Open thread weekend

by Judith Curry

It’s your turn to introduce topics for discussion.

191 responses to “Open thread weekend

  1. “In fact, however, highly credible empirical temperature data facts, readily available to EPA prior to its endangerment finding invalidate each line of evidence. And temperature data that is now available for the years 2009-2012 further confirms that each line of evidence was invalid.” (SC Amici Brief, SLF v EPA)

      • Sorry, David, this is not correct. Gavin was talking about social models.

      • David Springer

        Mibad pls disregard

      • Jim Cripwell
        Erroneous assumptions have equally caused erroneous climate predictions – i.e., ALL 4 IPCC reports projected global temperatures much higher than consequent global temperatures. That is a systemic egregious bias that has not been dealt with.
        Note the challenge of detecting major vs minor vs little anthropogenic warming in the face of warming from the LIA, millennial scale climate oscillations, climate persistence, chaos, few model runs, and major missing physics.
        We have not yet even begun serious verification and validation of GCMs. To date, those models have shown very poor skill.

      • Progressives engage in situational mathematics. Uncertain assumptions underlying mathematical models render their outputs uncertain, except when it comes to climate science.

      • Peter Lang

        Davide Springer,

        So, according to your own standards (see some quotes below from yesterday) you lied, eh?

        Note Lang’s first response to my question was to just make something up out of whole cloth. Don’t trust a f*cking thing this jagoff says.

        Followed by:

        What’s that make him an honest liar? He lied. He knew he was lying. To add insult to injury if he really didn’t know what happens when a spent fuel containment pool loses its water he an imbecile as well as a liar. Everyone with a modicum of interest in nuclear power safety and a triple digit IQ knows what happens. About a zillion people watched “The China Syndrome” after 3-mile island. It’s common knowledge.

        Then by:

        Some of us, unlike Lang who suddenly found an honest bone in his body and admitted he knew nothing about radiological terrorism, know it will render areas the size of large states uninhabitable.

        What a nut case!

        By the way, what would be the effect of a cruise missile strike on the 15 dry storage concrete canisters holding the high level waste from Yankee Rowe?
        http://www.yankeerowe.com/
        http://www.nukeworker.com/pictures/displayimage-94-5205.html
        http://www.storenuclearfuel.com/current-sites/yankee-rowe/

        Mine is a genuine question for anyone who would like to answer it.

      • Re coteries predictions …

        whether a blip in the Five – Year – Plan,
        or fifteen – year – projections in weather,
        or even month – of – March – predictions
        of April’s showers by climate – modellers
        in cloud – towers whiling away the
        tenured hours, … are fraught with
        un -certain – tease.

        B-t-c-g

      • David Springer

        I wasn’t answering a question, Lang.

        Let me ask you another one. When you were answering my question and said the effect of a cruise missile breaching a dry spent fuel storage cask would be

        Negligible effect over the long term.

        Did you have some basis for that and if so what was that basis?

        Here’s the basis for what I wrote that you compare as a lie like yours:

        “Climate modeler Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS comments on the failure of models to match real world observations.”

        A frank admission about the state of modeling by Dr. Gavin Schmidt

        Posted on June 1, 2013by Anthony Watts

        This is something I never expected to see in print. Climate modeler Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS comments on the failure of models to match real world observations.

        Gavin is a climate modeler. I lept to an erroneous conclusion that he was talking about climate models.

        Your turn to explain how your response about the cruise missile was an honest mistake rather than a lie. Good luck.

      • Say, what are blogs good for?
        http://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/what-are-blogs-good-for-anyway-fer-serfs/
        Fer serfs blogs mean that powerful coteries, like the IPCC,
        f’r instance, can’t choose what information gets out there.

      • It is good for any model to fail. We know more about the model.

      • Peter Lang

        DS asked,

        Did you have some basis for that and if so what was that basis?

        Well, just some background knowledge and thinking along the following lines.

        First the disclaimer: I have no knowledge about the consequences of a cruise missile hitting the sixteen dry canisters which contain the high-level waste from the now decommissioned Yankee Rowe nuclear power station.

        Having said, that I’ll now play with some numbers and seek input from others who would know much mare about this than I do
        [First, please look at the 8 minute video here: http://www.yankeerowe.com/fuel.html ]

        All the SNF from Yankee Rowe was transferred to the on-site ISFSI by June 2003 pursuant to a general license. The ISFSI contains 15 dry storage casks holding 533 SNF assemblies, and one cask containing Greater-Than-Class-C waste (GTCC) from decommissioning activities. … An excellent video of the process utilized at Yankee Rowe to transfer the SNF from the wet fuel pool to dry cask storage is provided below.
        Yankee Rowe SNF — Pool to Cask Video http://www.yankeerowe.com/assets/multimedia/Dry_Fuel_Storage.wmv
        Additional information regarding Yankee Rowe can be found at the following websites:
        http://www.yankeerowe.com/index.html
        http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/decommissioning/power-reactor/yankee-rowe.html

        My assumptions:

        1. Cruise missile strike breaks some or all of the canisters and disperses say 10% of the high level waste (HLW) over a radius of up to 2 km, (perhaps 10 km).

        2. The HLW is solid and contains little or any of the volatiles that were dispersed from the operating power plants at Chernobyl and Fukushima. So we are dealing with solid fragments (with properties somewhat like the radioactive material that was left after the nuclear bomb test explosions in the Australian desert and cleaned up decades later).

        3. There is 110 tons of solid, dry HLW in the canisters.

        4. The HLW might release say up to 5 TBq/kg as a rough estimate given its time since it was removed from the reactor.

        Total radioactivity = 110,000 kg x 5 TBq/kg = 550,000 TBq

        5. Assume 1% to 10% is released and dispersed = 5,500 to 55,000 TBq

        6. Maximum radius of ejected pieces of HLW = 2 km

        Compare with: 12,000 TBq released by Fukushima to the atmosphere (all volatiles)
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Contamination

        There were no casualties caused by radiation exposure, while approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima are predicted to be extremely low to none.[16]

        In 2013, two years after the incident, the World Health Organization indicated that the residents of the area who were evacuated were exposed to so little radiation that radiation induced health impacts are likely to be below detectable levels.[149] The health risks in the WHO assessment attributable to the Fukushima radiation release were calculated by largely applying the conservative Linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, a model that assumes even the smallest amount of radiation exposure will cause a negative health effect.[150]

        I expect the fragments of solid HLW that would be dispersed by a cruise missile attack would be much easier to find and clean up than the volatiles (iodine and caesium) released from Fukushima.

        Comments welcome.

      • Peter Lang

        Wow,

        So not a single comment on this eh? Not a murmur or acknowledgement that he may be wrong from the arrogant, and incessantly rude and abusive Springer (another IT geek).

      • David Springer

        Responses to this are a lot of “correlation does not equal causation”.

        True enought. But it’s usually more fruitful looking for cause and effect when they’re correlated then when they’re not correlated.

        I suppose looking for cause and effect where there’s no correlation might explain how it was that CO2 came to be investigated as a cause of global warming. Ha.

      • David Springer

        Above belongs after the next comment on halogens not here.

      • David Springer

        Interesting paper on added CO2 making arid regions greener (another bonus from human CO2 emissions)..

        This could explain why the percentage of CO2 released by humans which “remains” in the atmosphere is diminishing by around 1%-age point per decade, from around 55% over the period 1959-1990 to just above 50% over the period 1990-2010.
        http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8344/8200196434_ebb7559913_b.jpg

        The “standard” (consensus) explanation is that the ocean is absorbing the balance, but I always thought it did not make sense for a supposedly warming ocean to be absorbing a higher amount of CO2 from the atmosphere over time.

        Now it looks like plants are gobbling it up.

        Max

      • Study sees climate upside in greening arid regions

        Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a “fertilization effect” on plants in arid regions that has contributed to the flourishing of foliage there, Australian researchers report.

        […]

        What actually happened? Satellites showed an 11% increase in foliage after adjusting data for precipitation.

        […]

        Donohue said the “fertilization effect” could also alter the types of vegetation in dry areas. “Trees are re-invading grass lands, and this could quite possibly be related to the CO2 effect,” he said.. “Long lived woody plants are deep rooted and are likely to benefit more than grasses from an increase in CO2.”

        CO2 fertilisation has increased maximum foliage cover across the globe’s warm, arid environments

        [1] Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the ‘CO2 fertilization’ effect – the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels – is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analysed to remove the effect of variations in rainfall, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilisation effect is now a significant land surface process.

    • David Springer

      High impact Int. J. Mod. Phys. B publishes paper claiming halogens responsible for post-1970 warming and post-2000 pause in warming

      Abstract:

      This study is focused on the effects of cosmic rays (solar activity) and halogen-containing molecules (mainly chlorofluorocarbons — CFCs) on atmospheric ozone depletion and global climate change. Brief reviews are first given on the cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced-reaction (CRE) theory for O3 depletion and the warming theory of halogenated molecules for climate change. Then natural and anthropogenic contributions to these phenomena are examined in detail and separated well through in-depth statistical analyses of comprehensive measured datasets of quantities, including cosmic rays (CRs), total solar irradiance, sunspot number, halogenated gases (CFCs, CCl4 and HCFCs), CO2, total O3, lower stratospheric temperatures and global surface temperatures. For O3 depletion, it is shown that an analytical equation derived from the CRE theory reproduces well 11-year cyclic variations of both polar O3 loss and stratospheric cooling, and new statistical analyses of the CRE equation with observed data of total O3 and stratospheric temperature give high linear correlation coefficients ≥ 0.92. After the removal of the CR effect, a pronounced recovery by 20~25% of the Antarctic O3 hole is found, while no recovery of O3 loss in mid-latitudes has been observed. These results show both the correctness and dominance of the CRE mechanism and the success of the Montreal Protocol. For global climate change, in-depth analyses of the observed data clearly show that the solar effect and human-made halogenated gases played the dominant role in Earth’s climate change prior to and after 1970, respectively. Remarkably, a statistical analysis gives a nearly zero correlation coefficient (R = -0.05) between corrected global surface temperature data by removing the solar effect and CO2 concentration during 1850–1970. In striking contrast, a nearly perfect linear correlation with coefficients as high as 0.96–0.97 is found between corrected or uncorrected global surface temperature and total amount of stratospheric halogenated gases during 1970–2012. Furthermore, a new theoretical calculation on the greenhouse effect of halogenated gases shows that they (mainly CFCs) could alone result in the global surface temperature rise of ~0.6°C in 1970–2002. These results provide solid evidence that recent global warming was indeed caused by the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic halogenated gases. Thus, a slow reversal of global temperature to the 1950 value is predicted for coming 5~7 decades. It is also expected that the global sea level will continue to rise in coming 1~2 decades until the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar O3 hole recovery; after that, both will drop concurrently. All the observed, analytical and theoretical results presented lead to a convincing conclusion that both the CRE mechanism and the CFC-warming mechanism not only provide new fundamental understandings of the O3 hole and global climate change but have superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional models.

      full paper preprint (no paywall alternate link for those without access to int. journal of modern physics B) @ arxiv.org

      http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1210/1210.6844.pdf

      • “CO2 concentration,” he cried most heedfully…

      • If Lu is correct then our work to reduce halocarbon emission has probably been worth it, yet we don’t know whether his conjecture is right. The following is my attempt at duplicating his work.

        Lu doesn’t actually show the halocarbon plot in his arxiv paper
        and so get the Northern Hemisphere halocarbon data from here.
        http://water.usgs.gov/lab/software/air_curve
        I totaled up the rows since 1940 (it started at 0 in 1940). The offsets don’t matter as Lu is doing a linear regression fit between Halocarbon concentration and Temperature anomaly. I used the HadCrut3 global, with a 3 year smooth and ½ year interval to match the halocarbon interval.

        my graph of Lu’s results
        http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/2830/17272572.gif

        The important point is that Lu has a lag on halocarbon concentration so that today’s temperature is correlated with the halocarbon concentration from 9 years ago. If you don’t do this the regression is really bad, which is the top figure in the image link. As he states:

        ”In Fig. 10F (and Fig. 10C), a 9-year delay in halocarbon concentrations in the stratosphere from surface-based measurements must be applied, otherwise, global surface temperature would show a sharp rise with high total halocarbon concentrations above 1100 ppt (1.1 ppb).”

        The middle and bottom show the correlation when I add the 9 year correction. As is, without all the solar corrections, I get the same R value of between 0.96 and 0.97 he got (sneaky that he doesn’t use R^2).

        If global average temperature starts going up, his argument that all of global warming is caused by halocarbons will go in the dumpster. However that does not mean that a portion of the global warming is not caused by this GHG. According to the consensus model, 1/3 of the 3 degree per doubling is caused by other GHGs and albedo that is associated with increasing CO2. We probably did knock some of the GHG effect off with reductions in halocarbons.

      • And now we’re predicting seven decades of global cooling. Sounds like a new consensus.

      • David Springer

        Only time will tell, Dr. PeePee. It’s reassuring that you’re coming around to my way of thinking in that predictions of the future are tested by future observations. Neat how that works, huh?

      • Amazing how contrived a scenario that QP Lu has to concoct. He requires a 9 year delay between a value of atmospheric halocarbons and the global temperature for the two to correlate.

        The ocean heat content will likely need a longer delay to match as that still is rising.

        Reducing the amount of halocarbons was probably a good thing, much like removing lead from the gasoline. Incidentally, the delay between lead reduction and crime rate reduction is easily explained by the time it takes a lead poisoned child to be charged with adult crimes. The nine year delay for halocarbon to temperature change is inscrutable in comparison.

      • None of the usual suspects has yet cried that CFCs are trace gases measured in parts per trillion, so how could they have such an effect on global atmospheric temperature?

      • Figure 8, p.14. What a hellish presentation. When the caption gets that big and convoluted one need to revise the accompanying text–can anyone but anyone make a cogent presentation in climate science!

        Figure 10F. Why report R (which) and p value? Issues with residuals distribution; and reporting the numbers without regression diagnostics (and discussion) may be misleading. Giving R (which?) and giving p-val* one really is inviting inference–you want inference? conditions have to be met. As a group, ‘scientists’ really stink at statistics, and that is ashamed because modelling physical data should not be the domain solely of statistics.

        Still interesting physics…

        Note regarding some earlier observations by others: Lu does address the 9 year lag (whether one agrees or not with approach); Same forCO2 saturation.

        Enough.

        * At least Lu does present the p-val–more than seen in most presentations.

  2. http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/31/18663732-more-oklahoma-twisters-latest-outbreak-fits-tornado-alleys-pattern?lite

    vs.

    http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/climatesnapshot/climate-change-wild-card-tornado-seasons-smash-records

    When the data is of too poor quality to draw valid conclusions by usual methods, there is room for debate.

    My point in debate: Tornado Alley deserves no assistance of any sort for weather disasters. This is a well-established pattern. They can either build resiliently or self-insure, or move out of the way. Climate change or not, there’s no justification for aid to Oklahoma, as sorry as I am to hear of their hardship. It’s hardship they have every possible advantage of forewarning from.

    • The US is big enough to afford a few billion dollars here or there for these types of disasters. However, aid should be conditional on resilient rebuilding (tornado shelters, etc.). If these costs are showing an upward trend, it is either due to population growth or climate change, and these trends need to be factored into budgets.

      • David Wojick

        What is a tornado shelter and how much do they cost? Are you proposing that everyone has one? Is this part of the aid or a condition for the aid? Is FEMA supposed to build tornado shelters for everyone in Oklahoma? How about Kansas, or Virginia? Just asking because resilient is a weasel word, nice but empty.

      • depends

        I have a good friend who lives in OKC. His house, built in the 1930s, has a stairwell in the kitchen that goes down to a safe room built underneath his concrete driveway.

      • No, it’s what economists call a moral hazard. People without insurance and/or other resilience should be SOL. Except, perhaps, for enough food and water to get back on their feet. Every time this happens, more people in other places do the same thing, expecting the same aid. The only way to stop it is either let people actually see that those who don’t take accountability for their own resilience suffer the consequences, or use a morass of laws and regulations to try to force them.

      • There is a policy in Oklahoma that new schools have tornado-proof areas, and when rebuilding houses they need to consider tornado-proof rooms or underground shelters. It is a small addition to the house price, and probably a good selling point.

      • David Wojick

        All houses are resilient by definition. It is called shelter as in food, clothing and shelter. Having a safe room underground cannot be a condition for receiving aid since few can afford such a luxury. Nor can all houses be built to withstand 200 mile per hour winds, especially house trailers.The point is that there are already levels of resilience so calling for resilience per se is meaningless (a weasel word is one that sounds nice but is so vague as to be meaningless in the context). Arguments that resilience should be increased need to be specific and defensible.

      • AK, so what would you say about earthquake zones like Los Angeles and San Francisco? Or, how about freak weather occurrences? Is it always everyone for themselves, or should a large nation share the costs with the idea that everyone feels more secure, whatever freak event may occur in their area?

      • The return time for a house-destroying tornado at a point in tornado alley is, I estimate, hundreds of years, so people live with that level of risk, and the odds are against them being affected in their lifetime. Higher risks are associated with flood areas, some earthquake zones, and coastal zones where hurricanes make landfall. Perspective is needed before abandoning these people.

      • @Jim D…

        AK, so what would you say about earthquake zones like Los Angeles and San Francisco? Or, how about freak weather occurrences?

        That’s what insurance is for. If you don’t pay the premiums, you don’t get the protection. In most states, the insurance market is regulated, but there’s usually considerable competition. There’s no reason people who don’t pay the premiums should freeload at the expense of those who do. It isn’t as though it makes a difference in their taxes.

      • @David Wojick…

        The point is that there are already levels of resilience so calling for resilience per se is meaningless (a weasel word is one that sounds nice but is so vague as to be meaningless in the context). Arguments that resilience should be increased need to be specific and defensible.

        Insurance may not add resilience to the house, but it adds resilience to your access to “shelter as in food, clothing and shelter.” Not only that, but in a competitive insurance market providers will have incentive to offer lower rates for structures that, by their estimation, are less susceptible to damage. Because it’s a competitive market, nobody will be locked into a single mandated, possibly obsolete or erroneous, definition of structural resilience.

      • @Jim D…

        There is a policy in Oklahoma that new schools have tornado-proof areas, and when rebuilding houses they need to consider tornado-proof rooms or underground shelters. It is a small addition to the house price, and probably a good selling point.

        There ought to be a policy that new schools and other “public” constructions must be insured against damage, injury, and loss of life. As for private homeowners, insurance rates will reflect construction. In a freely competitive market.

      • David Wojick

        There’s resilience and resilience. From what we could see from the TV pictures a good proportion of the destroyed Oklahoma houses looked flimsy by British standards (which are invariably built of a double layer of Brick to form the external wall or Brick/breeze block, all tied in to deep foundations. Of course it could be that ANY house would look flimsy after being hit by a tornado so my impression might be wrong.

        tonyb

      • tonyb – here is an article about tornado proofing.

        They do research on that at Texas Tech University, which is in the region where many of these storms form.

        I doubt your home would fare as well as you think. The first tornado I can remember hit a town close to ours called Mitchell. Dad loaded us in the car to go see the damage. It picked a freight train off the tracks and scattered box cars and the locomotives around like toys.

        Corn is the ticket. The Corn Palace, encased in corn cobs, was undamaged.

      • climatereason, ” Of course it could be that ANY house would look flimsy after being hit by a tornado so my impression might be wrong.”

        Yep, a tornado can take loaded truck and drop in on a house or take a 2×4 and drive it through a telephone pole. Schools like the one destroyed are often built to double as shelters, so they don’t have “tornado safe rooms” because they are already supposed to be safe or at least safer than most buildings. You can build to withstand winds of 150 miles per hour, but not everything that 150+ mph winds can pick up and throw through stuff you build. Because of that, a ditch, culvert or any kind of under ground spot makes a fine tornado shelter.

      • JCH

        Thanks for the link about tornado proofing your home.

        To this day (I think) the Swiss have to have a nuclear bunker installed at their home or have ready access to one

        http://www.thecasualtruth.com/story/switzerland%E2%80%99s-bizarre-nuclear-bunker-law

        A nuclear war is something of an existential threat whereby it seems tornados on tornado alley are pretty likely.

        Assuming it is impractical to tornado proof your entire home without astronomic cost and making it look very ugly, surely the construction of individual or communal tornado shelters should be compulsory? It should surely be coupled with compulsory insurance in prone areas else you shouldn’t expect the state to pick up the tab for damage. That will take years of course to implement but you need to start somewhere.

        tonyb

      • We had one go through our neighborhood. I do not know how it did it. There was almost no structural damage, but large mature trees just lifted up out of the ground and were dropped close by. They did not appear to be tossed about. Some sort of weird pressure differential. Low profile and younger trees seem unaffected. They said lifted up as the root ball was much larger and a complete circle, unlike when one just lays over.

        Somewhere I read in one this year they found straw stuck into a concrete curb. That’s a common legend; straw stuck through something. There are photographs of it from the past.

      • Household tip for the future: Make your tornado shelter your refrigerator, too.
        ===============

      • “To this day (I think) the Swiss have to have a nuclear bunker installed at their home or have ready access to one.”

        Because if there’s a nuclear war, and your house gets hit by a nuclear bomb, and you don’t have one, the government will levy a really hefty fine. Then where will you be?

    • BartR

      I don’t know Oklahoma at all so assume it must be a nice place which is a prime reason for people wanting to move there.

      We have a similar problem in the UK with people wanting to live by the sea or next to a river. If you move to a road called Flood road or The Strand you should accept more responsibility for what is likely to happen-periodic flooding.

      The trouble is that when people move to the places, they then want protection, which is often at the expense of the older established households who suddenly find their centuries long resistance to flooding is overcome when a new defence wall is built and the shape of the flood plain alters.

      People moving to new property (and the developers) should take more responsibility for their own security and not expect the taxpayer to automatically bail them out.(pun intended)
      tonyb

      • climatereason | June 1, 2013 at 12:33 pm |

        Well and good, but.. weather relief is a sure vote-getter.

        A politician comes in with money after some entirely foreseeable event, he’s a hero. His party will be remembered by voters for generations, fondly.

        A politican says, “Folks, your decisions are your own responsibility; build where you like and how you like but expect no help if your house is built out of straw or sticks on sand; we know the Three Little Pigs, we know the principle of a foundation on a rock, and we have real victims of actual unforeseeable disasters who need the help more.”

        Yeah. He’s not going to get a first term in Dixie Alley or Tornado Alley.

        And if he’d said, “Folks, the Army Corps of Engineers tells us if you keep doing as you’ve been doing, and letting the refineries erode your drainage infrastructure, some day you’ll get a storm that’ll kill 3,000 of you, drive a quarter of you from your homes forever, and visit upon you the worst ever bungling of FEMA and the Executive Office; mend your ways.” Well, he’d have been tarsanded and feathered.

      • climatereason said on June 1, 2013 at 12:33 pm

        “BartR

        “I don’t know Oklahoma at all so assume it must be a nice place which is a prime reason for people wanting to move there.”
        _____

        Oklahoma is a nice place. People want to move there.

        HA HA !

      • Well, as we say in Texas, there has to be a place to stuff our rednecked cousins.

    • Everyone lives in harm’s way. Past Disasters are known. Future Disasters can be forecast and we do know how well that works, sometimes does and many times does not.

      If you want someone to receive no assistance and for someone to not be able to get insurance, you should sign up for that yourself.

      Some of the best places to make a good living or enjoy a good life are dangerous places. If you found a place that was really safe, you could not crowd the world population in that place.

      Humans have always and always will push it to the limits. We need to help each other when we can.

      More people are killed in car accidents every year than in natural disasters. Using your standards, we should stop insuring people who drive or ride in cars.

      • More good sense from Dr Pope.

      • People live close ter volcanoes and on flood
        plains because the soil is fertile. When yer a
        serf livin’ on the littoral, yer sometimes yer
        need ter do jest that, live on it literally.
        Bts

      • @Herman Alexander Pope…

        Humans have always and always will push it to the limits. We need to help each other when we can.

        If you want to help, go ahead. You have no business robbing other people to help.

        More people are killed in car accidents every year than in natural disasters. Using your standards, we should stop insuring people who drive or ride in cars.

        Let them insure themselves. That’s what almost everybody does.

    • David Springer

      @BartR

      If you’re consistent you’re against Obamacare too because getting sick or injured is as predictable as OK twisters.

      • David Springer | June 1, 2013 at 6:03 pm |

        That is an intriguing argument. One of the weaker arguments against Obamacare (or as it was previously called, Dolecare), but an interesting perspective on moral hazard.

        No person can stop living, and keep living.

        Any person can leave Oklahoma and keep living.

        No person can avoid forever the way of all flesh, but in time all men’s bodies turn to corruption, and it is a profound goodness to be cared for in one’s weakness and infirmity, David Springer.

        And while not all persons can choose to call home something built to tornado-resisting standards, and a tornado is a thing of terror, panic, surprise and power few people appreciate until they see what mere air can do when moved to violence.. we see in Oklahoma’s political representatives a strident and stubborn refusal to take warning or precaution, to provide their people with better options against this eventuality, and a constant and unremitting single approach to tornado damage: demand others bail them out.

        If Oklahoma and Dixie kept their own houses in order, I’d be less hostile to its continued begging after every twister. If it happens to you over a thousand times a year, and it happens that way for over a century (well, I’m exaggerating: we only know of frequency above a thousand recently).. you really ought take better measures than building more trailer parks.

      • David Springer

        Ooooh nice prevarication.

        But let’s extend your logic. You say one can choose to not live in Oklahoma and thus avoid the twisters. For the sake of argument I’ll accept that premise. One can also avoid becoming overweight, one can avoid eating foods containing know carcinogens, one can avoid leaving one’s home, one can avoid tripping and falling, and one can in similar fashion avoid many injuries and illnesses. One can wear a surgical mask in public to avoid contagious airborne diseases.

        Therefore, by your logic, Obamacare should not cover anything where the claimant could have conceivably avoided the illness or injury. Right?

      • David Springer | June 2, 2013 at 7:45 am |

        You keep trying to twister up a rehash of the least clear possible model to discuss a much simpler situation.

        I could not give a flying rats hindquarters about the Dolecare debate, one way or the other. It’s simply not my issue. At all. The embarassment caused America during the height of that sordid little example of bad government decision-making, legistlative inefficiency and political stupidity called the Health Care Debate serves the USA poorly to recite, from one side or the other. If you really need to play with this junk topic, I’m sure there’s some other weblog where you can trot around the dirty underwear of past decision-making incompetency unrelated to Climate Etc.

        If you do go there, perhaps I might suggest that appealing to an argument against subsidizing people who stand slack-jawed in the path of tornadoes might not play well among what is sure to be an audience largely from the most slack-jawed parts of Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley. Especially as there might be stronger arguments against the Dolecare plan. Like for example the moral hazard Dolecare could be shown statistically to be causing among people who eat themselves fat or drink themselves stupid because they know they’ll be taken care of.. if you could provide a link to such statistical support for your position.

        The rest of your argument ad absurdum fails on straw man. I’m not against helping someone rebuild, say by maintaining a strong market for available labor and materials with reasonable loans backed by relevant and fair-priced insurance, where the victim of unforeseeable events is an unfortunate pawn of Chance. I’m just against being a crutch to enable someone to retrash good capital time and again, wasting good labor, by write-off and taxation, Inhofe’s favorite ploy.

  3. We should get the UAH global temperatures for May 2013 on Monday or Tuesday. Wouldn’t it be fun if the anomaly turned out to be negative!

  4. Wouldn’t it be fun if the anomaly turned out to be positive!

    ONI is drifting back to zero from La Nina lite.

  5. Wouldn”t it be fun if everybody realized that next month’s UAH temperature report will tell us absolutely nothing one way or another about globalclimatewarmingchange?

    • You mean, a month with no global temperature recovery whatsoever? Unheard of.

      • First, we can’t really measure global average temperature to within tenths of a degree anyway in my opinion.

        Second, I suspect that even in ice ages, there were months in which temperatures rose, some in which they fell, and and others in which they stayed the same. The same probably held true for years, and perhaps decades.

        Color me unimpressed by short term trends as evidence of anything on a long term scale. Either way.

        The most that can be said of recent temperature trend reports is that they conflict with the hyperbolic claims of the consensus, and undermine their use of short term phenomena to prove their case. They do nothing to prove the contrary in my opinion.

      • Gary, you write “The most that can be said of recent temperature trend reports is that they conflict with the hyperbolic claims of the consensus, and undermine their use of short term phenomena to prove their case. They do nothing to prove the contrary in my opinion.”

        Fair enough. But the question no warmist seems to be willing to answer is:-

        How long do we wait for global temperatures to start rising as rapidly as CAGW demands, before we conclude that CAGW is wrong?

      • Jim Cripwell,

        I can predict their answer without a model. Not in their lifetime. Or at least, not until they have found another armageddonish issue to take CAGW’s place.

      • The decade on decade average of all of the series is still rising by 0.15 C per decade, so I would first wait for that to stop before starting to even count years. That is, the last decade is 0.15 degrees warmer than the previous decade (you can choose any end points in the last decade or so).

      • Alexej Buergin

        “GaryM | June 1, 2013 at 1:15 pm |
        First, we can’t really measure global average temperature to within tenths of a degree anyway in my opinion.”

        Spencer agrees.
        But the changes of temperature can be measured quite precise.

      • Jim D

        the last decade is 0.15 degrees warmer than the previous decade

        Sure.

        The amount of warming over the previous decade was greater than the slight cooling of the last decade, so, by definition, the absolute values of the current decade are higher – even though we are in a slight cooling trend.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/uah/from:2003/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2003/trend/plot/rss-land/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:2003/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2003/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2003/trend

        Plain old arithmetic at work, Jim.

        Max

      • manacker, your trend in the previous decade is because it ended with the 1998 super El Nino and a steady temperature maintaining that warming until 2002. This decade had no super El Nino but still ended up easily warmer on average. Trends like this are so distorted by these short annual events, which is why decadal average temperatures are the thing to look at, not short-term trends. I remember in 1998, everyone thought that was a freakish year, and cooling would follow, but it became the new normal. How perceptions change.

    • Gary, you write “Wouldn”t it be fun if everybody realized that next month’s UAH temperature report will tell us absolutely nothing one way or another about globalclimatewarmingchange?”

      You are, of course, quite right. However, IF CGAW is real, then sooner or later there will have to be several months where the global temperatures start to rise rapidly. One month will not tell us very much. As a old adage goes, when you run a marathon, you have to start with a single step. When will we see the first signs of CAGW occurring?

      • Or, how about the first signs of global warming instead of cooling over the last 10,000 years?

      • Jim Cripwell,

        I am no supporter of CAGW by any means. But I don’t see why there would have to be any particular change in temp, rapid or otherwise, in the near future, the absence of which would “falsify” CAGW. My layman’s view of climate is that it is a massive, chaotic system, with elements of natural variability (AMO, PDO etc.) that we know about that have huge effects over years, that could easily swamp and AGW.

        I assume, given how little man knows about his own world so far, that there are other forms of unknown variability, cycles, be their earthbound or solar, that can have large (when speaking in terms of a degree or two of warming or cooling) effects over periods of decades or more.

        I just don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either.

        Moreover, I take my understanding of the timing of the C in CAGW from the more rational, though still Chicken Littleish, types like Gavin Schmidt. The sky is going to fall, but not right away. Gavin has said the warming to date has been modest. And while the models predict an imminent rapid rise, the failure of such a rise COULD mean that they have simply underestimated natural variability but otherwise are correct.

        So, short of some cataclysmic, Cecile B. DeMille style event ala The Day After Tomorrow, I don’t think there is anything that could happen in the next month, or year, or probably decade, that would “prove” or “disprove” CAGW. Not in so far as weather is concerned at least.

        I am a skeptic because I don’t think the consensus scientists know anywhere near what they claim they know, at least with the certainty and precision they claim. That does not mean that I think I know more than they do.

      • Gary, you write “I just don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either.”

        Thank you for your answer, and I agree completely. The trouble is, how do we get the warmists to agree that they just dont know?

      • GaryM you wrote
        I am a skeptic because I don’t think the consensus scientists know anywhere near what they claim they know, at least with the certainty and precision they claim. That does not mean that I think I know more than they do.
        The real problem is, they know a lot of stuff that is just plain wrong.
        When model output forecasts temperatures that do not occur for two decades, it is clear that there is something really important that they don’t know and I think they really don’t even suspect.

      • Jim Cripwell said on June 1, 2013 at 1:15 pm
        ” One month will not tell us very much. As a old adage goes, when you run a marathon, you have to start with a single step. When will we see the first signs of CAGW occurring?”
        _____

        A few months can mold the cherries a cherry picker has picked.

  6. The meaning of the word “resilience” is being stretched beyond the limits of its…well…resilience.

    May this word die a quick and painless death in the climate debate.

    • […] a new idea, resilience: how to help vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions.

      getting compensated for damage from “unforeseeable disruptions” should certainly add resilience. May this word die a quick and painless death in the climate debate. It won’t. “Sustainability” has been overused to death. Resilience is clearer, easier to define.

      • Let’s try that again:

        […] a new idea, resilience: how to help vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions.

        getting compensated for damage from “unforeseeable disruptions” should certainly add resilience.

        May this word die a quick and painless death in the climate debate.

        It won’t. “Sustainability” has been overused to death. Resilience is clearer, easier to define.

      • AK,

        See, your comment shows the problem. The term is being used, as sustainability was, to mean pretty much whatever the writer means at the time. Thus losing real meaning. For progressives, this is intentional. They love terms like “fairness” and “for the children,” for the specific reason that they have no definite meaning.

        In your comment, you write that “getting compensated for damage from ‘unforeseeable disruptions’ should certainly add resilience.”

        So a policy of taking money from one group of people, and giving it to another, is justified as a form of “resilience.” Not taxation. Not resdistribution. Not social welfare. But the innocuous term “resilience.”

        (Not to mention you are using “compensate” which implies recompense for damages from the person causing the damage. Which is getting close to Bart R territory.)

        English is a full and varied language. There are sufficient words already to describe every aspect of the climate debate, without bastardizing yet another perfectly serviceable word.

      • @GaryM…

        I was talking about insurance, which I regard as part of a smart individual’s policy of resilience. And businesses. Smart, or required to have it by their counterparties, such as customers, vendors, lenders, etc.

      • AK,

        This is the problem with semantic debates. They lead to ever increasing issues.

        Resilience, properly used, is an attribute, not a policy, which is one of the problems I have with the primary post on the issue earlier here.

        “Sustainability” seems to be used as a proxy for mitigation, and “resilience” for adaptation. So why change? Why not leave the poor words alone?

        CAGWers adopted “sustainability” because..well..they just keep thinking if they just reframe their policies with a nifty new word, voters will suddenly endorse wholesale global economic suicide.

        If you want to talk about insurance, talk about insurance. If you want to talk about insurance as a policy of adapting to globalclimatewarmingchange, then do so. But why enslave yet another innocent word as a foot soldier in the never ending semantics of the climate debate?

        “’Sustainability’ has been overused to death. Resilience is clearer, easier to define.”

        No, they were both easily and clearly defined. Sustainability has indeed been overused to death. I am just trying to stop the semantic Kervorkians of the climate debate from doing the same thing to poor resilience.

      • @GaryM…

        Resilience, properly used, is an attribute, not a policy, which is one of the problems I have with the primary post on the issue earlier here.

        Attributes don’t exist by themselves, they’re always attached to something. When I think of resilience, I think of an attribute of my own (or somebody’s) lifestyle/survival. Things like insurance, with several different companies, putting money in accounts with several different banks, a few bars of gold buried in the back yard, backup generators, stores of food, clean water, bottled gas, etc. When I see somebody using the word in a different context, I work from analogy from there.

        Buildings, for instance, might be resilient not by being tornado-proof, but by being of modular construction, so damaged parts could be easily removed and replaced. I remember reading of buildings in ancient Rome where the lowest levels were expected to survive the frequent flooding of the Tiber, people would just clean out all the mud and move stuff back down from upper floors. Traditional Japanese construction, IIRC, involved light wooden frames and rice paper, so that when earthquake or fire destroyed it rebuilding was cheap and easy. And so on.

        I am just trying to stop the semantic Kervorkians of the climate debate from doing the same thing to poor resilience.

        That’s a lost cause. From as long ago as ancient Greece (at least) to today, political manipulators have latched onto any verbal formula with importance in people’s minds to misuse for the sake of their own agenda.

        The whole “climate debate” fits this mold. The potential risks from increased pCO2 are hardly limited to its effect on climate as a greenhouse gas, while the potential risks of increased greenhouse effect on climate are small compared to the risks present from natural variation. “Climate” is basically a stalking horse for a bunch of Marxists and fellow travelers who want to reverse the Industrial Revolution.

        Nobody really knows how big a part fossil fuel emissions play in increasing pCO2, relative to cutting down mature forests, land use changes, draining swamps, whaling and overfishing, marine pollution, and a host of other things that could have been affecting the carbon balance in an ecosystem that routinely emits and absorbs orders of magnitude more CO2 than the amount of fossil carbon humans burn.

        Nobody knows whether reducing human emissions would actually cause the pCO2 to stop increasing, even if they were originally (primarily) responsible. Nobody really knows what effect increased pCO2 has on the climate, marine ecosystems, or terrestrial ecosystems. What research so far has shown us is like tiny glimpses of the ground seen from a plane flying over a bunch of clouds. Whether the patterns we think we see are what’s really there remains an open question.

        Given all this ignorance and uncertainty, there’s no real justification for using “climate” as an excuse for demanding prohibitive increases in energy prices. The risks of increased pCO2 are best addressed by fostering new technology for energy not dependent on fossil carbon. The risks of climate change are best addressed with resilience.

        As for the role of “government”, that’s going to be a function of people’s thought patterns. Government action isn’t necessary to foster resilience, if everybody wants it. For that matter, if everybody wants “sustainable” energy, government action isn’t even necessary for that. There are other ways wealth can be invested in the R&D necessary for bringing solar power on-line. But many people are used to thinking of that as “government’s” function, so that’s how they address their demands.

      • tcf, notice this agnosis.
        =================

      • AK,

        “That’s a lost cause.”

        No way, Jose.

        You can’t surrender for me. I agree with you 100% that the Orwellian derangement of the language is one of the primary tools of the left. That is why it is essential not to give up on the cause of clarity of language.

        Taxes are not investments.
        Climate change is a vacuous term.
        Social justice is neither social nor just.
        The only estimates that are measurements, are measurements.

        Look, the semantic battles have raged on this blog too, trying to censor the C from CAGW, and make “denier” a slur equal to…well…Christian (shudder), for instance. And they have been lost. CAGW is still in common use, and they have had to neuter their use of the word “denier” by denying they mean the very slur it was intended to convey.

        The climate debate is just one front in the progressive’s drive toward centralized control of the economy (and for some, the polity – see eg. Thomas Friedman’s pining for the Communist Chinese style of government). Healthcare, education, immigration amnesty, and perhaps most of all the culture (ie. morality), all are part of the movement.

        It is a serious mistake to cede to them the semantic low ground.

      • @GaryM…

        I agree with you 100% that the Orwellian derangement of the language is one of the primary tools of the left. That is why it is essential not to give up on the cause of clarity of language.

        I’ve studied semantics from both sides: language and neurology, and as far as I can see, they’re simply taking advantage of a natural process. Are you old enough to remember when “awesome” meant something besides “pretty good”? When I was in school, “convince” and “persuade” were the big things. And “nauseous”. And so on. I suspect you simply notice this a lot more when you see it used against your positions.

        The climate debate is just one front in the progressive’s drive toward centralized control of the economy[…]

        And have you noticed how Marx&Co. managed to appropriate the word “progress”? “Movement towards a goal or natural endpoint” becomes an essentially Socialists agenda through confusing these two very different meanings and redefining the socialist agenda as the “natural endpoint” of historical evolution. IMO this is a better battle to fight.

    • Peter Lang

      We need a “Resilience Tax”

      Then we might need a tax on the ‘fabulously wealthy’ Elites for excessive “Resiliance”.

      For those who don’t know Australia’s Federal Treasurer (Labor and a life long unionist), Wayne Swan’ has conducted class ware against those he has dubbed the ‘Fabulously Wealthy’. It included miners, investors, business owners (all varieties from small to large) and people with just 1/5 as much superannuation as his fully inflation indexed, defined benefit, taxpayer funded, Parliamentarians’ pension scheme will provide him and his family for life from the time he is (hopefully) kicked out of Parliament in 100 days from now. Cant wait!!

    • GaryM | June 1, 2013 at 3:07 pm |

      While I agree the word resilience is being abused, coming out against children and fairness in the same sentence might warrant less dismissal from a skeptical reader if examples of how “they” abuse these words.

      We don’t need more examples of ‘resilience’ being abused of course; a basketball or mattress is resilient, it doesn’t mean a person who wants to be resilient wants to be bounced, dribbled, thrown through hoops, jumped on or slept on; the past few days have provided us with all the dysresiliency we could ever want.

      But by all means, provide some links to how terribly ‘they’ abuse ‘fairness’ and ‘children’, so we can know what you mean.

  7. The public pays more attention to natural disasters like Oklahoma”s Tornadoes than they do to changes in average global temperature. The same area in central Oklahoma being struck by tornadoes twice in the same month is unusual, and the public may associate unusual with climate change and global warming.

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      It’s unusual for tornadoes to strike the same spot in central Oklahoma twice in one month? That doesn’t sound like the tornado seasons I remember down there.

    • Maxok

      Here in the real world we are certainly paying attention to temperatures but real ones rather than a global composite which doesn’t reflect the climate state of any country

      http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/

      tonyb

      • tonyb, I wouldn’t count on a regression to the mean in that area anytime soon.

        Re your earlier comment about houses in Oklahoma. For many years now, new residential construction in the State has been mostly one-level on concrete slab. I don’t know if slab is common in England.

      • Maxok

        Larger buildings would be on slab but not so smaller domestic houses. Must be terrifying to be in the path of a tornado.i bet you’re glad you didn’t live in the lia or mwp when the weather events were much worse than today. After reading through all the contemporary accounts I would say the weather events in the lia were worse.

        It’s certainly cooling down pretty quickly here in the uk. A global composite average temperature doesn’t reflect the real world
        Tonyb

    • David Springer

      Max_OK | June 1, 2013 at 2:39 pm | Reply

      “The public pays more attention to natural disasters like Oklahoma”s Tornadoes than they do to changes in average global temperature. The same area in central Oklahoma being struck by tornadoes twice in the same month is unusual, and the public may associate unusual with climate change and global warming.”

      In Oklahoma they’re more likely to think they did something to piss God off.

      • Nah. Doesn’t make sense. Nothing’s happened to California.

      • David Springer

        California’s government is going bankrupt. People and businesses are fleeing the state like scalded dogs. I lived in CA from 1975-1993. In my book something bad was happening there and I beat the rush for the exit. Although it was quite a rush even in 1993. There are probably as many people in Austin, TX that moved here from California as there are native Texans. Austin is even nicknamed Silicon Hills after Silicon Valley it’s so similar except for the fact that it doesn’t strangle high tech enterprises and employees with nanny state regulatory laws and burdens.

      • Gee Dave, I mean natural stuff. We know unnatural stuff is happening in CA all the time.

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      Max_OK, that’s the second time this week you responded to one thing I said while asking for evidence for something I didn’t say. Without addressing what I actually said. It isn’t going to work out any better for you this time.

      Acknowledge you’re changing the subject, and we can discuss a new one. Don’t, and you’re just creating a straw man. Again.

      • Brandon, I acknowledge it looks to you like I changed my subject, but actually I was just reshaping my subject. It’s the same subject in a different form.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Max_OK, nonsense. You made a claim. I questioned that claim. You responded by making a new claim without saying anything to indicate a transition between the two claims. The obvious reason for that sort of behavior is to avoid admitting you were wrong with your original claim.

        In any event, what matters is you challenged me to find evidence for an issue I never discussed. That is creating a strawman.

      • Brandon, my posts are loaded with sense.

        I said on June 1, 2013 at 2:39 pm
        “The same area in central Oklahoma being struck by tornadoes twice in the same month is unusual, and the public may associate unusual with climate change and global warming.”

        You replied on June 1, 2013 at 3:03 pm saying “It’s unusual for tornadoes to strike the same spot in central Oklahoma twice in one month? That doesn’t sound like the tornado seasons I remember down there.”

        I then replied to you on June 1, 2103 at 4:28 pm saying
        “Actually, Brandon, it was fatality causing tornadoes in a concentrated area (three counties) twice in 10 days. How many of those can you find in the record?”

        My 4:28 pm reply was (a) a reshaping or refinement of my initial 2:39 pm post, and (b) and an invitation for you to add to it.

        Apparently, you are declining my invitation just as you declined my previous invitation to discuss curve fitting.
        These were not open invitations, so you no longer have the opportunity to discuss these subjects with me.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Max_OK, a “reshaping” of a point is, by definition, a changing of the point. Changing a point means you’re no longer discussing the original point. Your own words say exactly what I’ve described.

        The only claim I discussed was whether or not it is “unusual for tornadoes to strike the same spot in central Oklahoma twice in one month.” I had no reason to discuss the different claim you tried to drag me into discussing, especially when you refuse to admit your original claim was wrong.

        Given I’ve never had any reason to discuss your new claim, I don’t see the point in saying I no longer have the opportunity to discuss it with you. You’re basically saying I don’t have the opportunity to do what I’ve never had any reason to do.

        I can’t say I’m saddened at missing out on the opportunity to discuss your straw man arguments.

      • Brandon, you obviously are upset about me rescinding my invitation to you to discuss tornado records, or you wouldn’t be wasting your time with yet another unnecessary post.

        Just remember this, Brandon, I regard my invitation as an offer, and if in reply my offer isn’t accepted, my offer is null and void. It’s like contract law. If I offered in writing to sell you my car for $500, and you relied in writing with anything other than an acceptance of my offer, my offer to you automatically becomes null and void, and I have no obligation to sell the car to you if you later offer to pay me $500 or even more for my car. Let this be a lesson to you.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        What are you talking about? How could I possibly be upset you rescinded your offer to discuss a topic I didn’t want to discuss? I’ve repeatedly pointed out I never wanted to talk about the subject you tried to get me to talk about. That’s why I didn’t talk about it!

        How do you go from me trying not to talk about something to me being upset I’m not getting a chance to talk about it?

      • Well, if you never wanted to talk about it, stop talking about it. Continuing to do what you never wanted to do is not healthy.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Max_OK, I can’t stop talking about something if I never talked about it in the first place. To stop talking about it, I’d have to first start talking about it. Only then would I be able to stop talking about it. I think it’d be much simpler for me to just never talk about it. So that’s what I’m going to do.

        It’s worrying you can’t seem to distinguish between a certain set of tornadoes and your behavior. To be clear, I’ve discussed the latter to some extent, but I have not discussed the former. Unless you think your behavior is a tornado, I have not discussed what you say I shouldn’t continue to discuss.

        It might be wise to learn to distinguish between things like “your comments” and “tornadoes.” They’re slightly different.

      • David Springer

        Max_OK | June 2, 2013 at 1:56 am |

        “Just remember this, Brandon, I regard my invitation as an offer, and if in reply my offer isn’t accepted, my offer is null and void. It’s like contract law. If I offered in writing to sell you my car for $500, and you relied in writing with anything other than an acceptance of my offer, my offer to you automatically becomes null and void, and I have no obligation to sell the car to you if you later offer to pay me $500 or even more for my car. Let this be a lesson to you.”

        I’m pretty certain “Max_OK” is not able to enter into contracts. Max_OK is a fiction not a legal entity. Let that be a lesson to you, Max_OK, whoever you are.

      • David Springer

        Max_OK | June 2, 2013 at 1:56 am |

        “Just remember this, Brandon, I regard my invitation as an offer, and if in reply my offer isn’t accepted, my offer is null and void. It’s like contract law. If I offered in writing to sell you my car for $500, and you relied in writing with anything other than an acceptance of my offer, my offer to you automatically becomes null and void, and I have no obligation to sell the car to you if you later offer to pay me $500 or even more for my car. Let this be a lesson to you.”

        I’m pretty certain “Max_OK” is not able to enter into contracts. Max_OK is a fiction not a legal entity. Let that be a lesson to you, Max_OK, whoever or whatever you are.

        *correction in bold – I lept to an unwarranted conclusion :-)

  8. tonyb,

    I always took Trenberth’s comment regarding the “missing heat” to be a tacit admission that the “global average temperature” is nothing of the kind.

    • GaryM

      For sure ‘global’ temperatures are as useful as a global averaged telephone number (I just rang it and you didn’t answer-are you out at an internet café?)

      The world is composed of a number of ‘Koppen’ climate zones and lumping them all together is a pointless exercise as they all react in different ways to changing weather/climate. There is no such thing as ‘global’ warming, it is regional.

      I am still waiting for Mosh to produce his papers on those stations that are cooling. Richard Mueller agreed with me that it was around one third of all stations but there are lots of caveats.
      tonyb

      • Steven Mosher

        The world is composed of a number of ‘Koppen’ climate zones and lumping them all together is a pointless exercise as they all react in different ways to changing weather/climate. There is no such thing as ‘global’ warming, it is regional.

        Koppen zones are a construct. Look at how they are constructed. These zones dont react differently. They are not things. They do not exist. Physics knows nothing about them. They are labels of convience.

        “I am still waiting for Mosh to produce his papers on those stations that are cooling. Richard Mueller agreed with me that it was around one third of all stations but there are lots of caveats.”

        Hmm. we have a new release coming out that will be a good baseline to work from. 30% of stations are not cooling. I know people continue to latch onto that chart without understanding how and why it was constructed.

      • Mosh

        Look forward to your paper on those areas that are warming, cooling and static.

        The Romans knew about climate zones two thousand years ago. They are not a construct but reflect real world circumstances

        Tonyb

      • Labels of convenience.

        Like global warming. Or climate change. Or climate disruption.

      • David Springer

        Steven Mosher | June 1, 2013 at 5:42 pm |

        “we have a new release coming out that will be a good baseline to work from. 30% of stations are not cooling.”

        What are the other 70% doing?

        Awkward. High?

      • Steven Mosher

        tony

        “The Romans knew about climate zones two thousand years ago. They are not a construct but reflect real world circumstances

        Tonyb.

        Tony they reflect real world circumstances but they are not physical entities.

        All you have to do to see this is to look at the history of the system. Its a human invention.

        Distance is not a human invention. neither is speed, planets? well it depends on your definition..

        “Some climatologists have argued that Köppen’s system could be improved upon. One of the most frequently-raised objections concerns the temperate Group C category, regarded by many as overbroad. Using the 0°C isotherm, New York City, NY and Orlando, FL would both fall into this climate scheme, despite dramatic differences between these 2 locations. In Applied Climatology (first edition published in 1966), John F. Griffiths proposed a new subtropical zone, encompassing those areas with a coldest month of between 6 and 18 °C (43 and 64 °F), effectively subdividing Group C into two nearly equal parts (his scheme assigns the letter B to the new zone, and identifies dry climates with an additional letter immediately following the temperature-based letter).
        Another point of contention involves the dry B climates; the argument here is that their separation by Köppen into only two thermal subsets is inadequate. Those who hold this view (including Griffiths) have suggested that the dry climates be placed on the same temperature continuum as other climates, with the thermal letter being followed by an additional capital letter — S for steppe or W (or D) for desert — as applicable (Griffiths also advances an alternate formula for use as an aridity threshold: R = 160 + 9T, with R equalling the threshold, in millimeters of mean annual precipitation, and T denoting the mean annual temperature in degrees Celsius).
        A third idea is to create a maritime polar or EM zone within Group E to separate relatively mild marine locations (such as the Falkland Islands, and the outer Aleutian Islands) from the colder, continental tundra climates. Specific proposals vary; some advocate setting a coldest-month parameter, such as −7 °C (19 °F), while others support assigning the new designation to areas with an average annual temperature of above 0 °C.
        The accuracy of the 10 °C warmest-month line as the start of the polar climates has also been questioned; Otto Nordenskiöld, for example, devised an alternate formula: W = 9 − 0.1 C, with W representing the average temperature of the warmest month and C that of the coldest month, both in degrees Celsius (for instance, if the coldest month averaged −20 °C, a warmest-month average of 11 °C or higher would be necessary to prevent the climate from being polar). This boundary does appear to more closely follow the tree line, or the latitude poleward of which trees cannot grow, than the 10 °C warmest-month isotherm; the former tends to run poleward of the latter near the western margins of the continents, but at a lower latitude in the landmass interiors, the two lines crossing at or near the east coasts of both Asia and North America.
        Trewartha climate classification scheme [edit]

        The Trewartha climate classification scheme (1966 and 1980 update) is a modified version of the Köppen system, and was an answer to some of the deficiencies of the 1899 Köppen system. The newer Trewartha theme attempts to redefine the middle latitudes in such a way as to be closer to vegetational zoning and genetic climate systems. This change was seen as most effective in Asia and North America, where many areas fell into a single zone (the C climate group). Under the standard Köppen system in the USA for example, western Washington and Oregon are classed into the same climate as southern California, even though the two regions have strikingly different weather and vegetation. The Köppen system also classes Midwest into the same climate as the Gulf Coast.”

        The koppen system is a classification system. A construct that we use to simplify our understanding.

        Contrast that with this

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_kind

      • Steven Mosher

        David

        What are the other 70% doing?

        There is no “other 70%” since the 30% dont exist and the 70% are by definition not the 30%.

      • Mosh

        So what you seem to be saying is that the Koppen zones are so useful that they are thinking of creating even more of them, or at the least refining them?

        Everything evolves, so surely that all shows the value of some form of classification? Look forward to your paper on the stations that fall into the various overall categories of warming, cooling and static and just to keep yourself out of mischief why not do it by modified Koppen zones also?

        Tonyb

      • Ya, ya, Kappa Zones. Ya gotta watch those little weather imps. Pacify them with offerings and faith. Ricelience, they like.
        ==============

      • ‘I say, I say … What’s the difference between a construct
        and real world circumstances?’

        ‘I dunno, what is the the difference between a construct
        and real world circumstances?’

        ‘One yer think yer perceive, the other can give yer
        heat-stroke or a chill.’

  9. Physicists are generalizing the Chewbacca Conjecture:

    Decades of confounding experiments have physicists considering a startling possibility: The universe might not make sense.

    https://www.simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/is-nature-unnatural/

  10. If the “skeptics” want to debunk Cook’s 97%, they need to produce their own study with a percentage. There is no other way to do this that anyone would listen to. The fact that they haven’t yet shown anything, seems to indicate the numbers are against what they wanted.

    • Jimd

      Does this apparent deconstruction by dr tol fit the bill?

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/01/tol-statistically-deconstructs-the-97-consensus/#more-87391

      Tonyb

      • > Does this apparent deconstruction by dr tol fit the bill?

        Not really:

        https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/340833356977676289

        We should wait until Richard starts to begin or begins to start.

        Most of these mugshots appear (h/t Tonyb) to be for blogland effect anyway.

        Twitter science moves forward 140 characters at a time.

      • Tonyb, no this is not an equivalent study. It just makes implications and insinuations about what papers are chosen without saying what the result would be if you chose papers according to these other criteria. Incomplete at best. No percentage produced for a start.

      • Steven Mosher

        Well tony it shows that Cook ( and others before him) really haven’t done their homework. Pretty shoddy work ( but the answer is largely correct). There are additional fundamental issues, primarily with the definitions and the norming of the raters. That said, there is little doubt that the vast majority, lets say 95% plus, of climate scientists would agree with the core physics of AGW. That number isnt really important except for rhetorical bullying, presidential tweets, sideshows on blogs. The real consensus is pretty damn bland. Put another way, you know how you object to the notion of a “global ” temperature? “the science” is the same sort of problem. There is no there there. “the science” is a bully club. There are papers, and data and koppen zones of agreements. There are broad areas where every one agrees ( C02 is “opaque” to IR ) there are continents of agreement on this matter or that matter, oceans of agreement on others and koppen zones of agreement on policy and islands of disagreement. That agreement is scientifically un interesting.

      • Do not send to know for whom the Tol wonders, he wonders for you.
        ==============================

    • If I want to prove that Bernie Madoff was a fraud, do I have to produce my own ponzi scheme? Or will simply revealing his suffice?

    • JimD, you write “If the “skeptics” want to debunk Cook’s 97%, they need to produce their own study with a percentage”

      Why??? I cannot speak for all skeptics, but I could not care less what ANYONE thinks; no matter how many degrees he/she has, or what presigeous position he/she holds. All I am interested in, is the empriical data. And since there is no empirical data to support any numeric value of climate sensitivitry, CAGW is, was, and probably always will be, just a hypothesis

      • Why?
        Because it can possibly indicate- if it’s a high percentage- that a lot of people claiming to scientists [who could sheep skins as proof] are
        not qualified to be considered to be scientists.

    • the 97 percent is real. It only includes the people in the consensus clique. It includes no real scientists because real scientists are always skeptic.
      the real scientists are outside the clique and they are never counted by the clique.

      • Jim D and Herman Alexander Pope

        OK.

        Let’s play the silly “97%” numbers game.

        The John Cook blurb does not claim that 97% of climate scientists agreed with the IPCC CAGW premise, only that 97% of the papers on climate included the general conclusion that humans are changing our climate due to AGW.

        It would be absurd to twist this to meaning that “97% of climate scientists agreed with the IPCC CAGW premise”, and here’s why.

        A couple of years ago, Eli Rabett put together a list on his blog of individuals supposedly on Senator Inhofe’s list of skeptics of the IPCC premise.

        After removing some sociologists and others who are not “qualified” to have a relevant opinion on CAGW, plus adding some others who are qualified but were not on the original list, there is now a list of 333 qualified climate-related scientists and meteorologists who have gone on record that they do not support the IPCC position.

        So if 97% of all qualified individuals agree with the IPCC premise, this means that

        333*0.97 / 0.03 = 10,767 qualified individuals have gone on record in support of the IPCC CAGW premise.

        Not very likely.

        Max

      • manacker, the Anderegg/Schneider PNAS study was more like that. It looked at the top thousand or so people publishing in climate science and checked how many of them were on Inhofe’s list or various anti-AGW petitions, and found – wait for it – 97% were not. The list is still online somewhere and now up to 3000, and I think I counted 95% on that a few months back.

      • Jim D

        You say there is a list of 3,000 scientists who have specifically endorsed the CAGW premise as outlined by IPCC in AR4. I have not seen such a list. Can you cite a reference with names and qualifications?

        But I have seen a list of 333 scientists who have specifically stated that they do not support the CAGW premise.

        And it would require over 10,000 on the other list before this would be 97%.

        So the 97% is NOT in the number of scientists pro and con, it is in the number of papers which included a statement that humans are changing the climate.

        And that is something totally different, Jim, for the reasons I outlined.

        Max

    • The related question, of course, is why the “skeptics” haven’t produced their own journal yet. Surely an online journal without a printing cost, can’t be hard to produce. I think, if they had anything worth saying on climate science that they thought was being blocked by peer review, they would have made sure there was an outlet for it with friendly reviewers, but so far they’ve got nothing. Organize better, people! Make your best case. I am looking forwards to reading these things. Perhaps it is because the “skeptics” don’t like each other’s ideas either, so they wouldn’t even pass “friendly” peer review. Just guessing.

      • They could even allow the authors to remain anonymous if that helps people who don’t want to publicly come out as “skeptics”. How about that for a deal?

  11. I know of an enormous coastal city built near sea level in a notorious hurricane zone. Its inhabitants regard themselves as extremely clever, even though some of the cleverest of those clever people arranged to dump rubble into the mouth of its river, narrowing it by 700 feet. There’s no question of withholding insurance or assistance, even though as recently as 1938 the place copped a cat 3 at landfall. (Admittedly, the worst hurricane was in 1821, but that’s history, which is now abolished.)

    Apparently, the unique status of the city in question is due to it being a place one flies TO instead of OVER, but this is something I do not understand. Need to ask a clever person!

  12. Help! Can anyone point me to some physics answers I’ve been unable to find:

    1. A “blackbody” experiment showing a different “blackbody” material/composition results in a different radiative equilibrium temperature.

    2. Experimental measurement of thermalization of IR by any greenhouse gas free to radiate the IR to space.

  13. 97% of “papers” related to climate agree that “humans have caused some change in our planet’s climate”, according to John Cook at Skeptical Science.

    (Hey, this is what you have to conclude in your paper if it is about climate and you want to have a chance of publishing it.)

    This does not mean, of course, that 97% of climate scientists believe that CAGW, as defined by IPCC in its AR4 report, is a valid premise.

    And that is the point of debate.

    But even if it were true that “97% of climate scientists agree with the CAGW premise as outlined by IPCC in AR4”, (for which there is no evidence), a rational skeptic would still say, “so what? I do not care how many people agree with it, where are the empirical data to support the CAGW premise?” (following the scientific method).

    So the whole John Cook blurb is a) misleading and b) meaningless.

    Max

  14. Let’s talk about the vibration modes of the CO2 molecule.

    We already know that the specific heat of CO2 at 25C is no where near enough to account for its prodigious capacity to absorb heat. The only explanation is in its vibration modes. According t the HITRAN database there are 314919 of those. But about 98% are contained within about 128170 of them. Because of the isotopic nature of the two elements in CO2 all these variations occur. So which CO2 arw we talking about? No one seems to know. Is that sufficient reason to say we don’t understand global warming? Yes, it is. CO2 is a rare gas (<1%) and the isotopes are even rarer.According to quantum theory the amount of energy each molecule can absorb or release in the vibrational mode, on gaining or losing a photon of energy is a fixed amount. So as temperature rises or falllls, each CO2 molecule executes a kind of temperature stair case, either up or down. The point is, there are pauses on each step. But how many steps are there?

    The greatest change the CO2 molecule ever encountered, apart from volcanos, was at the beginning of the 20th century, when Henrt Ford made 15 million model T by 1927 Fords and every town with more than about 5000 people had eletric power. Is it not possible that a majority of CO2 molecules arrived at the same step in 1940. ending the temperature rise?
    This could explain the on/off nature of climate change.. Is this something worth debating?

    • ” Is this something worth debating?”

      Science is not about debating. Create a half-way decent scientific model and then others can evaluate it. All I see is a vague assertion and hand-wavy correlation, much like QP Lu’s association of warming with halocarbon levels.

      • From the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_controversy

        A scientific controversy may be a fundamental disagreement among scientists about the validity of a major theory, a secondary scientific controversy, i.e., “scientists disagreeing about a less central aspect of a scientific idea.”[1]

        A true scientific controversy involves a sustained debate within the broader scientific community (McMullin, 1987[2]). In other words, a significant number of people must be actively engaged in research that addresses the controversy over time.[3]

        True scientific controversy … is healthy and involves disagreements over how data should be interpreted, over which ideas are best supported by the available evidence, and over which ideas are worth investigating further.[1]
        Anne E. Egger said, “Controversies cause progress in science by encouraging research on the topic in question.”

  15. How IPCC’s climate models are wrong.

    Simply put, the error in the climate models was to assume the warming from 1975 to 2005 is a secular climate signal instead of a transient climate signal. That is the problem with the climate models of IPCC’s fourth assessment report.

    So the secular global warming rate for the period 1975 to 2005 is about 0.09 deg C/decade instead of IPCC’s 0.2 deg C/decade. This relationship gives a trend multiplication factor of 0.2/0.09 = 2.2, so IPCC’s climate sensitivity should be divided by this factor to get at the true climate sensitivity:

    True climate sensitivity = 3/2.2 = 1.4 deg C for doubling of CO2.

    Here is the graph that shows the 0.2 deg C/decade warming was a transient climate signal:

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:756/plot/hadcrut4gl/compress:12/from:1870/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1974/to:2004/trend/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.005/offset:-1.62/detrend:-0.1/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.005/offset:-1.35/detrend:-0.1/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.005/offset:-1.89/detrend:-0.1/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:756/offset:-0.27/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:756/offset:0.27/plot/hadcrut3sh/scale:0.00001/offset:2/from:1870/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1949/to:2005/trend/offset:0.025/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1949/to:2005/trend/offset:0.01

  16. Lawmakers blame philosophy for recent spate of trolley deaths

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill turned their attention to philosophy this week after Monday saw what appears to be the nation’s third trolley-related homicide since April. Members of both houses of Congress raised the prospect of legislation to regulate the violent content found in much contemporary moral philosophy, and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to study the effects of violent philosophy on children and adolescents.

    http://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/lawmakers-blame-philosophy-for-spate-of-trolley-deaths/

  17. Just did a quick scan, and Wow! all over the place.
    Denizens, ever consider that when the professor says you have the weekend off, you should take her advise and take the weekend off?

    Me are the weekend off. I somehow doubt the world will change over the weekend. Maybe just my crazy sense of inertia.
    Regards to all who did not.

  18.  

    Why climate is not controlled by radiative forcing as IPCC thinks

    The issue of “net flows” has been stretched literally beyond belief in the climatology world. The Second Law is talking about an isolated system (See Wikipedia – “Laws of Thermodynamics”) and any physicist should be able to tell you that a system in physics has a very specific definition. (Also see Wikipedia “System.”) It can of course have a single component (often represented by a one-way heat transfer between two objects) but if it has more than one component, then the components must be interdependent.

    Now, if radiation from a cooler atmosphere were actually able to add thermal energy to a warmer target on the surface, say a rock beside a tidal lake, then that is the first “component.” The problem then to consider runs like this: if that extra energy is then stored for a while (say, until high tide) and the energy then transfers to some water on the surface by conduction, and then that same parcel of energy eventually gets back into the atmosphere with two further “components” such as evaporative cooling of the water, followed by subsequent release of latent heat, where then is the interdependence between any of these four separate components which you are in effect assuming to be all part of the one system, as defined by the Second Law? Sorry, the very first component (if it could occur) is not just a component of a larger system and it would be an outright and indisputable violation of the Second Law.

    Think of Venus. Every 4-month long day its surface warms by 5 degrees, and then it cools by five degrees as the atmosphere radiates to space during the 4-month night. The surface temperatures are in the vicinity of 730K to 735K approximately. It takes a lot of energy to warm it by 5 degrees, and it doesn’t happen in the first day of sunshine, especially when you remember that such Solar radiation reaching the surface has only about one tenth of the power of that reaching Earth’s surface. So there must be a process in which energy builds up during the 4 month day.

    Now we know that about 97.5% of incident Solar radiation is either reflected or absorbed by the atmosphere, so obviously the atmosphere will warm while the Sun is shining, but gradually over 4 months – say I.25 degree per month.

    Clearly we are not talking about a radiative process warming the surface here, because incident radiation would have to be about 16,100W/m^2 into the surface to have any effect in that temperature range. And if it were it could probably do the job in a few hours, not 4 months. Furthermore, we at PSI would insist that any such radiation having any effect on such a hot surface would have to be directly from a hotter source, namely the Sun. We just don’t believe in non-interdependent components violating the Second Law, so we rule out radiation from the colder atmosphere. In any event, with only about 10W/m^2 of incident insolation entering the surface, there’s not a lot of energy to play with for back radiation, now is there?

    Perhaps you think that the energy entering the TOA will do the trick. Well look at the figures – something like 2,600W/m^2 from memory before any is reflected away, which is much more than half of it. Perhaps we have about 1,000W/m^2 starting on its way into the atmosphere. (That’s to 1 significant figure – it doesn’t matter what the precise figure is.) How could the atmosphere somehow magnify this about 16 times before it comes out of the base of the atmosphere and into the surface, and why would it have so much more success getting through the atmosphere than did the Solar radiation? Remember – no more than 10W/m^2 could be from back radiation that was sending back energy from the surface, which was sending back energy from the Sun. By the way, Science of Doom has a totally incorrect figure of about 158W/m^2 (if I remember correctly) for the incident Solar radiation reaching the Venus surface. You’d think he would have checked the data from the Russian probes before using a figure which is at least 10 times the real one.

    So the Venus surface is not heated by any “runaway greenhouse effect.” If you’re not convinced, then think about how energy gets down into the Uranus atmosphere which is mostly hydrogen and helium. I’m happy to discuss any questions you may have about my explanation of what is happening on these planets – and on Earth, where the Sun cannot heat our surface to 288K with direct Solar radiation alone. Just use SBL to convince yourself of this obvious fact.

    Radiative forcing is not what is the primary determinant of Earth’s mean surface temperature. As on Uranus and Venus, and throughout the universe, temperatures in any atmosphere have a propensity to follow a temperature gradient which is between about 65% and 100% of the quotient of the acceleration due to gravity and the weighted mean specific heat of the gases. The level of the plot is determined by the need for radiative balance, so that Is the “starting point.” Then, at whatever temperature the plot intersects the surface, we have a pre-determined base supporting temperature which slows all radiative and non-radiative cooling at night, enabling the Sun (if applicable) to warm somewhat the next day, this being but a marginal effect, as is the slowing of cooling as the surface comes back towards the base temperature. No big changes in climate will occur without natural changes in the parameters just mentioned. That is the “New School of Thought” which we are starting to talk about at PSI. Keep watching for a new article on such within a few days.

    • Are you the Doug Cotton who got banned from The Blackboard?

    • Your arguments don’t make sense to people whose world does not have an atmosphere.

      They have replaced the real world’s heavy voluminous ocean of real gases which expand and condense with the fiction that from the surface up all is “empty space with massless weightless imaginary ideal gas molecules miles apart from each other zipping through at great speeds under their own molecular momentum bouncing off each other and the walls of an imaginary container in elastic collisions and so thoroughly mixing they can’t be unmixed”.

      They’re on the other side of the looking glass with Al where they vie with each other as to who can imagine the greatest amount of impossible things before breakfast.

      And, you’re part of that imaginary world in taking their “solar” energy to be what they claim, shortwave from the Sun, having eliminated the direct longwave infrared from the Sun, which is the Sun’s radiant heat energy actually capable of heating matter, visible light from the Sun can’t.

      The KT97 and ilk comic cartoon energy budget of AGWScienceFiction’s The Greenhouse Effect Illusion has been created out of sleights of hand manipulations using terms from real world physics – it must be appreciated that all of their basic fisics is deliberately faked.

      Think of it as an imagined fisics in a sci-fi fantasy novel, to argue with them as if any part of their fisics is real is a gross error, because it only serves to confuse them more.

      • I really am not concerned about how much of which Solar radiation gets absorbed on the way into the atmosphere, or on the way back out. There are absorption spectra readily available and you can see the notches where plenty of UV, visible and IR insolation is absorbed by the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide absorbs in the 2.7 to 2.8 micron band for example. So long as the atmosphere absorbs some thermal energy, then the supporting temperature at the base of the troposphere will be the dominant determinant of mean planetary surface temperatures, here or on Venus or wherever in the universe there is a planet with a significant atmosphere and a surface. And if there’s no surface, then the atmosphere at any altitude will be at about the temperature which a surface would have been if it existed there.

        Is there anything else I can help with that’s not already explained in great detail in my papers and articles or blog comments?

  19. Craig Rucker and CFACT issued an advisory on new UN climate talks that will be held in Bonn, Germany on 3-14 June 2013:

    http://tinyurl.com/l8uh2pp

  20. Global warming is causing an increase in deaths from being hit by lightening. Death by lightening happens without warning. It is given little attention and yet this year alone we may see nearly double the number of lightening deaths compared to those killed by the storms in tornado alley.

  21. Observation versus the projected warming of 4.5 deg C at the end of this century by the IPCC

    http://bit.ly/11awxR2

    Obviously IPCC does not understand pattern recognition.

    • That second link is a must-read. I love how Al Gore finds ways to enrich himself by snorting the greenie line.

      “Excuse me?!! I’m supposed to “reduce my carbon footprint” by doing my part to divert “organic food waste” from ending up in a landfill (which amounts to a mere 5% of our greenhouse gas emissions – for which there supposedly already exists a “proven” process for dealing with the methane gas created) to comply with a future environmental regulation [pls. see footnotes below] that results in the “creation” of … the dreaded – and constantly demonized – Carbon Dioxide … all the while lining the pockets of Waste Management, Harvest Power and Al Gore!”

  22. Alexander Biggs

    Here is the definition for SECULAR variation from wiki:

    The secular variation of a time series is its long-term non-periodic variation (see Decomposition of time series). Whether something is perceived as a secular variation or not depends on the available timescale: a secular variation over a time scale of centuries may be part of a periodic variation over a time scale of millions of years. Natural quantities often have both periodic and secular variations. Secular variation is sometimes called secular trend or secular drift when the emphasis is on a linear long-term trend.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_variation

  23. Paul Vaughan

    Volcano Sun ENSO 9 year 11 year tips …
    1. http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/2314/sunspotsvei.png
    2. http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8272/sjev911.png
    3. http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2836/volcano911.png

    That’s enough info to crack the code of NPI and July & August ENSO. Let’s see if anyone’s willing & able to take a minute away from modeling “science” and climate “debate” to appreciate and understand nature. (My guess is no.)

  24. I read about science
    On Curry’s et cetera
    So high is the level we read
    The knowledge is fearsome
    Each academic person
    Has an opinion no other can see

    Armies of strawmen
    Bushels of herring and
    Thermodynamics we read
    Then comes by the Mosher
    And Web Hubble Telescope
    With Wagathon thrown in for good measure

    I faithfully come back
    To indulge in my quest
    Of groking the big argumentum
    But all articles repeat
    With the very same beat
    From each and every one of them

    • Wonderful! Replace ‘read’ with ‘treasure’ at the end of the ninth line.
      =======

  25. Phyllograptus

    Nature Geoscience is conducting an experiment in double blind peer review. The authors will not know the names of the reviewers, but even better the reviewers will not know the names of any of the authors of the papers. Link provided below

    http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n6/full/ngeo1853.html

    • Sadly, such exercise has flaws unless one can also obscure all the references of the paper neign peer reviewed. A list of references used can provide clues as the the author.

      • Phyllograptus

        I’m interested in why you think the list of references can provide clues to the identity of the author? Maybe if the referenced papers are small and one author or group of authors is cited extensively, but in most papers the list of referenced papers is fairly long and lists lots of papers covering a wide variety of authors.

  26. UN over-reaching its authority again.

    “It appears to be a blatant violation of two international resolutions,” said Kristina M Gjerde, a senior high seas adviser for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Even the placement of iron particles into the ocean, whether for carbon sequestration or fish replenishment, should not take place, unless it is assessed and found to be legitimate scientific research without commercial motivation. This does not appear to even have had the guise of legitimate scientific research.””

    The UN criticizes the most potent economic force known to mankind: a profit. If a company can sink CO2 into the ocean for a profit, so the **** what? The UN needs to be disbanded. They are a much bigger problem than any solution they have ever delivered.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering

  27. Ah, a subject near and dear to my heart.

    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/28/How-Did-The-Educated-Become-So-Ignorant

    “A student can graduate with a 4.0 GPA in U.S. history and know less about history than the ‘uneducated’ citizen who buys and reads good history books on his or her own time.”

    Ain’t that the ever lovin’ truth.

    • Mosh

      Ironic isn’t it?

      There was a programme on the BBC last night as to how Chinese companies are trying to exploit the vast coal resources underneath the highly fertile Liverpool plains in Australia .

      Seems like the West is being out-manouvered for fossil fuel. Perhaps that is a deliberate ploy by our respective governments in order to encourage green energy?

      Whatever the truth of it China will continue to be the largest emitters of Co2 for many decades to come

      tonyb

    • Yeah. If you buy the propaganda that the war in Iraq was a US grab for Iraqi oil, that’s a shocker. If you live in the real world, you would know how ridiculous that is. For you low information progressives, moderates and independents:

      The first war in Iraq was in 1990-91. The second started in 2003.

      Here is a graph of US oil purchases from Iraq from 1996 to the present.

      http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mttimiz1&f=m

      From zero to a peak in 2002 (a year before the war), with a steady decline during the period the US ran the country.

      But hey, “our blood; their Oil” sounds so pithy. It’s dumb. Reflexively progressive. But pithy.

      • I think Mosh has read so many Reason Magazine articles, he’s forgotten how to reason.

  28. If we can channel our inner Chewbacca, so does He:

    https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/341691422371610624

  29. maksimovich

    Urban legend the 400 ppm reached is a global measurement,the SH at present trends will not attain this level for 4 more years,