by Judith Curry
The answer is the fruit of my labor, not the object of it. Because of that, you’ll look for anything to come up with the correct answer, not just a predetermined one where your self-esteem depends on it. – Joe Bastardi
The last two weekends, I have featured perspectives on the climate debate from:
- an engineer (Mike Haseler)
- a physicist (Pierre Darriulat)
This week I feature a perspective from a weather forecaster, Joe Bastardi, which was published in the Patriot Post. I’ve received permission from Joe Bastardi to reproduce this in full:
I would love to debate Dr. Michael Mann. He’s a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and I’m a Penn. State Grad (Meteo. 1978). Enough people know me, as well as him, so we could charge a modest admission, fill Eisenhower Auditorium at PSU, and give all the money back to the PSU meteorology department whom I still love dearly in spite of my outcast status on the anthropogenic global warming issue.
But Dr. Mann would probably want no part of debating me on the main drivers of weather and climate given I have no higher degrees. C’mon, a BS in meteorology from PSU against this:
Education: A.B. applied mathematics and physics (1989)
MS physics (1991)
MPhil physics (1991)
MPhil geology (1993)
PhD geology & geophysics (1998)Alma mater: University of California, Berkeley, Yale University
This would be a blow out. What chance would I have?
Let me be clear: Dr. Mann’s résumé, along with anyone who receives a PhD in the physical sciences, impresses me. I’ve read almost everything Dr. Mann has written and, because of that, I understand where he’s coming from. But there are things that are lacking if one is pursuing the right answer, and that’s the methodology one learns in putting together a forecast, as to how to weigh factors in determining what’s going to happen. One has to examine all of what his opponent has, not close his eyes to anything that might challenge his ideas.
For instance, while I’ve read almost everything Dr. Mann has written, how many times has he had hands on experience in making a forecast that has to verify? It’s laughable to think, as a private sector meteorologist whose livelihood depends on being right, that one can separate climate from weather. I realized a long time ago that being able to recognize current patterns from understanding the past (it was drilled into me by my father, a degreed meteorologist) was essential to making a good forecast. The fact many climatologists downplay the relationship, or say they’re different, shows me they don’t know what they’re talking about. In other words, I do what they do, but they don’t do what I do. I read what they write, but they won’t stop to look at the other side.
Perhaps it’s like something we sometimes see in sports – the curse of talent. Most of these people are very smart. I went to school with future PhDs and could see that in the classroom, they were like my wrestling coaches at PSU – guys that were great doing what came natural to them. However, my wrestling coach used to stress that when you’re used to having everything come to you, it’s very hard to change and step up your level. Consequently, you’ll get beat on your weakest point and what you don’t know, and that’s where the methodology in forecasting comes in to the climate debate.
You see, in what I do, one must weigh factors and decide which ones are most important. Additionally, one gets used to challenges that can never really be seen in research. How so? Suppose someone gives you a grant to study global warming. Can you come back and say, “My research says there’s no global warming”? You have been given a grant to produce a result; how can you possibly justify that result if it’s the result that would cost nothing to come up with in the first place?
In my line of work, getting paid (having clients) depends on the correct result. The client doesn’t say, “I want a cold winter, here’s the money, forecast it.” The client asks for a forecast that gives him an edge. If you are right, the client renews; if not, it’s bye bye. But there’s no up front money that looks for a set result. This means the forecaster does not care whether it’s warm or cold, just that he gets the right answer, whatever that may be. This is not the case in the AGW branch of academia. Research grants come with the cause du jour – just try getting a grant to disprove global warming (actually, you don’t need one; it’s easy to refute it just by understanding what’s happened before).
That said, regarding the climate debate, what factors am I looking at to come up with my conclusion? To me, this is a big forecast, and the simple answer is: It’s hard to fathom that CO2 can cause anything beyond its assigned “boxed in” value to temperatures because of all that’s around it. It comes down to the sun, the oceans and stochastic events over a long period of time with action and reaction, versus a compound comprising .04% of the atmosphere and 1/100th of greenhouse gasses.
But unless you work every day in a situation where you are reminded you can be wrong, you don’t have appreciation for the methodology of challenge and response you need to be right!
Then there’s another big problem: What if you have all this knowledge, you’ve taken a stand on this, and it’s your whole life – how can you possibly be objective? The climate debate and past weather events are needed building blocks for my product. That product involves a challenge each day. In the case of a PhD on the AGW side, they believe the idea is the product. Destroy the idea, you destroy the product; destroy the product, you destroy the person. Therefore, it’s personal. Your whole life – all the fawning students, the rock star status – is all gone. I would hate to be in that position. Each day I get up, and there it is – the weather challenging me. The answeris the fruit of my labor, not the object of it. Because of that, you’ll look for anything to come up with the correct answer, not just a predetermined one where your self-esteem depends on it.
So these giants of science have a fundamental problem, and it runs contrary to their nature. In the end, the very talent and brilliance of a lot of these people may be what blinds them to what it takes to truly pursue the truth.
JC comment: Bastardi raises a critical point, regarding the issue of forecasting as it relates to climate science. Until recently, the public and policy makers were content to consider projections of future climate that depended only on scenarios of future greenhouse emissions. Since the climate models and observations agreed during the last quarter of the 20th century as portrayed in highly confident attribution analyses, these scenario projections were treated by many as forecasts, including the IPCC, who expected a temperature increase of 0.2C/decade in the first few decades of the 21stcentury.
The growing divergence of climate model simulations and observations in the 21st century is leading to the growing realization among scientists, policy makers and the public that other factors are important in determining climate on decadal and multidecadal timescales. The IPCC dismisses this as unpredictable internal climate variability, unpredictable solar variability, unpredictable volcanic activity. Well, this is good enough only for scientists that are only interested in the CO2 impact on climate, but not for the public and policy makers (paying the bills for all this climate research) that want to know how the climate will actually evolve over the the 21st century.
Here is an analogy from my personal experience. My company CFAN started making hurricane forecasts in 2007 for a major oil company, who wanted advance knowledge (better than market and NOAA) of Gulf hurricane activity. We had devised a scheme that predicted the formation of hurricanes from African Easterly Waves, up to a week in advance. We had some major successes in our first season, notably our forecasts for Hurricane Dean and TS Erin (which I understand made them alot of money in natural gas trading), but we completely failed (along with everybody else) to predict the formation Hurricane Humberto. Humberto formed near the Texas coast and rapidly intensified. This was not picked up by our prediction scheme, since Humberto did not form from an African Easterly Wave. Well, telling our clients that this kind of hurricane just isn’t predictable wasn’t going to be good enough for our clients. So we embarked on a research project to figure out what kind of predictability there was for this type of storm, and developed a probabilistic warning scheme with different scenarios for this type of storm.
The point is this: climate modelling needs to move towards actually predicting future climate variability change. The initialized decadal forecasts are a step in the right direction, but we need scenarios of future volcanic and solar activity as well (not to mention more research needed to figure out the sun-climate connections). Having climate modelers work on the seasonal climate forecast problem, and watching their forecasts fail to verify, would be invaluable experience for climate modelers making the productions runs for CMIP/IPCC.
And finally, a remark about Bastardi’s invitation to Mann to debate, which is captured in these tweets:
.
Bastardi has certain fallen his sword for the anti-AG effort, that said, I find him less than a linear thinker and he would really gain from a Ph.D. in Judith’s department to focus that energy and clean up the thinking a bit.
justsomeguy31167
Or has Mann so committed his career and reputation to the HockeyStick that he dare not test it?
Heh, ‘false balance’
Hey, that foolish old woman with the balance is blindfolded for a reason.
==========
Great point and well done too!
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/radioactive-water-leaks-fukushima-operator-underestimates-rainfall-023633953–finance.html
Yes, more debate between opposing views in a refereed atmosphere would be useful. However those who have the most to lose-such as Dr Mann-are surely the least likely to want to take part.
tonyb
“I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”
I think the competitive element of a healthy science (or market) is underappreciated in both Bastardi’s and Dr. Curry’s remarks. You don’t have to be right or correct; you simply have to do better than your scientific or forecasting competitors. At least, this is what I mostly believe. One of my main professional efforts has been to push fellow empirical decision researchers away from classical hypothesis-testing and toward competitive out-of-sample forecast comparisons.
+1.
If you need to do better than a polar bear in a triathlon, you might wish to focus on the biking part.
There are no polar bears, they all died of sun stroke.
1. Please define “better”. 2. Do you use Bayesian statistics?
1. I like the log likelihood of an estimated model on the hold-out (or future) sample, but there are other measures that have their charms for specific purposes. 2. Not exactly, though I am gradually moving in that direction. I have no problem communicating with applied Bayesian folks… our language is close enough.
Joe Bastardri has sent out his latest forecast of a hurricane on the way. Will he do better than his competitors?
Bastardi @BigJoeBastardi 4h
http://Weatherbell.com 5 pm Sun Oct 21,2012 map sent to clients, saying tropical wave would become hurricane, hit NE pic.twitter.com/3NmJi6aqWs
Who knows. But I’d guess that “better” on a single event (or nonevent) isn’t going to move many clients around. These are all probabilistic forecasts and the big boy clients (e.g. futures traders) know that.
NW,
I hope you and the other climate scientists who agree with you don’t expect us to implement massively costly mitigation policies on the basis of your outrun-the-other-guy type of science.
Peter, I’m not a climate scientist, but I would argue that, in the long run, the progress of all sciences have almost always been about “better” as opposed to “correct.” That’s how a new theory replaces another one without being “correct:” It is merely better. And I believe that this way of thinking is about the ONLY way a skeptic can (with a straight face) point to the actual history of science as strong evidence against Panglossian views of contemporary science.
As for my policy preferences, I mostly try to keep my mouth shut. Last Friday we had some policy wonk as our seminar speaker. Not my idea. I couldn’t have been less interested, and snuck out and back to my office as fast as I could.
Bastardi doesn’t even understand the evidence that CO2 is a well-mixed atmospheric gas:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/03/joe-bastardi-idiot-liar-or-both.html
He has made one failed prediction after another, and is a sloppy thinker who doesn’t understand the nature of scientific evidence. Why would anyone put his forth as a serious voice for their cause?
“Why would anyone put his forth as a serious voice for their cause?”
There is no “cause” in science.
David A says:
‘He has made one failed prediction after another, and is a sloppy thinker who doesn’t understand the nature of scientific evidence’
and yet it seems he is still in business!
How many climos can show that their predictions are good enough that other people will spend their money to hear them? I’ll wager it’s very close to zero.
Here perhaps this will enlighten you
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Joe_Bastardi_is_Correct.pdf
Point of fact.
I had a 3 minute hit that morning and was trying to simplify the idea that co2 can do nothing beyond what it already contributes to that wonderful blanket ( hardly a Greenhouse) that helps make our planet livable. Your argument is like saying the batboy is responsible for the team that wins the world series. Every team that wins has a bat boy, but I hardly think the bat boy is affecting the ups and downs of the team.
And while your at it, why dont you bring up what the global temp has done since i was on the Oreilly factor saying it would start down
http://models.weatherbell.com/climate/cfsr_t2m_recent.png
Inconvenient truth.. the know nothing Neanderthal ( me) is right
Joe B. said:
“Your argument is like saying the batboy is responsible for the team that wins the world series. Every team that wins has a bat boy, but I hardly think the bat boy is affecting the ups and downs of the team.”
_____
Thinking of CO2 as the “bat boy” is an amusing metaphor Joe, but it does not work for the role of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere. A team can still play the game without a bat boy. They can still win without a bat boy. A bat boy is just “nice to have” and makes things easier. Without CO2 of course we go back to Ice Planet Earth pretty fast Joe. Even you, without a PhD must understand the critical role of this noncondensing GH gas. Take away CO2 (even without the critical role it plays for plants) and it’s get colder, more water vapor is removed from the atmosphere, and then it gets colder, and even more is removed, and eventually most of the planet looks similar to Antarctica. Cold and very very dry.
Yes, just like it was the last time there was zero CO2.
…er, just when was that?
Bastardi claimed:
“We have a gas that is .04% of the atmosphere that increases 1.5 ppm yearly and humans contribute 3-5% of that total yearly, which means the increase by humans is 1 part per 20 million.”
Seriously enough of this clown.
Bastardi,
You are on the wrong track. Look around! there is grey literature that shows that we have global warming; it is undisputed. Not climate change, but man-made global warming 100%. It is not as bad at the Warmists claim, but it is real. Be prepared.
I would take Bastardi’s predictions over yours any day Appell. He has had to live in the real world (private sector) with his results. You still don’t get it David, you AGW cult gig is over – find another “cause”.
“who expected a temperature increase of 0.2C/decade in the first few decades of the 20th century”
21st century
Mann’s response to Joe Bastardi’s debate challenge:
David, Mann is more articulate than I expected.
“..not just a predetermined one where your self-esteem depends on it. ”
I’ve followed Joe Bastardi for years. While of course I’m in sympathy with his POV on AGW, imvho he’s not the guy we want debating Mann (not that there’s the slightest chance of Mann or any one of those fraudsters debating a skeptic. I love that “false balance” stuff.)
I just don’t think he’s got the depth needed to be effective. One of Bastardi’s favorite debating points seems to be, “well how can a trace gas necessary for life etc etc? ” Even I (no technical background at all) recognize this is weak.
Yes anyone who mentions or alludes to the trace gas argument should not get on the stage to debate. Joe has never been a leader in the skeptical movement gas never offered up any novel criticisms. He makes assertions plays the poor dumb me card and generally uses the worst tricks from the skeptical bag. However given the right audience he might win the debate. You know anyone can be fooled. This is why debates are a bad idea. Not that it gives false balance but rather the very act of debating science is anti scientific. If joe wants to debate mann he can do it by doing his own damn science. Words on blogs are not science.
If joe thinks that co2s influence is small then he has to show that. In math. In someway other than just stomping his foot.
Merely pointing at the failures of the ipcc does not make joes affirmative case.
How about Tomas Milanovic?
Steven Mosher: the very act of debating science is anti scientific.
lol
And Mann has done precisely what in the way of greenhouse science?
1) Nice attempt to erase 60 years of science studies. Read some David Hull or Harry Collins. Debate is, in practice, central to the course of science. It just isn’t written down in the official literature. It occurs in hallways and conference rooms and people’s offices.
2) Mosher’s channeling of the Scientific Revolution ethos that “nature will decide” and that experiments, not the disputations of logic-choppers and sophists, determine what we should believe, has much truth on its side. But since he is pretty up on post-modernism and other critiques of simplistic Modernism (see his comments about measurement and the Quine-Duhem thesis, for example), he is probably just having fun with some ironic provocation here. Tomorrow he might come back and say that experiments don’t prove anything because they must be interpreted, and interpretation always come down to words and conversations and debates.
3) Galileo was a great debater as well as the founder of Scientific Modernism (if you want to call it that). The two modes of generating insight are partly complementary.
Was going to counter some of Mosher’s crap. But honestly, once I read “if joe wants to debate Mann he can do it by doing his own damn science” I knew Mosher is a lost cause who lives in some make believe world.
“Mosher’s channeling of the Scientific Revolution ethos that ‘nature will decide’ and that experiments, not the disputations of logic-choppers and sophists, determine what we should believe, has much truth on its side.”
If by “experiments”, you mean runs of computer models that generate their own “data”, then yes, Mosher argues for science by experimentation. “Doing his own damn science” in this context means running his own statistical analysis, generating his own computer model, or other such non-experimental experiments.
But arguing that the Climate Etc obscurantist-in-chief is somehow anti-sophism, is a bridge too far.
the very act of debating science is anti scientific.
LOL. Tell that to the Pope.
Mosher is always good for a laugh. And I suppose he considers himself a scientist, not a cardinal. That is what we have come to: the technocratic elite are the new clergy of the new religion.
I often read through these comments and find JC’s thought as well as the follow on comments to be most interesting.
But you’re an arrogant wind bag in the same vane as David Appell.
> he’s not the guy we want debating Mann
The best guy might be Judy.
Or GaryM, or Latimer Alder, or Manacker (just three that come to mind quickly)
Pokerguy,
Yeah I hear ya. Saying CO2 can’t efficiently absorb and transfer heat to its surroundings because there’s only a trace of it in the air is pretty frickin’ boneheaded. Dark pigment is just a trace amount of the weight of car body but check out the difference in surface temperature of a white car and a black car sitting in the sun.
The hell of it is that Bastardi is right but for the wrong reasons. CO2 has a significant effect only over dry land. Elsewhere not so much because more of it simply drives a higher level of evaporative cooling at the surface which very efficiently and imperceptibly transports energy from the surface to thousands of feet up in the atmosphere where it has a less restricted radiative path to space. The cloud, able to radiate more efficiently because of its closer proximity to space, does double duty during daylight hours by reflecting shortwave energy from the sun back out to space before it can reach the surface.
In short on an ocean world with adequate shortwave energy to keep the ocean liquid a balance is established where SW reaching the surface evaporates water which forms clouds when then restrict further shortwave energy from reaching the surface. It’s really just that simple. Empirically speaking the balance point is about 70% cloud cover. More than that and the ocean cools and fewer clouds form. Less than that and the ocean warms and more clouds are created.
We can see this balance happen at the beginning of every interglacial period where, once a melt begins, temperature shoots up like a rocket until it hits a ceiling temperature which is the same temperature each and every time. After that temperature is hit there’s a long slow slide downward until ice dominates again. It’s all in the ice cores for anyone who cares to look:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/graphics/tempplot5.gif
If anyone thinks they have an alternative explanation for why temperature peaks at almost identical points at the beginning of each interglacial period I’m all ears! :-)
David Springer: Elsewhere not so much because more of it simply drives a higher level of evaporative cooling at the surface which very efficiently and imperceptibly transports energy from the surface to thousands of feet up in the atmosphere where it has a less restricted radiative path to space.
Is that something for which there is a lot of evidence, or a so-far-untested conjecture? I and others have written that I might be true, but I have not previously read it stated as a known fact.
It is certainly well proven that a higher albedo surface has a lower temperature. Stevensen boxes are painted white for a reason. Even a child knows it is cooler in the shade than in the direct sun. As for clouds having a negative feedback that is also empirically proven. The climate type with the highest mean annual temperature is the tropical desert. Not coincidently the tropical desert has the fewest clouds shading the surface.
Physical Geography 101
http://www4.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/climate_systems/tropical_desert.html
Matthew,
It occurs to me your question is about whether there is evidence that rising DWLIR from rising CO2 concentration drives evaporation higher imperceptibly. One way or another it must drive evaporation higher either by virtue of raising ocean temperature or by virtue of being completely absorbed by a skin layer so thin that it must immediately vaporize.
The main evidence is that the surface skin layer of the ocean is cooler than the water below it by about 1C so there can be no thermal conduction from the skin downward as heat diffuses from warmer to colder not the other way around. The skin layer is sometimes broken up by white water in wave caps but this only serves to mix cooler water downward not warmer water downward. I think the burden of proof is to find evidence that increased DWLIR has any significant warming effect at all versus virtually all of it being immediately rejected as latent heat of vaporization. I’ve looked long and hard for any experiment or practical application which warms water from above with ~10um illumination and can find none. You’d think something so fundamental to the global warming hypothesis would be tested but near as I can tell it’s just taken as a given with empirical proof of concept nor practical application of the effect in any engineered device. All observations make perfect sense in light of the inability of DWLIR to significantly warm (or slow the cooling rate) of a deep body of water warmed to great depth by shortwave and which body is free to evaporate in response to DWLIR. Occam’s Razor demands that I assume the simplest explanation for the observations is correct until proven otherwise and DWLIR having no significant warming effect on liquid water bodies is the simplest explanation.
David Springer: Elsewhere not so much because more of it simply drives a higher level of evaporative cooling at the surface which very efficiently and imperceptibly transports energy from the surface to thousands of feet up in the atmosphere where it has a less restricted radiative path to space.
Let me try this again. The “it” of which you wrote is increased CO2 concentrations. How is it known that an increase in CO2 concentration will increase the rate of surface water vaporization?
I wrote that as a conjecture in a comment on the Graeme Stephan energy flow diagram, and I imagine that others have elsewhere. (Willis Eschenbach may have written it before I did — credit where it’s due.) But you wrote that quote as though it were an established fact. Is it in fact even supported by published evidence somewhere? Has anyone shown, for example, that if you shine a IR light beam on sea water at 9 am near the Equator you get an increase in the vaporization rate of 0.1%/W/m^2? Or anything directly relevant to an increase of IR over ocean?
David Springer: It occurs to me your question is about whether there is evidence that rising DWLIR from rising CO2 concentration drives evaporation higher imperceptibly.
Ah. You caught my drift. I am not disputing you, I am asking whether there is anything like direct evidence that an increase in IR intensity in fact produces the reasonably conjectured increase in vaporization.
David Springer: I think the burden of proof is to find evidence that increased DWLIR has any significant warming effect at all versus virtually all of it being immediately rejected as latent heat of vaporization. I’ve looked long and hard for any experiment or practical application which warms water from above with ~10um illumination and can find none. You’d think something so fundamental to the global warming hypothesis would be tested but near as I can tell it’s just taken as a given with empirical proof of concept nor practical application of the effect in any engineered device.
I agree, but I hate to depend on “burden of proof” arguments. When scientists disagree about nature, they also disagree on who has the burden of proof. The people who rely heavily on “equilibrium” arguments for example, act as though they believe that others who write about the details of the transients have the burden of proof of showing that the details of the transients matter.
Matthew,
I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to perform a controlled experiment with a mid-IR laser and no one who does have the resources appears interested in it. As far as I’m concerned it’s proven by the observation of a cool skin layer which persists at night so the evaporation isn’t driven by shortwave. The energy from DWLIR must go somewhere. If not into latent heat and not into heating the skin layer then where?
” CO2 has a significant effect only over dry land.”
Are you kidding? If that’s the case explain why temps can drop more than 10 degrees/hr once the Sun goes down in the desert, or any place with clear skies and low humidity.
Tropical deserts have the highest mean annual temperature of any climate type. See previous link to Physical Geography 101 text. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas but where there’s a lot of water vapor there are clouds and clouds deprive the surface of more shortwave heating from the sun than the water vapor is able to retain through greenhouse effect. This is effectively proven by the tropical deserts having the highest mean annual temperature of all climate types. Why deserts have such a large diurnal temperature swing is because there’s very little energy in dry air compared to wet air so it cools much faster once the heat source is removed.
“Why deserts have such a large diurnal temperature swing is because there’s very little energy in dry air compared to wet air so it cools much faster once the heat source is removed.”
Right, the days heat escapes right through the Co2 into space. The only thing keeping the surface warm at sunrise is the slow loss of heat from the ground.
David Springer:As far as I’m concerned it’s proven by the observation of a cool skin layer which persists at night so the evaporation isn’t driven by shortwave.
Well, I think everything not double-checked, confirmed by careful measurement, should be questioned. Writers in this field have too may certainties, leaps of faith, and so on.
No Mi Cro that’s not correct. The atmosphere slows down the rate of cooling. We can see its effect by comparing to the cooling rate of the lunar surface in the first 12 hours after sundown. It’s about twice as fast as the earth.
“The atmosphere slows down the rate of cooling”
You’re right, I didn’t mean to imply that the atmosphere doesn’t slow cooling. But if you actually measure air temps and also stick a temp probe in the first inch or two of the ground and measure it over night, the ground doesn’t cool as fast as the air. A couple hours after dusk (clear low humidity) the air has cooled a lot more than the ground has. You can see this in how dew collects, and what it collects on, same with frost. By sunrise the air can be 5-10 degrees colder than the ground, at the same time grass a few feet away is covered with frost.
When you look at daily minimum temps and the nightly temperature drops, there is no Co2 signal, the only way you get a “signal” is mashing global temps together, but when you look at temps regionally you find areas that show little to no warming, and some with pulses of warming. It looks to clearly be based on ocean surface temperature cycles, not on Co2.
When you look at nightly temp drops from the 50’s on, there is no loss of nightly cooling, it’s not there.
There is proof that the increase in Co2 did not change cooling in the temperature record. Follow the link in my name, there are 4-5 different blogs showing what the actual surface record measurements are, not the standard over processed pile of bilge passed off as the temp record. And if you don’t like my number, get the data yourself (120 million daily station records), I’ve posted my code. I ask everyone to get the data and look at it, and I’m offering to build data for people here.
I can provide data time series for any square of lat, lon values, I can provide daily and yearly averages for an area, average temp, max temp, min temp, rise, fall, difference between daily min and daily max, station pressure, sea level pressure, rel humidity, and “rain” fall, sample counts, google maps of the stations included, as well as a break down of each station that was used in each area. I’m trying in include some quality measurements, and calculate a population variant on the min daily diff, and an error based on the rounding error NCDC claims for each value they provide.
What I don’t do is make up data for places that temp are not measured at, temperature is not spatially linear, I don’t understand why they do this, and then don’t include some sort of error value based on how sampling has changed in the record set. Right now in the NCDC data set there are more than 8,000 stations collecting data globally, in the data set I have in 1950 there are about 1,300, in 1930 there’s 22. That paper that was from ~100 years ago mentioned 200 stations, that’s for the fricking world.
Joe forgets to mention Michael’s Nobel Peace Prize…
Difficult to forget something that did not happen. Mann did not in fact receive a Nobel Peach Prize…
Nor did he receive a Nobel Peace Prize…
It is difficult to be impressed by Bastardi’s scientific abilities. He doesn’t even understand, for example, the reasons why climate scientists say CO2 is a well-mixed atmospheric gas:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/03/joe-bastardi-idiot-liar-or-both.html
He’s made one failed prediction after another, I don’t see how anyone besides Fox News can take him seriously.
Seems like the word ‘Bastardi’ is triggering the spam filter, I will try to keep my eye on this
David A seems to be spamming this topic with nasty insults pretending to be url’s.
Lol. That’s a new internet trick on me.
A phishing we will go, a phishing we will go,
Hi, Ho, the David A, a phishing we will go.
==============================
An Appell a day keeps the sunshine away.
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Which failed predictions are you referring to? Four years ago he referred to the “triple crown of cooling” and predicted falling temperatures which is what is occurring in step-wise fashion according to satellite and surface observations.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:2009/to:2013/plot/gistemp/mean:12/from:2009/to:2013/plot/rss/mean:12/from:2009/to:2013/plot/uah/mean:12/from:2009/to:2013
There is no fall in temperatures. If he predicted that, he’s wrong. Starting your graph from an El Nino peak?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/mean:12/from:1990/to:2013
I’ve got to say, the TV spot is pretty “darning” (to pass the spam filter) evidence. I’m not going to ask anybody to take my word for it, but I know it’s ridiculous gobbledygook. A molecular weight 1 1/2 times that of air gives it completely different radiative characteristics? (Granted, it has, but that’s because it’s molecule has 3 atoms instead of 2. AFAIK.)
IMO anybody willing to pay attention to this clown until he’s explained this clip is an idiot. Sure, he may make the occasional good forecast, but he clearly doesn’t understand the science of the air.
I like this comment from Dr. Curry,
The IPCC dismisses this as unpredictable internal climate variability, unpredictable solar variability, unpredictable volcanic activity. Well, this is good enough only for scientists that are only interested in the CO2 impact on climate, but not for the public and policy makers (paying the bills for all this climate research) that want to know how the climate will actually evolve over the the 21st century.
I would conjecture that some may also say “unpredictable CO2 impacts”.
Factual error: CO2 accounts for more like 10% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not 1%.
JimD
What percentage of the atmosphere comprises of water vapour and what percentage is Co2 and what percentage are ‘other’ greenhouses gases such as methane?
Tonyb
H2O averages about 4000 ppm (mostly lower down), CO2 400 ppm fairly uniformly, CH4 about 2 ppm. In the colder upper atmosphere CO2 outnumbers H2O molecules.
Sorry Jimbo but you’re off by a factor of 10. That should be 40,000 ppm for water vapor.
From the horse’s mouth:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gsd/outreach/education/climgraph/docs/cg_8.pdf
Do you feel stupid now? You should.
CO2 400 ppm fairly uniformly
390 in SH mid latitude stations,obviously not uniform (the lag rate with MLO having increased to around 4yr in the 21st century).
DS, nope, they got it wrong. Notice how their % adds up to 103%. 4% water vapor is ridiculous as an average. It peaks at those values near the surface over the tropics.
Their Fig. 7 had it right (0.4%), and Fig 8 had it wrong (4%).
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gsd/outreach/education/climgraph/
Jim D | October 20, 2013 at 9:06 pm |
No, you’re still wrong. You have a reading comprehension problem. Figure 7 is percent by volume. Figure 8 is in parts per million. It’s probably rash of me to assume you know the difference. Do you?
What has you confused, maybe, is that most of the mass of the atmosphere is in the troposphere which has water vapor all through it. Most of the volume of the atmosphere is above the troposphere which has very little water vapor in it. So if we take a column of atmosphere from top to bottom and count the number of molecules there will be an average of 40,000 water vapor molecules per million molecule of all kinds. But if we do that same thing by volume it’ll be 4,000 volume units of water vapor per million volume units of air.
Are we clear now? You were wrong and you continue to be wrong. NASA didn’t screw up your lack of comprehension of the distinction between volumetric and molecules per million measurements screwed you up.
Do you feel stupid now? You should.
David Springer, when speaking about gases, ppm is short for ppmv. They mean the same thing. The molar fractions of the gases equate their respective shares of the volume because at a given pressure the volume occupied by ideal gases only is a function of the number of molecules. It is independent of molecular weight. Also, Jim D is correct that the average concentration of water vapor in the whole atmosphere is about 0.4% (or 4,000ppm, or 4,000ppmv). 40,000ppmv (4%) only occurs in very warm tropical conditions. But even in such conditions, the concentration drops very rapidly with altitude, even within the troposphere. The saturated adiabatic lapse rate is 5°C/km. As the air cools, the water precipitates out.
…at a given pressure *and* temperature…
pierre
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!!!
Wrong.
http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-ppm-and-ppmv/
ppm vs ppmv
PPM and PPMV are different measures.
Write that down.
Global map of specific humidity:
http://www.knmi.nl/research/CKO/doc/EMIC/ReferenceRun/Images/q_djf.png
It’s given in kg/kg. The reds are in the 0.04kg/kg range or 40,000 ppm. Note this is ppm not ppmv since the units are mass not volume. Even at 60N and 60S it’s still above 0.01kg/kg (10,000 ppm).
Note specific humidity is weight of water vapor per total weight of air (including water vapor) and doesn’t fall off much with altitude because the gases all expand proportionately so the relative weights of each don’t change. Granted water vapor becomes water droplets or ice crystals after adiabatic cooling to the dewpoint. The effective emission height of CO2 is about 5km (~500mb) so above that it no longer makes any difference for greenhouse warming purposes.
David, in the very same reference they write that:
“Trace gases found in the atmosphere such as sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and other pollutants in the air are denoted by “ppmv” that is, parts per million by volume.”
And this is how “ppm” always is understood in the context of climate science, and never as ppmw. Are you now claiming that the Mauna Loa measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentration, that always are reported in ppms, don’t denotate the molar fraction of CO2 but rather the weight fraction? The strange thing that you yourself correctly interpreted the NOAA number expressed in ppms while contrasting it with your interpretation of their different (albeit mistaken) percentage number.
Here is the note from the second page of SMP AR4:
“ppm (parts per million) or ppb (parts per billion, 1 billion = 1,000 million) is the ratio of the number of greenhouse gas molecules to the total number of molecules of
dry air”
DS, this is still going? The usual measurement is ppmv and water vapor in those units is 4000 ppmv, about ten times CO2. ppmv, because of gas properties, is also the number of molecules per million air molecules, so for every ten H2O molecules you have one of CO2. If you want to take mass, it is 2.5 g/kg (not 40 g/kg which any meteorologist would say is ridiculous even for the tropics, where it hardly exceeds 30 g/kg at the surface). Hope this helps.
climatereason, be sure to take all of this in proper context. The 40,000 ppmv water vapor is also correct but only near the surface on a warm normal summer day, sub-tropic like. I roughly come up with that via vapor pressure at 37°C at 65% RH. What Jim D seems to speaking of is the mean columnar water vapor globally, usually stated as ppcm or centimeters of precipitable water vapor in a unit column. Concentration of water vapor between 100 mb and the surface can differ by two magnitudes. By temperature it of course varies greatly. So his 4,000 ppmv may be closer to a whole-atmosphere global average but where most of us live it can be much higher only near the surface. I also hope that helps. Water vapor is a very mixed bag! :)
Wayne
For sure its complicated but the net result is that all carbon is only an (arguable) fraction of all Greenhouse gases and the man made part of co2 a much smaller fraction than that, although obviously co2 and water have different radiative properties and different life times in the atmosphere.
tonyb
Pierre-Normand | October 22, 2013 at 12:22 am |
That very well may be in many cases but not in this case. In the NOAA links I gave above it is explicitely stated that one is ppmv and the other is ppm.
From http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gsd/outreach/education/climgraph/
Let me know which part of that, if any, you do not understand.
Jim D | October 22, 2013 at 12:41 am |
I gave links to global map of specific humidity in kg/kg. I suggest you actually look at them. I also suggest you learn what specific humidity is and the primary reason for using it – it’s the ratio of water weight to total weight of air and therefore can be used to compare water content at different altitudes independent of volume. Weight of water vapor content falls off per unit volume as altitude increases the weights of all other components such as nitrogen and oxygen and CO2 fall off per unit volume as well at the same rate.
Here they are again:
http://www.knmi.nl/research/CKO/doc/EMIC/ReferenceRun/Images/q_djf.png
Please note the vast majority of the lower atmosphere where mean specific humidity remains above 0.01kg/kg or 10,000 ppm (NOT ppmv).
David, if your interpretation were right, that “ppm” means “ppmw” in their figure 8, then that would mean that all their reported ppm numbers for Oxygen (210,000ppm), CO2ppm (345ppm), etc. would be wrong. But those figures, although outdated in the case of CO2, are roughly the same in the two graphs. Hence, they clearly mean ppmv. If they had meant ppmw, then the figure for Oxygen would have been 23.1ppmw, and for CO2 it would have been 525ppmw (outdated 345ppmv value), or 600ppmw (for the current 400ppmv value).
And which percentage of the zero warming from 1998 to 2013 was caused by each greenhouse gas?
Actually, the land and Arctic warmed a lot while no one was looking. Everyone is too focused on the ocean circulations.
The SH land T decreased over the last 17yrs,SH sea ice increased,as did Antarctic blue ice.The SH rate of co2 growth decreased over the same period with step like differences in the MLO sh mid latitude stations in the 21st century.
Problem Why.
The SH is dominated by the ocean which is 80% of it, and this is consistent with the cold upwelling in this phase of the ocean circulation. When you get away from the ocean upwelling areas, that is where you see the forcing from CO2.
Explain the CO2
ie the rate of decrease in rate of growth in the SH
Cold water is more effective in keeping it in or absorbing it. The SH has large areas of cold upwelling water.
Jim D, are you saying this year the arctic warmed up or another?
Contrasting weather conditions were a significant factor in this year’s higher sea ice extent and lower Greenland Ice Sheet melt intensity, compared to last year. This summer saw air temperatures at the 925 hPa level that were 1 to 3 degrees Celsius (2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) lower than last summer. It was also a cool summer compared to recent years over much of the Arctic Ocean, and even cooler than the 1981 to 2010 average in some regions, particularly north of Greenland.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
It is safe the say that the Arctic warmed up since 1998. Look at the effect of that on the sea ice trend.
Cold water is more effective in keeping it in or absorbing it. The SH has large areas of cold upwelling water.
Mid latitude stations in the SH show a decrease in the inter annual amplitude compared with MLO.This suggests that the rectifying mechanisms are now operating throughout the year,which is troublesome where ocean T increases in the annular mode by 6-8c, and which does not fully explain the cold pump proposition.
JimD: ” the land and Arctic warmed a lot while no one was looking”
The Arctic Seems warmer. Latitude 40 to 75 is cooling like crazy over the last 7 years.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/northern-hemisphere-winter-doom-by-latitude-band/
The average is 2% to 3% H2O – and you are still out an order of magnitude Jim.
I think you are only looking at the surface, not the whole atmosphere. Common mistake, it seems.
80% of the mass of the atmosphere is in the troposphere and most of the water vapour. Although an interesting phenomenon is tropical thunderheads punching through the tropopause and feeding into the Brewer-Dodson circulation.
Warm, humid air at the surface rises buoyantly to and beyond dewpoint and water precipitates out in cloud. I have read 2 to 3% on average water vapour content in the troposphere – but I don’t know how to do the calculation easily. It seems reasonable. We would really have to go back to Ed Lorenz’s 1960’s convection model – and look where that took us.
You can look for total precipitable water, a vertically integrated quantity, which is 25 mm globally. This converts to 4000 ppm.
JIMD
Your computer models are lying to you.
DCA, that is from satellites (NVAP). Are they lying too?
David wrote: “Note specific humidity is weight of water vapor per total weight of air (including water vapor) and doesn’t fall off much with altitude because the gases all expand proportionately so the relative weights of each don’t change.”
It’s not because different components of air don’t expand proportionately that specific humidity drops with altitude. It’s rather because the water vapor precipitates with falling temperature. The fact that air expands uniformly is irrelevant, (except as it account for the lowering of the temperature of rising air masses, as they adiabatically expand).
Also, all you say about specific humidity at ground level and how it varies with latitude is true. It’s also quite inconsistent with the average ppmv *or* ppmw of water vapor in the whole troposphere being anywhere close to 40,000. Notice that the ratio of the molar mass of H2O to the molar mass of dry air is 18/29. This isn’t anywhere close to the factor of ten that would be needed to reconcile the two NOAA figures. Their percentage H2O figure (4%) clearly was wrong as a figure for the whole atmosphere. It only comes close to that in the lower tropical troposhere.
Mann’s retreat.
Why would Mann want to debate Joe Bastardi?
Why would Richard Dawkins want to debate Kent Hovind?
For that matter why would Joe Bastari want to debate Mann? Why Mann? Couldn’t be because he’s a flashpoint among deniers could it?
Entertainment for the debasement of science! No thanks!
I see Bastardi is still playing down the significance of CO2 on climate. Until skeptics admit to the significance of CO2, I don’t see any reason why climate scientists would want to debate them!
If Bastardi is a skydragon denying the warming effect of CO2 then why would any serious scientist want to debate him?
What’s that Bastardi fanbois? Bastardi ISNT a skydragon? Could have fooled me! What’s all this:
It’s hard to fathom that CO2 can cause anything beyond its assigned “boxed in” value to temperatures because of all that’s around it. It comes down to the sun, the oceans and stochastic events over a long period of time with action and reaction, versus a compound comprising .04% of the atmosphere and 1/100th of greenhouse gasses.
That’s not a skydragon tract?
Then what distinguishes what he just said from a skydragon? Anything significant enough to make a blind bit of difference?
He wants to convey the idea that Co2 has zip all effect on climate, but doesn’t want to be labelled as a skydragon. Is that it?
Well….we would have to wonder if that sort of dodging should be allowed. I mean if he really does accept the 1C no feedback warming from CO2, then that should be contrasted with the 0.8C warming over the last 100 years. It’s pretty clear then that given the rate Co2 is claiming, it is a major, if not the dominant driver of global temperature.
But of course it seems that’s the last thing Bastardi wants to admit.
Playing games, that’s all it is. Bastardi and pals would love a debate with Mann because it would be some more material that Anthony Watts, Judith Curry and Morono can blog about. Some more material for Fox News. Ya da yada. Gotta keep it noisy in the echo chamber!
“Why would Mann want to debate Joe Bastardi?”
On 24 November 1679 Hooke wrote to Newton, inviting Newton to take part in the scientific discussions of the Royal Society (of which Hooke had recently been appointed Secretary). Newton agreed and the debate was carried out in subsequent letters, copies of which were sent to members and interested parties.
We are not standing on the shoulders of giants here however (due to an absence of “Newtons “) unfortunately small pygmies do cast long shadows under the setting sun of mathematical physics.
“We are not standing on the shoulders of giants”
Newton hated Hooke with a passion. Hooke was described as a short, ugly hunchback. Newton wrote to Robert Hooke on February 5, 1676
“What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”
This is a put down, as Newton damns Hooke with faint praise, and ends by intimating that he has learned nothing of any value from Hooke, who was no giant.
> For that matter why would Joe Bastari want to debate Mann?
Good question.
NW was saying something about advertising earlier in the thread.
Something to do with negative prisoners’ dilemmas.
This going to be rather long, for which I apologise. I am sorry, Judith, you are dancing around the real issue; not addressing it. Mann’s retweet says it all. The scientific establishment, led by the Royal Society and American Physical Society cannot afford to have the debate you are suggesting, because of the very real possibility they will be shown to be scientifically incompetent. And they can afford to wait, and simply not attend any such debates. No-one can FORCE them to discuss, scientifically, whether CAGW is valid or not.
And that is the issue. We can wait until global temperatures actually start to fall as we get into positive phase of the PDO, and slowly enter the Eddy minimum, but this may take years, or even a decade or two. I believe that the issue is so urgent that we cannot afford to wait for the empirical data.
So this brings up the question, how do we force the scientific establishment to debate CAGW on a level playing field? The RS recently had a two day conference discussing the AR5, and carefully only invited speakers who were know to be fully supportive of CAGW. And no-one can stop them and say they are doing the wrong thing. The Astronomy Royal gave a talk recently, where, on CAGW, he merely repeated the mantra of the warmists, apparently without realising he was talking scientific nonsense. But there is no-one around to call him our. And there are many such stories that are happening almost on a daily basis.
I go back to the story of the mice who wanted to be warned when the cat was around. One bright young mouse suggested that a bell be placed around the cat’s neck. Certainly that would do the job. But an older and wiser mouse asked “Who is going to bell the cat?”
That is the position we skeptics face, here in October 2013. It is clear, as you and Joe have so eloquently stated, that a debate is not only desirable, but almost essential. But how do we FORCE to scientific establishment to enter into such a debate?
There is another story, this time from biblical times. David goes forth to fight Goliath; apparently a complete mismatch. But David has a sling shot, and has great skill in using it. A single shot to Goliath’s forehead knocks out the giant, and David then kills him with his own sword. David had the necessary firepower to win..
We skeptics are faced with a double whammy against us on this issue. We do not have the firepower to slay Goliath, and we have no-one who can bell the cat. Until those issues are addressed and answered, blogs like Climate Etc, and WUWT can be filled with this sort of very sensible science, and nothing at all is going to happen. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
So, I ask my question again “Who is going to bell the cat?”
Jim
You said;
“So this brings up the question, how do we force the scientific establishment to debate CAGW on a level playing field?”
If sceptics want to be taken seriously we stop throwing all sorts of wild and intemperate accusations at the climate establishment (not that I am suggesting YOU do that) and we produce peer reviewed -or at the very least properly scientifically constrained- papers on specific areas of the science we want to get across.
tonyb
I may be wrong, but as anecdotal evidence I have noticed a decrease in climate alarmism stories on certain liberal news web sites. And it seems that when a story does go up there are more people bashing the article than supporting it.
M. Hastings said:
“I may be wrong, but as anecdotal evidence I have noticed a decrease in climate alarmism stories on certain liberal news web sites. And it seems that when a story does go up there are more people bashing the article than supporting it.”
______
I also have observed that to be true, and would attribute it to multiple causes:
1) General “burn out” or saturation by the public in climate related news. There may be important news out there, even alarming news, but the public is simply burned out on hearing about it.
2) The current hiatus in tropospheric temperature increases, (except for Australiak, which is seeing a record warm year) most of the world currently is seeing only about the 4th warmest year on record (land and ocean), and the “4th warmest Year” doesn’t really grab the headlines.
3) The current La Nada (or ENSO neutral) Pacific ocean status. It is the extremes of La Nina or El Nino that can really wreak the havoc and create the headline grabbing news. The current La Nada condition doesn’t really lead to the extreme weather events.
Certainly not the case on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission). On last night’s news and current affairs programs we were being innundated with ideilogical BS that the bushfires we are experiencing around Sydney are due to carbon dioxide and the new government’s policy to dump carbon pricing will make it much worse.
Google indeed shows a hiatus in “global warming” interest, with no AR5 signal distinguishable from the noise. But could an ongoing rise in related, “deeper” search terms explain this approximate stand-still?
You’re kidding, right ? AGW alarmists calling rational minded people using common sense “denialists”, “sceptics” and dropping polar bears out of planes to splat in bloody pools on NY streets ! (there are two decades of these examples)
You jokers have been full on torching us for decades and now that your AGW gig is falling apart you’re telling us how to act to be taken seriously ?
You’re NUTS !
We skeptics are faced with a double whammy against us on this issue. We do not have the firepower to slay Goliath, and we have no-one who can bell the cat.
Actual DATA is our sling shot and skeptics will “bell the cat”
It is a work in progress!
Actually, now that I think about it, the Cat has been Belled.
Al Gore, the IPCC and the Nobel Prize Belled the cat.
Now, the Cat cannot do anything without everyone in the world knowing where the Cat is and What the Cat is doing.
Sometimes you can take an idiom a bit too far Herman…this is one of those times.
Goliath was comfortable with the consensus that he could not be defeated.
Consensus Climate Science will fall the same way.
A piece of data will slip in and destroy the Giant.
The Climate Goliath is not a person, it is a FLAWED THEORY.
The Cat has been Belled and the Flawed Theory will be destroyed with actual real data that will continue to not agree with Climate Computer Model Output.
You raise good points, Jim, but I think there are plenty of excellent scientists who could “bell the cat”. However, the primary dilemma that prevents an open discussion between the two sides is the disinclination of the CAGW crowd to engage in meaningful debate, for the Mann people would have much to lose and nothing to gain.
Remember Gavin’s refusal to debate Spencer when both appeared on the same TV program.
Congress could actually force the issue, as the recent history of the baseball steroid fiasco proves.
If we say the consensus has belled the skeptics, I think that works too. The cats just need to maneuver to where they have enough room to make use of their advantages. The mice are wary and depend on cover, places where only they can be.
Wouldn’t it be odd to have this all settled either way? What would we do with ourselves?
Jim C., said:
“We skeptics are faced with a double whammy against us on this issue. We do not have the firepower to slay Goliath.”
—–
Except there is where you completely reveal your hand Jim, and the fact that you are anything but a true and honest skeptic. Skepticism is not a “side” or a badge you wear or a destination. It is an approach to acquiring knowledge. A true skeptic does not want to “slay” Goliath, or anybody for that matter, but simply wants Goliath to present the data that proves why he believes what he believes. You, on the other hand, seem convinced 100% in your position, making you no skeptic, and simply out to “slay” those who differ in opinion.
R. Gates, you write “Except there is where you completely reveal your hand Jim,”
Excellent. I seem to have got my message across. Maybe skeptic is the wrong word. I am a denier. CAGW is a hoax, and I want to expose it for what it is. I am 100% convinced of my position, and I am out to slay those who believe in CAGW. By doing so, I hope to save Canadian taxpayers an enormous amount of money, and get our hydro (electricity) bills back to a sane level. That will help bring manufacturing back to Canada, and we will benefit enormously.
Jim C. said: “I am a denier.”
____
I can respect that. So long as everyone knows where you stand and you don’t hide behind the “skeptic” label. You know there are some blogs where you could not use that term for youself. It is considered blasphemy.
Jim C. said:
“I am out to slay those who believe in CAGW.”
____
Wow Jim. I hope you are speaking metaphorically. Please tell us you are. Just in case, Judith you might need to note and archive this as it could be evidence in some future criminal case. I believe your WordPress agreement might require some action on your part.
Sorry. I should have put “slay” in quotation marks, as you did.
R. Gates, you write “. It is considered blasphemy.” I don’t care what it is called. I use my real name, I have said where I live. I have given my email address. I am proud of what I write..
Jim,
Please understand…I think the word denier is quite appropriate to people like you (who also have no problem wearing that badge). It is quite honorable of you to come clean and admit what you believe. It is not blasphemy in my book. But there are those “sensitive” types who just can’t see how the term is appropriate, that is is akin to a true un-believer, if by the opposite- a believer, we mean those who are 100% sure that AGW is real. My argument has fallen on deaf ears and I’ve been chased off of a few blogs for mentioning the denier word.
Thanks for confirmation that I am completely justified in the use of the word when the appropriate person, such as yourself presents themselves so honorably and steps out from their hiding place behind the term “skeptic”.
Do be careful in suggesting you want to “slay people”. This is against the rules of WordPress, even if you are speaking metaphorically.
Actually Jim C., in looking back over the thread, it was not you who even made the original quote:
““We skeptics are faced with a double whammy against us on this issue. We do not have the firepower to slay Goliath.”
It was Herman Pope. So you confessed to being a denier and admitted (metaphorically, of course) that you wanted to slay those who believe in AGW– all on a mistake. You’re still a noble man, Jim C.
We skeptics are faced with a double whammy against us on this issue. We do not have the firepower to slay Goliath,
It was Jim Cripwell who said that first in this thread.
The tools of his trade include weather models. If he understood these models in depth, which maybe he doesn’t, he would see that setting CO2 to zero in them, or doubling it, would show him the kinds of bias that would develop, slowly at first, but probably noticeable when verified against a few days of data. It would be a bad model with CO2 off by a large amount like this. This may make him think about the consequences of globally doubling CO2 a little more in the context of something he claims he knows about. Weather forecasters don’t have to know how their models work to be able to do their job, but they can distinguish a bad model from a good one. It is kind of like a racing driver not needing to know the detailed mechanics of his car, or a computer user not needing to know how the computer works, but they know a good tool from a bad one.
There isn’t going to be another debate:
http://www.npr.org/2007/03/22/9082151/global-warming-is-not-a-crisis
“In this debate, the proposition was: “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.” In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.”
The alarmists got their butts whipped on their home field. They got Phds. They have learned their lesson. Why should they debate when they have nearly all of the major purveyors of information/propaganda on their side? They will stick with the false balance meme as their strategy. The gutless wimps need to step it up, if they are going to save the world.
Having said all that, I don’t see why Joe Bastardi (or anybody else) would think Joe is particularly qualified to debate climate science with Mike Mann. There is nothing in it for world famous Nobel Mikey to debate a weatherman.
Our problem is that the alarmists could be right, but they haven’t proven it. They probably have been wrong about the extent of natural variation, but they could still be right about CO2 + positive feedbacks causing harmful warming, somewhere down the line. Unless I have missed something and they have been proven to be wrong. Uncertainty cuts both ways. Since the alarmists are in the driver’s seat, whatever happens is on them.
Don Montford,
Yes. True!. But we will not know unless we can do due diligence on the information that is relevant. And we cant do due diligence properly unless the information is documented and structured in a way that is easily accessible.
I say again, a model I’d suggest is the way the information is documented for nuclear waste disposal. It is engineering standard. It is accessible. It can be and is contested in appropriate adversarial forums. Here is an example of what I am suggesting is needed: http://www.nwmo.ca/home
Somebody should pay me the big bucks to be a reverse weather forecaster that can hindcast the global average temperature accurately without using any direct measures of temperature.
All you need is these component measures at any point in time:
1. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere
2. SOI as defined by the values of atmospheric pressure in Tahiti and Darwin
3. Aerosol concentration in the atmosphere as generated by volcanic events
4. LOD as defined by the correction in the Length Of Day measure in seconds.
5. TSI as a measure of the solar insolation plus sunspot variation
The parameters form the mnemonic CSALT
The CSALT model works very well over the years going back to 1880:
http://imageshack.us/a/img41/1231/1gfq.gif
You can try it out here and play with the tuning parameters:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
So to do a good job of forecasting climate n the future, all we need is a good projection of CO2 levels to get the elevated temperature anomaly and the SALT parameters to get at the possible fluctuations.
That would get me even bigger bucks.
WHUT. Has CSALT been use to predict the future, and been proven to do so consistently?
Where are the auditors when you need them?
WHUT, I take it that your answer means no. Am I correct?
See if Cripwell is sharp enough to figure out why his question does not apply.
All Cripwell does is play rhetorical games, so I will give him a logical one back.
WHT, to make a genuine forecast using this model–say for 20 years ahead–don’t we need to forecast the explanatory variables? In your third figure showing the hold-out sample fit, are these based on contemporaneous explanatory measurements, or (say) 20-year-back forecasts of the explanatory measurements?
WHT, sorry, I should have said the top figure, not the third figure (there is no third figure)… the top figure shows the hold-out sample performance. But again, what is this based on as inputs? If it requires the contemporaneous values of these five inputs, it’s not (yet) forecasting.
WHUT, you write “See if Cripwell is sharp enough to figure out why his question does not apply.”
I must be dumb. I have absolutely no idea why your model cannot be used to forecast the future. Can you explain it for me please. In my experience, ALL models should be capable of predicting the future. That is how we test to see if the model represents reality.
The five inputs could conceivably be estimated as future projections
1. CO2 — no sweat, we just need to know fossil-fuel emissions
2. SOI — trying to predict the subdecadal oscillations is much more difficult, but they are historically bounded in range with an average value of zero
3. Aerosols — volcanic activity is impossible to predict except as a sporadic noise source
4. LOD — This is a multidecadal value that might be related to known mechanisms having a periodic nature
5. TSI — This has a 11 year period in sunspots but is not entirely predictable.
The SOI could be modeled as a red noise source, using an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to generate a random bounded walk about zero.
Volcanic activity would be a Poisson noise source.
I will probably add these in as a projection capability, and then you would have a stochastic projection.
Cripwell asked :
and then not knowing the answer to the rhetorical question he asked, Cripwell sighed:
The answer is that I developed the model over the past week or two and since the future has yet to arrive, I can not test it against the future !
WHUT, you write “The answer is that I developed the model over the past week or two and since the future has yet to arrive, I can not test it against the future !”
Fair enough. In your original you wrote “So to do a good job of forecasting climate n the future, all we need is a good projection of CO2 levels to get the elevated temperature anomaly and the SALT parameters to get at the possible fluctuations.”
When are you going to test this out, and provide us with a forecast that can be tested sometime in the future?
People have gotten Nobel prizes lately for far less.
Best of luck to you!
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=32
The residual is everything else and the decadal trajectory of climate depends on the persistence of the shift in cloud around the turn of the century that is associated with a shift in ocean and atmosphere circulation.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ProjectEarthshine-albedo_zps87fc3b7f.png.html?sort=3&o=9
Earthshine changes in albedo shown in blue, ISCCP-FD shown in black and CERES in red. A climatologically significant change before CERES followed by a long period of insignificant change.
Again Chief,
Just random unrelated “cut-n-paste” postings? What’s up dude?
Again living up to your reputation as a warminista troll gatesy?
The graph by Palle and Laken is precisely what the IPCC is discussing – but joined with MODIS using tropical SST to intercalibrate.
The cloud shift is captured as well in Project Earthshine.
The researchers used a climate model, a so-called coupled ocean-atmosphere model, which they forced with the observed wind data of the last decades. For the abrupt changes during the 1970s and 1990s they calculated predictions which began a few months prior to the beginning of the observed climate shifts. The average of all predictions for both abrupt changes shows good agreement with the observed climate development in the Pacific.
“The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm
The 1998/2001 climate shift is a fact of life – get used to it.
Chief,
It’s just the timing and placement your random cut-n-paste diatribes that are somewhat of interest – more as a psychological study on you, rather than any substance they contain.
As to the obvious fact in your statement: “The 1998/2001 climate shift is a fact of life – get used to it.”
Yep, a lot less energy has been flowing from the ocean to the atmosphere over this past decade+. It’s called the “cool phase” of the PDO. A great time for the oceans to be retaining more energy, as they have and as numerous studies are now confirming.
Oh for God’s sake – it is in webby’s csalt thread. You seem to have extreme difficulty in making the most obvious connections.
Webby’s graph like many of these attempts at multiple regression suffers from neglecting changes in cloud radiative forcing. It is not merely that we don’t have all the information – but that the data says something else entirely.
CO2 should read all other factors. The funniest thing is that the ‘residual’ is always about 0.1 degree C/decade – which itself is abundantly obvious.
As for energy and oceans – I have done it to death with you.
judithcurry.com/2013/10/18/open-thread-weekend-37/#comment-402055
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/18/open-thread-weekend-37/#comment-402065
I have been listing groupthink symptoms and showing how they apply to warminista behaviour. The inability to review assumptions, the demonisation of perceived outsiders and post hoc rationalisation of anomalies have played in the past day with you.
Here the most recent of my groupthink comments – http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/18/open-thread-weekend-37/#comment-402152
You really seem to have so very little understanding and return again and again to the theme that I am utterly mad. It is all boring as hell and I would appreciate it if you would stop corrupting the threads with meaningless and twaddle directed at me.
Didn’t link – http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/18/open-thread-weekend-37/#comment-402055
Chief, if you have something better, serve it up. Come up with an alternative model to CSALT, and we can do an objective comparison.
AIC or BIC are useful criteria to apply because they give credit to accuracy while penalizing over-fitting with too many parameters. So we can do one of these information criteria metrics when your model is ready.
There are several over nearly a decade. The first attempts couple of years
Early attempts merely cleaned up ENSO in the series.
e.g. – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ensosubtractedfromtemperaturetrend.gif.html?sort=3&o=125
Lean and Rind did one that included solar, volcanoes and TSI.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Lean2010.png.html?sort=3&o=90
Swanson did one at real climate that merely removed the 1976/77 and 1998/2001 ‘dragon-kings’ and presumed that the residual trend was CO2. I quite like this – although I would presume that the residual was the result of radiative forcing at TOA that seems dominated by cloud changes by about 2 to 1 over greenhouse gas forcing changes in the same period. There was some 0.7 W/m^2 cooling in IR and 2.1 W/m^2 warming in SW between 1983 and the late 1990’s. That’s the starting point for what the data says.
Tsonis et al did one that used models to clean up the series.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/MONOTONIC.gif.html?sort=3&o=123
Tung and Zhou recently calculated a trend by removing AMO effects.
My method simply calculates a least squares trend over the last complete cycle of warm and cool regimes.
They all come up with about the about the same number. So we have at most 0.1 degrees C/decade warming and probably somewhat less. Higher precision is probably not possible at this time so this seems to have been taken as far as it should be.
To go beyond to near term prediction you need theories about what happens to both the components of the physical climate system – ENSO, volcanoes, dust, snow, ice, cloud, Sun, biosphere, AMOC, etc – and insight into the fundamental nature of coupled nonlinear systems. Tsonis – as usual – comes closest.
‘Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’
To 2020 the Sun declines, sulphates are negative whatever happens (there is a theory that mixing of sulphates and black carbon in Chinese emissions actually enhanced the warming potential – but we wont go there), the cool Pacific mode active since the 1998/2001 climate intensifies, cloud increases with yet cooler SST, carbon dioxide flux to the atmosphere declines as the planet cools a little. Just the big ones. Gatesy took the biggest bet in quatloo history. What a sucker.
Beyond that there be dragons and potentially catastrophic change – predominantly with AMOC on the cool side as far as I can see but theoretically on either end of the spectrum of warm or cool – in as little as a decade as climate shifts unpredictably yet again. What a wild ride we are on.
Where is this “method” Chief?
If you don’t post something it continues to confirm that you are a complete poseur.
The other dude Tisdale challenged with a model. Even though that model is contrived, at least he produced something.
You on the other hand have always shot blanks.
Here I was being nice. You ARE such a poontanger webster.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1945/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1945/to:1998/trend
Tisdale’s ‘model’ uses cumulative SOI. A quite respectable technique that assumes that the system has a memory of previous ENSO conditions.
It was used in this report I showed you just the other day – http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1828v1.pdf
Want me to calculate one so you can update your graph?
It is used in Australian hydrology to determine inflection points in multi-decadal regimes. Why we discovered regimes back in the olden days – way olden days of the 1990’s.
He is nuts. What do these people do, just pick anything laying around and see if it matches the trend?
SOI is defined as the pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin.
If someone is insane enough to do a cumulative of this, it will turn into the integrated pressure of Tahiti minus the integrated pressure of Darwin.
What kind of sense does this make over 130 years?
What happens to the integrated pressure over the span of thousands of years before this time?
Then again you might be making this stuff up Chief.
The idea of producing some oversimplified and conceptually unjustified blog science to qualify for webby’s A team is absurd. This particular exercise has been done to death and there is nothing to be gained by picking over such a dessicated little scientific corpse.
I discussed half a dozen such endeavors – mostly from peer reviewed science – and compared and contrasted.
I anticipated the trends of major climate factors in the next few years – perhaps I will need to graph it. A 0.2 degree C cooling to 2020. This should be within my Excel skills – I am after all an engineer and an environmental scientist who has made a career of numerical modeling. Perhaps instead I need a 2B pencil, a scale rule and an abacus.
Finally I came to the theory of coupled nonlinear systems. This is why it is suspected – as Tsonis suggests in the quote – that the cooling may continue for some decades yet. Why do they never focus on the theory and only peripheral trivia?
Perhaps I should blow my own horn more – less risky if you are shooting blanks.
I checked, Chief is not making this stuff up, Tisdale is actually integrating the SOI signal to make up the trend !
Tisdale is also carefully choosing the offset of the initial point so that the integrated curve straightens out enough so that it matches the HadCrut curve.
This is really bad.
Web,
be careful you are showing Jim Cripwell the co2 signal. He might blow a head gasket.
Mosh,
Nah, at most Cripwell will miss a cross-stitch and have to start over with his needle-point.
Too bad you don’t have a reliable metric to measure the signal. Oh well, someday…
WebHubTelescope: Why does your model need so many parameters? It can be done with only three monthly components:
o HADISST-based NINO3.4 SST anomalies, 1951-1990 base years per Trenberth (ENSO)
o Sunspot Numbers (solar)
o Aerosol optical depth (volcanic aerosols)
I did mine almost 5 years ago:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/reproducing-global-temperature-anomalies-with-natural-forcings/
That is embarrassing. You took a set of time series that individually have no trend and then a trend somehow appears out of nowhere?
NINO3.4 has no long-term trend.
Sunspot Numbers have little long-term trend over the span, and it wouldn’t add much to the trend anyways.
Aerosols from volcanos have no long-term trend.
You put these together and somehow it creates a curve that follows the warming trend of HadCrut. How can that happen? Magic?
Seriously, what the heck are you doing?
Bob, what happens if you use the same algorithm to extend the data from 2007 to 2013?
Do you note a pause?
WebHubTelescope, it is you who should be embarrassed for your failure to grasp that ENSO is more than an index. ENSO is a process that contributes to or suppresses the transfer of heat from the tropics to the poles and contributes to or suppresses the distribution of warm water from the tropical Pacific to the rest of the global oceans.
Bob said:
“ENSO is a process that contributes to or suppresses the transfer of heat from the tropics to the poles and contributes to or suppresses the distribution of warm water from the tropical Pacific to the rest of the global oceans.”
___
And contributes to or suppresses the transfer of energy from the oceans to the atmosphere.
Doc Martyn: First, I was in error above with the base years. Trenberth and Stepaniak (2001) used 1950-79 as base years, not 1951-90 as noted earlier.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/jclim2001b/ENflavorsr.html
To answer your question, yes. The underlying curve is generated by the running total of the HADISST NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies (1950-79 base years). Here’s the long-term curve:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/nino3-4-running-total-ref-1950-79-start-jan-1870.png
And here’s the underlying ENSO-related curve from January 1975 to July 2013:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/nino3-4-running-total-ref-1950-79-start-jan-1975.png
So it did capture the slowdown.
Regards
Not to mention that it, in conjunction with other processes, affects the transfer of energy from the sun to the oceans.
============
Webster, Here is that “trendless” solar/volcanic combination by hemisphere.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/JELXyK4v9-RJ6nQ4_lx2lgcrWaTfdHVTO1Vkm_HbuAk=w355-h198-p-no
There is no such thing as “global” solar/volcanic forcing if you use surface temperature which is biased to the NH due to land amplification as a measure.
And with respect to ENSO R. Gates the Skeptical Warmist says: “And contributes to or suppresses the transfer of energy from the oceans to the atmosphere.”
Yup, and this can be seen in the ocean heat content data for the tropical Pacific.
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/figure-9-31.png
But we cannot use an ENSO index to determine the amount of heat discharged or recharged by ENSO, because there are many other factors come into play: trade wind strength, cloud cover, thermocline depth, etc. When looking at the ocean heat content of the tropical Pacific, we can only use an ENSO index to determine the timing and duration of ENSO events.
kim says: “Not to mention that it, in conjunction with other processes, affects the transfer of energy from the sun to the oceans.”
Bingo! Have you again been reading that wonderful book about ENSO “Who Turned on the Heat?”
Heh, wish I could have helped write it.
===============
I confess that I can be sloppy at times, but nothing as egregiously bad as thinking that a cumulative sum of an ENSO index means anything ala Tisdale.
Team Denier is weak when it comes to any kind of scientific modeling expertise.
You don’t use a cumulative ENSO index webby? Shock!!!! Horror!!!
We know that ENSO+PDO = IPO warm or cool over decades. We do all know that don’t we? The cumulative values reflect that the system has a memory. The conditions now are the sum of conditions in the past. An El Nino will add energy to the atmosphere – more frequent and intense El Nino over decades – or indeed centuries and millennia – adds yet more warmth.
It is not possible to distinguish the CO2 effect from this cumulative effect of the IPO because of collinearity. It makes this method pretty much a dead end for attribution.
IPO energy dynamics need some real world anchor in data for TOA radiant flux data to understand what is happening.
Cloud cover is negatively correlated to SST. So we get less cloud in El Nino and more in La Nina. This results in increased IR emissions and decreased SW reflection in El Nino and vice versa. The net seems to be planetary cooling in El Nino and warming in La Nina. This is not merely transfer of energy between oceans and atmosphere – but the far more fundamental idea of total planetary energy content.
Loeb et al combined ERBS and CERES and conveniently labeled the peaks and troughs of IR emissions as La Nina and El Nina.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=70
The large losses in IR outweigh the gains in SW in El Nino and vice versa.
Enric Palle and Ben Laken has recently combined ISCCP-FD and MODIS to produce this cloud history. The data sources are intercalibrated using tropical SST. It is a proxy for reflected SW. The change between the 80’s and 90’s is 2.1 W/m^2 warming.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandLaken2013_zps73c516f9.png.html?sort=3&o=33
The large changes in TOA flux – completely dominating flux changes from greenhouse gases in the satellite era – arise from these changes in ocean and atmosphere circulation and seem to accumulate over time.
Both dynamics operate – TOA flux change and ocean/atmosphere energy transfer. But the records suggest that fux change is dominant.
You do not even know what you are saying because you have no concept of logical reasoning.
The index that you are using is derived from temperature so that if you integrate that over time it becomes an integrated temperature.
But this integrated temperature has to be at least somewhat similar to the original temperature otherwise it won’t recursively stabilize.
This is what you are saying:
Integral of temperature = K * temperature
This has only one solution and that is an exponential function.
It is exceedingly frustrating to see this kind of butchery of scientific and mathematical principles but with skeptics that only know that the answer is ABCD, what else can we expect?
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
Are you again denying what is obvious to any knowledgeable observer? The IPO is something that I have studied for decades. You bring to this an understanding that is ultimately too limited to be of much interest. In the end it is science that progresses and tells us about climate shifts, ocean and atmosphere patterns, stadium waves, synchronised chaos and much else that is informing the new climate paradigm. In the end science is providing the answers – but in the meantime the obsessions of the climate space cadets inhibits progress. Inhibits progress on policies and responses to carbon emissions especially.
The cumulative ENSO method works because it is an index. It oscillates around zero. The cumulative values show the preponderance of negative or positive states over time. In the decadal mode the values stay predominantly positive or negative for decades alternately cooling or warming the planet. Now you can either accept or not – and I suspect that with your history you are more interested in anything but reality in the quest to deny that there are complexities and natural variability.
As I said – the methodology cannot attribute between the cumulative effects of ocean states and carbon dioxide because of collinearity. Your method is a dead parrot. Which is why I didn’t even read the Xie (?) paper. It is both derivative and pointless – your re-creation doubly so as revelatory to you as it seems to be.
Many of us were at that stage a decade ago. It hit me in 2003 while continuing a decade and a half study of rainfall regimes. After thinking about it non-stop for three days – I spoke to a leading Australian hydro-climatologist who knew all about it already. My 2007 American Thinker article expressed what was known in response to the IPCC failing to rethink natural variability. The space cadets continue a policy of resisting the reality of the science and ongoing post-hoc rationalisation when they can deny no longer. It is why they are 10 years behind the curve clinging to obsolete science.
Debates always have problems because the skeptics can make things up as rhetorical points and not be fact-checked, and the non-expert audience has no way to distinguish a valid point from a bogus one. Debates need to be via blog or email, not in real time, and someone needs to arbitrate or fact-check the points being made at each step.
The alarmist can obviously make things up as well. Regardless, I don’t think this setup would be an issue. John Nielson Gammon debated Robert G. Brown on the website Climate abyss in this manner.
It seems fairly obvious the reason there is never a debate has nothing to do with skeptics being unfair and everything to do with maintaining a false perception of “consensus” to the public. If people realize how many PHD’s don’t actually believe the thermageddon is imminent they might look at the evidence themselves and then the house of cards will collapse.
When your hypothesis is dependent on nobody ever looking at the evidence it’s a pretty good sign there’s problems with it.
“Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.”
Oscar Wilde
skeptics can make things up as rhetorical points and not be fact-checked.
Who was making things up in Climate Gate? Who was using tricks
Wasn’t Daffy Duck using tricks in Climategate?
Climategate is a demonstration of fact-checking working. Doubt all initial results until someone has had a chance to repeat them. That is how science progresses. There are dead-ends. Spencer and Christy made the famous blunder with their own satellite data that was later corrected through the work of other people.
Those of you who criticize Joe so readily seem to forget he earns a good living in s field where you are judged every day on the accuracy of your work. If he isn’t very good at what he does, how come he maintains his clients and is not put out of business by those so much better educated?
Joe’s weather forecasting company seems to do pretty well, has alot of clients
I bet he is honest and accurate about uncertainty.
Millions of people earn a good living in fields where they are judged every day on the accuracy of their work. Accountants and engineers have lots of clients. What has this got to do with debating climate science?
That means he can predict the weather. It means he is observation focused. He can extrapolate some of his observations to climate. Climate scientists need to focus on observations also and delineate patterns like Joe B. does. I know they do that to an extent, but they don’t wait for a thorough understanding before they start writing code for climate models.
Modellers in cloud towers
Are unaware of April showers,
Whiling away … … … .
jim2 | October 20, 2013 at 7:25 pm |
“…..but they (Climate scientist) don’t wait for a thorough understanding before they start writing code for climate models.”
Jee, ya’d uv thunk that a 97% consensus for a global tax to prevent the impending might have been preceded with a “thorough understanding”.
There are a lot of weathermen, who earn a good living predicting the weather. They don’t even have to get it right very often. Chance of rain. Partly cloudy. It’s gonna be a warm 85F, or somewhere in that vicinity. What qualifies them to debate a climate scientist on climate science? Why would a climate scientist debate a weatherman? Why not get a climate scientist to debate a climate scientist?
You can’t get a consensus climate scientist to debate a real climate scientist.
A consensus climate scientist does not recognize anyone who disagrees as a scientist.
Real scientists do disagree and consensus people (who are not real scientists) don’t recognize or acknowledge them.
Belief or disbelief in CO2-driven global warming would not factor into a weather forecast any more than belief or disbelief in macro-evolution would factor into a medical diagnosis. Joe’s skill at weather forecasting is not dependent on small slow changes in a trace gas any more than a doctor’s medical diagnosis is dependent on small slow changes in species.
Joe’s good, but he has some important weaknesses as a forecaster.
For one thing, he’s almost always wrong, when he is wrong, on the extreme side. That is to say, he almost always forecasts the most extreme event possible. I’ve been an attentive subscriber for 6 or 7 years now, first at accuweather now at weatherbell, and I honestly can’t recall a single time when his forecast was on the more benign side of the range of forecasts out there, on an impending or possible storm. Needless to say, he’s frequently wrong. When he is right, he’s spectacularly right since he’s often a lone voice, and that’s what drives him. Smart and talented guy often undone by his own ego…
I have never read such an insightful article about AGW motivations and I have read many of them!
And Joe’s article is insightful on AGW motivation. Many of those consensus guys would be driving cabs or waiting tables, if the AGW scare definitively collapsed.
I do not crave anything in this field except what I already have.. the chance to make forecasts every day. I have never sought approval of other men, as seeking something makes me someone else’s puppet. As far as one blown forecast after another, well I get paid for being right, not wrong, that is how life in the private sector works.
Climate is something that is a NEEDED BUILDING BLOCK for what I do. These people came into our domain with this idea that co2 is leading to catastrophic weather. Is that so. I guess the 1930s through 1950s heat and hurricanes was not catastrophic enough, as an example.
By why argue, You can present fact after fact and people wont pay attention to anything that could possibly challenge them. In what I do, you pay attention to everything that challenges you. There is no bridge that can allow this closed minded ilk to actually cross to take a look.
In the meantime, the choke hold on our nation that this issue is causing ( EPA 3 lines of evidence easily debunked, yet on they go, shutting down the fossil fuel industry) continues. All these AGW grant people, here is my question. When there is no tax base left for you to get grants from ( that is where it comes from you know, it doesnt grow on trees) what are you going to do? And how are you going to feel when you realize that with all your brilliance, you were just useful fools.
And BTW, I have nothing against other forms of energy. In fact Solar and Wind are more profitable for a met than fossil fuels, since outside of hurricanes, the weather every day is not that big a concern to a fossil fuel company.. longer term ideas are. I do have something against forced compliance though.
What did you mean on Fox News when you said that CO2 doesn’t mix well? What measurement data leads you to believe that?
That is probably the first thing Mikey would hit him with. Game over.
There’s a lot more to the issue of “mixed” versus “well-mixed” that is being discussed here. CO2 isn’t really a well-mixed gas in the sense that I would use the term. If I were to say a gas is well mixed, that would indicate it mixes by diffusion, rather than depending on mechanical mixing.
CO2 is heavier than air, and the principle CO2 sources are near the surface of the Earth. As a result you can see up to a factor of two difference in CO2 atmospheric concentrations from day to night.
The question isn’t, though whether CO2 is truly a well-mixed gas, but whether that assumption is an adequate one to describe radiative processes involving CO2. I think the correct answer is “it is an adequate assumption.”
Clear this up:
CO2 is heavier than air, and the [principal] CO2 sources are near the surface of the Earth. As a result you can see up to a factor of two difference in CO2 atmospheric concentrations from day to night [near the surface].
While I’m at it, above the surface layer, the regional variability is around 10% (40 ppm). The annual variability of a particular latitudinal band around the mean is less than 2.5% (10 ppm).
For annual scales (climate rather than weather), I think the assumption of “well mixed” is an adequate one.
Carrick | October 20, 2013 at 8:00 pm |
“As a result you can see up to a factor of two difference in CO2 atmospheric concentrations from day to night [near the surface].”
Do you have a source for this? I’ve taken CO2 measurements myself and never seen anything approaching a 2x day/night difference so I’m going to need a little bit more than your say so before I conclude my eyes are lying.
Carrick | October 20, 2013 at 7:50 pm |
“If I were to say a gas is well mixed, that would indicate it mixes by diffusion, rather than depending on mechanical mixing.”
CO2 mixes by diffusion. One gravity isn’t enough to overcome diffusion produced by Brownian motion.
FAIL
Carrick,
“Clear this up:”
Ask Joe.
David:
Why would you conclude that your eyes must be lying, when what I said was you can see concentration changes this large? “Can” has a different meaning that “will”, it means you “could” not that you “must”, so you can read this “you can see up to a factor of two” not exactly a factor of two everywhere (and not exactly a factor of two for the upper limit, if memory serves, it is somewhat above 2x ambient CO2 levels).
Typically you see very large swings in urban areas where you have temperature inversions (so mechanical mixing is greatly reduced) or pressure domes that trap air within a confined region (so that mechanical mixing is suppressed).
The Phoenix Dome is as classic example of this. See Isdo, et al 2001, Fig 2, where approximately a factor of two increase is observed. This study is pretty interesting too, since they look at the effect of the excess heat trapping associated with the increased CO2 (the effect is negligible).
For forests, what you see is a drop below mean atmospheric levels in the day time (the forest consumes CO2 via photosynthesis) and a dramatic increase at night (the roots respirate, consuming O2 and producing CO2). Because of the stable atmospheric conditions typically found at nighttime in a forest, the later effect of more pronounced. Factors of two variability day to night are not uncommon in established growth.
There is hourly data available online, but I’m afraid you’ll need to do your own googling, I don’t have time to play with this.
Yes, that was a partial fail on my part. I said what I was trying to say poorly. It is of course true that molecular diffusion still works when the gas has a higher molecular weight, it just no longer is able to produce a well-mixed gas: That is, you end up with a concentration gradient from molecular diffusion alone.
Contra to your comment “CO2 mixes by diffusion”, it is easy to demonstrate that molecular diffusion is not the dominant mechanism for mixing from observational measurements. Were molecular diffusion were the dominant mechanism for mixing, you wouldn’t observe stratification of CO2 only when atmospheric conditions were stable against turbulent mixing.
The time scale for molecular diffusion is very long compared to mechanical mixing, but I suppose you knew that already and were just trying to find something to poke at.
You’re clutching at straws, Carrick. Idso didn’t find a 2x difference it found up to 75% greater CO2 concentration in downtown Phoenix than in surrounding rural areas at a height of 2 meters.
Yeah, if you’ve got CO2 pouring into the atmosphere from automotive exhaust pipes in the heart of a crowded city you’ll get a temporary rise while it diffuses. The percentage of the earth’s land that lies at the heart of crowded cities with a large number of automobiles is less than 1% and the very bottom few meters of the atmosphere is less than 1% of that. So youi’re clutching at a 0.1% unmixed straw in a 99.9% well-mixed atmosphere. So there.
P.S. I’ve been inside a small room not well ventilated and watched CO2 on a digital ventilation control go from 400ppm to 4000ppm in an hour just from my own breathing. Isolated instances like that and downtown Phoenix during rush hour don’t negate the fact that CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere by any reasonable definition of well-mixed. You’re defending the indefensible. Joe Bastardi screwed the pooch on that Fox News interview saying CO2 doesn’t mix well. Maybe he was high or nervous or something but whatever it was caused him to have a brain fart of monumental proportions. Then to top it off he brain farted again and said CO2 couldn’t cause warming because it’s a trace gas which also exhibits scientific and engineering illiteracy on a grand scale.
Sigh. Another close-minded fool.
Bye.
Thought I’d follow up with a few more details. I’m breaking this up into three parts due to restrictions on numbers of URLs per comment.
There is a measurement station at Linden, Germany that provides continuous 24-hour measurements (typically 30 minutes to 1-hour between measurements).
Link to data here
You can see from the following figure that variations at the Linden, Germany site exceed a factor of three.
Figure.
This substantiates my comment that “As a result you can see up to a factor of two difference in CO2 atmospheric concentrations from day to night”.
Again “can” does not mean “must” except to exceptionally motivated reasoners.
(Part 2)
The correct link for Linden is : http://www.hlug.de/?id=7122&station=1005
Secondly, you can look at boreal forest variations using the ERSL data for Park Falls, Wi, for which there is tower data available. There are no “near surface” measurements, so you would have to model the observed variations with height and extrapolate to the ground to infer what you’d measure on the ground. None the less, even at altitude, more than a factor of two variability of CO2 is observed. See e.g., this
Here is the most recent 24-hour period from their website. The variability observed is 180 ppm to 640 ppm, again more than a factor of two.
The observed variability is due to the nature of how trees absorb, store and use light energy:
During the day they convert photons CO2 + water + to O2 + glucose via photosynthesis.
During the night, the glucose is converted back into fuel via respiration. here glucose + O2 is converted into energy + CO2 + water.
So during the day CO2 is absorbed and O2 emitted, resulting in lower than average CO2 levels, during the night CO2 is emitted and O2 absorbed.
I’d love to have some data with O2 and CO2 measured at the same site. My prediction is, because O2 is more nearly equal to the molecular weight of N2, you won’t see the very large diurnal swings in O2 in a boreal forest. I’ve not seen the data so I don’t know if this prediction is valid or not.
bueller? bueller?
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/plants-suck-half-the-co2-out-of-the-air-around-them-before-lunchtime-each-day/
Chapman H. W., Gleason L. S., Loomis W. E. (1954)
“On a windless day CO2 values rose to 410ppm overnight and fell to 210ppm during the morning.”
Calm Summer nights? Not that unusual for the corn belt.
(Part 3)
Here I’m looking at vertical structure. I believe this is useful to look at, as it allows you to look at the relative importance of molecular diffusion to mechanical mixing. You can download the data I’m looking at, which are for the WLEF tower in Park Falls, WI from here:
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/towers/co2/lef/
Here are a couple of plots:
2008 calendar year
24-hour diurnal cycle
There’s a lot to look at with this data, but the short version is the nocturnal boundary layer typically has a height of about 200-meters. This means that regions above 200-meters are decoupled from those below.
Note that because this vertical stratification of CO2 is so strong, you probably can’t assume that 11-m is representative of near-surface (e.g., 1-m) values. One could probably model it using Monin-Obhukov, but I’ve no time for that.
(Part 4) To finish a thought “This means that regions above 200-meters are [mechanically] decoupled from those below.”
If molecular diffusion were the dominant mechanism, you wouldn’t see the break-point that you do here.
Steven Mosher, of course everything I’ve said here is familiar territory to people who take environmental measurements for a living (or should be).
The thing that really looms in my mind is Beck’s work. He plotted a lot of old measurements, taken before the surface boundary layer was well understood, many of which were contaminated by regional CO2 sources.
One of the major contributions made by Keeling was to work out how to take measurements near the surface and get values representative of the troposphere above the surface boundary layer.
I think this is a more accurate representation of tropospheric CO2 levels. which combines Antarctica flask data with Law Dome.
(Part 5)
This wraps it up. I could discuss regional scale variability in CO2, but I’ve chosen not too: There’s plenty of data out there and discussion already about the non-uniformitty of CO2 in the troposphere.
People who assume I’m defending Bastardi here will find themselves mistaken, as Bastardi’s conclusions are certainly in error, even if he starts on sort of the right path.
As I see it, the problem here is in the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. “Well mixed gas” is a sufficient condition to arrive at a certain set of conclusions. The real question is “what are the necessary conditions to arrive at these same set of conclusions?”
The way I would put it is: Well mixed gives you certain elegant results. Real atmospheric CO2 is not well mixed, but it is mixed “well enough” that the conclusions drawn from the “well mixed” gas approximation are still valid, within experimental measurement uncertainty.
It is plausible that models in the future will need to incorporate features variations of CO2 in the atmosphere to describe regional scale variations (especially models that incorporate a biosphere).
As far as I’m aware, there’s no data that requires you to incorporate these regional scale features. Or put another way, I don’t know of any data which are known to conflict with results obtained starting with the assumption of “well-mixed” gases.
Hopefully that’s both clear & sensible.
Carrick
By great coincidence I was going through some old emails this afternoon and came across some I exchanged with Beck just before he died.
He understood the nature of his figures and his conclusion, and mine, was that the scientists who took the (better) measurements had good knowledge of how to do it properly and the equipment they used was increasingly accurate. After all they had been taking measurements from 1820 To the mid 1950’s.
Keeling took the figures callendar selected from the lower part of the possible range he could have chosen.
Becks work remains an enigma and it should not be rejected in its entirety
Tonyb
Steven Mosher, of course everything I’ve said here is familiar territory to people who take environmental measurements for a living (or should be).
#########
ya but springer knows better.
Now, now, moshe. Applaud Carrick’s elegance, and mimic it.
==========
TonyB:
That might be Beck’s opinion, but it’s implausible at best. It assumes they knew about as yet poorly understood surface atmospheric meteorology. As far as I know, Keeling was the first one to identify these issues with surface layer meteorology.
As I pointed out on this thread, if you take Beck’s historical data set at face value, that suggests until Keeling’s time we had very rapid increases & decreases in CO2 levels.
And then, suddenly, when people adopted Keelings methodology, the scatter was greatly reduced.
You can clearly see from the surface data I included above, that you can get the same sort of scatter as reported from Beck’s historical data set by not using careful positioning, or by recording at the wrong time of the day.
Here is a link that describes the history of Keeling’s work in some depth. This chapter is especially relevant.
I think this makes short work of the problem of whether Beck’s data set is reliable or not. Keeling recognized the source of the variability and how to large reduce it.
Briefly, you collect data in mid-afternoon, when boundary layer turbulence is a maximum. You drop days where the atmospheric conditions are not suited for measurement. Hill tops are better than valley floors.
TonyB if you can find any text from these older measurements where they acknowledge these issues and address it in their measurements, it would make Beck’s claims a bit more plausible. You’d have to explain away Law Dome, but that’s another problem.
You’re really clutching hard now Carrick. The daily mean in biologically active areas is still close to the same as the constant level at Mauna Loa and Antarctica (for instance). Duh.
Carrick
I am well aware of everything you say. I wrote an extensive article on this subject three years ago.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/historic-variations-in-co2-measurements/
The comments and links are also informative, as is the fact that Beck joined in with probably his last public responses.
if we follow todays consensus, the basic facts are that apparently thousands of well qualified scientists took hundreds of thousands of incorrect measurements over 140 years using increasingly sophisticated equipment without knowing what they were doing. Then keeling comes along with no previous experience and manages to do what they couldn’t-take measurements accurately.
As I say, the evidence is in callendars own biography and archives that he carefully selected co2 readings from the lower end of the spectrum (from these old time scientists self same measurements) to support his 1938 hypotheses. it is also a matter of record in keeling’s autobiography that he was influenced by callendar and that in later life he grew to respect the diligence of the old time scientists.
At the very least lets say that if keeling was the first to crack the problem it illustrates that ‘the overwhelming consensus’ and ‘settled science’ of the day can be entirely wrong, which surely is a lesson for today, in as much perhaps we don’t know as much as we think will do and one day it might also be invalidated
tonyb
A lesson grand in its elegance, tony.
==============
David Springer:
The daily mean in biologically active areas is still close to the same as the constant level at Mauna Loa and Antarctica (for instance). Duh.
No idea what I’m supposed to be clutching at…
There is a well-known annual variation at Mauna Loa compared to the Antarctica, so “close to the same” is not accurate, since Mauna Loa varies relative to the Antarctica. Mona Loa also has a larger value when you compare annual values. As you move farther north, the disparity becomes larger.
There is also a bias between the daily average near the surface and measurements aloft, which gets larger when more biological activity is present: Around 50 ppm variation between surface and elevated measurements (or more than 10% of the regional mean value) is not uncommon for summertime NH. A value of 10% is certainly not “close to the same”, so your claim is false.
The annual variability was first discovered by Charles Keeling in fact, and is discussed in the Scripps link:
Figure.
The diurnal was also discovered by Keeling in taking measurements on the Olympic Peninsula, as discussed on the Scripps website.
In looking at your comments on this thread, virtually nothing you’ve said has been accurate, but that hasn’t stopped you from belittling other people from your position of ignorance. That’s a pattern of behavior I’ve seen before too.
Carrick
I don’t know where you’re getting your data. Here’s mine:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/sposio.co2
2007 at South Pole annual average = 380.42 ppmv
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/maunaloa.co2
2007 Mauna Loa annual average = 383.55
That’s less than 1% difference. You lose. Thanks for playing.
P.S. Carrick, you smug phuck, you’re the one who started the name calling. And you didn’t even wait 5 minutes before making a liar out of yourself by replying after you wrote “bye”. What a putz. But of course you must have heard that many times before in your life as I couldn’t possibly be the first to observe your gross character deficiencies.
Carrick | October 21, 2013 at 10:37 am |
If I were in the audience I think I would find it difficult not to heckle Mann by shouting out from time to time the name “Tiljander”.
@J Martin
Not sure I could restrain from shouting ‘Bastardi’ at Mann and his henchmen. (I’m assuming that the ‘i’ suffix designates the plural in some language or other :-) )
Mann’s “stick” has cost the world trillions. What do you do with a person like that ? Really, how can that damage ever be made right ?
It would do Mann no service to debate Bastardi as Mann is correct that it would give Bastardi the “false balance” he craves, but does not deserve. There is no upside for Mann in a debate. As for having lunch and simply discussing issues, that’s purely a personal decision.
Regarding Bastardi’s general knowledge of climate issues, his statement:
“It’s hard to fathom that CO2 can cause anything beyond its assigned “boxed in” value to temperatures because of all that’s around it. It comes down to the sun, the oceans and stochastic events over a long period of time with action and reaction, versus a compound comprising .04% of the atmosphere and 1/100th of greenhouse gasses.”
____
Is almost textbook from the AGW skeptics handbook and has been shredded by so many actual climate scientists (yep Joe, those people with PhD’s), that for him to still hold it out as the reason he can’t fathom CO2’s effect on the climate indicates exactly why it is wise for Mann to steer clear of a debate. How far could the debate go if Mann had to continually go back to Climate 101 and Physics 101? He would constantly appear to be talking down to Joe, which would automatically give Joe some sympathy points from the audience.
Yeah I tend to agree Mann and Bastardi debating climate doesn’t make much sense due to different areas of expertise. How about a debate between Michael Mann and Richard Lindzen?
Mann vs. Lindzen, Mann vs. Curry…yeah, I paid a few bucks to see that…
You better get your money back, Gates. It ain’t gonna happen.
Ha! I meant to say “I’d pay a few bucks…”
Would be very entertaining and probably make a lot of money for some worthy cause (Maybe Judith could start a scholarship in the sciences for women).
But you’re right…like so many other things that should happen, it’s not gonna happen.
Mann will never debate Bastardi or any other skeptic. He has nothing to gain and much to lose. Mann’s stance reminds me, however, of a football “prevent defense” which often results in a loss rather than a win.
I suspect Bastardi would wipe the floor with Mann in a debate. As I see it there are three factors involved in guessing the outcome
1. The intrinsic merits of each position.
2. Depth of knowledge.
3. Debating skills.
To a considerable extent the three factors are independent.
The first factor I’ll skip over in the interests of peace and harmony in the blogosphere.
Mann should have a slight edge with regard to the second factor; certainly he has the more impressive qualifications on paper. However scientists tend to be narrow specialists while meteorologists are generalists which may offset this to some extent.
With regard to the third factor, in my opinion Bastardi would be all over Mann like white on rice. Bastardi lives and dies in the public arena and has the personality and debating skills to match. He thrives on confrontation and controversy and presents his case in a way which is entertaining and appealing to an audience. Mann speaks mostly at academic conferences to supportive audiences and his debating style in the public arena does not impress. He seems to walk around with a perpetual sneer, refuses to engage with those he disagrees with, and he throws insults and has temper tantrums when things don’t go his way. I don’t see this working well for him in a debate.
Bastardi is loud and scientifically illiterate. In a moderated debate having a big loud mouth is no advantage and in a scientific subject being illiterate in it is an extreme disadvantage. Mann would make him look like a fool in front of an audience of scientists, undergraduate science students, engineers, or anyone else that could get an above average grade in high school science classes. I have no idea what his track record is like in predicting the weather but I understand from reading here it’s either spectacularly wrong or right with little in between which result can be obtained by flipping a coin and being loud about the correct results while quietly sweeping the mistakes under the rug.
Judith said:
“Seems like the word ‘Bastardi’ is triggering the spam filter.”
—-
Oh my, what fun we could have with this…but it speaks for itself.
Jim Cripwell Thanks for the Cat and Mouse Story.
I know who Belled the Cat – For those who may have missed this.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/20/perspective-from-a-weather-forecaster/#comment-402012
Really?
For god’s sake, why?
Why not just turn on the WWF?
What meaningful would possibly come out of such a debate? Do you think that Bastardi would present any questions that touch on issues where you don’t already know Mann’s perspective?
Would you derive some sort of pleasure from hearing Mann’s responses that you already know you reject? Perhaps if Mann engaged in such a debate, maybe you would quote his answers (Mann = red meat) and you and our much beloved skeptics could yuk it up a bit?
Would you see it as some sort of vindication if Mann were to debate a climate warrior like Bastardi?
I must say, Bastardi’s argument is lock-tight.
I mean after all, no one, and I mean no one, ever makes it in the private sector by selling useless products, or by convincing people that they’re right about things w/o evidence in support, or along with making mistakes. After all, information asymmetry is an unknown concept within the private sector.
Yes, indeed, because he sells a product in the private sector, his take on these issues is obviously better than someone who has spent a career developing expertise.
And that settles it. Let’s not evaluate the quality of his output on the basis of a careful evaluation of his track record.
Instead, let’s assume a perfect market, and evaluate the quality of his work simply on the basis of whether he has a lot of clients.
Weather forecasts are not useless products; the evidence supporting (or not) a stream of forecasts accumulates publicly for all (both clients and forecasters to see); and hence there is no interesting sense in which this market should be plagued by asymmetric information issues.
NW –
The usefulness of weather forecasts may be assessed largely independent of their accuracy? How accurate is the Farmer’s Almanac? How “useful” is it?
How well do all consumers of weather forecasts understand the evidence related to accuracy? Am I familiar with enough information to assess whether Acu-weather is correct about how accurate they are relative to other forecasters?
BTW – how, along the same lines, how accurate are the horoscopes in my daily newspaper? Should I determine that any astrologers that have clients are accurate in their predictions – because of the wisdom of the market?
Josh, the fortune tellers’ forecast is not probabilistic and is incredibly vague. Almost nothing is at stake for the buyer of the newspaper. Weather forecasters are generally forecasting an event with a pretty exact definition, and assigning it a clear probability; and the consequences to the clients of people like Bastardi and Curry are very big… they are placing futures market bets. Include me out of this false equivalence of yours.
And Josh, YOU aren’t paying for the forecast, nor are the casual users on the web. Those forecasts are likely to have the least value. I’ve noticed that the TV weathermen in my region give better, more accurate and richer forecasts than the free web forecasts I can get. This makes sense because TV eyeballs are more valuable than web eyeballs (to advertisers).
NW –
Include me out of the false distinctions that substantiate your arguments.
Survivorship and the existence of a client base can be reflective of many factors. Context specific evidence is necessary to judge the various influences, IMO, and not just in some cases.
@ Joshua – wrt Farmers Almanac:
“The Old Farmer’s Almanac is going further out on a limb than usual this year, not only forecasting a cooler winter, but looking ahead decades to suggest we are in for global cooling, not warming.
Based on the same time-honored, complex calculations it uses to predict weather, the Almanac hits the newsstands on Tuesday saying a study of solar activity and corresponding records on ocean temperatures and climate point to a cooler, not warmer, climate, for perhaps the next half century.”
That was in 2008 – so it would seem it was better at climate predictions than your precious models…
You alarmists are so caught up in your own bubble cult and self arrogance it just disgusts me. Exposing this aspect would be the best byproduct of any debate.
Hey Joshie did your parents have any children they could be proud of?
Joshua you have forgotten the sarc/ tag. Lots of clients proves nothing except possibly the power of advertising.
Peter –
I like leaving the sarc tags off so as to see whether people read with a skeptical eye.
As for what lots of clients proves, my point is that it proves nothing. Yes, what you state might be possible.
Or with study, it could turn out to be legitimately attributable to competence, or with study it could turn out to be legitimately attributable to good advertising. It could be attributable to luck, or charisma, or connections, or corruption, or politics. And those attributions might apply on either side of the private/public sector divide.
The point is that any assumptions about what is proven, without a careful examination of the supporting evidence, is more than likely just reverse engineering that is based on selective reasoning. At any rate, if the evidence isn’t presented, then the arguments are fallacious.
Josh you left out the most likely scenario (not surprising given the shallowness of your thinking) which is that Weatherbell is more than one person and the others are generating valuable reports for clients Bastardi generates value in the form of publicity.
See here for the Weatherbell team members:
Weatherbell Team Bios
Our Team of Dedicated Professionals
•Michael Barak
•Joe Bastardi
•Joseph D’ Aleo
•Dr. Ryan N. Maue
•Michael Shanahan
• Alex J. Sevilla
•Alan Lammey
•Mike Furlender
How do we evaluate the quality of his work? What information do you think is available to do that?
John –
In this context, I’d say that Joe’s arguments about climate change.
I’m not smart nor knwledgeable enough to really say, but I’ve seem some pretty smart and knowledgeable people make some pretty strong arguments against Joe’s.
I think that his body of work w/r/t weather prediction is pretty tough to call, because as a field there is a built in failure rate. I would imagine that his meteorological work relies quite a bit on a legacy of work done by academics, which is rather ironic. I would imagine that it also relies on the principles of modeling complex phenomena, which is rather ironic.
But I’m not sure that any of that is particularly relevant to his arguments about climate change. I would think that they stand on their own. I’d say that Judith’s argument (and his own argument) is fallacious. That he works in the private sector is part of his fallacious reasoning. That he has clients is part of Judith’s fallacious reasoning.
Judith has the smarts and scientific chops to evaluate his arguments about climate change. That is what I would look forward to reading – not cheap appeals to his authority as someone who works in the private sector, or cheap appeals to his authority as someone who attracts clients.
Joshua:
“Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory.” — Warren Buffett on how the academic community regards his investment approach.
Having clients is more of a practice thing. Some people market their knowledge successfully. I would consider that a necessary bridge to cross.
With academia (theory), I don’t think it’s so straight forward. With practice the standard can be money, with theory, what is it?
In business, you know when you’re successful by some standards. It’s this theory/practice thing that may be part of the climate divide, that did precede the issue.
The Brier Score would be a natural. So would a prediction log likelihood relative to season base rate prediction log likelihood. There are lots of straightforward ways to evaluate a probabilistic forecaster. Personally, given the repeat nature of a profitable relationship for both sides, and the easy mutual observability of the relationship between forecasts and outcomes over time, I would say that the survival of the forecaster is a pretty good indication that their forecasts succeed at a higher rate than the seasonal base rate provides. As for the ‘advertising’ remark, everyone can do that; it is mostly a negative-sum prisoner’s dilemma situation from the viewpoint of the firms involved. Evidence that advertising actually has a net impact on demand in the field (I mean, when your competition can strategically counter your own advertising), in the long run, is actually pretty mixed. So Madison Avenue lives like a parasite on the economy, basically mostly destroying surplus to no net effect. I support a steep tax on all advertising. That’s in spite of the fact that I actually like the ads (as art) better than most of the programs.
“In this context, I’d say that Joe’s arguments about climate change.”
I was thinking of his forecasting skills.
“I would imagine that his meteorological work relies quite a bit on a legacy of work done by academics,”
or other professional meteorologists
“I would imagine that it also relies on the principles of modeling complex phenomena,”
I’m sure he uses models, that is state of the art now… no?
“which is rather ironic.”
Do you find it ironic that JC uses models to forecast hurricane trajectories yet also has problems with GCMs?
” That he works in the private sector is part of his fallacious reasoning.”
I agree with this… mostly. His argument is that because he has paying clients, who pay him for ‘correct’ forecasts, he is more beholden to the truth which will be tested in a time frame for everyone to see. If he makes poor predictions, then his clients will drop him for someone who does a better job. Opposed to an academic climate scientist who receives a grant to study AGW who may be less beholden to the truth of what they find… i.e. are more interested in getting more grants and thus will show that AGW is really a problem and needs to be studied more. That the predictions they make about AGW will not be clear cut and visible to everyone in a short time frame… yet they will continue to get paid (receive more grants) despite not having their predictions tested. I think there is truth to this… but I don’t see how this makes him better at understanding the climate.
What I think Joe does not accomplish in his argument is how making successful weather forecasts equates to a better understanding how the climate works. I agree with him that working under conditions where you are more accountable tends to keep you more open to all possibilities… but I’m not sure he has shown academics, in general, don’t also do that. As such, I don’t really buy into his argument.
I do identify with the frustration of Joe and other denizens that there appears to be a lack of accountability for academic climate scientists and the predictions they make. The real problem is it is pretty difficult to put them to the test. This is where ‘the pause’ gets traction, because current observational data appears to be tracking outside the model predictions for GAT’s. That is a separate discussion.
“With practice the standard can be money, with theory, what is it?”
Ragnaar, how does being successful in predicting weather, i.e. making money at it, make Joe better at understanding climate science than academia? Do you think he has successfully shown that does?
NW –
Well, I assume that you’re speaking w/r/t a meteorological context, specifically, buy let’s enlarge the scope a bit to see if it might be instructive w/r/t the logic.
Consider some very common probabilistic forecasters – financial advisors. I have read many times that you’d be better off, on average, investing in index funds than hiring financial advisors. Really? So on average, they do worse than chance? And yet they stay in business, in fact get paid quite handsomely?
How about pollsters? Perhaps you read Nate Silver’s study of the accuracy of Rassmussen? And yet, they still get hired, and still have many who consider them to be not only reliable, but more reliable than other pollsters?
So once again, why engage in these fallacious arguments? If we want to know about Joe’s abilities as a forecaster, then we need to examine his results as compared to other forecasters. We can’t rely on the fact that he exists in the private sector, or that he has clients, as stand-ins. To do so is fallacious.
But further, and perhaps more importantly, it wouldn’t have any relevance to his arguments w/r/t climate change, anyway.
John Carpenter:
“…make Joe better at understanding climate science than academia?”
I just read his Wikipedia entry. I wouldn’t say a better understanding than all academia but better than some of it. This is not meant to be feint praise, I just can’t summarize or know all academia.
Maybe it’s a question of time frames. His being the short term, the familiar, the better understood. I’d say my position is closer to Bastardi’s than it is to Mann’s.
Here are some key sights from the Wikipedia article:
Nuccitelli, Dana (August 16, 2011). “One Confused Bastardi”. Skeptical Science. Retrieved 2013-04-20.
Fong, Jocelyn; Theel, Shauna (August 17, 2011). “Why Is Fox Going To Joe Bastardi For Climate Change Analysis?”
Weak on the part of Wikipedia.
Ragnaar –
Having worked many years in education, I am a big believer in walking the divide between theory and practice. I find it an exciting place to be. I have had similar experiences in my work in the trades (walking the line between designing something and building it), and indeed in other areas of my life.
I have seen, in many fields, that the theoreticians spend a lot of time justifying why they are superior to the practitioners, and that the practitioners spend a lot of time justifying why they are superior to the theoreticians. As someone who likes finding and walking the line between those different domains, my own view is that neither side is often correct in their conviction of superiority, but in fact, are blind to what they could learn from folks on the other side of the divide.
Yes, these are, IMO, questions of identity struggles that well-preceded the climate wars.
People can be successful in business for all sorts of reasons, just as there can be many explanations for success in academia. I say beware of any explanations that seem too “convenient,” too categorical, too simplistic, or that lack a carefully controlled approach to evidence.
Josh, you are mostly changing the subject. This word fallacious… in the area of empirical claims, I do not think being legalistic has much value. The question at issue is: Does the survival of a forecaster in a market for forecasters make it more or less likely that they have forecasting abilities that clients have found useful? You talk like the question here is one of logic. It is not; it is one of weighing evidence. I believe that survival in a marketplace for forecasting does indeed make it more likely that the survivor has skills above chance. I base this on some long experience of laboratory market experiments, performed by myself and many others, and some acquaintance with conditions for effective improvement of probabilistic forecasts over time, from my acquaintance with the psychology of probabilistic forecasting. You seem to believe that survivorship has no probative value at all.
NW –
The question is skills at what. Where the argument becomes fallacious is when someone draws conclusions not on proving the cause-and-effect, but making assertions about that effect w/o context specific evidence.
Why do probabalistic economic forecasters survive when their success rate is below chance?
Not really. I am saying that arguments about the explanation for Joe having clients are fallacious if they aren’t supported by evidence.
First, we need evidence that supports the general argument (that the success of forecasters is correlated to the accuracy of their forecasting as opposed to many other factors such as a good business sense, influence, good advertising skills, charisma, etc.). Second, we need evidence that supports the argument that Joe is an example of that general argument.
Neither of those points argues that survivorship has no probative value at all.
> So Madison Avenue lives like a parasite on the economy, basically mostly destroying surplus to no net effect. I support a steep tax on all advertising. That’s in spite of the fact that I actually like the ads (as art) better than most of the programs.
Zest and gusto.
You and Vaughan should write a book.
Josh, I would prefer to call those people mutual fund managers rather than economic forecasters. Be that as it may, I don’t agree with your premise about these managers. The advice to go with the index fund is mainly based on expense ratios, not really on asset-picking that is worse than buying an index. For the average schmuck, any extra return you get from the actively managed fund is likely to be more than dissipated by the cost of active management (to the schmuck). For wealthy clients–who invest way more, and so get a lower expense ratio–the active management can be worth it. The big brokerage houses also sell a premium kind of management to their bigger clients and use a less active form of management for their institutional class funds–the ones most of us end up buying if we buy active management at all.
I have mainly felt it necessary to take issue with this:
“And that settles it. Let’s not evaluate the quality of his output on the basis of a careful evaluation of his track record. Instead, let’s assume a perfect market, and evaluate the quality of his work simply on the basis of whether he has a lot of clients.”
This statement of yours is not about Joe’s likely transfer of skills from weather forecasting to climate science. It is about “his output,” which you imply has to be based on “a careful evaluation of his track record.” This is followed by some stuff about a perfect market, with an implication that anyone who would be so foolish as to base an inference about performance on survivorship would be some kind of fool. Or at least, this is how I took the tone of your comment. If you want to distance yourself from that implication, and insist that you never meant that, be my guest.
NW –
Well, that’s a good point. It would be nice to know whether the returns on managed assets outperform the market index taking into account the fees.
On the other hand, we do know that despite having the most skilled probabilistic forecasts money can buy, major “economic forecasters” with many clients, and very great reputations for success, messed up big time – in contrast to other economic forecasters with lesser track records and fewer clients.
My argument has been, and remains, that assessment of his success as a weather forecaster should be made on the basis of evidence related to his weather forecasting, and assessments of the quality of his arguments about climate change should be made on the basis of evidence related to his arguments about climate change, and arguments that imply that his weather forecasting, his clientele, or his sector of employment are somehow informative as to his opinions on climate change, are fallacious. I see no reason whatsoever to distance myself from that argument. Why should I?
Perhaps because your argument may be seen as to become so powerful it may destroy any kind of evolutionary perspective in science.
Unless weather forecasting has no skill, we need to posit that Joe has some kind of expert system built in. This provides him with a perspective not totally independent from climatological facts. The same applies to astrologers, incidentally.
What differs from astrologers, or so I believe, is that this skill is not only based on interpersonal abilities like cold reading, but is connected to reality. In that case, you can argue with success (hi Sir Rud), but you need to take into account that it makes you play Visitor.
There’s no need to reject Joe’s predictive skills to observe his PR skills.
Theory – Academia – Regulatory – Some Scientists – CPAs some of the time
What is between and here?
Practice – Marketplace – Some Scientists – CPAs some of the time – The clients or users
At the intersection of the two, that’s where things are interesting. If my Board thinks the the CPAs are a bit too lax, they may require 8 hours of ethics classes every 3 years. I consider that an attempt to draw theory and practice closer together.
Ethics isn’t necessarily my main point, just the one that seemed to fit for my situation. Another one in the middle of theory and practice is communication. Of all the things in the middle, a bridge should be attempted, and if it fails, another one should be attempted.
Agreed Joshua. The middle can be exciting. I’m often between my clients and the IRS.
Well Joshua, it works for lawyers.
Reminds me of a popular saying/joke around courthouses
“What happens to the really bad lawyers?”
Answer: They become Judges
Tom –
I’m a fan of the Peter Principle, personally.
.”The goings on of foreign Embassies are but a passing interest to the People, but a problem in the local market is like a pebble in your sandal.”
John –
I think that his argument is overblown on both ends. There are plenty of reasons that he might maintain a clientele even if he is error-prone. On the other side, it is my observation that for all the problems that exist with academic research and the mechanism for funding academic research (and indeed, I think that there are many), there are many folks who fallaciously exploit those problems for tribal expediency within the climate wars and other contentious issues. There is a long list of the fallacious components. As some primary examples: (1) criticizing the outcomes and processes of academic research and funding even while relying, on those process and the outcomes they generate, on a daily basis and, (2) selectively decrying in a categorical fashion, the process of academic research and funding when the research findings are those one is in disagreement with, and then turning right around and promoting the outcomes of academic research when it returns findings that one is in agreement with and, (3) simplistically creating caricatures of the validity of academic research and funding on one side, and the outcomes of the private sector on the other side, without making a controlled argument to support the putatively stark comparison. It is like when people point to fraud in government and attribute it to a lack of market forces while ignoring the vast amounts of fraud in the private sector.
People like to reverse engineer from their opinions on various issues to create explanatory mechanisms that fit perfectly with their political ideology. Skeptics, IMO, should consider such “convenient” logic to be dubious as a starting point, and then work hard to research the available evidence to either confirm or deny their skepticism, or identify whether the degree of certainty is insufficient to confirm or deny their opinions.
“Skeptics” look at vastly complex phenomena and accept simplistic causal explanations. My guess is that Joe has not researched the causal mechanisms for the phenomena for which he is offering explanations. In fact, I’m not sure that the phenomena he is describing even exist.
Joshua,
“Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal – BMJ”
I’m not sure whether I rely on the outcomes on a daily basis. Maybe you do. I wonder if a patient needing an MRI had to wait while this important research took place. I don’t care, as I support all research, as long as nobody expects me to pay for it.
And yes, I have no objection to my Goverment collecting taxes to pay for societal needs – teachers, nurses, police, defence forces, emergency workers and so on.
Research into averages of weather? Multi billion dollar desalination plants built and never used, requiring multi millions to maintain in a care and maintenance mode as result of such “research”? Not so much.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
I wasn’t suggesting that you rely on the outcomes of all research on a daily basis, only that every day you rely (either directly or indirectly) on the findings of some research that has been conducted in the past.
Joshua,
Let me refine things a little, if I may.
Can you provide me with examples of any outcomes from academic climate research which are of any utility to me?
I can’t think of any offhand. I would be interested in discussing further with you, any that you can provide. Predictions don’t count, obviously.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Joshua its not a private sector versus public sector issue.
The issue is feedback that modifies behavior and consequences for missed projections
generally speaking a weather forecaster is going to get real time feedback on his forecast. He learns ( the good ones ) how to adjust forecasts. If he doesnt then the probability that he will drift toward the bottom of the market. increases.
Climate forecasters dont have a comparable feedback system.
in 2007 they published a projection. It was out of wack. By the time they started the next round of projections there wasnt feedback from the first set.
the asymmetry is NOT public versus private. the asymmetry is rapid feedback versus limited feedback.
on top of this we can add consequences for getting things wrong.
none, not a single one of the 42 modelling groups will lose funding because they got the forecast a bit high. Nobody will shut their modelling center down. If a weather forecaster did the same repeatedly chances are he would lose market share. And yes some in some spectacular failures they have been fired.
None of this however has any bearing on Joe’s understanding of the science.
Steven Mosher,
Do you not find it interesting that forecasts given to aeroplane pilots have to be backed up by weather radar, both on the ground and in the aircraft, manual and electronic observations at the destination airport, and, most telling, the requirement that the aircraft carry additional fuel in case the forecast is wrong.
Where human life is at risk, aviation authorities realise that the fervent hopes of the forecaster may not be enough. And this is so, even in the case of flights taking less than hour.
If successful forecasting merely required feedback and adjustment, life would be simple indeed.
If wishes were fishes, no one would go hungry.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
“The IPCC dismisses this as unpredictable internal climate variability, unpredictable solar variability, unpredictable volcanic activity. Well, this is good enough only for scientists that are only interested in the CO2 impact on climate, but not for the public and policy makers (paying the bills for all this climate research) that want to know how the climate will actually evolve over the the 21st century.”
Who exactly are the poor politicians who “want to know how the climate will actually evolve over the the 21st century” and are being misled by that terrible IPCC? Gee, I expect the IPCC to be defunded any day now, with the “pause” in reported temps showing how wrong the IPCC’s predictions were.
Ooorrrrrr, maybe the politicians aren’t interested in the slightest in what the climate wil be like in 2100, and just want predictions of catastrophe to increase their personal and political power right now.
Our current crop of politicians are willing to bankrupt the entire global economy in decades, in return for re-election now. What in the world makes anyone think they actually care about the global average temperature in 2100?
The IPCC, as Bastardi notes, provides the advice it was created and paid to provide.
JC says:”The IPCC dismisses this as unpredictable internal climate variability, unpredictable solar variability, unpredictable volcanic activity.” While solar and volcanic activity are at least as large as natural internal variability and inherently unpredictable, as is the future emission of GHGs and aerosols by mankind, the decade-by-decade prediction of future climate is always going to be near impossible. However, for given anthropogenic scenarios, the GHG effect far outweighs these other wiggles in the long term, so the focus remains on tonnage burned and warming due to GHG forcing, rather than short-term wiggles. The difference between these scenarios is several degrees warming at equilibrium. None of the other factors comes close.
Jim, I’ll bet you a cup of coffee that this trend
http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/10/1619/2013/osd-10-1619-2013.pdf
is more important than this trend
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
Can anybody tell me what Joe Bastardi’s success rate is with forecasting temperatures 24 hours ahead, (or another arbitrary period)? Within plus or minus 5%, say.
The naive forecast success rate is around 86%, so he would need to better this to be a better forecaster than my 12 year old granddaughter.
I am happy to bet that Joe Bastardi can do no better than I at predicting the future. If my naive forecast is outside agreed error limits, and Joe’s is within, he wins. If the opposite applies, I win. If both of us are within the agreed error limit, it is a draw.
Joe agrees that he provides access to the same records to which he has access.
We start by each putting up $5.
If Joe wins, I give up, losing five dollars.
If I win five dollars, it is considered a fluke, and Joe agrees to cover the $10 I now possess. And so on. If I win 10 times in a row, then Joe can console himself that amateurs like myself can have a lucky streak, but obviously can’t compete with professionals.
If it is illegal to attempt to profit from forecasting the weather, then we can run the contest “for fun”.
My assumption is that the future is unknowable in any useable sense – guessing or making naive assumptions is as useful as anything else.
Please note I intend no offense to anyone. My offer is in response to the posting, and some subsequent comments. I trust serendipity will be my friend.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Excellent post.
But I wonder why would Mann refuse such an offer (almost everyone would benefit)?
Because Bastardi believes that science is best conducted as an experiment on what sounds good to a layman in an auditorium, and apparently, Mann does not.
Peter Lang,
Mann, or any other CAGW advocate, has nothing to gain in a debate. Remember, CAGW is about politics, not science.
In the typical election in the US, the politician with a large lead in the polls (usually the incumbent) almost never debates a challenger. And they make the same arguments that the CAGWers are making now – they do not want to afford the challenger a seriousness he has not earned. But, if and when the incumbent falls in the polls, or the challenger heaven forbid gains a lead, then the incumbent can’t wait to debate.
The CAGWers’ political patrons now lead virtually all of the western governments. They are in the ascendancy, no matter the delusional claims by some that “GAGW is dead.” They are the “incumbents”. They have nothing to gain in a debate, and a good chance of losing political ground.
Now, if that should change, if conservatives should win the presidency in the US, and control of the Senate in the next election, there will be a real possibility of rolling back the decarbonization freight train. Then, and only then, will the “scientific” CAGW consensus community deign to engage in open debate.
GaryM,
Are you suggesting the US citizens might follow the wise Australians example? :)
Peter Lang,
We have three times in the past two decades elected men who claimed to be conservative to get elected, then governed as the progressive lite politicians they were. Both of their names were George Bush.
We then ran two more progressive lite politicians, John McCain and Mitt Romney against the genuine, hard core progressive Obama.
The only way the CAGW movement can be reversed is by the election of genuine conservatives; those who actually have conservative principles, not just conservative political advertising.
It remains to be seen which type you all have elected in Australia. But we can hope.
Gary M,
But, is it possible/practicable to get some one elected as president that is off at one extreme or the other? How would you suggest it is possible to convince a majority of the voting public to vote for some one that is far from the centre? How would he be able to convince the population he could be trusted given the enormous baggage that could be thrown at him to discredit him. I just don’t seen it a pragmatic to focus in getting some elected whose ideological beliefs are far from the centre.
Peter Lang,
The “center” has been moved inexorably leftward by7 decades of unrelenting progressive attacks on conservative principles. In the US, the main target has been the Constitution, which created a framework of government that made centralization of control extremely difficult.
The movement left has not been by argument on principle, it has been accomplished by demonizing conservatives and conservatism. For example, Obamacare is just the latest iteration of the drive to socialized medicine in the US. The left was beaten badly when it was last tried, and called Hillarycare.
They did not then throw up their hands, say the voters have spoken, and moved to the right to compromise with conservatives. They stepped up their attacks, and further disguised their intent.
Socialism does not work in the long run. But you do not roll it back by electing “conservatives” who have adopted the ideology of the left. It may take time, but conservatism only has a chance it genuine conservatives run on its principles, and fight for them when they do get elected.
One of the facts that you will never hear in the media, conservatism has fared quite well in elections, on the rare occasions it has been tried. When John McCain named a relatively unknown, but genuinely conservative Alaskan governor as his vice presidential candidate, his poll numbers shot up. His pol numbers fell drastically when the real estate bubble started to burst, and he “suspended his campaign” to go back to Washington DC to “save” the country like a good progressive.
He then marginalized and muzzled his conservative running mate, and his progressive advisors arranged interviews she was ill prepared for (not on knowledge basis, but on understanding she was being set up for sucker punch interviews).
Long before that, Ronald Reagan ran as an unrepentent conservative on all three legs of the conservative movement – free market, Judeo-Christian social policy and strong defense.
George HW Bush got elected by claiming to be the next Reagan. Once elected, he raised taxes and spending like the progressive lite he was, and got beat.
His son ran as a conservative, got elected, restrained his progressive beliefs having seen what his father did, and got re-elected. Not having to face re-election again, he promptly moved left, where he belonged, on both economic and foreign policy.
Republicans got trounced in the next election.
Newt Gingrich lead a national congressional campaign in 1994, and managed the first Republican House in my lifetime. All based on campaigning on conservative principles. After two years, he and his colleagues got seduced by the lust for power, and started spending like Democrats. The GOP has never recovered.
Can a conservative win the next election? Probably, if they can get nominated. Obamacare is a train wreck. The EPAs regs are economic suicide. The GOP leadership won;t run advertising to teach the public because it does not increase their own personal power and status. So it will take a charismatic, genuine conservative, who can run the gauntlet of character assassination that is the left’s principle weapon.
It is possible, but not likely.
What I really think will happen is we will need to start experiencing the economic collapses that are being held back with massive government borrowing, in Europe and the US. If the Euro house of PIIGS cards starts to fall, and Obamacare does the damage it is designed to do, there is the chance that enough default progressives will desert the ship they are helping to sink, to convince a conservative to face the storm. England is starting to pay a high price for its CAGW lunacy. As is Spain. Maybe the few conservatives hiding in the political weeds in Europe will even raise their timid heads. That could take merely a matter of years.
If not, it could be decades before the damage can be undone. The Soviet Union lasted for 74 years, and it was built on the corpse of WW I ravaged czarist Russia. The wealth of Europe, and even more the US, could sustain the dismantling of the free market for a long time, before they collapse.
Based on the accuracy of Gary’s political reasoning and prognostication from prior to the last election, I’d say that liberals are in trouble.
And no, “moderate” conservatives cannot change the direction we are headed. By at most slowing the forward progress of the leftists, while effectively endorsing the shift, they save progressives from themselves and prolong the agony. They will not reverse progressivism because, no matter what they say, they embrace it.
Ignore what politicians say. Look at what they do.
GaryM,
You argued a lot of ‘principles’ and belief an causes of why USA politics has moved to the left. But you have not presented an persuasive case that if a Conservative was elected to lead the GOP he/she could be elected to be president. That is the important question I was asking.
From my perspective there is no point arguing to get a leader of a party elected leader if he is unlikely to be elected president. Politics is about what is achievable, not what some people think is ideal
Peter Lang,
“We can’t do any good unless we get elected, and we need to be more progressive to get elected,” is the strategy that has led to no conservative parties in Europe, and the leftward slide of Republicans in the US.
You are thinking in terms of winning elections. Sometimes you have to fight on principle, even if it costs you the next election.
The left long ago earned to take the long view. Unless conservatives do the same, we will not roll back the tide.
But my case is actually quite strong, even in the short term.
Reagan ran as a conservative and won.
George HW Bush ran as a conservative and won. Then governed like a progressive and lost.
George W Bush ran as a conservative twice, and won. Then governed as a progressive in his second term and doomed the GOP.
McCain only ever led the race against Obama for the short time he looked conservative by nominating Palin. Then he ran as a progressive Republican and lost.
Mitt Romney claimed to be conservative, but his campaign was pure progressive Republican from the start. (Think Romnneycare.) He lost badly.
Newt Gingrich ran a nationalized congressional campaign as a conservative and the GOP wrong the House. He then governed as a progressive, and they got beat.
You almost certainly don’t know that Republicans running as conservatives for governor, who also govern as conservatives (for the most part), are having great economic and political success. You don’t know that because the mainstream media doesn’t report it.
And Republicans, particularly conservative Republicans, hold the majority of governorships in the US, and control most of the state legislatures in the US. I wonder if you know that as well.
Conservatism wins on a regular basis in the US. When it is tried.
The main obstacle is that progressive Republicans run the GOP. So the chances of a conservative being nominated are slim.
This is an astute analysis of the issue, both political and ideological, by someone you have been told hundreds of times to think is a dummy or crazy or evil. The same arguments made against Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, or any other articulate conservative. (The left saves their most vicious hatred for those they fear the most – see Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.)
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/20/Sarah-Palin-Exclusive-Op-Ed-DC-Corrupt-Bastards-Club
Gary;
+1
The pool of successful R governors you cite gives some hope. Not sure how much, but some.
GaryM,
Up to a point. But you need to balance pragmatism and principle/ideology. If you don’t you cant achieve anything. Australia will be and is already far better off with a centre-right government than with the previous highly incompetent centre to far left Government. But, if the Conservatives had tried to get a mandate for all their centre-right policies at the first election, they would not have got elected. Now they are elected, they can begin educating the public by doing reviews, studies, white papers, royal commissions, etc. on important policy issues. Then they can offer the important policies to the electorate at the next election once people have had a change to digest and understand what policies are being offered to the voters and why. They could never have done any of this from opposition. You can only do it from Government.
Peter Lang,
I hope you are right, but I have my doubts. You can only expect that kind of education if the leaders of your new government actually hold conservative principles. The vast majority of conservatives in the US Congress do not.
Here is the real problem. If you think conservative politicians should tell the voters what they want to hear to get elected (like the GOP “leaders” in the US do), but conceal what you actually believe, you are campaigning the same way progressives do. They hide their genuine ideology to get elected, then try to get the laws they want.
“Conservatives” who pretend to believe one thing to get elected, then try to govern another way (with or without white papers and commissions), are not real conservatives. That is what I am afraid you will learn in the near future about your new “conservative” government. Again, I hope I am wrong, but that is how it has happened anywhere else.
“We have to be more progressive to win election” becomes “we have to stay more progressive to stay in power. (The Gingrich House was famous for this “change of direction”, which was just really them giving into their own elitist/statist instincts).
I say again, ignore what they say, watch what they do.
GaryM,
In democracy the government is there to do what the people want, not the other way around. So, if we want to move the electorate more towards conservative (I think if it as putting more priority on economically rational policies), then the government has to provide information that moves the beliefs of the people to lean a little more towards conservative principles. That happens slowly. If you go too far too fast the electorate will reject the conservative government and elect another ‘progressive’ government. Then all the years or even decades of good work gets undone. That is what happened in Australia. A decade of excellent government under John Howard got overturned and we had 6 years of ‘progressive’ government (Labor and Greens) that unwound more that two decades of real progress – such as industrial relations – and left us with enormous debt, no control of our borders, defence budget down to 1.5% of GDP (back to where it was in 1943 before WWII) and much more I could list – (Oh, yes, and a carbon price scheme that would cost us $12 for ever $1 of projected benefits but with near zero chance of getting any benefit from it!).
So, I say again, politics must be pragmatic to achieve anything. Idealism doesn’t succeed.
Make that two and a half decades.
GARY M dude you are a Political idiot. stop listening to Rush.
Reagan was 30+ years ago. The demographics of the country is VASTLY different. To argue “Conservatism wins on a regular basis in the US. When it is tried.”…
speaks volumes about your grasp on political reality
OK, genius. During what period did Republicans hold 30 governorships out of 50, and control the legislatures of 27 states, and control at least one house in 5 others?
When were Bobby Jindahl, Mike Pence and Rick perry elected as governors?
You know, you don’t HAVE to believe everything you read on the Huffington Post. It is not against the law to think for yourself.
Yet.
Oh, and George H Bush, who ran as a conservative, was president until just over 5 years ago. I don’t expect progressives to have much in the way of an attention span, but good grief.
Dubya. And everything is all his fault, doncha know?
Here’s one funny thing about the discussion. There’s a lot of folks impugning a particular weatherman’s forecasting ability and, more generally, all weather forecasters. But when I was introduced to the heuristics and biases literature in grad school, and I learned about the typical overconfidence of intuitive judgments of likelihood, I also remember reading that meteorologists (as a profession, relative to other professions and/or groups that probabilistically forecast events) were the best calibrated probabilistic forecasters in the world. That was about 25 years ago, so the findings may have changed since then. But I kind of doubt it. Weather forecasters make forecasts constantly and get immediate and unambiguous feedback about most of their forecasts. The psychologists will say that those are two indispensable ingredients of effective learning. So to those of you who think it unlikely that Joe or Judith have any skill above the base rate, or that you or your kid can do as well as they can, nothing I know about this supports you.
Joe’s strengths are in the long range, seasonal realm. As for individual storms, I doubt he’s any better than average due to a strong bias toward extreme scenarios.
Then the feedback will be less than immediate, and the forecasts themselves less frequent. Both of those things will make it harder to improve forecasts from experience.
Josh, If you believe I’ve made some claim about transfer or domain-generality somewhere, show me where.
NW –
From a meta-cognitive standpoint, I think that you make an excellent point there. But certainly you would agree that while those ingredients are indispensable, they are not sufficient. And surely you would also agree that “effective learning” can be highly domain specific, and that it would be a mistake to make assumptions about the transferability of those lessons learned. For example, deep knowledge of and experience in immediate and unambiguous feedback about weather phenomena would not necessarily make someone good at probabilistic forecasting of the stock market. In fact, I could imagine where deep knowledge of and experience in the one domain would create tendencies that would exacerbate heuristic errors or enhance problematic biases in another domain.
I would imagine some of the skills are transferable – but only with a careful investment of time and energy in making that transfer.
It would seem to me that if you’re going to make assumptions about such transfer, you should support your argument with some form of evidence.
Josh, If you believe I’ve made some claim about transfer or domain-generality somewhere, show me where.
NW –
I’m not saying that you made a claim. Sorry for making an argument that seemed that I was.
I was pointing out an aspect of what you were discussing that I felt was important, and not addressed in your comment.
And I was pointing to one of the reasons why the assumptions that are being made elsewhere, about the transfer of Joe’s skills, are fallacious.
Peter and Chris ,.its simple really. Bustardi is a awful operational forecaster . He has never had a single paper on AGW or GW published. He does however frequently post on far right wing and religious kooks web site where 99.999999% of all readers think that AGW is UN one world govt socialist Hoax.
Not that AGW is unproven or wrong..but a HOAX: that is to say a conspiracy to commit fraud . Have either of you ever read any of the replies / posts to Bustardi’s essays on that Patriot web site?
It is appallingly that Dr Curry would suggest a debate between Dr Mann and Joe Bustardi . There are a lot of folks …real skeptics ..who would treat Dr Mann with respect … like Dr Roger Pielke Jr for example.
Now that would be a debate worth seeing
“Bustardi [sic] is a awful operational forecaster.” Then his clients should be an excellent business opportunity for you.
> an excellent business opportunity for you
Joe sounds like the best seller of the two.
The has been fraud committed in the name of AGW, look no further tha Mann and his “stick” work. Climategate, peer review fixing, grant fraud…
..the list goes on, so don’t start with horror at a hoax being called a hoax.
Joe has the right idea .The simplest and most accurate way of forecasting is to identify quasi repetitive, quasi cyclic patterns in the past and project them forward. In my opinion climate forecasting is reasonably simple and transparent. Using Ockhams Razor it appears that it is more likely than not that the recent peak in temperatures in about 2003 was a peak in both a 60 year and 1000 year cycle. Using that as a working hypothesis produced the following cooling forecast posted with the supporting data and discussion at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
“To summarize- Using the 60 and 1000 year quasi repetitive patterns in conjunction with the solar data leads straightforwardly to the following reasonable predictions for Global SSTs
1 Continued modest cooling until a more significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and more CO2 would help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !!
The Solar Cycles 2,3,4 correlation with cycles 21,22,23 would suggest that a Dalton minimum could be imminent. The Livingston and Penn Solar data indicate that a faster drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures might even be on the horizon. If either of these actually occur there would be a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigor for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up. This is where scientific judgment comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others. A past record of successful forecasting such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops rapidly. I am sure, however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate.
If there is not 0.15 to 0.2 degrees of global SST cooling by 2018 – 20 I would have to re evaluate.
Dr Norman Page,
“Joe has the right idea .The simplest and most accurate way of forecasting is to identify quasi repetitive, quasi cyclic patterns in the past and project them forward. In my opinion climate forecasting is reasonably simple and transparent.”
This is what I would classify as naive forecasting. It is extremely cost effective, as it requires almost no technical knowledge.
I assumed Joe used more “sophisticated” methods.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike It seems simple but it is actually quite sophisticated. In order to recognize which patterns are most meaningful and which ones or bits of ones to use , you have to have in depth knowledge of and select from the very substantial data base e.g. the very considerable number of post Mannian temperature proxy reconstructions with all their different methods and regional variations. Same thing goes for possible climate drivers. Joe has such a background in his weather patterns- therefore his judgments in that area are reality based. I modestly suggest that I am familiar enough with the climate data base to make reasonably informed selections and correlations in that area.
Mike to clarify again The basic idea of pattern recognition is simply stated. To actually do it requires considerable depth of knowledge over broad areas of science. and years of experience in actually doing this sort of thing.
It is at heart what exploration geologists do for a living. Their objectivity is enhanced because their employers will bet hundreds of millions of dollars on their forecasts (hindcasts) which are often tested within the time span of a few years. This environment tends to concentrate the mind on what the truth is as opposed to the academic need to conform to the current fashionable consensus in order to get grants and publications.
Dr Norman Page,
I appreciate your modest suggestion that you can make reasonably informed selections etc.
May I respectfully suggest that correlation does not necessarily reflect causation. In respect to your claim that “. . . The basic idea of pattern recognition is simply stated. To actually do it requires considerable depth of knowledge over broad areas of science. and years of experience in actually doing this sort of thing.”, I suggest that nobody has actually managed to “do it”, as you imply.
Sir Isaac Newton was convinced that base metals could be transmuted into gold, by means of alchemy. All that was needed was much experience and deep knowledge.
You may well be more gifted than Sir Isaac, and like him, you may believe in alchemy. I claim to be less gifted than Sir Isaac, but I still deny that base metals can be turned into gold by alchemical means.
And so it is with patterns and weather, or average weather – climate. You express devout belief that someone, sometime, will be able to divine the mystic meanings and cryptic messages hidden in the “data”. Like turning lead into gold, obviously there’s a little way to go.
In the meantime, if you want to bet you can perform better than my pencil, ruler and bowl of chicken entrails, I am more than happy to accommodate you.
With respect to Joe Bastardi’s commercial success, I can only note that any selling of predictions to TV or other broadcasters, media etc., proves absolutely nothing. I don’t know what he does, but being able to perceive the future in any useful sense is nonsensical, without Godlike powers. You will be aware that the amount of money paid to practitioners of Astrology does not guarantee the accuracy of their predictions. I may be wrong, but I see far more advertisements seeking money for astrological predictions than climatological ones. Therefore, astrological predictions are far more likely to be correct. The market forces “prove” it. What tosh!
Once again, I state that intellectual brilliance, depth of experience, the number of degrees from prestigious universities hanging on your wall, provide no protection against gullibility, or absolute faith in the impossible.
With your reference to geologists, might I say that this is a tactic employed by Warmistas (and I mean no offense, so I am not suggesting you share their delusion), changing the subject, and bringing in irrelevant analogies. We could both point to great advances in geology, but you may need to carefully consider how many great advances in climatology would roll off your tongue.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Dr Norman Page | October 21, 2013 at 12:14 am | Reply
Loehle and Scafetta (2011) did exactly that and so far made a perfect prediction of the three subsequent years’ global average temperature since their empirical decomposition ended. I did a similar thing in 2006 just by eyeballing the instrument record going back to 1850 and noting there was a 60-year cycle of 30 years warming and 30 years non-warming and that this non-warming side of the cycle was due to begin in 2005. So I boldly went with the climatology instead of the physical climate models and staked out a position that global warming in catastrophic proportion was based on exaggeration and that the actual climate response to anthropogenic CO2 would be greatly beneficial when taking into account the economic benefits of inexpensive energy to drive industry, fertilizing the atmosphere with CO2 for agriculture and reducing fresh water requirements per unit of plant growth, and some modest warming concentrated in the higher northern latitudes over land during winter and night time precisely when such warming is welcomed as it lowers heating fuel consumption and extends growing seasons.
The only thing not to like IMO is sea level rise but that’s slow and manageable and not disadvantageous enough to outweigh the immense benefits of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions therefrom.
David Scafetta’s methods are very helpful in suggesting possibly meaningful periodicities and correlations for careful consideration. If he would just incorporate the 1000 year cycle into his approach he and I would, I think ,come up with very similar cooling forecasts.
“The simplest and most accurate way of forecasting is to identify quasi repetitive, quasi cyclic patterns in the past and project them forward.”
There’s no repetitive cycle to CO2. It continues upwards.
lolwat exactly that is why the lack of warming since 1997 indicates that CO2 has little measurable influence on temperature. Once you get a good handle on the natural cycles then you might have some chance of estimating the effect of anthropogenic CO2.In Ar5 the IPCC have given up saying simply they don’t know what it is.
“IPCC is saying: (Section 9.7.3.3)
“The assessed literature suggests that the range of climate sensitivities and transient responses covered by CMIP3/5 cannot be narrowed significantly by constraining the models with observations of the mean climate and variability, consistent with the difficulty of constraining the cloud feedbacks from observations ”
In plain English this means that they have no idea what the climate sensitivity is and that therefore that the politicians have no empirical scientific basis for their economically destructive climate and energy policies.
In summary the projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them are based on specifically structurally flawed and inherently useless models. They deserve no place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a basis for public policy their forecasts are grossly in error and therefore worse than useless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBGxMz0GPLc
when theories dont match observations
He has some nice gags, delivered totally deadpan.
Answers are easy; good questions are hard.
Very Cool. Thanks
Joe, my compliments to your editor, and to you. Much better prose, and more complete logical flow and appropriate vocabulary than I’m used to seeing in your writing.
As for details, the grammar and punctuation are impeccable.
Grade: A
Passing through, hello-goodbye, off air for two weeks, be good.
When I return, I hope to find that all outstanding CAGW issues have been resolved. Try hard.
I think you’d better keep your typing fingers limber!
Hope you’re doing something fun while you’re away.
Faustino,
We await yer return and further words of wisdom.
Serf.
Hard to keep him on the field. He’s off to the sheds again! Following Geoffrey Boycott’s example, I suppose.
Dramatic careers both. )
Oh, Gawd, sans F’s sensibleness it’ll all go off the rails. Which sets in mind a train of thought.
Global chilling is a cure for the madness of catastrophic alarm over climate. So is economic chilling. We are an awesome set-up for overkilling cures.
==============
Well here at the East Anglia oval it’s been an exciting match
with a lot hanging on the result.There was some talk of match
fixing but the referee ruled this out.
The Norfolk TEAM got off to a great start, treating the crowd
to a dazzling display of spin bowling with a nice attacking
fielding array that initially non-plussed the opposition.
But late in the day when the Norfolk team were batting and
looked to soon declare, the top batting order hit the nervous
nineties and became became defensive. A few off-spin
bowls, a leg before wicket and a change in the weather
seem to have turned the game around.
Analogizing to a game nobody in NA knows isn’t cricket! OTOH …
The hockey stick Mann has no credibility. His error proves his incompetence or dishonesty. Take your pick. His education is physics and geology. Meteorology is more relevant to climate. Mann is at a disadvantage debating a meteorologist. The PhD, MS and Professorship are irrelevant. The ‘amateur’ scientist McIntyre had proven him wrong.
I refer to
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WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | October 20, 2013 at 3:03 pm | Reply
Somebody should pay me the big bucks to be a reverse weather forecaster that can hindcast the global average temperature accurately without using any direct measures of temperature.
@@@@@
From my exchanges with WHUT, I gather that his model has not been validated. I also guess that he has no intention of ever validating it. So I have to ask myself, of what use is this model? We have a classic case of the complete uselessness of a non-validated model in Smith et al, Science August 2007, where the authors go to great pains to explain how the model was calibrated, and then claim this calibration process makes it capable of doing predictions. These predictions are now showing themselves to be completely incorrect.
I do get very frustrated when warmists come up with new models, don’t validate them, and then seem to claim that they have widespread utility. There may be uses for non-validated models, but if there are, these uses are very limited indeed. I can see no utility whatsoever in having a model that can hindcast what has happened. There are various mathematical techniques that can ne used to do this. But such efforts have extremely limited utility.
WHUT goes on to say
@@@@@
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
So to do a good job of forecasting climate in the future, all we need is a good projection of CO2 levels to get the elevated temperature anomaly and the SALT parameters to get at the possible fluctuations.
@@@@@
Really? Until this model has been validated it has no hope of doing any practical “projections”.
Take off the motivated reasoning blinders Cripwell. This could be the greatest model in the world, but you wouldn’t know it because your mind is already made up.
Webby
Odds are against that, Webby.
At any rate, Cripwell is right.
“It don’t mean a thing” until it’s been validated.
And it hasn’t.
Max
WHUT, you write ” This could be the greatest model in the world,.”
I agree. But Max is right. Until the model has been validated, it is useless for providing predictions. And from what you have written, you have no intention of ever validating the model, so we will never know whether is has any merit or not.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Michael Mann to agree to a climate change debate with Joe Bastardi.
Mann is obviously afraid of such an encounter.
It’s pretty obvious why.
Max
Although I think Dr. Mann hurt his long-term professional & personal prospects by campaigning to obfuscate his missteps … he’d now ‘have to be crazy’ to debate Joe Bastardi.
His professional colleagues & allies have ‘invested’ what they consider real & valuable resources in Mann & his positions. They would consider that ‘stock’ eroded & diminished, if he were to now ‘acknowledge’ Bastardi.
Mann would also generate hard feelings among his populist base. “The Greenpeace 30 are rotting in Murmansk, and you’re talking to a reprobate creep like Bastardi?!?”
Joe Bastardi, for his part, would immediately become Rocky Balboa, Conan the Barbarian, and several other quasi-super-heroes, to his populist supporters throughout.
“Valdez Is Coming!”, his irregular Patriots will shout from behind their rock fence & tree-trunk cover.
Regardless of the dynamic & outcome of such a debate, Dr. Mann is reviled and Mr. Bastardi surges forward on the shoulders of the throng.
I think Dr. Mann has some poor & costly judgment-issues … but I’d be surprised if they were that flawed.
“not just a predetermined one where your self-esteem depends on it.”
An analogy: last doctors discovered that my sister-in-law had a large cyst which, prior to a biopsy, showed all signs of being malignant. Great sorrow and concern as you can imagine. The biopsy dispelled this fear and you can imagine the laughter, hugs and tears of joy.
Why are those most concerned about AGW not equally “thrilled” with the Pause? Why are they not thrilled that their catastrophe-angst might be ill-founded?… that the world may not be poised on the edge of a deep fryer?
Joe’s comment captures it well. They are FAR more concerned about “being right” in regards to their theory that whether or not the earth burns up.
In fact I am convinced that most meteorologists have a much more realistic and deep insight into climatology than academic climatologists have.
As it doesn’t appear clearly (imho) in J.Bastardi’s text, I will try to reformulate because I think that these insights are what is most important for climate science.
.
Before you read farther, please look and study first the pictures on the link below.
The document is in French but don’t worry – look only at the 50 pictures numbered from 1 to 50 on page 24.
In December 1999 western Europe and mostly France and Germany were hit by the storm of the century. Winds over 200 km/h have swept over most of western Europe making billions € damage. The pictures show the meteorologic scenarios formulated 42 hours before the event. Top left you see 2 pictures labeled “deterministic previsions” and on these there is obviously no storm let alone one of the century.
The 50 pictures below correspond to atmospheric states obtained by perturbating slightly the initial conditions and/or the equations of the model. I highlight the latter because it is little known that meteorologist (as opposed to climatologists) know that their equations only imperfectly describe reality and are bound to fail horribly in some situations.
Here are the pictures (page 24) : http://www.smf.asso.fr/Ressources/Palmer36.pdf
.
So what are the lesson ?
Well first the differences between the results are HUGE. In the scenarii 7 or 49 a major storm covering half France is developing. In the scenario 8 or 50 not even a light breeze is inconveniencing the population.
Overall the 50 possible states cover about everything between “nothing happens” and “the country will be destroyed”. Clearly the models are unstable at this stage, the deterministic prediction says “nothing happens” and the range of possible outcomes is so large as to be totally useless. This insight that high resolution numerical models of the atmosphere (e.g with only physics inside) are in many situations useless is something that a meteorologist meets every day and is very familiar with. The reason for this is that a meteorologist has to do predictions and it is better if they are right.
Now compare this realistic evaluation of our knowledge to the statements of people dabbling in climate (some of them post on Climate Etc). For them climate models and sometimes even primitive 1 or 2 D models are the summum, can’t fail and if there is something that is not well understood then it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s too small. Climatologists suffer from hubris while meteorologists were taught better every day. That’s why a meteorologist will always have a much better understanding of what numerical models can or cannot do than a climatologist.
.
Second is an insight about probabilities. As the models say nothing useful, one could compute a probability of a storm of the century. Let’s say that 8 pictures out of 50 show such a storm of the century. Can we say that the storm will occur with a probability of 8/50 e.g 16 % ?
Of course not for at least 3 reasons :
– The number of perturbations, here 50, is purely arbitrary. Would the %tage stay the same if I did 100 ? Or 1000 ? Certainly not.
– The nature of the perturbations (initial conditions or equations) is predetermined. However meteorologists know by experience that the results are highly sensible to the nature of the perturbation. Change the 50 perturbations used here by another 50 and you obtain 50 pictures that will look very different. Now the probability of a storm will be two times less or 2 times more.
– The finite number of perturbations (here 50) is selected from an infinite set of possible perturbations. How representative is this sample to the uncountably infinite sample ? This depends on the ergodicity of the system and that’s why I have written so often about ergodicity. Here again the meteorologists understand the ergodicity argument much better than the climatologists do because they meet it in practice almost every day.
.
There is much more that could be said but the short of it is that I would always listen with interest to a professional meteorologists when the behavior of spatio-temporal complex dynamics is concerned. On the other hand people like Mann&Co have nothing interesting or even true to say about these subjects.
This thread reminds me of a good Paul Graham quote:
The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they’re so much influenced by intellectual fashions. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they’d just get into an ideological argument.
It seems that certain people here are incapable of learning from others with different conclusions. May I recommend the social sciences to you guys?
Addendum
.
What Judith described with the hurricane prediction is exactly the same thing as what I described above. For a given set of initial and boundary conditions (among an infinity of possible) she lived for a long time on an “ergodic island” where the system was statistically well behaved.
But then one day she fell in an “ergodic hole” where the initial/boundary conditions belonged to a completely different statistical behavior family.
Now of such families of initial/boundary conditions with radically different statistical behavior there is potentially an infinity and people who are doing predictions for a living finish by having a good feeling about the structure, relevance and behavior of these families.
Tomas You say ” people dabbling in climate (some of them post on Climate Etc). For them climate models and sometimes even primitive 1 or 2 D models are the summum, can’t fail and if there is something that is not well understood then it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s too small. Climatologists suffer from hubris while meteorologists were taught better every day. That’s why a meteorologist will always have a much better understanding of what numerical models can or cannot do than a climatologist.”
This is essentially what I say in my comment and the replies above at 21/12:14
Forecasting climate from the IPCC models is inherently impossible apart from the particular problem that their models are incorrectly structured anyway. The modelers were scientifically naïve in not recognizing this from the start.
Pattern recognition is perhaps the only way to proceed given the inherent level of complexity in the climate system of quasi independent oscillating variables.
JC said: “The point is this: climate modelling needs to move towards actually predicting future climate variability change. The initialized decadal forecasts are a step in the right direction, but we need scenarios of future volcanic and solar activity as well (not to mention more research needed to figure out the sun-climate connections).”
I check that JC did not read my:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA
In fact, about CMIP5 models, the point is:
– Climate models need of HUNDREDS (or THOUSANDS) of years of statistical recording in order to being capable to predict climatic changes based on the observation (on empirical measurements).
– But if there is no time for measurements, at least let scientist develop some kind of scientific RF models. CMIP5 models need to accomodate aerosol forcing deduced by some kind of scientific way. Otherwhise, climate scientist have a model to get the CO2 equivalent forcing but have an invented number to deal with aerosols (appart of investigating in these JC’s volcanic&sun – climate connections).
Come on!, climatic science is not that difficult. What it is difficult is to get scientist motivated only by its ethical values.
Bank accounts will take another small hit this winter season as residents across the nation will see an increase in their heating bills.
As AccuWeather’s winter forecast predicts blankets of snow for the Rockies but an ease into winter for the East, expenditures for winter fuels are anticipated to rise, with the exception of heating oil costs.
More than 90 percent of homes in the United States are expected to have higher bills for heating costs this winter season, from Oct. 1, 2013, to March 31, 2014, in comparison to last, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/winter-fuel-bills-to-rise-this-season/18921069
one does not have to be ”climatologist” to know weather / climate – honesty is what counts!
Mann, like so many of the opinion leaders of the AGW community, seems oddly unable to deal with serious unctrolled challenges to their promotional activities. Even the current Pope is willing to meet with atheists. But AGW leaders sem too delicate to tolerate meeting those who dare to seriously disagree with them.
They are trapped.
==========
hunter, you write “Even the current Pope is willing to meet with atheists.”
There is an enormous difference between the Pope and Mann. The Pope has faith that his beliefs are right, and meeting with atheists is not going to change his beliefs. Mann is not supposed to have any beliefs. He is supposed to have solid science to back his ideas. We know he does not have this solid science. So when he meets with skeptics, they are perfectly capable of demonstrating that he is wrong. Mann cannot afford for that to happen . Hence he will never meet and debate any skeptics.
Judith Curry,
An excerpt from Bastardi’s point of view on climate change; http://en.wikipedia.org/wki/Joe_Bastardi :
“Bastardi asserts that the world was likely warmer in the 1930s than today, that human contribution of carbon dioxide is too small to have any effect, and warming is caused by sun spots and exchange with warmer oceans.”
In my opinion, this proves the unbiassed view of Bastardi. During the 1930s the human CO2 emissions have been minimal compared to the present CO2 emissions caused by human activities. In addition, during the last 15+ years there has not taken place any global warming although the total CO2 content in atmosphere has continued its – even mildly exponential – increase.
In this debate it seems to be difficult to understand, that there in the recent total increase of CO2 content in atmosphere the share of anthropogenic CO2 emissions has been only 4 % at the most, and that the anthropogenic CO2 emissions control only the same 4 % of total CO2 content in atmosphere at the most. At the latest this should make one understand, why any warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions can not be empirically distinguished.
On the basis of climate model calculations IPCC states only what kind of assumptions are needed by means of which the recent warming is made seem probably to be caused by antropogenic CO2 emissions, without any proper, empiric evidence.
The increasing trend of CO2 content in atmosphere is dominated by natural warming, especially by with lag rising temperature of global sea surface in areas where sea surface CO2 sinks are.
(Look e.g. at comment http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/#comment-198992 ;
Tom V Segalstad says, http://www.co2web.info/Segalstad_CO2-Science_090805.pdf : ”The rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the last century is not consistent with supply from anthropogenic sources. Such anthropogenic sources account for less than 5% of the present atmosphere, compared to the major input/output from natural sources (~95%)”; and
Tom V Segalstad; http://www.co2web.info/ESEF3VO2.htm : ”Carbon isotopic trends agree qualitatively with fossil fuel CO2 emissions like stated by IPCC, but show quantitatively a fossil fuel CO2 component of maximum 4 % versus the 21% claimed by IPCC.”)
If ever one had any doubts about the showmanship aspects at the root of AGW ….
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
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