack of warming” you mean the longterm trend has ended then NO method can establish that from the data.
Yes running OLS from 31-60 can show a “lack of warming” in the sense of a flat OLS over that period.
But that isn’t the same as a “lack of warming” in terms of the longterm warming stopping. The longterm warming can continue despite flat OLS from 31-60 (and from 91-120, etc) if the warming pattern is a staircase.
Therefore complaining that my method doesn’t find the lack of warming is beside the point. No method can as you have defined “lack of warming”.
Note that I am not the one claiming a lack of warming since 1997. David Rose and the 1997 OLSers are the ones claiming it. I am claiming their method doesn’t support that idea. There’s no indication that the longterm 1970-1997 warming has stopped. It seems you agree with me.
lolwot, never letting anything get in the way of a stupid comment, misrepresents what I’ve said, creating a random and nonsensical definition of his own then attributing it to me. He then claims I agree with a position despite having accused me of holding the opposite position just a little while prior.
Question. Aside from Pekka Pirilä, is there anyone on his side who acknowledges lolwot’s comments range from wrong to nonsensical to stupid to insane?
Well this is certainly not lol’s finest hour. This temperature plateau that just can’t be spin-doctored away does seem to have got under the skins of those like lol wanting a CAGW conclusion no matter what the facts.
‘Lolwot is right. Something can “warm up” in the sense of absorbing tremendous amounts of heat without measurably changing temperature. All it takes is a high thermal conductivity material placed along a conductive path. The issue is that this does not spontaneously appear unless it is something as simple as cooler upwelling ocean flows providing a steeper concentration gradient for excess heat to flow down.
If that path disappears, then the excess heat will continue on with its fluctuating random walk, hopping into and out of thermally conductive sites. That is what the classical heat equation describes, a purely diffusive system.
What is interesting about this description is how it aligns with basic time-series analysis. The simplest analysis of any time series is to assume a random walk. However, this does not have a reversion-to-the-mean (RTTM) property, so you pick a random-walk model that does, such as a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. As with any RTTM random-walk, if the fluctuations get to far away from the actual mean, it will takes it’s time in reverting back to that mean.
Someone might be able to make some physical sense of this not me.
‘Lo and behold, we look at what Kyle Swanson says, as quoted by lolwot further down in this thread:
“… that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. “
The terms “overshoot” and “radiatively dissipating” is used to describe that a particular year of excess heat was just that, excess thermal energy that is above the mean energy trajectory.’
What he actually said ‘We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020. Of course, this contrasts sharply with other forecasts of the climate system; the purple line roughly indicates the model-based forecast of Smith et al. (2007) , suggesting with a warming of roughly 0.3 deg C over the 2005-2015 period.
Why would anyone in their right mind believe what I’ve just outlined? Everything hinges on the idea that something extraordinary happened to the climate system in response to the 1997/98 super-El Niño event (an idea that has its roots in the wavelet analysis by Park and Mann (2000)). ‘
‘This fluctuating behavior, when placed in the hands of goofs like Chief Hydrologist, is made to look like some astounding “climate paradigm shift”. Sadly not, as this is most parsimoniously explained (as with many other aleatory natural phenomena ) by RTTM statistics, which is also known as red noise. Take an elevation profile along an average terrain path and it will show up as red noise with characteristic Gauss-Markov properties. This noise model is used by engineers as input to sophisticated Kalman filtering applications. No remarkable paradigm shifts to see for miles within that particular discipline, just the application of stochastic analysis approaches as described in textbooks by authors such as C.W. Gardiner.’
Noise and ‘aleatory’ uncertainty have no place in climate – everything has a cause – everything is determinant in principle. When we have a graph such as this – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES_MODIS-1.gif – the two things are related and are the result of coherent variability in ocean/atmosphere couplings.
To quote from the paper that is the actual subject of the post. “Has the climate recently shifted?’
‘This paper provides an update to an earlier work that showed a foreshadowing of such climate shifts in the time evolution of major Northern Hemispheric atmospheric and oceanic modes of variability [Tsonis et al., 2007]. In that paper, it was hypothesized that certain aspects of the climate system behave in a manner analogous to that of synchronized chaotic dynamical systems [Boccaletti et al., 2002]. Specifically, it was shown that when these modes of climate variability are synchronized, and the coupling between those modes simultaneously increases, the climate system becomes unstable and appears to be thrown into a new state. This chain of events is identical to that found in regime transitions in synchronized chaotic dynamical systems [Pecora et al., 1997]. This new state is marked by a break in the global mean temperature trend and in the character of ENSO variability.
It follows on from Tsonis et al 2007 “A new dynamical mechanisms for major climate shifts.’
The term climate shift comes directly from these papers. They provide quantitative analysis of chaos – in the sense of theoretical physics – in contemporary climate. The paradigm shift was first applied to this new idea of how climate works by the NAS – ‘Abrupt climate change: inevitable surprises’.
Webby the wanker has taken a sentence from a post on papers that say something the reverse of what he stupidly infers from almost total ignorance. The guy is a moron.
‘What I find odd is how the skeptics use entropy and randomness as a convenience crutch, whereby they will invoke it when it serves their agenda, but dismiss it and gravitate toward some esoteric path when it doesn’t.’
Given what has preceded this – I fail to give a rat’s arse about what webnutcolonoscope thinks is an esoteric path.
‘I don’t engage in the trendology unless I can work with an adequate data set because I understand the nature of noise and know where it can trip you up.’
What he engages in is ignorant moronicity.
Give it up Chief. You take an unattributed graph from one of James Hansen’s colleagues at LaRC and you make up stuff. What a surprise.
The graph comes from a Norman Loeb presentation – as you are well aware of becuase I linked to the source recently. The data is of course avaiable id you care to look. The graph shows the link between cloud and SW at TOA. Duh.
You want to distract from your idiocy above in quoting a sentance from on a paper showing dynamical chaos in climate to show that dynamical chaos doesn’t happen? One that you obviously haven’t read – let alone the underlying papers. You have shown yourself to be a liar and a fraud on numerous occasions – you are also a moron.
Brandon, simple question: do you think the warming from 1970-1997 has stopped since 1997?
ARIMA is a purely statistical technique but Ornstein-Uhlenbeck has more of a grounded foundation based on physics.
WebHubTelescope I don’t there is much to choose between in their relationship to some form of physical behaviour (apart from one being discrete and the other continuous). But you miss my point. If you fit a model more appropriate to the characteristics of the data (which in this case is discrete and therefore ARIMA is more appropriate) you find all the trends with time become more less significant.
Sorry poor hand eye co-ordination ” ….. much less significant.”
lolly, your missing the point. We have been told that the rise in temperature in the 20th century is ” very likely” due to human emissions. We’ve had an IPCC period (1995 – 2012) of no warming with CO2 emissions increasing, while the climate science community have continued to tell us that warming is due to CO2. I think that any rational human being would take the observations and question the theory. But not you eh?
Judith, love the photograph this time round, it’s you.
“We’ve had an IPCC period (1995 – 2012) of no warming ”
not true. There’s been warming over that period.
“‘According to the longterm trend warming from 1970 is”
The century long trend is warming followed by a substantial pause(cooling) then warming again according to HADCRUT4 for a trend of 0.08C per decade.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/diagnostics.html
Calculating the trend from the end of the last substantial pause is cherry picking. It ignores the 30 year pause.
The IPCC says it’s likely the late 20th century warming is mostly human caused. So I am focusing on late 20th century warming. I could start the trend from 1950 but I think people would complain I had avoided the more obvious 1970 or 1980 start points so I had a smaller pre-1997 rate of warming.
@lolwot
If I want to see if it has warmed from 1997 to now, I really do think that plotting a trend from 1997 to now answers the question extremely satisfactorily.
Trying to torture the data another few times until you find some hidden secret ain’t going to change anything. And just makes you look desperate to hold on to your magic power charm as it falls from your grasp.
Bye bye power, bye bye influence, bye bye alarmism, and bye bye f***g windmills.
Latimer Alder is repellently vulgar in his hatred of people working toward solutions. To join a term from the political front where you have neo-liberals and neo-cons, he appears as a neo-Malthusian. Not exactly spouting a Malthusian tag-line but egging on failure whenever he can. Something has always bothered me about this type and now I understand it. Just like the war-mongering neo-cons, the neo-Malthusians, neo-Luddites, and neo-Cornucopians are completely agenda driven.
@web hub telescope
Just another bunch of content-free neo-incomprehensible crap from you.
If you choose to put it into understandable English I might comment further, but I need only read the first sentence ‘hatred of those working toward solutions’ – which has zero content…(what solutions? to what problem(s)? how do you measure ‘towards’?) to know that it would be futile.
And the last sentence
‘Just like the war-mongering neo-cons, the neo-Malthusians, neo-Luddites, and neo-Cornucopians are completely agenda driven.’
seems just to be a nonsensical stringing together of words?
Do you make them up with some form of random word-generator?
I once wrote (buried deep in a sales proposal something like ‘you new computer will be grey in colour, washable with the patented OMO feature wearable at even the most sophisticated evening events, accessorisable with a range of glamorous baubles and will provide total technical flexibility within a unified and comprehensive overall business and commercial strategy’..on the basis that I wasn’t sure anybody was really interested in what we said on p 242 wasn’t going to be read at all.
I was right. And we won the business. But mine was meant to be near-gibberish. Do you have the same excuse?.
Latie,
Your hatred of renewable energy technologies is obvious.
Is that clear enough for you?
You believe that the cessation of global warming signals the end of the need for wind turbines.
Is that also clear?
You also have said in the past that the British have long known that their own fossil fuel supply won’t last.
Is it now clear that you do not care for the UK’s future?
I have no problem with you criticizing my writing style. It gives me a chance to lay out the argument more clearly.
@web hub telescope
1. ‘You believe that the cessation of global warming signals the end of the need for wind turbines’
There has never been a ‘need’ for windmills. The original ones fell out of favour very soon after the invention of a reliable steam engine because of their fundamental technical deficiencies. Just renaming them ‘wind turbines’ and hoping that some credulous fools will think them to be somehow ‘different’ doesn’t actually change anything.
The only need for windmills was for the pollies to demonstrate how ‘green’ they were And these are simply monuments to the cult of Gaia. Since they are entirely uneconomic (at least in UK), the operators need enormous bribes (aka ‘subsidies’) to build and run them. So we end up not with ‘wind farms’ but with ‘subsidy farms’.
Like the Cargo Cultists recreation of old ATC towers, believers in this myth hope that by constructing these edifices they will somehow bring back some fantasy land ‘good time’ . But like the Cargo Cultists their beliefs are completely wrong.
2. ‘You also have said in the past that the British have long known that their own fossil fuel supply won’t last.
Is it now clear that you do not care for the UK’s future?’
Wow. That’s a huge non sequitur How TF do you equate noticing that North Sea Oil is finite with ‘not caring about the UK’s future?.’
But in terms of strictest accuracy, you kept droning on about North Sea Oil as if you were the very first to note that it wasn’t going to last forever. I merely pointed out that the guys in the Treasury (our Finance Ministry) had noticed this undeniable truth about thirty years ago.
And North Sea Oil is not our only source of fossil fuels. Your comment makes little sense.
BTW the lead time for putting up a windmill is a matter of months. If and when they ever became economic, sensible and necessary, we could construct them very quickly. But there is no need to stick them up now when none of those conditions have been met.
As to your writing style today I find it much easier to follow your remarks when laid out clearly as I recommended. +1! Keep it up.
So Latimer is a neo-Luddite because he reflexively says that wind technology will never work. You can’t prove that, so the neo-Luddite tag sticks.
Latimer is a neo-Cornucopian because he thinks magic beans will replace North Sea oil. That tag sticks because he hasn’t described a replacement.
Latimer is a neo-Malthusian because he hates the fact that greens are concerned about the future of the world. This is a transitively logical construct. If green technology were to succeed and the earth’s population retained a comfortable carrying capacity, Latimer would become very unhappy. That makes him a neo-Malthusian.
OTOH, classify me as a neo-realist and a neo-optimist.
I make these classifications because I am disgusted with your kind and believe that you are severe impediments to progress. That’s my opinion.
See the next post on the Myth of Affordable Energy for ways in which these jerks go further down the rabbit hole.
@web hub telescope
Webbie webbie…no need to get so upset.Dry your eyes little one… the big Green Warming Bogeyman really isn’t coming for you!
But to lull you to sleep. here;s the answer to the load of bollocks you wrote just now.
1. ‘So Latimer is a neo-Luddite because he reflexively says that wind technology will never work. You can’t prove that, so the neo-Luddite tag sticks’.
Until you can make the wind blow reliably and consistently and/or provide low cost economic ways of storing bulk quantities (TWh s) of electricity easily and retrievably, then wind power is pretty useless beyond a few very localised applications. you might wish it to be otherwise, but since neither condition looks to be on the horizon I’ll not say ‘never’ but ‘in the reasonably forseeable future’. If a miracle occurs the lead time is short to build more windmills.
2. ‘Latimer is a neo-Cornucopian because he thinks magic beans will replace North Sea oil. That tag sticks because he hasn’t described a replacement’.
The replacement is what it has always been. Money. Because of it’s constituents most NSO was not used locally but traded on world markets You may have head about a price for ‘Brent Crude’. We sold NSO and bought what we needed. This will continue just as before.
North Sea Gas is still widely used for domestic consumption, but that’s a different thing.
3.’Latimer is a neo-Malthusian because he hates the fact that greens are concerned about the future of the world. This is a transitively logical construct. If green technology were to succeed and the earth’s population retained a comfortable carrying capacity, Latimer would become very unhappy. That makes him a neo-Malthusian’
The key to your rant is the little but highly important phrase ‘if green techology were to succeed’.
If it were to do so, I’d be delighted. But I;d be delighted if my fairy Godmother came down and offered me Three Wishes as well. Despite zillions of dollars and pounds ‘invested’ in ‘green’ technologies, none (that is a big fat zero) are even approaching the level of cost and efficiency we get from conventional energy. And the reason is simple thrmodynamics – energy density. You need a lot of wind to generate a few watts of electricity – hence a big windmill. You need a big solar panel to do the same (at least in Northern Europe). The former doesn’t work when the wind don’t blow (like today in SW London) and the latter don’t work at all when it’s dark or poorly when its cloudy (like today). AFAIK we can’t store wind for later and we can only effectively store sunbeams in one way.
And that is fossil fuel. Stored sunbeams from a long tine ago. Coal, oil gas are all very nice fuels…they are energy dense..you don’t need a lot of them to get a decent amount of energy. You can store them and use them when you want and/or need. They are controllable and transportable. All these reasons remain good ones and won’t go away because you’d like them to..
If you want to go even further into energy density you can use the stored energy of the Big Bang in nuclear fission or the simple conversion of mass to energy in nuclear fusion. None of these are perfect, they all have advantages and disadvantages, but the oil, coal and gas is there in the Earth. And make no mistake, it will be used, whatever you may think…unless your green technologies become so much better that they are made obsolete. Given that at the moment no green technology can survive without huge subsidies, there is an awful long way to go and an awful lot of new technology that needs to be invented from scratch to make this happen. (bulk electricity storage to start with)
Your silly remark about ‘greens are concerned about the future of the planet’ is just about on a par with ‘will nobody think of the children/’ as the last appeal to emotion when you know that you are losing the rational case.
4. ‘I make these classifications because I am disgusted with your kind and believe that you are severe impediments to progress.’
Sorry that you’re so upset. But David Rose’s article has clearly upset a lot of you alarmist types…..a bit too lose to home and you know that you have no counter to the unhappy fact that the temperature ain’t been rising for a long long time….
And if you think that pointing out that real energy systems and real economies and health services and agriculture and all the things needed to live a reasonably happy life don’t come from windmills and sunbeams then I am delighted that I am ‘a severe impediment to progress’. Coz pouring good public money after bad in a wishful dream search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the Coup de Ville hiding at the bottom of a Crackerjack box is not what I call ‘progress’ at all. Just straightforward stupidity.
When I write my next book I will already have two of my back cover quotes from you.just from your remarks today.
‘A severe impediment to progress’ ‘Latimer Alder is repellently vulgar’
With such great free advertising it’ll be a smash best seller I’m sure.
But to be serious for a moment. Apart from calling me names in terms of ever-increasing obscurity, I don’t think that you have come up with a single sensible argument during our recent exchanges. Can you identify a single one?
Latie has lost the argument big time. Any time someone has to write lengthy paragraphs to defend himself indicates that the initial description cuts too close for comfort.
It also indicates that you do understand my writing, contrary to what you first indicated.
A neo-Malthusian, neo-Luddite, neo-Cornucopian fits you to a T.
WEB,
There is nothing vulgar or an indication of hating people in Latimer’s comment above. Considering some of the comments you’ve posted, this is a case of the kettle (cast iron variety) calling the pitcher (clear glass variety) black.
@web hub telescope
Whatever.
@web hub,telescope
On further reflection:
Neo-whatever.
@web hub telescope
I don’t think the use of common sense is an entirely new concept even if it is unfamiliar to you.
Latimer Alder writes: “If I want to see if it has warmed from 1997 to now, I really do think that plotting a trend from 1997 to now answers the question extremely satisfactorily.”
But what if you want to see if warming since 1970 has stopped?
I argue plotting a trend since 1997 doesn’t answer that question and the claim “warming stopped 16 years ago” is unsupported.
After-all back in 1998 if you had plotted the trend since 1987 you would have found the trend was flat. Did that mean warming since 1970 stopped in 1987? No, obviously not.
@lolwot
‘But what if you want to see if warming since 1970 has stopped?’
I don’t.
Why should I be bothered with the old stuff? if it has hasn’t warmed up since 1997, I don’t really give a toss what happened 42 years ago…or 420 years ago.
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.
“if it has hasn’t warmed up since 1997, I don’t really give a toss what happened 42 years ago”
Would you have said the same back in 1997 when the past 10 year trend had been flat?
@lolwot
I think you must be using some different meaning for ‘warming’ than the rest of the human race.
To be clear. For something to be ‘warming’ it requires its temperature to be increasing. If the temperature is not increasing it is not warming.
If the temperature was going up fifteen years ago then it was warming. It isn’t going up now. It is not warming. Maybe the temperature will start going up again at some future time. Then it will be warming. But right now it is not warming. Warming has stopped.
what lol et all are desperate do, it keep everyone’s eyes off the damn thermometers, and take on faith (from the guys who brought us Climategate) that CO2 is causing the same amount of warming they joyously ascribed to it when the thermometers were doing the politically correct thing prior to 1997.
Has warming stopped 1997?
Yes, if the sentence is taken to refer to statistically significant change in surface temperature up to present.
Impossible to tell, if the sentence is taken to refer to the heat content of oceans, atmosphere and top soil. (Some data indicates warming in that, but I don’t think that it’s reliable enough. We just have too little data on oceans at depths below 750m, where the signal is claimed to be.)
Does the apparent stop over 15 years give strong evidence concerning continuation of the AGW-type warming trend?
No. It does not. The fit in Foster – Rahmstorf paper proves that the evidence is not strong. Their fit is not necessarily correct, but it proves that the evidence for more persistent stopping is very weak.
@pekka pirila
‘Has warming stopped 1997?
Yes, if the sentence is taken to refer to statistically significant change in surface temperature up to present.’
Good enough for me and 99% of the rest of the population. That’s where we live, that;s where we grow things, that where the sealevel is.
We really don’t give a toss about the deep ocean heat content. It is not of relevance to us in any meaningful way.
Arguing about that is just a desperate attempt to hide the Inconvenient Truth.
Pekka, you write “Has warming stopped 1997?”
Let me say it again, this is the wrong question to ask. http://bit.ly/V19Im8 shows that warming has been going on at a rate of around 0.06 C per decade ever since proper records began; and the CET suggests this warming has been going on ever since the 17th century. There is no evidence that this warming has ceased.
What happened was that in the latter part of the 20th century, there was a period when the rate of warming was above 0.06 C per decade. IMHO, this was wrongly claimed to be proof that CAGW is real. All we are now seeing is a pause in the warming, so that the rate of 0.06 C per decade is being restored. Presumably, this pause will continue until such time as another rise comes back to restore the trend that has been going on for centuries.
What counts is not the rise in temperature, but the rate at which temperatures are rising. It will only be when this rate of rise continues for a significant period of time at a rate in excess of 0.06 C per decade that we will be able to conclude that CAGW is real.
We really don’t give a toss about the deep ocean heat content. It is not of relevance to us in any meaningful way.
It is relevant, unless your thinking is both figuratively and literally shallow :)
Bart R | October 21, 2012 at 11:05 am |
“Reply Conjecture: a & b
Lie: c, d & e”
You are pretty hopeless aren’t you.
a; Conjecture.
b: Lie, in its exact sense. Temperatures have actually fallen in the 21st Century.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2001/to:2013/plot/wti/from:2001/to:2013/trend
c: Truth.
d: Truth. See What Gavin Schmidt says on the subject.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/
e: Conjecture. However a few more posts like those above will be convincing people it is actually the truth.
Alan
Alan:
????
Here?:
Alan Millar | October 21, 2012 at 11:13 am |
I’m quite hopeful, contrary to what you claim.
You are incorrect when you say b is a lie.
There is no meaningful logical connection between, “Temperatures have actually fallen in the 21st Century,” and, “The Global temperature is rising much slower in the 21st Century than the 20th Century.”
“Global temperature” doesn’t meaningfully exist on timescales under 17 years, and strong significance requires about 32 years. “Temperatures” is just a collection of thermometer readings. You can collect them in groups so little as two, but you can’t call them global, or make relevant comparisons to global warming, in groups on so short a timespan as we have since the start of the 21st Century. You’re comparing apples to appleseeds.
All your evidence is thereby conjecture; you cannot use it to indict claims that themselves are conjecture.
However, we can get more and better evidence than you did cherry-pickingly resort to. On 17-year trends, we can achieve 95% confidence reaching to the end of 2005 of strong ongoing statistically significant global warming. Further, by using disjoint datasets (GRACE, Argo, RSS, UAH, sea levels, Arctic Sea Ice extent, ocean circulations, aerosols) to arrive at parameters, we know to over 95% confidence that 2012 is not significantly colder than 2005, so can dismiss all claims of no significant global warming in the 21st Century to date. Hence, (c) is a lie.
d) Even as a small child I knew the model airplanes I built wouldn’t fly me across the country. If you can’t tell the difference between a model and the thing it represents, there’s no help for you here.
e) Argumentum ad populam, however phrased, remains a fallacy. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=idiot
All persons are born into a natural state of idiocy; psychologists no longer use the word as a technical description of a person with a mental age of three or less, however the implication remains. Perhaps you mean, “You are a fool,” or perhaps, “You are mendacious?”
“truth” and “gavin schmidt” in the same sentence. Phew.
“The first casualty of war is the truth” or so I have been told, and the climate wars should be no different. Of course that assumes that there is a truth, just that this truth is being stretched and torn every which way.
I don’t see that there is “a” truth in climate science. What truth we can derive from the Tyndall gas in a bottle experiments may not be directly applicable in a mixture of gases, where the concentrations and capabilities of each gas is different; where one gas is part of one cycle and another gas is part of another cycle. Where assumptions are implicit in the outcome; where there is an assumption of equilibrium where there is no equilibrium; where experiments are run “all other things being equal” where we know that all things do not remain constant while we look at one piece of the puzzle and trying to make sense of the whole.
To me the biggest assumption is that we understand natural variability. The “pause” highlights the fact that we don’t know “natural variability” so the “pause” becomes the bone of contention rather than the awareness that: no, we don’t know natural variability and it is possible that the effects/truth/reality of natural variability will put Tyndall back into the bottle.
I doubt natural variability will put anything back into the bottle. The only thing we really know about natural variability is that it is variable. That is the initial conditions problem, the impact of any variability, forcing or feedback changes. It is like needing to replace the shocks on your car, you never know what any particular bump will do, exactly because you can’t see the next bump.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/10/old-shocks-in-climate.html
Capt’nDallas
I was hopin’ that we could leave 19th Century science to age/mellow, to sample now and again instead of making it the main ingredient of our GCMs stew (simulations). Also, I’m seem to be a bit confused by Navier-Stokes equations to account for turbulence and mixing at the edges.
I would like to see an assault on natural variability understanding with a new set of assumptions and a new math which I think such understanding will take. It seems to me, we keep trying to fit CO2 and N-S into this circular hole and because it doesn’t fit, we need more forcings.
I think we need a re-think. I’ll have a think on it.
I think that is happening. Just because there is no “solution” doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the attempt to solve the problem. lolwot is actually a good example. By attempting to prove a point by using 3 significant digits when the accuracy of the data at best is to one significant digit, he is illustrating the problem. Go lolwot and Kevin Trenberth!
Here ya go HiR008, a new Assault on natural variability, sans N-S, this is just the variability in sensitivity and time constants.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/10/playing-with-enso-and-solar.html
The recurrent patterns in climate are clues, but not guides to future performance. Everything is changing, but you can pick out a clue here and there like Tsonis with the network analysis. Most of the clues indicate that climate is a tad complex and hard to predict :)
Capt’nDallas
Just as a crazy reach, and I know that Tomas Milanovic said that “Never twice the same space” so we aren’t going to see what has happened in the past necessarily in the future, I am intrigued by your graph of solar output superimposed upon the global and tropical temperatures. As the sun’s output diminishes, are we going to see the tropics, and following that, global temperatures decline? Natural variability, as I infer that the sun in our solar system is natural, will mostly trump the gas mixture we have in the atmosphere? That the oceans and their currents hold onto and redistribute those energies at high sun output, only to off’-load that energy at a convenient low sun output period down the line? Hmmm. The sun is important to climate change.
The part that the sun looses its impact at times reminds me of heating a pot of water. Once it begins to boil, the temperature of the water does not rise further until all the water is boiled away. Now, if our earth has a thermostat and does not allow all the water to boil away, i.e. a shield, like clouds, then we have an oscillatory system: the water cycle creates more clouds at high solar output and diminished clouds at low solar output. With the appropriate lags, this crazy idea should be testable, eh?
HiR008, there are so many interactions and decay times I have no idea what would be testable. That could change in a few decades with better data, but right now, FIIK is the correct answer. It is still a fun puzzle though.
For a more comprehensive argument than mine I recommend this post by Tamino who goes into far better detail than I did and also accounts for uncertainties.
It’s clear that any claim the warming has stopped or slowed down is not supported by the data itself and the analyses Rose et al are performing are insufficient to even answer the question.
“After the natural influences are removed, the adjusted data look like this:…”
LOL!
Oops, that’s not the post. Sorry.
That’s a reverse escalator graph!
Going up the escalator (flat) landing platform?
Tamino quotes Foster & Rahmstorf that has the basic methodological flaw of fitting every possible lagged model and than claiming significance for the best fit.
Better said Tamino quotes himself.
BartR, you really are a piece of work. You complain about Alan Millar thus:
“Y’know, no matter how someone says please, the line “You are an idiot” comes off as impolite. Please answer what could possibly convince me to take up an exchange with on obviously manipulative boor?”
Impolite? And yet you feel to accuse me of being a liar, deliberately deceitful, and in the pay of the GPWF. This quote alone is, without question, defamatory and legally actionable:
“He’s lying. He’s doing harm. He’s acting on behalf of unidentified other parties.”
You poor, sensitive lamb. If you’re going to dish it out, you going to have to be able take a little heat as well. Your claims that I am deliberately lying and acting on behalf of some hidden manipulator are as false as they are vile.
Why not undertake some real journalism – investigate the source of GWPF funding?
Instead of shooting the messenger, why dont you address the graph. What a tired and transparent tactic you continue to use. Debate the science, not someone’s funding sources. Your reaction to the science is what has turned off those who have done some homework. Sorry, but the score is getting out of hand and you are on the losing team.
graph addressed below in a question to David Rose. Do you think he will answer? I don’t.
Louise is waving the flag of surrender by trying to shoot the messenger.
I always know when the skeptics have hit an especially sensitive point and have them down for the count- it is when they bring out these kinds of tactics. You would think they would learn after a while
No she’s not.
She just trying to get the messenger to run off in another direction so the message gets lost.
@louise
Suggest that you make that suggestion at the Grauniad . There seem to be quite a few ‘environmental journalists’ there who would no doubt be eager to do so prior to their imminent redundancies. But since my own few dealings with that body suggest it is little more than Benny Peiser, Nigel Lawson (when not at home in France), and a couple of office staff to do the excellent daily press cuttings service, I hardly think the GWPF will be found to be the enormous bogeyman of your imagination.
Press cuttings here:
http://www.thegwpf.org/
And Mr Rose is, no doubt, fully occupied in bringing the ‘global not doing very much at all whichever way you look at’ truth about ‘climate’s staying pretty much as it was before’ to the many readers of the Mail.
And though followers of Climate Etc may be misled into thinking that the Gauradin is the only UK newspaper, it is in fact a small and declining (both in readership and influence) paper with a circulation of c. 200,000. The Daily Mail, by comparison has c. 2,000,000. The Guardian’s Sunday editin is The Observer c. 250,000, while the Mail on Sunday manages c.1,800,000.
By any standard the Mail group reaches between seven and ten times more readers than the Grauniad. And it is not unreasonable to assume that while Guradian readers will be well-tuned in to ‘environment’ issues, Mail readers – massively from ‘Middle England’ – will not be so familiar. And so Rose’s article will have an even bigger impact than the 8;1 circulation ratio would suggest.
And as a sideline. the WSJ circulation is c.1,500,000 and the NYT c. 750,000 . Both smaller than the Daily Mail.
> I hardly think the GWPF will be found to be the enormous bogeyman of your imagination.
Latimer Adler not only has a perspicuous access to IT perspectives, but he does seem to have an intimate grasp of Louise’s imagination.
Who funds Nigel Lawson’s hobby horse is not public.
Nigel Lawson’s hobby horse gets five times more words printed into David Rose’s OP than any other sources, discounting Judy as a source for the moment.
Considering the readership numbers about which Latimer Adler just bragged, considering (at least for argument’s sake) that newspapers have some kind of intellectual impact, and considering that David Rose did misrepresent climate science results in a manner that may make readers doubt of his honesty, even Stirling English will have to admit that the claim of harm BartR was alluding to earlier might have some merit.
***
Right-wing populism does have an impact:
> During the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. This article empirically examines the motives of workers for supporting a right-wing populist party. Based on data from the European Social Survey for Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland, three different sets of explanations are tested: (1) hypotheses stressing economic determinants, that is, the fear of wage pressure and competition over welfare benefits; (2) hypotheses emphasizing cultural determinants, that is, the perception of immigration as a threat to national identity; and (3) hypotheses focusing on social alienation, that is, dissatisfaction with the way the country’s democracy works and the nonintegration into intermediary networks (trade unions). We find questions of community and identity to be clearly more important than economic grievances. Hence, in Austria and Switzerland, the electoral success of right-wing populist parties among workers seems primarily due to cultural protectionism: the defense of national identity against outsiders. In Belgium, France, and Norway, cultural protectionism is complemented by deep-seated discontent with the way the countries’ democracies work.
http://ips.sagepub.com/content/29/3/349.short
We emphasize the word “dissatisfaction” and remind readers of the Can’t Get No Satisfaction algorithm:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/33362796798
Seeing who funds the GWFP should reveal who’s interested in promoting such intellectual framework. A question of justice, and of fairness, not size.
@willard
‘Nigel Lawson’s hobby horse gets five times more words printed into David Rose’s OP than any other sources, discounting Judy as a source for the moment’
Not at all sure what you are trying to prove here, since Judith is by far the biggest contributor. Her remarks are the main topic in paras: 5, 6, 20 21, 25 and 26. There are 30 paras, so she contributes about 20% of the total content.
Phil Jones is quoted in one para. The Grauniad is quoted in another. There are no quotes from the GWPF..
Can you substantiate your claim with specific examples of the GWPF having five times more words than anybody else?
But more interestingly – even if your claim were substantiable, why would you care? You’d need to show that they were not only from teh GWPF but also that they were wrong. So far you have conspicuously failed to do so.
Attacking the messenger doesn’t change the message.
Latimer,
You’re right: I forgot to provide context to help readers who like Joe Sixpack do not have the attention span or the interest to pay due diligence to the GWPF dossier on this page. Here’s a quote I already provided elsewhere:
> The Daily Mail has given more than five times as much space to the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s views in its recent coverage of climate change and ‘green taxes’ than to any other source.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/07/daily-mail-and-the-global-warming-policy-foundation
Or, in a sentence like “David Rose is on the mat”:
> The DSM promotes GWPF talking points.
Would Stirling English find this sentence a fair characterization of the DSM relationship with Nigel Lawson hobby horse?
In any case, I should have written “OPs” in plural. From now on, I’ll write “op-ed” and “op-eds”.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The Daily Mail has given more than five times as much space to the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s views in its recent coverage of climate change and ‘green taxes’ than to any other source.
In its recent coverage. So the Daily Mail would consider the opposition view more interesting than the consensus view. Is that a sign of media “bias” or a changing tide?
What tide are you speaking of, and do you have any evidence of a change?
Joshua, I would rather find hints of the future than dwell in the past. There are signs of the changing tide, in the media and in the physics. This thread is a heated discussion over few hundredths of a degree “cherry pick” in data with a margin of error of 2 tenths of a degree or more. Someone would be grasping at straws.
Cap’n –
When you say that the tide is changing, you are describing an overall phenomenon. I don’t see that. I see individual skirmishes but not much movement in the war, and certainly not long term. Is Rose’s article, or his connections with dubious combatants, somehow reflective of a significant trend? I don’t see it.
For example, look at the most recent data on American opinions on global warming. Despite the confident predictions I’ve read over and over and over and over from “skeptics” for quite a while now, it doesn’t seem to be significantly influenced by climategate, by predictions about snow in England, etc., etc. It seems to be mostly influenced by economics, weather, and partisan politics.
I think that you are using a selective reasoning here.
@willard
Your link purports to about a set of articles written last May about ‘green taxes’. Their relevance to today’s discussion has escaped me.
Joshua, yes, the Tsonis et al climate shifts are real phenomena with real climate impacts.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-vWiC80TweKg/UIVQljNNVsI/AAAAAAAAFGY/XWAWwaeVaB0/s800/hemisphers%2520versus%2520tropics.png
There is a real oscillation between the two hemispheres, the northern hemisphere amplifies that change while the southern does not. About half of the warming from 1950 appears to be a natural variability caused by a long term oscillation amplifying a poorly conceived metric for measuring climate “sensitivity”. Funny huh?..
@willard
If you wanted my best guess, I think that the main contributor to GWPF is probably Nigel Lawson himself. It is not a big organisation… I doubt if it has more than four fulltime employees and its total expenditure for y/e Jun 2011 was just £205,000 (c. $300,000) according to its filed accounts.
Compare this with Heartland (c. $4,600,000) – fifteen times bigger or Greenpeace (c. 160,000,000 euros, $210,000,000) – seven hundred times bigger, and I think your hopes of finding an enormous financial scandal buried by ‘dark forces’ or of a modern day Protocols of the Elders of Zion are vanishingly small.
It will be difficult to paint a picture of a vast worldwide organisation with tentacles spreading everywhere based on an annual expenditure that would not buy a small semi in an unpopular London suburb.
High finance it ain’t.
willard,
if you want to discuss press coverage, go pick up the Time special issue on global warming and climate change. I could just as easily said Scientific American, or Huffington Post or any in a long list of media publications.
> You poor, sensitive lamb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
> Your claims that I am deliberately lying and acting on behalf of some hidden manipulator are as false as they are vile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
David I think we are going to see a lot (in fact a lolwot) of this frothing at the mouth as the alarmists start to realise the CO2 thingy has been over egged. I wish you well.
Assuming you are the real David Rose perhaps finally you will address why the chart of HadCRUT4 you display in both your Daily Mail articles have modified the HadCRUT4 data?
Aside from an incorrect X-axis, the graph plots September 1997 and August 2012 as being exactly 0.5C.
Yet the actual HadCRUT4 data shows September 1997 to be 0.475C and August 2012 to be 0.526C.
Did you author the graph or did someone else? Can you explain why those two data values were modified?
lolwot, ever heard of significant digits or splitting hairs? 0.5 can be from 0.451 to 0.549.
None of the other datapoints on the graph were altered. They were all plotted to at least a hundredth of a degree.
Only the first datapoint and last were altered to be exactly 0.5C.
Why?
Why? Journalistic license. There is no significant difference and the object was to show there has been no significant change in temperature since 1997. Why do you select regressions to “prove” your points? There is nothing particularly deceptive about having a thicker trend line on a plot.
capt dallas has just won himself an position on the hide the decline team.
Steven, “capt dallas has just won himself an position on the hide the decline team.” More a member of the remember the uncertainty team. The data has a margin of error of +/- 0.1 C, a trend line 0.05C thick is not particularly deceptive. Making a thinner line to imply accuracy that does not exist, that would be deceptive, kinda like smoothing out the handle, doncha know.
lolwot claims the Daily Mail figure had doctored values as it “plots September 1997 and August 2012 as being exactly 0.5C.” I decided to do a quick check of this. Personally, I don’t see it. Both lines go past the .5 line (which I overlayed to make things clearer). He also says:
April and May had values of .514 and .516. When I look at the Daily Mail graph, both extend above the .5 line (this isn’t shown, but it’s easy to verify) by the same amount as the September point. If we accept those points were plotted accurately, the Sepetmber 2012 point could not have been plotted at “exactly 0.5C.”
Did you take into account that the data is 9 months out of sync with the X-axis? The first point plotted is September 2012 even though according to the x-axis it is supposed to be January 2012.
If you look at the image I posted, you can see I was examining the endpoints of the graph.
lolwot, there are 100 ensemble members attached to the HAD4 data.
“deliberately lying” is as redundant as “past history.” A lie is a falsehood that intends to deceive, so you can’t have a non-intentional or non-deliberate lie.
David, keep up the good work.
David –
You said in your first article that Jones “admitted” that the models are imperfect.
I’m wondering how you could justify such wording/ It seems highly misleading to me, and deliberately so; did Jones ever indicate that the models are “perfect?” If not, then why would you say that he “admitted” that they are imperfect?
Joshua, what about this guy?
“As noted in the “Datasets” section, the TOA energy imbalance can probably be most accurately determined from climate models and Fasullo and Trenberth (2008a) reduced the imbalance to be 0.9 W m−2, where the error bars are ±0.15 W m−2.” +/- 0.15 Wm-2 is an unbelievable margin of error and that is published in a peer reviewed paper than does not have a page three.
The start of the next paragraph:
“For the surface we initially made estimates of the various terms, but encountered an imbalance of order 20 W m−2, which led us to reexamine the assumptions.”
The follow up paper for that peer reviewed paper has a “minor adjustment”, they found that there was 18Wm-2 unaccounted for. 18/0.15=120, a tad over the error bar estimates.
Since you attempt to be unbiased pointing out when individuals over step boundaries in media, what are you thoughts of “peer reviewed” communications?
Too technical for me to comment, Cap’n.
But Rose’s misleading wording is so obvious even I can see it clearly.
The debate is better off when people aren’t demogogic like that. We’re all prone to such behavior – but the standard should be higher when a journalist is writing an article. And further – when a journalist becomes demagogic they should acknowledge the problem. And further, when a journalist becomes demagogic, and fails to acknowledge the problem, they should not be defended by other participants in the debate – whether it be directly or by crying that “Mommy, mommy, they do it toooouuuu” or “Mommy, mommy, they did it firrrrssstttt.”
As for the comparison of impact between a scientist or a journallist being demagogic – I think that both are harmful. I think that playing games of moral equivalence are no more constructive than Mommymommyism.
Joshua, not that technical, they assign much more accuracy to models than the models deserved. The “minor adjustment” was a major F’up.
How about this one, ““Polar amplification” usually refers to greater climate change near the pole compared to the rest of the hemisphere or globe in response to a change in global climate forcing, such as the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) or solar output (see e.g. Moritz et al 2002). Polar amplification is thought to result primarily from positive feedbacks from the retreat of ice and snow. There are a host of other lesser reasons that are associated with the atmospheric temperature profile at the poles, temperature dependence of global feedbacks, moisture transport, etc. Observations and models indicate that the equilibrium temperature change poleward of 70N or 70S can be a factor of two or more greater than the global average.”
That is from realclimate 2006, There is not Polar amplification, there is northern higher latitude or land amplification, but since the Antarctic is thermally isolated from the ROW, GHG forcign is not “amplified” in the southern pole.
That is probably too technical as well, but the basic jist is that the “too technical” communicators have been blowing smoke up yer butt and you are picking on the people trying to communicate that to you.
And Cap’n –
Really? Don’t you think that Rose might be taking himself just a tad seriously? Can we even begin to count the number of times that participants in this debate have been accused of lying? That people are acting on behalf of a hidden agenda or hidden manipulators? These types of accusations are commonplace in the “skept-o-sphere.” They happen at this site, thread after thread, post after post, day after day. Rose knowingly contributes to this atmosphere. He could write about the very same “skeptical” questions without disregard for the impact of his work, but he clearly chooses not to. He’s caught up in the “outrage machine.”
Not to say that he wouldn’t be attacked no matter how he approached “skeptical” content. That’s a given. But his approach shows an ignorance for contributing to the unproductive nature of the debate at best, and I don’t find that plausible. The next worst possibility is that he has a disregard for contributing to the unproductive engagement – which may be more likely but I think also not very probable. What seems most likely to me is that for one reason or another, he has the specific intent of encouraging the unproductive engagement.
To go back to my first comment here – he or anyone else is welcome to explain why he worded his characterization of Jones’ position in the way that he did. Step up to the plate and explain why his wording wasn’t deliberately misleading. Mosher tried and failed. Maybe you could be more successful.
Cap’n –
Unless you can accurately characterize what my opinion is, then you can’t possible determine whether anyone’s blowing smoke up my butt. So that would need to be the starting point if you’re going to make determinations about whether I have or haven’t been snookered.
Methinks that you are drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence; decidedly unskeptical behavior, I might add.
My point about the technicality is that I understand your take on the attribution of accuracy of the models. The determination of how to interpret their accountability in that regard absolutely requires a sophisticated technical understanding – of the sort I don’t have.
Joshua, replace Rose with Mann. BartR called Rose a lair and claimed that Rose was doing global harm. Did you jump BartR or Mike Mann? Rose’s job is to sell papers, he is doing a damn fine job today.
captdallas2 0.8 +0.2 or -0.4 | October 21, 2012 at 1:56 pm |
Just harm. Not ‘global harm’.
Also, you appear unfamiliar with the long diatribes against scientists who horde and hide data I’ve posted at Climate Etc. in past topics. I am not the friend of abuse of data regardless of who practices it.
BartR, by comparing Rose’s post to vaccine etc., there was an implication of “global” harm. I am aware of many of your various stances, but the “pause” is not something that should be making much in the way of headlines if it wasn’t due the “pause” denial. It is an inconvenient truth. The uproar in the climate science community is pretty telling, doncha know.
David Rose
Can you tell readers here more about the Daily Mail’s disproportionate use of the GWPF as a source? Many – perhaps most – won’t know that the Daily Mail gives so very much more space to the Global Warming Policy Foundation than to any other source on climate/clean energy cost stories. Why is this?
Can you tell readers here more about the relationship between Lord Lawson and your editor, Paul Dacre? Some find the close alignment between the GWPF and the editorial position of your extremely influential newspaper on both climate science and the cost of clean energy development in the UK disturbing. What is your view on this?
What can you tell readers here about the Daily Mail’s repeated misrepresentation of the cost of ‘green energy’? Again, the chief source of *frequently erroneous* information appears to be the GWPF. As a conscientious journalist, do you not find this apparent reliance on an apparently unreliable source troubling?
Sorry but changing the subject has been outed hundreds of times by this crowd and it will get you nowhere. How about you telling us why there is a plateau and when you think it will end. Show me the data.
Do your own research; it’s not my job to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.
The causes of the recent warming hiatus are some or all of the following. I’ve included a few references to help you with your reading:
1/ A change in the rate and depth of energy accumulation within the oceans (Trenberth et al. 2011)
2/ Increased sulphate aerosol loading from both anthropogenic (Hansen & Sato 2011 Earth’s energy imbalance and its implications) and volcanic sources (Vernier et al 2011)
3/ SC23/24
4/ Predominantly La Nina conditions; negative phase PDO
5/ An increase in stratospheric water vapour (Solomon et al, 2011)
6/ A climate shift (Swanson & Tsonis 2009)
I point at:
> [C]hanging the subject has been outed hundreds of times by this crowd and it will get you nowhere.
I also point at:
> How about you telling us why there is a plateau and when you think it will end.
That is almost all.
I will observe that the topic’s blog post is David Rose’s response to the critics of his latest op-ed, and that the topic of David Rose’s comment, beside the character of BartR, is David Rose’s disingenious defense of corporate interests by using a right-wing populist rhetoric, or something to that effect.
Is David Rose honest?
David Rose | October 21, 2012 at 11:18 am |
You have a byline in print. You are held to a higher standard of truth by virtue of this privilege.
All I need do to establish you are a liar is that you ought know better and yet proceed to put out a falsehood.
Well, you’ve been told you’re putting out falsehoods of exactly the same sort on several past occasions. Dr. Curry’s citations of Bob Ward clearly establish this pattern of knowing falsity in press. QED
As for actionable? Really? Are you attempting to quell the free and open discourse you so loudly promote by threats? Illegitimate threats? Threats that are themselves based on patent falsehood?
This constant resorting to scare tactics of yours, is it due to a natural tendency to bully, or is there something else to it?
And as has been pointed out, I certainly did not assert that you are on the payroll of anyone. How could I, when the funding and finances of the GWPF are secret?
Also, you appear to have a real problem with the definition of the word “quote”. I recommend, as you’re published in print, you familiarize yourself with it better. You ‘quote’ Judith Curry to say things she never said. You interpret my quotes in senses that clearly are not intended.
Your lies are patent. The harms of your lies are manifest to the reasonable person. You’re caught. Show some grace, and admit it.
David Rose,
Maybe you are not lying. Maybe you think the stuff you write is true. That doesn’t reflect well on you either.
Your defense of your reputation is justified, and any of us would do the same. Still, it would be nice to see you place near surface temperature data over the past 15 years in its true perspective related to the full Earth energy system and the long term perspective of Earth’s energy imbalance. Specifically:
1) Flattening of near surface temperatures does not mean the Earth had not continued to warm, only that models did poor job of accounting for the natural variability that affects near surface temperatures.
2) The flattened temperatures occurred at and remain at or near the highest on instrument record, despite the triple negative forcing of the cool phase of the PDO, increased aerosols, and a rather quiet sun. None of these three points of natural variability could be reasonably put into global climate models and can only be factored in after the fact. When doing so we see the actual anthropogenic greenhouse forcing on the temperatures of the lower troposphere continues at somewhere around .14 to .17 w/m^2 during the last decade.
3) Other metrics measuring Earth’s energy imbalance show continued warming as well.
Correction to last comment. The end of point 2 should have read:
When doing so we see the actual anthropogenic greenhouse warming of the lower troposphere continues at somewhere around .14C to .17C during the past decade.
Where did those numbers for the AGH forcing come from?
Andrew
Thank you. It will be fascinating to see how the temperature record evolves over the next few years and whether this current period will be seen as merely a ‘pause’ or something more signficant.
In the CET record back to 1660 I can see only one 20 year pause. Generally there is an up or down movement every decade so it wont be long before we see the significance of what we are observing.
tonyb
R gates,
I think andrew, Bart and BBD could take a lesson from you in how to respond.
timg56 | October 22, 2012 at 9:20 pm |
I won’t speak for others (recalling Groucho Marx and clubs that wouldn’t have him); I take lessons from R. Gates quite often and quite seriously. You should have seen me before.
timg56,
When Rose has written misleading articles in the past I have responded by writing detailed blog posts criticising his arguments, by writing to the Mail (they did publish my letter) and writing to the mail’s ombudsman (no response). In a previous thread here I have made a fairly detailed argument why I think his original piece was nonsense. I’m not going to apologise for losing patience with his constant misrepresentations and calling it how I see it.
Andrew Adams
Here is the the information directly from the Met office showing the three Hadley global records from 1850 to 2011 that Rose would have seen. All appear to show a cooling -or at least a pause- for at least this century. Do you disagree?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
In the real world of individual data sets, many of these also show distinct recent cooling according to BEST, albeit at varying levels of statistical significance. These are best exemplified by CET, also kept by the Met office, which appear also to have some relevance as a proxy for global temperatures;
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Where it goes from here I don’t know. Its been warming for 350 years so the chances are it will continue.
What issue do you have with the Met office regarding these figures and the apparent trend they show?
tonyb
Yep, T, warming for a third of a millenia, and maybe time to turn again.
It’s a long shot, but there are the fading sunspots. We’re near the level of the recent climate optimae, the regularity of whose appearance strongly suggest cycles. Most likely source of cycles is the sun, and/or some kind of Tsonic Dosey-Do with the oceans. And then I think of Tomas and the Kouts, and wonder how long it will take us to figure it out.
=====================
The problem with this particular fantasy kim is that the physics of radiative transfer mean that increasing the fraction of atmospheric CO2 will cause energy to accumulate in the climate system (mainly the global ocean) – exactly as observed.
In your fantasy universe, the entire matter of CO2 is magically disappeared. Phut! Gone!
That’s very silly.
BBD, this is a particularly ignorant comment. You apparently don’t know my beliefs about the physics of CO2 because you’ve badly characterized them here. And you are completely unresponsive to my post, which is obvious and blatant speculation, not fantasy.
==============
Seems what Andrew Adams is actually “losing patience with”, is the refusal of the globe continue warming of late.
BBD
Another textbook strawman from BBD.
It’s magical discourse. He does have his fantasies.
=============
> [T]he refusal of the globe continue warming of late.
Emphasis added.
tonyb,
The GAT chart appears to show temps rising until around the middle of the last decade and a slight decline since then. I have no particular issue with that, I actually made a similar point in a comment on one of the earlier threads. We have had 3 la Nina events in recent years and a pronounced solar minimum so I see no great mystery about it. But Rose’s claim was that there has been warming since 1997, which is not the same thing at all.
I would dispute your claim that it has been warming for 350 years. As I said elsewhere in this thread the trend was pretty flat or slightly downward over the second half of the 19C and from around 1940 to 1975. Either side of and inbetween those periods we have had warming trends but there is no particular reason to believe the causes were the same.
Andrew
Thank you for your reply. Both CET and BEST show this extended warming period albeit with advances and retreats
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-historic-variations-in-temperatures-part-3-best-confirms-extended-period-of-warming/
To get back to the main point-which at least you are addressing unlike some on this blog who are dancing on the head of a pin- if temperatures are showing a decline over the last decade or more-as was demonstrated in the Met office links-surely that demonstrates that there has been ‘no warming’. (you said there had been warming in your post, but I assume that was a mistake?) Its repeated below for clarity
“But Rose’s claim was that there has been warming since 1997, which is not the same thing at all. ”
tonyb
tonyb,
Yes that was a typo, sorry.
I don’t really disagree with what other critics of Rose are arguing, I’m just making a sightly different point.
As I see it there are two separate but related question here – what has happened to the average surface temperature over the last 16 years or so, and what can we conclude from that.
Rose sees that you can plot a linear trend starting in 1997 and get only a small warming trend, and concludes “global warming stopped in 1997”. My view, which seems to be supported by the chart you linked to, is that the surface temperature record actually continued to rise after 1997 and has only really declined since the middle of the last decade, so instead of “no warming since 1997”, or as you put it, “a decline over the last decade or more” we have seen a slight decline over the last 7 or 8 years, or arguably a “plateau” over the last decade. It certainly seems to me to be nonsense to say “warming stopped in 1997” when every one of the last 11 years bar one has been warmer than that, and this year almost certainly will be as well.
So my answer to the first question is that yes, we have seen a plateau or even a decline in the surface temperature recent years, I don’t think anyone is actually disputing this, but that Rose cherry picked his start date to make it look as if it has lasted longer than is actually the case. As to what it actually means, well my answer is not much because these kind of short term variations are expected to occur and we have a good enough explanation for a large part of what has happened in recent years. But there is a further argument that there are other indications of warming other than the surface temperature record and these have continued to show that the earth is warming. I agree with that, although I don’t think that means we can disregard what is happening to surface temperatures.
How have I ‘badly characterised’ your views on the physics of CO2? You do *deny* that the increasing atmospheric fraction of CO2 is emerging as the dominant climate driver, do you not? You seem to take the view that very small fluctuations in TSI are in charge. But the forcing from CO2 is much greater than the fluctuation in TSI, and only increases with time. So I have to conclude that you live in a fantasy parallel universe where CO2 forcing has mysteriously vanished. Furthermore, instead of defending this position, you retreat into huffiness. You appear to be caught in a rather large inconsistency.
Ooh Matron!
Bart & andrew,
I meant that primarily as recognition of RG’s well crafted response. I certainly am not looking for any sort of apology. You both are free to comment in any manner you like.
> I certainly am not looking for any sort of apology.
I thought you abided by the pot and kettle rule, tim.
lolwot | October 21, 2012 at 11:14 am | Reply
“For a more comprehensive argument than mine I recommend this post by Tamino who goes into far better detail than I did and also accounts for uncertainties.”
Ahh the oldest trick in the book for the gullible.
Lets consider a mountaineer climbing Everest. He starts in the foothills and has substantial rest periods along the way to acclimatise. He has a man in basecamp monitoring his progress and climbing trend. He finally reaches the summit stays a while to take pictures and then starts to climb back down slowly.
He calls in to his monitoring man and tells hm he is on the way down.
‘No you are not’ says the man. ‘You are still trending upwards on all the long and medium term trends. Only the shortest period shows any decline and it is not statistically significant. I fully expect you to be a couple of thousand feet higher in the not too distant future based on the trend.’
“I am just below the summit, you idiot’ says the climber.
‘Stats and trends don’t lie’ says the man.
The climber says ‘If you keep on wittering on about how I am still climbing higher I will give you a big slap when I see you’
The man then continues to report to the climber that he is still going up though there has been a little reduction in the rate lately.
Some time later in the basecamp. Monitoring Man…….. “Ohh hel……” SLAP!!!
Alan
Alan you admit: “Only the shortest period shows any decline and it is not statistically significant”
So you know full well the decline isn’t statistically significant, yet you think you can ignore that and claim there is a decline anyway?
lolwot: So you know full well the decline isn’t statistically significant, yet you think you can ignore that and claim there is a decline anyway?
The point of the analogy is that the lack of statistically significant decline is not by itself evidence that there has been no decline. Another example is in the stock market, where a “plateau” or “correction” may or may not signal a long-term decline. And there have been lots of “turning points” in the climate time series themselves. The only thing we can tell with confidence is that, from the LIA until now, there has been a halting trend upward. Trends always continue until they end, and we can’t have a lot of confidence that the upward trend has or has not ended.
Another trend, that we have observed since model-based forecasts were made (hence, we don’t have to “cherry pick” the starting point, we can choose the date of the forecast), is for an increasing disparity between forecast (“model”, “scenario”, etc) and measurements. We can’t tell whether that trend is continuing or ending. Related to that trend is the trend of an increasingly large number of explanations for the apparent inaccuracies of the forecasts. The two trends together cast doubt on the reliability of the forecasts, and if the two trends continue as they have since their starting points, eventually nobody will believe the forecasts.
“The point of the analogy is that the lack of statistically significant decline is not by itself evidence that there has been no decline.”
I agree with that, but given there will always be a period in which there may have been a decline it becomes pointless focusing on it.
For example back in 1997 it could have been claimed that temperatures may have declined since 1987.
“Trends always continue until they end”
Exactly exactly, and given the question is whether the warming trend has ended we must wait until the data show with it has with significance before concluding that. Otherwise we’d have to conclude it’s ended all the time because the last 3 or so year trend is never going to be statistically significant.
Stock market = manipulated by human psychology and responsive to mass hysteria and fast feedback control systems.
Natural phenomenon = guided by random aleatory processes that respond to physical laws
As a word of warning, bringing up the stock market as anything more than a metaphor in watching trends is a bit misguided, and puzzling for a statistician to do .
lolwot: I agree with that, but given there will always be a period in which there may have been a decline it becomes pointless focusing on it.
I disagree with that. Every potential turning point is worth some study. The current apparent plateau is especially worth study because it has lasted longer than the warming had lasted when the climate catastrophists had started to cite it in their warnings.
Web Hub Telescope: bringing up the stock market as anything more than a metaphor
I brought it up as a metaphor in watching trends. The study of investment portfolios was one of the origins of statistics. The problem of appraising the conditional probabilities of errors of measurement and judgment arises in many contexts.
A lot of good research on what one can learn from time series has been done on market data. Particularly valuable is perhaps research related to difficulties in avoiding confirmatory bias in testing models through hindcasting, when the model builders have some, perhaps only qualitative, knowledge on the data to be used for testing already when they develop the model.
So where is this “good research”? You should try applying it.
I believe the path forward is to model Ornstein-Uhlenbeck reversion-to-the-mean statistics, incorporating first-order physical values. Most of the quants steal the ideas from mathematical physicists anyways, so might as well go to the source.
WebHubTelescope pray tell why would you choose that particular model?
WHT,
Quants use certainly sophisticated tools but I don’t know about “good research” related to that.
What I had in mind is research on testing models using history data and figuring out how to avoid false conclusions due to unintentional tuning. Such questions are very relevant in the estimation of predictive skill of climate models. As the basic dynamics is different it’s not possible to take directly any results but there’s a lot to learn in the scientific literature on that subject. Similar questions have certainly been studied in other fields as well and the research I refer to has used work from these other fields. Even so, some of the papers on testing models for financial markets do provide valuable content also for climate modelers.
MattStat,
The only thing we can tell with confidence is that, from the LIA until now, there has been a halting trend upward. Trends always continue until they end, and we can’t have a lot of confidence that the upward trend has or has not ended.
I don’t think it’s true to say there has been a warming trend from the LIA until now. There was no warming or even a slight cooling over the second half of the 19C and between (roughly) 1940 and 1975, those would seem to me to be long enough periods to say that the previous upward tends had come to an end. If they are not then presumable we won’t be able to say the warming trend has come to an end until we have another thirty odd years of no warming, which doesn’t seem right to me.
OU statistics is Gaussian and Markovian and generates the fewest number of adjustable parameters of any model than I am aware of save for a pure random walk.
lolwot
You are making progress.
No longer do you deny the current lack of warming.
You now simply say this trend is statistically insignificant.
You have not yet said how many years it would have to continue, in order to become statistically significant.
[Hint: Ben Santer has written that this is 17 years. Does this sound about right to you?]
Max
Once HadCrappy is either fixed or chitcanned, you will be left with what is happening on the earth: the globe, and the current 17-year trend is strongly upward.
The first non-positive trend is at 11 years back.
The problem for you hadcrappy clowns is the second strongest La Nina in the instrument record had no staying power.
@jch
You sound almost gleeful that your figures supposedly show that 7 billion people are on the way to a dreadful future of a warmed planet. Seems a strange reaction to be so triumphant about such a serious subject.
Just sayin’
JCH
Frankly, I don’t give a fiddler’s f*** whether there was a La Nina last year or several big El Ninos during the late 1980s and 1990s, culminating with a real big one in 1997/1998, and followed by another one in 2005. Whatever ENSO throws at us, we’ll handle.
I just see that the climate models are unable to make any realistic projections.
– Hansen’s 1988 forecast was off by 2:1.
– IPCC forecasts were off both in magnitude and sign!
When will these modelers finally realize that, in their myopic fixation on human GHGs (especially CO2), they have programmed in a climate sensitivity that is exaggerated by a factor of at least 2?
Once they clear that up their projections may start to be less goofy.
And once they learn how ENSO, PDO AO and all the others plus natural (solar) forcing are all tied together, they might even start to be able to make some realistic projections for the short-term future.
But the longer the projection time period, the more likely a “black swan” will render the projection useless.
Max
David, keep up the good work, we need a more open discussion in the British press.
Bart R: “David Rose omits that he’s taking his marching orders from the GWPF”
David Rose: “And yet you feel to accuse me of being….in the pay of the GPWF”
Interesting. Not quite what Bart R claimed. Which makes me wonder.
David Rose, in the process of producing and writing your article did you had any communication with or input from anyone in the GWPF?
good parsing.
I am enjoying the spittle coming from the deranged warmists as they show all they have left is hate.
you will be interested in what Ar5 has to say about sunshine.
I’m fascinated by the few papers allowed to be pubished that talk about 15 Watts/sq m caused by cleaner air and more sunshine.
Will AR5 use that paper?
… “brain fossilization,” how ‘Brute’…
I’m waiting for Bart R to identify the lies.
Phillip Bratby | October 21, 2012 at 11:54 am |
You’re exhibiting gnosophobia. Read harder.
I think that is gnosiophobia, so perhaps not the perfect sledge.
The lie you identify is that you and he think different models apply in analyzing this data. It is a relative matter, so I’m afraid you are lying as much as he is.
HAS | October 22, 2012 at 3:09 am |
So you think it’s gnosiophobia too? Though I think it’s a bit far to compare Phillip to a hammer.
However, you may be right that is a relative matter, so he could be compared thus if one were of a mind.
Speaking of; David Rose asserts an incorrect model he’s been informed many times is incorrect.
Mathematics is not a matter of religious faith.
Belief doesn’t play a role in whether or not 2+2=4.
David Rose has been dulyand repeatedly informed of his mathematical error (and his habit of getting quotes wrong); he’s ignored information from people with better qualifications than himself, substituted what he claims is his own judgement (wink, wink), suppressed the corrections he’s been offered and gone to press with a knowing misrepresentation.
David Rose reported on the Andew Wakefield scandal only two years ago, so he must know how serious this sort of falsification is.
So, no. It’s not all relative.
So you’ve moved from Rose lying to him just asserting an incorrect model, and even then this is just other people’s opinion.
So some progress at least in lowering the level of abuse.
I should add there is a difference between a formal system incl. the theorems able to be derived within it (2+2=4), and empirical models that attempt to describe the observed world.
We’re talking about the latter and you clearly believe in your particular model here i.e. you believe it is better at describing the climate than a whole raft of competing models.
It is a belief because you don’t use language that recognises the contingency in models of the real world, rather you are so absolutely sure of your particular model that non-believers become liars.
You shoudl get out more – there are a lot of models of the same phenomena that happily co-exist, we use different ones every day because some are more useful than others when dealing with a particular problem.
HAS | October 23, 2012 at 12:27 am |
Now you’re just misrepresenting what I said.
Sophistry? What’s up with that?
Also, I use language the way Isaac Newton did.
You seem to want to frame the discourse in an unscientific pragma.
Well, it’s about climate science, not climate opinion or climate belief. I get to use the language of science, and am not constrained to the terms of mere belief or opinion.
Don’t believe in ab initio reasoning about science? That simply excludes you from the discourse.
“The graph is ‘nearly flat’ is a trick of the eye, exploited by Rose in his article to make false claims and mislead readers. …….
“Therefore we are correct in identifying what David Rose does as lying, not mere misrepresentation; we can call him a professional liar, without fear of overstating the case.” Bart R much earlier
“David Rose asserts an incorrect model he’s been informed many times is incorrect. ” Bart R more recently
“So you’ve moved from Rose lying to him just asserting an incorrect model, and even then this is just other people’s opinion.” HAS
“Now you’re just misrepresenting what I said.” Bart R
:) HAS
As to the balance I’d simply encourage your scholarship in this area. I found it pretty rewarding.
Earlier, Bart R said:
I offer this as evidence Bart R has no ground to stand on in criticizing David Rose’s piece.
It being patently obvious that contrary to earlier decades, the earth temperatures have flattened out these last 16 years, the silly attempts to deny beggar belief. Rose doesn’t claim the *process* of global warming is any different to before – however large or small it is – and doesn’t claim it will remain level. The hysterical polemicists like Bart do the alarmist cause no favors at all.
Bart R,
Sometimes, I believe that econometry is the contemporary sophistry:
http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/27/scenarios-2010-2030-part-ii-2/#comment-26260
If you follow the discussion over there, you’ll find an interesting discussion between HAS and Vaughan Pratt.
HADCRUT3. Sounds decades ago.
HAS,
That you could find one sentence where he says something softer and more appropriate for the auditing sciences is no evidence that Bart R does not maintain that David Rose lied anymore.
Please leave quote mining to Chewbacca and stick to your econometrical tricks.
How’s your Granger causality analysis going, by the way?
Willard, I didn’t say Bart R had changed his mind about Rose lying, I was just discussing one purported lie.
Never been very good at econometrics but now you mention it I recall your difficulties with Granger causality.
HAS,
I point at
> So you’ve moved from Rose lying to him just asserting an incorrect model, and even then this is just other people’s opinion.
and I point at
> I didn’t say Bart R had changed his mind about Rose lying, I was just discussing one purported lie.
That is all.
Willard, I know it’s tedious but you do need to read these threads in context.
Bart R has a veritable catalog of matters on which he seems to think Rose has lied, I have simply commented on one, which as you say Bart R appears to have softened his stance on. I’m sure Bart R still thinks Rose lied on these other matters.
Now no doubt Bart R could come back here and say that he also still thinks it is lying not to use the Bart R preferred model, but the problem he faces is that it then becomes fair game for anyone to accuse him of lying for not using the accuser’s preferred model.
gnosophobia – fear your mother will insist on you becoming a doctor and you end up as a gynocologist?
Only if knowledge is defined biblically.
Philip Bratby,
State your criteria before asking for evidence, or else you’ll play an ad hoc game.
Would you consider perpetuating a misrepresentation over and over again after being proven wrong over and over again evidence enough of a pattern of lying?
It’s all far too academic, what ‘Mail’ papers need to say at the behalf their readership ‘Cameron stop building all those silly windmills, and cut down our CO2 taxes’.
+1
Category “You can’t make this stuff up!”
;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
LOL … In other words, “Yes The Mail cherry-picks shamelessly!” ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
On the plus side … at least The Mail found a better picture of Judith! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
As for publishing sound scientific journalism, not so much, eh?
The Mail persistently fails too, in denying its egregious errors, eh?
Is The Mail’s strikingly persistent denialism a socially institutionalized manifestation of cognitive anosognosia? :shock: :eek: :oops:
That’s becoming a credible scientific hypothesis, eh? ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Fan
Do you think the 350 year warming trend-in which Giss and Hadley are merely stagng posts not starting posts-has merely paused its upward trend or is set to decline? I confess I don’t know
tonyb
Fan:
What’s wrong with picking the low-hanging fruit. The pause in temperature is obvious to everybody. No statistics required.
Of course this does not mean that global warming has stopped. We know that CO2 marches upward. Unfortunately, the OHC data is too short and too buggy at this point to draw any conclusions. My guess is that CO2 warming is preventing a cooling trend, thereby creating a pause.
The fact that you, lol, BartR BBD and others protest so loudly over something that cannot be spun hard enough to fool the public is circumstantial evidence that you fellas are the sales and marketing pushing an agenda.
The *pause* is a real problem for the marketing campaign because you have been banking on fear, terror and destruction. Now that children can look at the HADCRUT 4 plot and see the pause, you choose to double-down on the take-no-prisoners strategy.
This is empirical evidence that your views are subjective, unscientific and a little delusional. Your intellect is on par with the pseudo-science curve-matching denizens of WUWT. No one except true believers and bitter clingers are buying the sophisticated tales you and your friends keep spewing.
Pretty depressing for you, eh? eh? eh? eh? eh?
(sorry, I needed to clear my throat)
Howard | October 21, 2012 at 2:31 pm |
Would be valid points .. except:
a) Argumentum ad populam is a fallacy. It’s obvious to everybody that a stage magician has sawn the lady in half. We know he hasn’t really, but we want proof.. which Statistics or Graphical Analyses provide in the case of David Rose’s illusory graph. I’ve used both to disprove his claims; why do you tritely disparage statistics so tendentiously, and ignore the graphical analytics? They’re ‘obvious to everybody’ too; only they aren’t fake.
b) I openly acknowledge the four decade pause from the 1940’s to about 1980, and I don’t know anyone who denies there are and can be pauses in GMT under AGW.
c) The more parsimonious explanation is that I’m just a geek about technical precision.
d) If I were marketing or selling, one expects I’d have selected a more influential and relevant forum.
e) Fear and terror are terrible techniques of sales and marketing. Perhaps you’re thinking of propaganda? And if I were propagandizing, why would I be the one who has taken the most pains of any here to educate the denizenry on identifying techniques of propaganda? (http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/proptech.htm)
f) You’re not very good at validating and verifying what you call empirical evidence, on the empirical evidence. Perhaps you should look into Dr. Curry’s post on BS-detectors, and self-evaluate.
Howard | October 21, 2012 at 8:21 pm |
I’m “pedantic”?
You know, it never occured to me that this might be so.
I am extremely surprised.
Would you be good enough to provide some examples supporting this claim? My recollection is that my recent statements here either point to the various mechanisms which may explain the hiatus, or to the rather awkward question about where all that energy in the global ocean came from. The other questions I ask are about why the Daily Mail allows itself to be used as a megaphone for a contrarian pressure group which feeds it inaccurate and/or biased information.
Perhaps I have missed something. Alternatively, you may be misrepresenting me. Let’s sort out which it is.
I have to say, Bob Ward confuses me when he says:
He acknowledges the method he used cannot be justified for the data he’s examining, yet he claims it can show something “is entirely false.” Does that make sense to anyone? He doesn’t do anything to show the problem with using his methodology is irrelevant to his conclusions so how can he say it shows anything is entirely false?
Brandon, Bob Ward is a master of testiculation or as we say round here – talking bollox.
A question is asked, “When will warming start again?” and there is musing about some ideas like, “Other scientists say that [the missing] heat has somehow been absorbed by the waters deep in the oceans [and is hiding],” and yet nowhere in the article do we see anything about the only truly independent variable is nominally responsible for global warming AND global cooling: nominally, it’s the Sun, stupid.
I think I have a solution for the “missing heat”- it has been absorbed and is responsible for the earth’s core being 1 million degrees per Al Gore.
The ‘quiet’ SC23/24 could well be a factor in the current hiatus. But not in the warming from the 1970s. Look.
Look, Solar Squirrel!
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/10/playing-with-enso-and-solar.html
Look! The squirrel added a 0.8C centennial trend to the TSI reconstruction and posted it on the internet. Well I’ll be damned. Thought that was just dogs. Mind you, squirrels are inventive and persistent.
But the unaltered data looks squirrel-proof to me ;-)
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
The Daily Mail’s “REALLY Inconvenient Truth about AGW” falls into the same category as Al Gore’s Oscar-awarded (and Nobel Prize winning?) “documentary” film with the similar title, ”An Inconvenient Truth”.
Why get so excited about it?
Where were all the “howls of outrage” when Gore released his film, which has many more exaggerations and untruths than Rose’s article?
Double standard?
Now to the misquoting of our hostess, which was supposed to be a “big deal”.
She, herself, has been quoted as saying:
“A note to defenders of the idea that the planet has been warming for the past 16 years. Raise the level of your game. Nothing in the Met Office’s statement . . . effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past 16 years.”
Get over it folks.
Journalists (and ex-politicians turned “savior of the planet”) exaggerate and sometimes stretch the truth to get their point across.
It’s part of the game, so get used to it.
Worry more about the correctness and objectivity of all the real scientific studies out there or the supposed “gold standard” IPCC summaries of climate knowledge, folks.
Max
+10
+ 10 as well.
Bob Ward has made a boneheaded newbie error when doing the statistical calculations. He has not adjusted for autocorrelation, which makes his mathematics meaningless.
Adjusted for autocorrelation, even the HadCRUT4 data (which comes with its own problems) shows no statistically significant warming for the period described by David Rose.
Once again, bogus “science” in the service of a bogus theory.
w.
PS: Ward also says:
This is either an error or a lie, as the graph from the Rose article verifies …
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/30/article-2055191-0E974B4300000578-6_634x639.jpg
The Rose article clearly shows January 2007 as the warmest month. Ward is just peddling pre-digested puerile pap …
Willis has switched the graph! That isn’t the graph from the Daily Mail that Ward is talking about!
How did you manage to do that Willis?
lolwot | October 21, 2012 at 1:15 pm
I wave my hands and say “These are not the graphs you are looking for …”
Hmmm … so perhaps David Rose keenly appreciates which “cherries” the corporation he works for likes best? ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Scientists know that in the long run, “Nature cannot be fooled” … yet ideology-driven institutions like the GWPF … the Heartland Institute … LaRouchePAC … etc) … all keenly appreciate that in the short run, via unscientific tricks of journalistic cherry-picking, the The Mail’s readers *CAN* be fooled! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
This blog attracts
A certain twit
Whose specialty
Is gibes half-wit
With grinning discs
That weirdly sprout
Growth-like upon
His taunts creep-out
In other words
A troll effete
At best good for
A “barking tweet”
+ 1000
Thank you timg56!
You have exquisite tastes in poetry might I add.
How many of you have access to the second order draft of AR5 WG1?
There from you can learn about the prejudices of IPCC to maintain the AGW scare.
Look!
A shrieking squirrel!
leave a PO box and I’ll send you a recipe book on serving squirrels.
There’s an email on my tumblog.
dont facilitate cannibalism
I thought black hat marketers liked it.
yep. eat ur own.
excellent comeback.
witty. true.
Dr. Curry, you are happier with this photo than the last?
The trend since 1986 is not statistically different (with alpha = 0.05) from 0, and the trend since 1986 is not statistically different (with alpha = 0.05) from what was predicted at that time. The trend is closer to 0 than it is to what was predicted. What’s a statistician to do? All the calculable conditional error rates are greater than the usual values invoked for decision-making. Looks to me like a situation for hedging our bets: invest some funds in the idea that the global warming is continuing, and invest some funds in the idea that it is not continuing.
The statistical tests to date have been post-hoc: when the trend was cooling, the claim was that there was a persistent cooling (based on selected data), and when the trend was warming the claim was that there was persistent warming (based on selected data). Perhaps with all that is known now, someone will propose a well-defined multivariate test entailing all relevant global data (including Antarctic ice extent and total Antarctic ice mass, mean and extremal rainfall everywhere, mean and extremal cyclonic storms everywhere.) Surely this business of citing the occasional heat waves post hoc while ignoring the equally extreme and equally common cold waves, post hoc, can be improved upon.
A few years ago, beguiled by the predictions of permanent drought, the leaders in Queensland Australia decided not to enhance their flood control system. At the same time, China enhanced its flood control system substantially, independent of the claims of modern climate science (but recalling their long recorded history.) These should be cautionary tales for people who recommend the investments, (or non-investments) of hundreds of billions of dollars based on claims made by climate experts. It might be worth something to shut down all the coal-fired power plants, but it is certainly a higher priority to enhance all of the flood control systems and irrigation systems over the next two decades.
With the comprehensive multivariate test as I have proposed above, appropriate to all the possible measures world-wide and including the complete (correctly calibrated and managed) record of each kind, we can then test the hypothesis that human CO2-induced climate change poses a greater long-term risk than the variable natural disasters that befall Queensland and China.
oh, nuts! I meant the trend since 1996.
MattStat, since you got your stats hat on, I was trying to dig out the longer term solar signal in the HADCRUT4 data using a lag 3 cheat (non standard is my middle name).and found the signal I was looking for. Unfortunately, it was the signal I was looking for, so I am not sure if it is valid or not.
If you could take a look I would appreciate it,
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/10/weird-autocorrelation.html
Met office/Hadley seem to be trying to forget their previous hubris in declaring that their model had separated out the manmade contribution to warming and that it was now dominating over natural variation. Perhaps they hope the rest of us have short memories. In fact they didn’t expect a pause at all, never mind one for 17 years. The only noise is their denial of that fact.
If they don’t know why the pause occured then they obviously don’t know what caused the warming before it nor the cooling before that. Their model is not fit for purpose. They should swallow some pride and just admit they were overly optimistic about their models abilities and overly pessimistic about the warming if they are to win back any respect.
Those who don’t yet even admit there is a pause are just fooling themselves, not the rest of us. Quite why they want to believe in thermageddon is still a mystery to me.
There hasn’t been a pause for 17 years. That’s simply wrong.
If there had been a pause since 1995 the warming trend since 1995 should have reduced.
?
Don’t worry about it. Lolwot lost the plot long ago.
lolwot
Should have?
Would have?
The “warming trend” after 1997 WAS flattened out and after 2000 it WAS reversed
Brandon Shollenberger has already pointed out why your analysis is bogus, yet you keep coming back with the same rubbish (apparently following Lenin’s advice that “repeating a lie often enough” makes it true.)
Get used to it lolwot. There has been a “pause” in the warming. Everybody knows it (except you, apparently).
Max
The warming trend from 1970-2012 is higher than the warming trend from 1970-1997. That’s entirely consistent with continued warming since 1997.
Calculating a trend since 1997 is a flawed method for determining if the 1970-1997 warming has continued.
As I said, you are only fooling yourself.
I clicked on the link to the daily mail article and found that the Guardian have said that “we have 50 months to save the World”.
They may have made a potentially embarrassing mistake as by then temperatures may well be steadily declining.
Wow. Bob Ward also says:
I’d love to hear how the graph is fake. The x-axis is labeled wrong, but how does that (or anything else) make the graph fake?
Armadillo hide is not prominent in the latest photo, I was glad to see. One of the best follow-ups to a MSM article that I can remember. Well done David Rose. And many thanks for engaging, with integrity and spirit, Dr Curry.
Will the global energy imbalance continue to increase in coming decades? At rates that reasonably portend planetary-scale super-CAGW extinction events? :shock: :oops: :shock: :!: :shock: :oops: :shock:
That is (obviously) a key question ClimateReason!
For the foreseeable future, CO2 levels will increase linearly.
Then Hansen-style thermodynamic theory predicts accelerating accumulation of global heat energy.
That is the scientific foundation for the prediction by Hansen and colleagues of acceleration of the rate of seal-level rise this decade.
It is regrettable that the Colorado folks are unaccountably late with the latest tranche of JASON sea-level data … for the next decade the satellite sea-level altimetry data, the ice-mass gravimetry data, and the ARGO ocean-temperature, all will (quite rightly) be a key focus of scientific attention.
Rose-style cherry-picked quibbles, not so much eh? :roll: :roll: :roll:
For the simple reason that “Nature cannot be fooled!” :!: :!: :!:
And therefore, we should respect what *NATURE* tells us about the *GLOBAL* biome … not what cherry-picking Mail editors and resporters choose to tell us! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Agreed, Rose et al are only setting themselves up for look mighty foolish with a heavy dose of explaining themselves in the coming decade.
lolwot said:
“Rose et al are only setting themselves up for look mighty foolish with a heavy dose of explaining themselves in the coming decade”
_____
This doesn’t matter. The goal is not to be correct overall but to alter perceptions about the urgency of doing something about anthropogenic climate change so as to reverse or forestall various policies seen as harmful to certain economic interests. Mr. Rose really doesn’t care if he were to look foolish in 2025. Changing the course of public perception and policy in 2012 is the goal.
R Gates “The goal is not to be correct overall but to alter perceptions about the urgency of doing something about anthropogenic climate change so as to reverse or forestall various policies seen as harmful to certain economic interests.”
This exactly explains the behavior of the state’s lackey climate scientists, certainly no stranger to sabotaging the science process in pursuit of political correctness, whose relentless cagw propaganda is primarily designed to further the state’s economic interests.
Fan, here is an interesting WUWT graphic from back in 2009 promoting a certain FLAT PLATEAU in sea level:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/pielke_slr.gif
It’s interesting to see whether it indeed was a sign of sea level flattening by looking at the data since then:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel4/sl_ns_global.png
Well a straight line from start to finish is never going to show any levelling is it? Replace that straight line with a curve and tell us what you see – something like a recent deceleration I’d expect. Mostly natural too.
If you want to shift emphasis to another failed metric then be prepared to be shot down over that too.
Why are you guys so pessimistic? Do you have shares in wind energy companies? I’m as hopeful as anyone that renewable fill the energy gap work but I’m also prepared to accept that they likely won’t.
“Replace that straight line with a curve and tell us what you see – something like a recent deceleration I’d expect.”
You expect wrong
And here’s WUWT trying the same short-termism exploit on sea level rise just over a year ago:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/nasa-notes-sea-level-is-falling-in-press-release-but-calls-it-a-pothole-on-road-to-higher-seas/
Notice the derision for the scientists who ultimately ended up correct.
I notice the third commenter is our very own Edim who writes:
It’s getting harder and harder to be warmist these days. One have to explain away:
– cooling
– decreasing sea level
– increasing global sea ice (coming soon)
– decreasing atmospheric CO2 (coming soon)
Increasing global sea ice! lol do you remember when the skeptics were claiming the ice was growing? Id almost forgotten. But is only just over a year ago!
Your examples are striking lolwot!
One wonders, do denialists like Edim, Watts, Rose, Monckton, LaRouche, Eschenbach, Tisdale (et al.) retain any personal memory of past cherry-picked blunders?
Or do they live in a kind of eternal present, in which old cherries are utterly forgotten, and new cherries continually sought?
The world wonders, eh? ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
You might not believe this but from our point of view the cherry-picking is mostly on the alarmist side. This is a fight you won’t win.
I still stand by those predictions. Only for the decreasing CO2 we will have to wait longer but, but the CO2 annual growth already plateaued and the trend is negative since 1997 and it’s basically flat since 1994. I predict again that this trend will only get more negative in this decade. Sea level lags a bit, but it’s also plateauing. Global sea ice the same.
lolwot, I will repeat again, have some patience – by 2020 we will know.
I especially love Edim’s (coming soon) in brackets. Global climate models have a hard time getting natural variability correct…but Edim knows!
But what this really shows is the utter foolishness and willful ignorance at looking at short term trends and trying to extrapolate anything meaningful about long-term climate change. Anthropogenic climate change is a long-term forcing (energy imbalance) to the whole Earth system, and the only way to approach it is as such.
Fake-skeptics and of course outright deniers can’t do this because the long-term whole Earth system data clearly display the forcing.
R.Gates, you first have to show at least some evidence of ‘anthropogenic climate change’. Of course GCMs have hard time, they ‘were told’ that without human CO2/GHG, the trend since ~1960 would have been negative and that human ‘forcing’ caused more than 100% of the GW since AGW started.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/drupal6/files/meteo469/lesson05/IPCCTSNatural.gif
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/images/gw/global-surface-temperatures.PNG
Edim,
Probably best to have you read the hundreds of excellent scientific papers on the subject referenced in “The Warming Papers”. Oh, but of course, your mind is made up, so why bother. For others, whose minds are not made up, see:
http://www.amazon.com/Warming-Papers-Scientific-Foundation-Forecast/dp/1405196165
This interesting, but rather “look…squirrel” focus on near surface temperatures flattening over a short period is quite telling about certain mindsets. If Arctic Sea ice recovers, ocean heat content declines, and near surface temperatures decline over a 10 year period…why then we might actually have something really worth getting excited about.
R Gates
Was that a trick to see if we would follow your link to ‘The Warming papers?’
Do I pass, as unfortunately it seems pages 9 to 416 are not included in the preview. Perhaps you werre going to buy it for me for Christmas?
Tonyb
In terms of what is happening on a planet called earth, the best series appears to be GISS.
So it stopped on HadCrappy4. Big deal. On GISS it does not stop until the 11-year trend, which is meaningless. And that makes sense because the arctic is hotter, and we’ve had back-to-back La Nina events.
Three hottest Nov-Dec periods after 2003.
try again.
How hot is it?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:11/mean:13/from:1940/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1940
The coldest year since 1997 is hotter than the hottest year before 1989. That includes triple points of La Nina, volcano-influences, peak soot-influences and the lowest points in ocean cycles.
And as a result we have seen the following harmful effects:
Ok, give me a little more time. I’m sure there has to be at least one out there.
timg56 | October 22, 2012 at 9:34 pm |
If it’s the interesting question, why aren’t you spending any time looking for the answer yourself instead of pretending you’re too incompetent to find it?
Here’s a couple of places to start:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/17/reinsurance-climate-idUSL5E8LHMK120121017
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20121022/NEWS08/310220038/A-neighborhood-heading-underwater?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CHome&nclick_check=1
Bart,
Neither link is evidence. The first assumes a link between climate and increasing severe weather events and intensities. It also mention Katrina. Problem is no link has been identified as yet and the whole Katrina as an example of global warming impacts has been shown to be bunk.
The second link is an assumption of what could happen several years in the future, based on a prediction based on models not historical data.
You can’t make the claim that storm related economic loss is increasing due to global warming based on either link. Which is exactly why I keep asking for evidence. Future predictions of harm and evidence requiring unsupported assumptions do not count.
I am not trying to claim no harmful effects will occur. But I would think that based on what we are being told, at least some impacts should already be making themselves felt. It has been 24 years since James Hansen started making his dire predictions.
using terms of methodology GISS is superior to HADCRUT. If you take synthetic data representing temperatures and average it using three different methods: hadcrut, giss and Berkeley, you can show rather definitively that CRU has the highest error rate.
The interesting question from my perspective is why does the community persist in using a method that is known to be inferior?
Mosher, if you think you can justify that GISS is superior to Hadcrut then you should present an article to that effect on WUWT. Unless by superior you mean more fraudulent.
J Martin | October 21, 2012 at 5:39 pm |
Or people could visit stevemosher.wordpress.com/ .. as if the definition of superior is less fraudulent, we’d have to accept that as superior to WUWT.
I don’t think I can justify that the GISS method is superior I know that it is superior. I know this from experiment.
Experiment:
Take a full globe of synthetic temperature data. Data for every place and time. Since you have full data for every place and time you can construct the true average of this field.
Sample: use GHCN as a filter for sampling. This means you sample the field at the places GHCN does and at the times it does. So, if GHCN samples New york city from 1898 to present, your sample of the synthetic field will also only have data for 1898 to present.
Construct an average from this sample using;
1. CRU method
2. Giss method
3. Berkeley method
compare the average as calculated by the various methods to the true average.
When you do this you will have a measure that shows the error enduced by the averaging method. we are talking about the METHOD.
The CRU method.
A. Only use stations that have enough data in the 1961-1990 period.
B. average stations within a grid
C. normalize by area.
D average.
The GISS method.
A) Build reference stations, using temperal constraints
B) create equal area grids
C) average within grids
D) average.
The Berkeley method. ( otherwise known as the optimal method )
A) construct a temperature field from all data solving both the time and space problem simultaneously.
B) average the field.
###########
the differences arise from two issues
1. using all available data.
2. gridding / weighting.
If you look at synthetic perfect data where you know the true average
and then you apply the 3 methods to a sample of the data, you can test the ability of the method to capture the true average. This is known as a test of method. Sadly, it has not been done before. Part of the reason is that the code for the methods wasnt available. But now the code is available and you can test it for yourself.
My goal in life in not to do your damn work for you. My goal is to fight to free the data and free the code that will make it easier for you to do your own damn science and move out of the realm of rank speculation and into the realm of informed judgement.
The test is easy. It is one proposed long long ago by those of us on climate audit. The result.. well you tell me what do you expect?
and will your mind be changed by actual results?
Because it gives them what they want to believe. They’re believers.
In some ways it is more reliable and goes back further. It’s apples to apples.
You were a fan of IPCC’s climate science which used HADRCRUT as long as it showed warming. Now that it is showing a different result you are letting your faith get ahead of the facts, just because it shows a a result that you don’t like. What a hypocrite!
I’m an American. I’m a lifetime fan of NASA and NOAA. As for the IPCC, I think it’s always behind the times, and I don’t have much use for it. Google Scholar is better.
Rosenthal’s flag and NOAA’s device – you can tell by features of the battlefield that the photograph was taken within days of the capture of Mt. Suribachi. Marines were still mopping up on and around the volcano. It was a very dangerous place. Lucky members of the 28th, like my father, got to spend a night on the top. None I’ve met remember the NOAA device.
It’s global warming, so it’s kind of idiotic to look at regional series like HadCrappy, but have a good time with it.
In terms of what is happening on a small portion of a planet call Earth, the best series to see the flattening of global temperatures at the highest levels on instrument record appears to be GISS.
R Gates
Here are the three Hadley global records from 1850 to 2011. All appear to show a cooling or at least a pause. Do you disagree
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
As someone who uses the Met office library and archives on a regular basis I think public access (for me) ought ot be a major criteria as to which is the best database
tonyb
Tony,
Undoubtedly the Hadley records show a “pause” or “flattening” or “plateau” in the near-surface temperature anomalies over the last decade to or so. It would seem obvious to all but the brain-dead that temperatures have leveled off at or near the highest levels on instrument record. Much the same thing is shown in the GISS records, but with less flattening. The answer as to why the difference of course is well known to all of us here– Hadley does not extrapolate to the polar regions whereas GISS does. With a great deal of polar warming going on (more so than lower latitudes) it would be the opinion of many that GISS is more accurate overall if you want to look at the whole surface of the planet. It has been argued by some that GISS extrapolations are too generous and are exaggerating the polar warming. Record low sea ice this summer and other mathematical arguments lead me to believe that GISS is closer overall to a global near-surface snapshot than Hadley. Either way, temperatures have not been climbing these past 10 or so years as steeply as they were the previous 10, but neither have they been falling, and thus, the past 10 year average is higher than the previous 10 year on both Hadley and GISS and we had our warmest La Nina year ever in 2011. All these facts, combined with the fact that the actual measurement of near-surface temperature anomalies is only one small metric of Earth’s overall energy imbalance, and so to focus on it at the exclusion of others which may be equally as important is a bit of a “look…squirrel!” distraction to the core issue of Anthropogenic climate change. Anthropogenic climate change certainly seems to be occurring at a steady rate if you look at all the various spheres (cryosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, full-atmosphere).
R Gates
But we are not talking about GISS, whose methodology is a thread in itself. We are talking about the Met office and the claim by David Rose that the temperatures have at the least paused. Arguably they are cooling.
In the real world of individual data sets, around a third of those also show cooling according to BEST. These are best exemplified by CET, also kept by the Met office, which appear also to have some relevance as a proxy for global temperatures
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
There is a pause that has lasted this century. Where it goes from here I don’t know. Its been warming for 350 years so the chances are it will continue
tonyb
Tony,
What is your estimate for CET warming between 1780 and 1900? You said the warming had been going on for 350 years, yet I don’ see much warming in that time frame.
Of course, as a side issue here, the close parallel between land surface and sea surface temperatures, with both rising and falling together, sort of blows a hole in Anthony Watts notion that the land surface temperatures have been grossly overestimated doesn’t it? Don’t think there’s much chance of UHI effects out in the middle of the Pacific. Time to tilt at some other windmills Anthony Don Quixote Watts…
R gates
Disappointed at you playing the bait and switch game. No one was talking about a random cherry picked period from the middle of the series. We are talking about a long term trend from one end of the chart to the other with all the advances and retreats that it shows.
However if you want to play that game around a 0.4C increase since 1780 to the present.
Now tell me what has been the decrease using the same chart over the last 12/15 years or so? It matches fairly well the Met office and Rose figures albeit it one data set (that allows for UHI) isnt the same as numerous averaged ones that don’t.
tonyb
R Gates
Further to my 3.16am post.
Here is BEST also showing a very long term warming trend. Its not confined to CET although the parallels between the two datasets reinforces the notion that CET has some merit as a global proxy
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-historic-variations-in-temperatures-part-3-best-confirms-extended-period-of-warming/
tonyb
Rgates:
“Either way, temperatures have not been climbing these past 10 or so years as steeply as they were the previous 10, but neither have they been falling, and thus, the past 10 year average is higher than the previous 10 year on both Hadley and GISS and we had our warmest La Nina year ever in 2011. All these facts,…”
That isn’t ‘facts’. That is one fact restated five different ways. And that one fact is: temps have plateaued. One of the drawbacks of the ‘stack of facts’ fallacy, is that it encourages people to gin up “extra facts”, as you have done here.
It is another thing entirely to come up with a cogent, testable theory of climate … and then test it. Insofar as that could be done, it would be done via model predictions. Insofar as that has been done, it has failed.
If they only made records that warmed public you’d sing a different tune.
the simple mathematical fact is that the CRU result is a combination of two things.
A. CRU DATA
B. CRU Method.
The CRU method is the worst of the lot in terms of error.
Experiment:
Take a full globe of synthetic temperature data. data for every place and time.
Take a sample using the CRU data as a filter ( place and time)
Construct an average from this sample using;
1. CRU method
2. Giss method
3. Berkely method
compare the average as calculated by the various methods to the true average.
guess where CRU comes in in terms of error.
Tony,
please dont mis use the 1/3 cooling statistic. its not what you think it is.
the POR is not identical for all the stations in that metric.
if you look at the same POR it drops to 1/8.
if you look at complete records… it drops to 1/10th
if you look at statistical significance… opps where did the cooling go
Mosh
Its the figure that Richard hmself gave me.
Whichever way you cut it thats an awful lot more stations than the cooling that is supposedly restricted only to Southern Greenland and some parts of the tropics as quoted by the IPCC. CET is part of that number as testified by my complete failure with outdoor tomatoes in the last few years…Well, not complete failure, we managed to get 5 fruits which had to be ripened indoors. I still havent replaced all the supposedly hardy plants Ive lost in the last few years.
tonyb
Tamino weighs in with his criticism of David Rose’s Daily Mail argument:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/temperature-analysis-by-david-rose-doesnt-smell-so-sweet/
He points out the same thing fan of more discourse pointed out: Rose admits to cherry picking 1997 without realizing it.
More importantly Tamino reports that the trend using just the data since mid-1997 does not disagree (statistically) with the trend prior to mid-1997
and he explains in length why the data since 1997 is compatible with ongoing warming.
The Pause started at the Super El Nino. At 15-years hence, it becomes a very obvious hing point. That’s not cherry-picking, that’s harvesting the low-hanging fruit. When you deny obvious truth as in this case, no one will listen to your future cry’s of WOLF.
The facts are the facts. The *pause* does not mean global warming stopped, it just means that the climate system is complex and poorly understood. No shame in that, that’s science. However, the desire to “paper over” the inconvenient data is an admission that politics and ego trumps mother nature.
You claim the fetid swamp of denial with your WUWT opposite numbers. Your prize is an eternal nonsensical debate shooting your wad at each other. It’s the only way you all can keep your hideous egos hyper-inflated.
“The facts are the facts. The *pause* does not mean global warming stopped, it just means that the climate system is complex and poorly understood.”
There’s no evidence global warming has stopped. Therefore why are people talking about it?
It’s because they want to pretend it has stopped.
@lolwot
The temperature hasn’t gone up. Good enough definition of ‘warming has stopped’ for me.
When T(t2) =T(t1) that says that it hasn’t warmed between t1 and t2.
Plot all the graphs you like. Squint at them in a darkened room while rotating widdershins and incanting praises of Mother Gaia if you like. Pray seven times in the direction of a small soapstone statuette of Mike Mann embracing James Hansen if that’s what floats your boat. Knock your self out.
It doesn’t change the Inconvenient Truth that it is no warmer now than it was 15 years ago.
Get used to it. Otherwise you’re going to get very lonely and frustrated as your onetime colleagues in alarmism drift away, the magic money tree stops showering climatology with goodies and you just become a sad old eccentric.
> When T(t2) =T(t1) that says that it hasn’t warmed between t1 and t2.
All you need then to prove that AGW is false is to find two such states separated by (say) one nanosecond, then.
Please mind Joe and Stirling when using variables like that.
Well if Tamino was blameless of cherry-picking to support his own strident POV then his comments might be of use. The only useful thing he has ever properly done was accidentally confirm that the Arctic was as warm in the 30’s. Take him to task on why he picks 1975 as a change point when his own assertion is that this period was supposedly artificially cooled by aerosols and you get ignored. Trying to remind him that putting a straight line over an obviously highly non-linear system makes no sense in the first place gets you abused.
Get this everyone; all linear fits are false so all start points are suspect; the best approximation is probably Roy Spencers least squares curve. However we do have the benefit of our own eyes and we can see there was an abrupt shift in the 90’s and we can see the el ninos and la ninas balancing out so that 1997 seems the obvious best place to put a changepoint should you wish to do so. You can put another at 1975, 1950, 1900 if you like but the hypothesis was that the human influence on temperature was supposed to be dominating by now over all other causes of warming and cooling and warming was therefore supposed to accelerate. The plateau is the evidence that it doesn’t. Trying to come up with a range of contradictory excuses as to why nature doesn’t follow the text laid down for it is a mugs game.
What of course Tamino doesn’t reveal is if you do fit a ARIMA model and show the model fits over this period, what the temperature “trend” coefficient reduces to.
Fan, you ought to know you’re in trouble when you’re hitching your wagon to lolwot’s star. I’ve pointed out several times that I’ve never seen lolwot concede a single point…not give up the smallest fraction of an inch on any issue…which is pretty telling when you think about it. Makes a pretty good prima facie case right there that the man is not being honest. Or perhaps that he’s simply delusional…Everybody’s wrong occasionally. Einstein himself made an error here and there.
But lolwotz? NO sir.
What about you fan? Are you ever wrong?
.
Holocaust Denier: I’ve tried for years to prove the holocaust didn’t happen, but you guys never concede a single point! that just shows you are not being honest!
No sir. I repeat, it’s you who are not being honest. It’s one thing to contend that CAGW is on the way. But underlying that basic premise there are, unless you’re a fanatical ideologue, many debatable points. But not for you lolwot. You’re absolutely convinced of everything you say. You’re never, ever wrong, no matter how convincing (to a neutral observer), the counter-argument.
But of course, you can’t even admit this.
Well there’s three possibilities:
1) You are right.
2) You are wrong, I have conceded points before.
3) You are wrong, I haven’t needed to concede points because I am very careful to make points that are robust.
I am going for a combination of 2 and 3.
I don’t expect you to concede this!
Beautiful photo Judith. Much, much better.
Be still my heart :-)
Stalker Alert™
One could do a lot worse, if one were inclined along those lines.
Doubling down on creepy.
It’s just a joke to assert a significant positive trend in the HADCRUT4 data from 01/1997…08/2012 as it did Mr. Ward http://www2.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/Media/Commentary/2012/october/myth-that-global-warming-stopped-in-mid-1990s.aspx . Of course the monthly data show a significant trend, anyway: Did the “Policy & Communications Director” of the LSE nothing heard about autocorrelation? If not: it’s the wrong man, if yes: it’s a misleading statement. Try to free the record of the years after 1997 of autocorrelation and test it with durbin-watson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin–Watson_statistic and you find, that you MUST create yearly means to get a d near 2 ( no autocorrelation) . The yearly data show no significant trend on 95% confidence- level.
Who do you think we are, Mr. Warp?
“For better or worse, I’ve put myself out there as being willing to talk to reporters (after brain fossilization and heretic, I now have the hide of an armadillo).”
This is both realistic and necessary…and probably represents a fine 1st step in the indicated direction. Nothing screams as loudly or attacks with as much fury as a gored sacred cow.
I agree that, in comparison to the first, the 2nd Rose article is a better article, but let’s take a look at just a few small issues, that in fact big point to bigger issues in the long run. Rose said:
“Other experts point out one of the biggest natural factors behind the plateau is the fact that in 2008 the temperature cycle in the Pacific flipped from ‘warm mode’, in which it had been locked for the previous 40 years, to ‘cold mode’, meaning surface water temperatures fell…”
_____
Mr. Rose really needs to get such an important fact absolutely correct. He gives an incorrect date about the start of the current cool phase of the PDO and then makes a broad generalization about it saying “surface water temperatures fell”. Both of these are incorrect or only partially correct, and by themselves can be misleading for an overall understanding. The current cool phase of the PDO, if by that we mean the running average PDO index crossing from positive into negative territory began right after the mega 1997-1998 El Nino. The ensuing mega-La Nina of 1999-2001 really initiated the current cool phase of the PDO in that the long term PDO average index crossed into negative territory for the first time in several decades and has been mostly negative ever since. Thus, we have been in the current cool phase since late 1998 or early 1999, and are thus in our 13th or 14th year. The other very important point is to be specific about what the cool phase of the PDO actually means in terms of “surface water temperatures” falling. As we all here know (but most in the general public who are reading Mr. Rose’s article probably do not), the “cool phase” is named so because of what it means for sea surface temperatures primarily along the North American west coast. Implied (but not stated explicitly) in Mr. Rose’s generalization is that the entire Pacific “flipped” to a cool mode with surface water temperatures generally cooling across the whole of the Pacific. This of course is not true at all.
So I would say to Mr. Rose– if you want to talk about things scientific, at least be very clear about the details. Current “cool” phase of the PDO began in late 1998/early 1999 (certainly not 2008), and when it flipped it generally meant cooler sea surface temperatures along the west coast of N. America but warmer temperatures on average over other other broad regions of the Pacific.
If Mr. Rose really wants to improve his reporting and do a general service of advancing a true understanding of the issue of anthropogenic climate change, he needs to do a comprehensive article about Earth’s energy budget, and state quite clearly all the different spheres (all layers of the atmosphere, hyrdosphere, crysosphere, and biosphere) in which the signal of anthropogenic warming is both modeled as impacting and then talk about what is data is actually saying in terms of Earth’s energy imbalance in all these spheres. By picking one specific area of only one of the spheres (surface temperatures), while it might be one piece of interesting information and it certainly it is quite true that surface temperatures have been flat at or near record high levels, focusing on this fact alone and the fact that climate models failed to have forecast it, does very little overall good if the goal is to educate the public about the bigger picture, i.e. anthropogenic climate change as an energy imbalance affecting the whole Earth energy system, including all the spheres discussed above.
Why do you author so many useless words of no account? No one of any consequence is reading your posts.
Howard said:
“No one of any consequence is reading your posts.”
____
Self-reflection, Howard?
@r Gates
I don’t think the general British public really gives a tinkers cuss about your long and very rambling wittering about the imbalance of the earth’s energy budget and all that stuff.
What they are very interested in is that they’re being asked to suffer a lot of inconvenience (budgetary and amenity) today to supposedly head off the distant threat of ‘climate change’ tomorrow. And that climate change will manifest itself as getting progressively and relentlessly hotter.
Leaving aside the many who think that a warmer UK climate would overall be a very positive thing, the news that it hasn’t been warming at all for the last fifteen years is deeply troubling. It looks like our Lords and Masters have been taking us for a ride. It looks like the institutions we trusted (science, guys in white coats, ‘charities’ like FoE and Greenpeace) have had us down as mugs.
And these hurt feelings will filter quickly into the ballot box in local, European and national elections. Those who sold us this ‘failed narrative’ will be punished.
And it will be a brave (nay foolhardy) UK pollie who will stand up and argue with a Daily Mail reader that,while surface temperatures haven’t gone up and we’ve just had the two coldest winters for some considerable time the global energy budget shows that if you read lolwot’s special graph while dancing naked around a maypole the earth will warm by 0.3C in 100 years and so not only must you have a 400′ windmill outside your front door, your lekky prices are going up to pay for it too.
Unless of course, you can put your lengthy screed into a format more suitable for an educated – but not specialist – readership. Try it.
R.Gates re; PDO went negative in 1998.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong.
The positive side of the PDO reached a zenith in 1993 and began to decline. It crossed the zero line in 2005.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/library/pics/PDO-index-since-1900.jpg
Tamino’s analysis further informs the question asked earlier:
The world wonders, eh? ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
And Climate Etc is a terrific forum for gaining insights into this question! For which, thank you Judith Curry! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
So many Strawmen, so Little Time, eh?
Pointing out that the Great Contrarian River is ever changing and always the same is not a strawman.
Those folks are not contrarians. They are deniers who are cashing in on the tea-bagger denier wet-dream stimulated by the *pause*. They are strawmen that Fan and other hysterical feminine catastrophists like yourself use to tarnish folks like Dr. Curry.
Just like you, Fan BartR, lolwat, etc, etc are strawmen of the true consensus.
Eh, Howard, you do talk rubbish sometimes. The trick to *not* coming across as a complete crank is to say things that are recognisably related to the reality everyone else can see. I’ve taken this up with you elsewhere on this thread because you are starting to make a habit of misrepresenting me, and that will never do ;-)
Next you will be saying noaa, is nothing but a straw-man…
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120524_atlantic_hurricane_season.html
or hugh-man.
I wanted to post this here.
I like this graph where you can see the development of the 15-year linear trend along the 50-year linear trend (not centered, the last 15 and 50 years, HADCRUT3).
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/15yrLR.jpg
Here the 30-year trend:
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/30yrLR.jpg
The 30-year trend is interesting. I predicted ~flat 30-year by 2020 few times on this blog.
Excellent work.
Your result agrees with my result:
http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/30YearsGmtTrends.PNG
Girma, it’s not my work. Someone posted it on ‘Open Mind’ blog a while ago.
According to that graph, global warming has stopped since 2004 because the maximum 30-years trend was for the period 1974-2004 and it has been going down since then.
The maximum was about 0.19 deg C per decade and for the latest period of 1981-2011 it is about 0.15 deg C per decade.
“According to that graph, global warming has stopped since 2004 because the maximum 30-years trend was for the period 1974-2004 and it has been going down since then.”
Timescale is everything. The 15-year trend reached zero in ~2011, 30-year is still positive (~ +0.015 K) and it started decreasing in ~2004. The 50-year trend looks very regular (~60 year cycle). I think the 60-year cycle is also variable in length, similar to the 11-year solar cycle. There are longer cycles too. All these cycles are variable in length and hence maybe better called oscillations.
Sorry, that’s 0.015 K/year (0.15 K/decade).
Your result agrees with my result:
http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/30YearsGmtTrends.PNG
We always making it harder than it is because we try to apply reason where it dosn’t. We have to base what we know of others on their behavior. And so, all the Left really wants to do is deprive the poor of affordable energy.
Condoleezza Rice opposed that the the hypocrisy of the Left. Rice has been involved in a number of humanitarian pursuits (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and in creating and serving on the board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation — endeavors to increase aid to developing countries and the worlds poorest, most disadvantaged populations — and serving as a member of the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center).
Rice is a strong woman and the Left hates that because they want people to be puny and so they really fear strong–e.g., women like Rice, Rand, Palin, Coulter, Maulkin, Curry…
As society gets weaker, the strong become the victims of an army of weaklings who look to government instead of themselves for their survival. That is what Ayn Rand was writing about: our sins. Howard Roark is Rand’s secular version of Jesus. The Left hates Rand but not because she is a atheist but because she was anti-communist and saw salvation in individual liberty.
+1
And, to the list we should add Krysten Byrnes (“Ponder the Maunder”) who had the courage to stand tall against Leftist hero, Al Gore.
LOL … Wagathon, your strong praise of strong women rationally equates to “Hurrah for Jane Goodall!” ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
But gosh-golly … don’t the *ALL* world’s great apes reside entirely within the climate-change Lethal Zone? :eek: :shock: :cry: :eek: :shock: :cry:
For sure, Jane Goodall ain’t in favor of *THAT*, eh Wagathon? :?: :?: :?:
As for the “army of weaklings who look to government instead of themselves for their survival” … is this political operative-slang for the infamous 47%, eh Wagathon? ;) :?: :!: ;) :?
I think you may have too much lead in your lipstick.
to borrow from Loyd Bengston:
I know Jane Goodall and you are not Jane Goodall.
Perhaps you might try doing even a small iota for science edcuation that she does.
PS – I don’t believe smily faces will cut it, should try.
Wagathon | October 21, 2012 at 3:01 pm |
To your binders of women, might one suggest you add Naomi Oreskes, Claudia Tebaldi, Marie Sanderson, Sallie Baliunas, Inez Fung, Ann Henderson-Sellers, Jean Grove, Vicky Pope, Susan Solomon, Katharine Hayhoe, ..
LOL … Bart R, your list establishes Wagathon’s instant-classic “binders of strong woman” post as a worthy contender for “Dumbest-Ever Climate Etc Comment!” ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Such was not my intention.
http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/wikipedia-workshop/
I’m not sure some people will ever understand what was wrong with the binders of women remark; the best I hope for is they move forward a bit.
Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, both astrophysicists at Harvard, who were characterized as fringe scientists whose work should be ignored. What did they do to attract such characterizations? They had the audacity to pull back the curtain on the wizard of global warming.
See, Global warming smear targets – Washington Times
@wagathon
Many would suggest that Margaret Thatcher should be included in a list of ‘strong women’. And Angela Merkel. Both were physical chemists by training, I am delighted to say.
And specifically in Climatology you’ve forgotten Donna LaFramboise, Author of the searing expose of the IPCC
‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert’
Yep.
Joshua | October 21, 2012 at 12:41 pm | Reply
“Alan:
d: Truth. See What Gavin Schmidt says on the subject.
????
Here?”
As per usual with global warming fanatics you have been deceitful by quoting something that was not related to the question asked.
This was what Gavin Schmidt said in relation to the models.
“A related question that comes up is how often we should expect a global mean temperature record to be broken. This too is a function of the natural variability (the smaller it is, the sooner you expect a new record). We can examine the individual model runs to look at the distribution. There is one wrinkle here though which relates to the uncertainty in the observations. For instance, while the GISTEMP series has 2005 being slightly warmer than 1998, that is not the case in the HadCRU data. So what we are really interested in is the waiting time to the next unambiguous record i.e. a record that is at least 0.1ºC warmer than the previous one (so that it would be clear in all observational datasets). That is obviously going to take a longer time.
This figure shows the cumulative distribution of waiting times for new records in the models starting from 1990 and going to 2030. The curves should be read as the percentage of new records that you would see if you waited X years. The two curves are for a new record of any size (black) and for an unambiguous record (> 0.1ºC above the previous, red). The main result is that 95% of the time, a new record will be seen within 8 years, but that for an unambiguous record, you need to wait for 18 years to have a similar confidence.”
Alan
I have not seen anyone try to put this into the context of what is happening politically in the UK government. I am a Canadian, but I was born and educated in the UK. As I understand it, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has taken a good look at the books, and concluded that if the UK implements the Climate Change Act, it is headed for economic suicide. He is trying to get away from the various “green” initiatives of the past, and do things which make sense from a financial point of view. In this he is opposed by the Lib. Dems. who are part of the governing coalition.
Now in the usual course of events, if the Chancellor is in one corner, and some other Cabinet Minister in another, it is strictly no contest; the Chancellor wins. But this is different, because of the Climate Change Act.
Now we have the Sunday Mail entering into the fray, and suggesting that maybe, just maybe, CAGW is not true. I wonder how this might play out in the next few weeks of UK politics.
It will be ignored because the Daily Mail largely preaches to the choir. To everyone else it’s taken for entertainment value.
A dozen clicks and you’ll understand the humorous context with which people take Daily Mail stories
Note that by no means has the Daily Mail actually waged war on CAGW. Some might think so, but the daily paper is actually quite indifferent to the subject. Roses stuff appears in the Sunday edition.
@lolwot
Not sure what you mean by
‘the Daily Mail largely preaches to the choir.’
It has a bigger circulation than the house journal of alarmism (the gauardian) by a factor of 10. Bigger than the NYT or the WSJ. The readership is estimated at over 5 million, which is well over 10% of the voting population and easily big enough to swing the next general election. You ignore the DM readership at your peril.
David Rose has done a great service by bringing these Inconvenient Facts to a wider public.
It will have hugely strengthened Osborne’s hand in his battle with Ed Davey. Few will be willing to make sacrifices in favour of a hundred year away threat that may not even exist. And even the Lib Dems will eventually realise that their policy is a millstone around their electoral necks.
At least the Daily Mail doesn’t brownose politics like the choir-preaching totalitarian BBC and Guardian do.
Keep an eye out for Owen Paterson:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9520174/Owen-Paterson-becomes-new-Environment-Secretary.html
GLOBAL WARMING STOPPED IN 1987 REVEALS MET OFFICE REPORT QUIETLY RELEASED…AND HERE IS THE CHART TO PROVE IT
By David Rose (copyright Daily Mail 1998)
Click for chart showing no warming since January 1987.
-The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1987 until December 1997 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1976 to 1986
The world stopped getting warmer over 10 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1987 until December 1997, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1976 to 1986. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 20 years.
Joy, oh Joy!
We are not warming to disaster! I bet that makes all of us relieved.
Why are so many people disappointed, nasty and vitriolic about that? It is surely great news.
Are their beliefs logical and objective or religion based?
Are they so deluded they cannot accept the measured data? (the only truth) – [not that I would regard all climate datasets as truth, since some are heavily massaged, but let that pass].
Science is devalued by those who attack observational data and prefer to cling to belief or worse, and is especially devalued by those who favour the output of models programmed to produce results supporting their own beliefs. That is true self delusion.
“We are not warming to disaster! I bet that makes all of us relieved.
Why are so many people disappointed, nasty and vitriolic about that?”
because it’s…not. true.
Lolwot – Is the data not true? Please explain.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/temperature-analysis-by-david-rose-doesnt-smell-so-sweet/
There’s one additional point that Tamino didn’t make explicitely. He fitted a trend to the data over preceding 22 years. That trend ended at 0.3C in 1997 while the “plateau” since 1997 is near 0.5C. Thus a step increase of almost 0.2C is needed to join the values, i.e. an increase more than expected for a decade according to IPCC. This is a serious failure in the interpretation of “no warming since 1997” when put in more relevant context. This plot shows the effect (but with a little trend also in the latter period).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:1997.67/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997.61/to:2013/trend
lolwot
Who knows whether or not “we are warming to disaster” (=CAGW).
IPCC claims this but this claim is not supported by empirical scientific evidence.
Therefore, it is simply an uncorroborated postulation.
It rests on the model-derived estimate of mean climate sensitivity of 3.2C.
But the actual physical observations do not support this climate sensitivity assumption.
No need to get “nasty and vitriolic”, lolwot. Just accept it – or demonstrate with empirical scientific evidence that this assumption (or estimate) is supported.
Time to “put up or shut up”, lolwot.
Max
The simplest arguments are often the strongest. In case of AGW the two simplest supportive and as a pair strong arguments are:
1) Theoretical understanding led to the prediction of the warming before anything of it was observable. The basic theory couldn’t tell the actual value of climate sensitivity but it leads to the range given by IPCC (perhaps rather to the low than to the high end of that range).
2) The dramatic warming over the period 1970 to 2000 and the fact that the starting level was not at the bottom of a dip and the ending level has been maintained until now.
That the decades before 1970 and after 2000 have been essentially flat indicates that the steepness of the rise has very likely been enhanced but natural variability, but they tell also that the warming is not just a fluctuation.
These factors alone are enough to make a convincing case for significant AGW but not enough to tell much more about its strength or effects. (I think Richard Muller’s recent comments on the anthropogenic contribution are based on similar reasoning.)
Whether the first article in the Mail on Sunday was seriously misleading or only a little incomplete depends on what we expect from its readers. For people as knowledgeable on the issues as most denizens of this site are it was just a bit incomplete and one-sided. Technically it didn’t make seriously wrong claims but it didn’t put issues in full context. For people with little knowledge on the issue the article may have been seriously misleading in emphasizing statements like
There Rose tells that warming stopped and there he puts ‘pause’ in quotes hinting perhaps that it’s not a pause but more permanent end for warming. Nothing in the article tells clearly that this proves little against expectations for further warming in future.
I don’t like specific numbers given for the allowable length of the period with little warming. As long as we don’t know the nature of the variability we cannot present such numbers. On the other hand every year with a temperature below previous expectations does influence the estimate of climate sensitivity. The more we have of such years and the more they deviate from expectations the lower gets the best estimate for transient climate response and climate sensitivity. The Foster and Rahmstorf paper gives now an estimate around 0.16 C/decade. I’m sure that their estimate had been significantly higher 10 years ago. This is the way we see properly the influence of the plateau.
The second Mail of Sunday article is better but to me it’s still strongly one-sided and formulated in many places to give a biased impression.
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/15yrLR.jpg
http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p623/Oefinell/30yrLR.jpg
If what you say is true, why didnt Judith blow all of the premises of the article out of the water? If anyone is qualified to do so, she is and yet I saw no repudiation of the essence of the article by her. There were more than ample opportunities for her to do that and yet if anything she placed the challenge on your position.
There are so many different issues in the whole. She prefers to emphasize some rather that others. I do believe that in most cases her views and my views are not in direct contradiction, but we do certainly have differing emphasis.
She didn’t agree with Muller on presenting that particular point in the BEST paper. I do also feel that the paper was not the right place for presenting such a personal judgment, in particular presenting a judgment presented by so many others before. Realizing the power of the argument may have been new for Muller, but there was not any new science in that.
She does certainly have in mind also the future of this site. Therefore she may feel that it’s better that many arguments are presented by denizens rather than herself. If she would present climate science here in the same way she does in her lectures would make this site very different from the present – and very different from the goals stated in the opening remarks.
Pekka,
There are a couple of problems with your argument:
1) the theoretical basis for the warming is fine, but it was not made when none of it was observable. The late 20C warming is not outside of the range of warming that has been observed before and before anthropogenic emissions were thought to have influenced it.
That the decades before 1970 and after 2000 have been essentially flat
Well that’s not true. If you put two graphs side by side, one depicting the temp anomalies for the period 1910-1952 and 1970-2012, they would look remarkably similar, and I would bet a decent sum that a layperson would not be able to tell which priod was which.
If you want to make a case for anthropogenic warming, it would probably be along the lines of the Swanson argument, that after an anomalously large el niño in 19997-98 the energy is dissipating throughout the system, however I have yet to see any calculations supporting that. I could believe that a combination of natural variability and the re-equilibrium gives us the current flat trend, but their arm waving assertion that warming will start to occur again 2020 smacks of moving goal posts.
Never the less, even if that were true it indicates that the climate is less sensitive, and the overall rate of warming is less alarming, and the urgency for “action” unjustified, even if you hold that there is still a problem to be addressed.
What I can’t get my head around is how people can possibly justify saying that the warming hasn’t stopped. Even the most suspect of the “team” climate scientists accept that but offer rationalisations at least. However some graph nerd wants to pick apart David Roses graph, the essential message is the same; the warming has not continued, this was not predicted, and it calls into question the urgency with which society has been asked to address this problem.
Agnostic,
Your argument is not consistent with history. It was understood very early that the increase in the CO2 concentration could not be significant in the warming that peaked in 1940’s. The expectation was that the influence of CO2 starts to be significant during the last few decades of the 20th century.
The understanding of the atmosphere reached the required level for making properly semiquantitative estimates by the work of Manabe and his coauthors in 1960’s. By middle 1970’s the atmospheric scientists had had enough time to scrutinize and refine that approach to be certain that it’s basically correct (although still incomplete and incapable of producing accurate quantitative results, as it arguably is even now).
The flat period has definitely influenced the best objective estimate for climate sensitivity. The balance of evidence remains, however, strongly on the side of the expectation of further warming in the coming decades. A flat period of 17 years is a minor factor in the balance of evidence in particular when we know that the latest solar minimum was exceptionally strong and prolonged.
The years 2011-12 have a higher solar irradiance and the ENSO as indicated by MEI does not explain lower than normal temperatures either. Thus the relative coolness of the last 20 months or so appears to be somewhat contradictory with expectations from the fit of the Forster and Rahmstorf paper, but the period is still too short for significant conclusions. If this situation prevails or gets even stronger, then the conclusions on the value of climate sensitivity will also get stronger.
Your argument is not consistent with history.
On the contrary, it is entirely consistent with history, which has seen temperatures rise and fall, but mostly rise since the time of Arrhenius which is the point at which I presume you take as the start of the theoretical basis. The rest of your comment doesn’t substantiate temperatures mostly being flat prior to 1970 which is what drew me to comment, but is none the less not unreasonable of itself.
The balance of evidence that the warming may continue to rise is from a theoretical perspective only, and yes I agree entirely that the longer the pause continues the more it says about climate sensitivity. But there is more than one hypotheses in the game, Pekka. Another is that cooling might set in until at least 2030. It seems to me that if that were to happen, and warming restarted after 2030, you would have a much better handle on natural variability versus sensitivity to increasing GHG.
@pekka
‘A flat period of 17 years is a minor factor in the balance of evidence’
H’mm
Maybe.
But its a big big factor in reducing public interest and hence public willingness to fund climatology and listen to or care about its results.
Last time I looked global warming came bottom of the list of things that people were worried about. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I’ll bet that nobody notices when AR5 is published and it’ll just get filed in a cupboard somewhere and forgotten about
No. The starting point is not Arrhenius, it’s in the 1970’s.
Arrhenius described crudely the very basics. He also concluded correctly that little is to be expected based on the foreseen changes in CO2-concentration.
The two scientific results that changed the scene came in 1960’s and were Keeling’s Mauna Loa measurements of CO2 concentration and the basic understanding of the physics of atmosphere developed by Manabe and others. Putting all this together indicated that a significant warming