by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Climate Politics
Carbon Brief: What’s the deal with this U.N. Climate Summit? http://bit.ly/1rdWsZI
Carbon Brief: US hints at vision for a new global climate deal [link]
Economist: Guide to actions that have done the most to slow global warming [link]
Why Al Gore is hopeful about global warming [link]
Essential reading from @jeffgoodell ahead of the UN climate summit: “China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet” http://rol.st/1r2Koc5
You can watch House Science hearing w/WH adviser John Holdren & EPA’s McCabe testifying on Obama’s climate rule here: [link]
Obama Delays Climate Change Plan, Casting Shadow Over UN Climate Summit [link]
Rupert Darwall: The UN’s Climate Summit Charade [link]
Dems tie climate skeptics to tobacco, lead backers [link]
Bobby Jindahl’s soft climate change skepticism [link]
Ross McKitrick: Climate change and the false case for haste [link]
Pakistan Flood 2014- Lesson Identified Never Learned [link]
New publications
Ten strategies to systematically exploit all options to cope with anthropogenic climate change [link]
Roger Pielke Jr: Have you heard that climate change means that wetter areas get wetter and drier areas more dry? Well, it is wrong–> [link]
The curious case of Indian Ocean warming http://buff.ly/ZmcypA
Is there a ‘heat-or-eat’ trade-off in the UK? Yes [link]
Climate science wars
Hugely important WSJ editorial from Steve Koonins (chair of APS committee to examine their public policy statement). [link]
Richard Lindzen’s first essay for CATO [link]
Mark Steyn: The Lonesomest Mann in Town [link]
Mark Steyn: The Barbra Streisand effect on steroids – #AskDrMann [link]
Sou from Boudanga: Fool Judith Curry denier off the scale: CO2 no influence on centennial times scales [link]
JC’s calendar
Here is an update on my travel schedule:
Sept 22/23: Washington DC: Environmental Law Institute Workshop on The Ethics of Communicating Scientific Uncertainty: Understanding How Scientists, Environmental Lawyers, and Journalists Treat Uncertainty
Sept 25/26: Houston TX: Texas Public Policy Foundation Conference: At the Crossroads: Energy and Climate Policy Summit
Oct 1: Oberlin University: Debate with Pat Michaels
Oct 6-17: Nanjing, China
Oct 23-26: London, Ontario: Rotman Institute of Philosophy Conference on Knowledge and Models in Climate Science
November 10: Ohio University Lecture: State of the Climate Debate
November 13: Tampa FL Lecture to Georgia Tech Alumni Association
Cartoon of the week
And finally, for cartoon of the week, Megan Darby tweets: This polar bear, meanwhile, is doing sit-ups for the climate [link]
“Debate with Pat Michaels”. So you disagree on something?
You know that’s a guy in a polar bear suit, right?
But what’s he doing in the Sahara?
I know, sit-ups.
=========
Beach in Cancun, actually. During COP-16.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-offbeat-1203-pix-photo.html
Self evidently the bear has a chronic headache through the ingestion of too much co2
tonyb
Excellent new post at ClimateAudit by the indefatigable Jean S, on the “Black Tuesday of Climate Science” — it is harder than ever to believe that Michael Mann can win his defamation lawsuit against Steyn and others.
That’s one for the history books. A shockingly clear picture.
========
don’t miss:
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/
That is a fun one. Thanks for the heads up.
A symphony!
Events this week have raised many questions:
The 2009 Climategate emails and the current effort to prevent public debate through legal action have increased interest in two questionable models that appeared in 1946 as consensus science [1]:
1. Stars are filled with Hydrogen
2. Neutrons attract other neutrons
[In fact stars make and discard Hydrogen and atomic bombs explode because neutrons repel neutrons]
Were these models designed to prevent public knowledge of the source of energy that destroyed Hiroshima [2]?
An almost complete “black-out” of news on the CHAOS & FEAR of nuclear annihilation that followed Stalin’s capture of Japan’s atomic bomb plant at Konan, Korea in late August 1945 [3] made it difficult for the public to decide if perhaps Stalin:
1. Emerged victorious from WWII, and
2. Established the UN on 24 Oct 1945 to expand totalitarian control globally [4]?
The scientific method will provide the answer because ultimately, “Truth is victorious, never untruth!”
References:
1. “Why Did You Deceive Us?” Message to the Congressional Space Science & Technology Committee (Dec 2013):https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/WHY.pdf
2. “Solar Energy,” Advances in Astronomy (Submitted 1 Sept 2014)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
3. Aston’s WARNING (12 Dec 1922); CHAOS and FEAR (August 1945)https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/CHAOS_and_FEAR_August_1945.pdf
4. Did Stalin Plan To Rule The World?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/educational_reforms_are_crushing_our_people_comments.html#comment-1595712934
No matter who won, unreported events in late August 1945 are clear: 1 + 2 = 3:
1. The survival instinct is strong
2. Aston had warned Earth might be converted into a star
http://veksler.jinr.ru/becquerel
3. An alliance formed to save the world by scaring the public and hiding knowledge of nuclear energy.
See Galen Winson’s video, “The Nuclear Scare Scam:”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ejCQrOTE-XA&feature=player_embedded
CORRECTION:
2. Aston warned Earth might be converted into a star
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1922/aston-lecture.pdf
For the UN’s new Climate Conference opening in NYC tomorrow, some ask, “Who won WWII and formed the United Nations sixty-nine years ago?”
http://orach24463.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/the-peoples-climate-march-is-not-about-saving-the-planet-it-is-about-power-to-the-elite-not-the-people/
Curious case? ” The results here reveal a larger picture–that the western tropical Indian Ocean has been warming for more than a century, at a rate faster than any other region of the tropical oceans, and turns out to be the largest contributor to the overall trend in the global mean sea surface temperature (SST)”
Who wudda thunk it.
Wow, you are one busy woman.
From the article:
…
U.S. crude oil fell on Friday, on track for its fourth daily decline on continued concerns about ample supply at a time of weak global economic data and fragile demand.
…
Brent crude hovered near $98 a barrel, up about 70 cents a barrel. U.S. crude ended down 66 cents at $92.41 a barrel. Both contracts saw their biggest drop in more than two weeks on Thursday.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102014709
Webby’s models prove you are a liar!
Antarctic Sea Ice breaks 20 million sq km.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-extent-sep-19-2014-7th-all-time-record-in-7-days/
Antarctic and Arctic mirror image
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/arcticantarctic-mirror-graph-day-260/
Damn that CO2!!
That appears to be about 4 standard deviations above the mean for the modern satellite period 1978-2014.
Yes.
Polar bears doing situps is nothing. We learnt this week that polar bears have set up and operated their own website, polarbearsience.com, to tell the world they are doing fine, according to standup comic Michael Loftus.
“comic” He was not very funny.
From the article:
…
Analysts say prices could fall to a range of $3.15 to $3.25, and that more than 30 states can expect prices under $3 a gallon.
…
Typically when gas prices fall, it has a positive impact on consumer spending. Gasbuddy says that due to the decline in prices consumers will spend $2.5 billion less on gas this fall than they did last year and that the money saved could trickle into other areas of the economy.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102009582
Gas prices function just like a tax. It is money out of the economy and into the government kitty.
Of course money going into the government kitty isn’t spent and so doesn’t re-enter the economy. Oh wait…
It is spent. It’s just spent on stuff no one wants. It get diverted to friends of the Administration and Congressional campaign fund supporters. It attracts con men and others who get rich off tax dollars while supplying nothing of value.
Not every dollar meets this fate, but too many do.
Well, no. Except for actual gas taxes, most of it goes to businesses along the supply chain. Especially the big oil companies. Much of that is as badly wasted as taxes, but some isn’t. We can expect a shake-out as prices for solar come down: the oil companies who spent money preparing for new technology will prosper, the others will go under.
Hopefully.
Of course it re-enters the economy – just at a lower value.
Exxon Mobil’s research and development costs from 2001 to 2013 (in million U.S. dollars)
For comparison: Exxon Mobil’s exploration expenses from 2001 to 2013 (in million U.S. dollars)*
IOW they spent more than half as much on research as on actual exploration.
For the middle middle class and lower, the increase in gas prices is like a tax in the sense that the additional money spent on gas is not spent in other areas of the economy. The only way for most Americans to compensate is to drive less, which means less recreational driving, shorter or fewer vacations, etc. This impacts the economy. They cannot drive 75% of the way to work, school, or grandma’s house. Also, the cost of fuel is,built into the price of almost every product and service. So, an increase in fuel prices functions like a tax.
Here is a good graph of the inflation adjusted cost of gas vs year. Notice the run up in prices before the great recession.
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gas-prices-inflation-adjusted.jpg?00cfb7
Justin
In many ways, yes. Not in all.
…and politicians and public servants also pay their taxes, just like everybody else.
Near $2 per LITRE is the norm in the UK thanks to government tax junkies.
Obama keeps getting saved economically by things he opposes.
He’s like a starving conservationist that accidentally shoots a whopping crane.
Would that be a whopping whooping crane?
Exactly.
If you watch the original Al Gore video, you will note that the phrases “we were amazed” and “they were amazed” occurred more than a dozen times. The implication was that climate scientists were amazed that things were much worse than they had expected. Lately, the climate scientists seem amazed that things are much better than they predicted. Altogether, it leads one to conclude that climate scientists are continually amazed because their models aren’t any good.
Amazing!
Meanwhile the rest of us would be amazed if they got something right!
They’re “amazed” for the same reason Stalin’s audience would be fearful to be the first one to stop applauding a speech. The climate “science” community are willfully trained political seals in large part, this was true from inception;
http://news.yahoo.com/tens-thousands-expected-york-climate-march-193229046.html?bcmt=comments-postbox
Watching the benign polititeness of the Marshall Institute to soft soap “middle ground” arguments compared to what will be on display this week in NYC illustrates the real societal risk of the Greenshirt agenda.
From “Obama Delays Climate Change Plan”
“In a conference call with reporters, the Environmental Protection Agency said it was extending the public comment period on the power plant rules for an additional 45 days, until 1 December.”
Of course, there is an election in November. I guess the POTUS doen’t think he can sell that plan tp the people. He is hoping for some MSM amnesia before the next election. I wonder how that tar sands oil pipeline thingy is going …
JustinWonder about the whole thing…
The comment period has little to do with the election, so I wonder what EPA is looking for?
They’re probably waiting to see what happens in New York.
It’s not the EPA, it is the POTUS directing the EPA. He doesn’t want press coverage of this topic in the weeks leading up to an election, especially when them Dems might lose a few senate seats.
Justin
There have to be a few people in the coal states that really don’t like what O’Bumbles did by limiting power plants using coal.
From the article (my emphasis):
…
Summary
Montney contains almost 29 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and over 136 billion barrels of oil.
Liquids-rich Middle Montney is where the real action is.
Enough shale gas to supply Canada’s needs for 145 years.
In the world of a constantly changing oil and gas environment, the Montney shale basin is the sleeping giant that holds the key to accelerating Canada’s shale oil and gas boom, but the real treasure within this giant is a tight liquids-rich zone (approximately 15-20 miles wide) that has big and small players alike narrowing their focus for the potential of a giant payout.
A pervasive hydrocarbon system in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) in Alberta and British Columbia, the Montney is estimated to hold 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas, almost 29 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and over 136 billion barrels of oil. But it is the tight liquids-rich fairway (approximately 15-20 miles wide) that contains high concentrations of both free condensate and natural gas liquids that everyone is pursuing in what may very soon be one of the largest commercially viable plays in the world.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2508465-canadas-shale-boom-more-to-come-in-montney
I wouldn´t use a Seeking Alpha article to study potential oil resources. The Montney´s “oil” isn´t producible. What the Montney has is gas, condensate, and NGLs. I noticed there´s a tendency by some parties to mix the condensate with the NGL figures, and the provincial authorities don´t seem to enforce a reliable breakdown. My guess is the Montney will become the largest single condensate source they can use to dilute the heavy oil. And eventually the gas from the Montney will be the largest gas source in Canada.
I think you are right about that. The article should have stated it in BOE terms. But, condensate is a valuable resource in its own right, used by chemical plants.
Jim2, believe or not I was a process engineer in the 1970’s. The first computer models I learned to run were process simulators. I’ve noticed some nomenclature issues in the industry, some of it driven by the desire to hype the stock.
Condensate can be a really good refinery feed. The condensate from very high pressure and temperature reservoirs can have a chemical composition almost identical to a light crude oil.
Unfortunately the reporting systems don’t give us the detailed chemistry breakdown. So what we see is a blurring of natural gas liquids with condensates. Some operators even try to label them as crude oil. To make matters even more complicated in some jurisdictions the royalties change depending on the way the hydrocarbons are marketed.
In general the prices go up as the hydrocarbons get heavier up to a point. Then they start coming down because the product slate has asphalt and residual fuel oil, which requires cracking and hydrogenation before it can be cycled into the refinery proper.
And indeed watch out for those pesky BOEs. They are used to hype stock value. I think the government is sort of playing along. They want people euphoric and confident so they keep buying Chinese goods and the world economy will hum until reality sinks in.
Reblogged this on Canadian Climate Guy and commented:
Judith Curry – week in review.
Record hot August:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/8
Extremes:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/extremes/201408.gif
…combining average global land and ocean surface temperature for the month of course makes perfect sense.
Is this map a component of the new war propaganda system?
Well, they should really show the departure from the 21st century average. That would be useful information.
1981 is so … last century.
August temperature anomaly from 1981-2010 average is 0.20C.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/09/uah-global-temperature-update-for-august-2014-0-20-deg-c/
Yes discussed below in reply to FOMD
They show an +anomaly of 05 c for the UK when there was a -1c anomaly.
Global Warming Causes Mental Illness, Cancer
(http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/04/global-warming-causes-mental-illness-cancer/ )
Wagathon,
It seems that belief in global warming has already caused mental illness. This no doubt explains the affliction known as Warmism.
Prior to this breakthrough, I surmised that Warmists merely suffered from delusional psychoses. I now see my error.
Thank you.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Do you think the Left actually believe no one ever stopped smoking until the sin tax on cigarettes was raised from 50¢ to $5 /pack? What the Left has done pretty well is boost marijuana sales, create the vaping industry and help rob the bread from the mouths of children in poor families with smoking parents.
Wagathon,
and helped “rob the bread from the mouths of children in poor families with smoking parents.” Don’t you know in the creed of the Left it’s there own damn fault. There can never be a victim of Progressivism…not part of the fabric of their universe.
http://ttac.org/services/Tobacco_101/images/slideshow/part2-3-exciseTaxes.jpg
Any questions, Waggy?
david springer supplies a lovely chart which unfortunately does not include black market cigarette sales. without doubt cigarette consumption has dropped in the west as a result of health information campaigns ,but not to the extent the chart shows below.
in the uk it is likely black market cigarette consumption is in excess of 50% in some areas , people will only take so much taxation before they do something about it,in the uk that time passed a long time ago for cigarettes and to some extent energy costs.
more people are using red diesel (tax exempt in the uk) and one of the reasons for increasing energy bills the power companies do not mention is theft of both electricity and gas. various tricks abound ,usually involving electricity and gas meters rigged by professionals to earn extra income. this is prevalent in the uk among a certain demographic and will only increase in line with escalating energy costs.
Got some kind of data to support you claim, chilly?
Probably not, eh Climate Etc readers? ;-)
Uh, Springer, it is called a black market because the activities are not done in the open.
What has the increase in legal and illicit drug use been in the US since the 80s and is that habit any better and less ‘sinful’ than a cigarette habit? State-run lotteries are more sinful than a smoker’s habit?
http://www.nicotronic.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/electronic-cigarettes-sales-trends.jpg?w=200
David, can you kindly point out where the steady decline in consumption since ~1982 suddenly accelerates in line with the huge increase in price?
1970-1982 consumption rises as price declines.
1982-present consumption declines as price rises
Claim was made that data doesn’t include black market sales. That’s incorrect. Consumption is consumption regardless of source. The graph doesn’t say total legal sales it says consumption. Duh.
More like sales fall when high school cannot buy a pack for 50¢ (including matches) in a coin operated laundry. So, they buy grass instead… or, crank or crack or coke or glue or whatever…
White lightning. Gov’t never makes anything better, unless you believe handing out free needles to prevent AIDS is being compassionate.
David, the price shot up to nearly double between 1998 and 2002. That is not reflected in the consumption graph.
Consumption continued to go down after 1998. It had gone down a lot, before that. Some people can’t, or don’t want to, give up their smokes no matter what the price. Study up on price elasticity demand curve:
https://www.google.com/search?q=price+elasticity+of+demand+curve&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb
Judy,
Congratulations on the discussion of Dr. Koonen in the WSJ. As you know, as the head of the APS panel and past undersec for Science for DOE which does much of the modeling, his transformation is a major blow to the settled science CAGW hypothesis. Your presentation plus the others in the APS review had spectacular results.
Congratulations on your effectiveness.
Scott
I agree. Dr. Koonen’s essay is pretty amazing. I wonder if he tried to publish it in the NYTimes as well.
It will be very interesting to see what the APS does next.
The APS meeting and transcript is what prompted me to dig into CAGW deeply.
Lindzen’s essay is great next to Koonen’s.
” wonder if he tried to publish it in the NYTimes as well.”
Ah yes, the very belly of the Progressive beast. I suspect as a certain point they’ll just go silent on the subject, hoping people will forget their pathetic credulity,
Ah, well, too bad he’s a BOFD.
Scott: Right on. I raise a toast to her. This is the start. The wall is starting to crumble; the climate wall is falling!
Dr Curry: This may soon come true – “I would make sure the observations are funded (satellite, monitoring, and important process experiments). I would then spend funding on basic research related to climate dynamics (none of impacts stuff or endless analysis of model output) including solar physics. We need to entrain physicists, mathematicians, engineers, chemists and computer scientists for an infusion of new approaches to understanding the climate system.”
“Dems tie climate skeptics to tobacco, lead backers”
Waiting for just one Climate Etc. warmist to concede how cynically off the mark this is…Is there one of you with the integrity?
re Darvall link:
Mr Ban will not
be over the
moon that
a globul treaty
on fossil fuel
emissions is
out of reach-
he wants
to convey that
it’s jest over
the
horizon.
Clever! :) It is all in jest…of course there is always the hope that they can squeeze some reparations out of the US.
“Hugely important WSJ editorial from Steve Koonins (chair of APS committee to examine their public policy statement). ”
Heartening piece. Seems we can be optimistic about their upcoming policy statement. Something expressing a little humility rather than the usual sneering hyper-certainty would be welcome indeed.
Did you hear climate change was the main driver in the Scottish vote?
Well for peat’s sake…
Actually Scotland doesn’t have climate just miserable weather
No true Scotsman would believe that!
Whatever happened to Braveheart? I can never watch that movie again knowing they finally had a chance to be a sovereign nation and they lost heart.
We had a chance to become a nation without a currency, ruled by various flavours of left and green intent on selling everything we had in desperation to rejoin the EU. No thanks.
Justin,
Braveheart bore as much relationship to the real facts as Al Gore’s ‘An inconvenient truth’ movie. Both overhyped nonsense. but only one got the attention of the High Court.
tonyb
it was certainly a deciding factor in my decision to vote no. the ludicrous charge to be 100% reliant on renewable energy by the scottish national party would see the elderly in real trouble when the first proper scottish winter hit,never mind the cost to industry as a result of power outages when the wind stopped blowing and the sun stopped shining. a regular occurrence in any scottish winter,mild or severe.
Bitchilly
It’s about now as the sun loses its strength that my solar powered lights lose their effectiveness. Give it another month and they won’t come on at all.
So let’s add lowlight levels and the fact that solar power doesn’t work in the dark and wind doesn’t work in times of too low and too high a wind.
I am a bit baffled as to why Scotland was promoted as being the alternative energy capital of Europe. It’s not renowned for its sunshine and a great deal of those wonderful uplands would have to be covered in turbines for them to have any noticeable impact on energy supplies.
You have some hydro and the ocean is at present woefully under exploited, as it is in the rest of the Uk. Unfortunately wave and tide technology is at least twenty years behind that of wind.
Tonyb
tony b,
Please keep the space in bit chilly’s moniker. When I first saw your comment, I thought it was an adverb.
Judith, You look like a busy bee for somebody who’s in the ostracized camp.
The curious case of Indian Ocean warming http://buff.ly/ZmcypA
Important contribution to knowledge of the hydrologic cycle, I think. It is remarkable that two areas of ocean so near to each other warmed by such different amounts.
Hugely important WSJ editorial from Steve Koonins (chair of APS committee to examine their public policy statement). [link]
That was a good essay.
Very remarkable. Worked for Chu and BP renewables.
===========
In the article, we find that the asymmetry in ENSO forcing (El Niño warms up the Indian Ocean, while La Niña doesn’t), and the positive skewness (more El Niños) during recent decades explain the century-long warming trends over the Indian Ocean. The study suggests that, even without greenhouse gas forcing, El Niños may piles up the heat over the Indian Ocean. There is a twist here though. The positive skewness of ENSO is most likely due to greenhouse warming.
Roxy Mathew Koll: There is a twist here though. The positive skewness of ENSO is most likely due to greenhouse warming.
I believe that it is possibly due to greenhouse gas warming, but the evidence is full of holes.
It switched to negative skewness at high atmospheric co2 and even higher human emissions.
Haven’t explored this last aspect, Matthew :)
Perhaps the Indian Ocean is warming due to GHGs. It then becomes interesting as to why it cooled into the LIA. Perhaps Atlantis actually didn’t sink until the top of the MWP and they were advanced and industrialized but too stupid to leave the island? Probably sunk by their own emissions!
Multidecadal variability in East African hydroclimate controlled by the Indian Ocean
Tierney et al 2013
steven, I doubt that. The Indian Ocean doesn’t mix well due to the northern out flow blocked by land and the low THC flow in general. So the IO lags the Western Pacific by roughly 7.5 years, but the lag is irregular.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Yc685J4iZD4/VB2Xy2IiecI/AAAAAAAALhE/kAW9GwxxM4w/w641-h463-no/io%2Bv%2Bwp.png
Using the Oppo et al 2009 Indo-Pacific Warm Pool reconstruction, the IO has been warming slowly since 1700.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-WJiDVg2R0KM/Ubx8SnnJOxI/AAAAAAAALXE/MWz-9MfST10/w805-h513-no/giss%2Band%2Bersst%2Bwith%2Bipwp.png
There is that little long term persistence issue which hasn’t been “discovered” by the right people yet.
Dallas, the paper I referenced goes back much further. As to the ability of the Indian Ocean to cause warming elsewhere see Lee et al 2011.
steven, “Dallas, the paper I referenced goes back much further. As to the ability of the Indian Ocean to cause warming elsewhere see Lee et al 2011.”
Going back very far tends to confuse the minions.
Dallas, they actually use the same reconstruction that you use but that reconstruction goes back 2000 years. They only use about 700 of them in the paper I referenced to compare with precipitation in E Africa.
steven, Right, but remember your audience.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-0Ljwh9NTkS0/Ubx9dAfZtAI/AAAAAAAALWE/LcPTFjijgB4/w807-h513-no/giss%2Band%2Bersst%2Bwith%2Bipwp%2Bfrom%2B0%2Bad.png
If I show them the whole reconstruction which indicates that todays temperatures are right in line with the MWP, they start freaking out. Kind of like mentioning the impact of ocean heat transport and the inherent lags associated with huge irregularly sized basins. You have to go slowly with these guys.
BREAKING NEWS
Record Heat By Sea-and-Land
The “Pause” is “OVER”
Summary We live upon a planet of rising seas, heating oceans, and melting polar ice … and this heating is projected to continue, without pause or near-term limit.
Well, *THIS* climate-science surely helps to simplify the climate-change debate, eh Climate Etc readers?
Uhhh … unless *ALL* of this data is the result of a *MASSIVE* conspiracy of scientists, that is!
Consensus It’s nutty to blame the end-of-the-pause on a conspiracy of scientists … isn’t it?
The world wonders!
‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this
update shows that these climate modes have recently
synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year
2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an
increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’ http://www.leif.org/EOS/2008GL037022.pdf
We don’t know that oceans are still rising – but a turn around in the surface temperature anytime soon seems quite unlikely.
Fan, I don’t know where you got that third bullet but the NOAA is proclaiming aug 2014 beat 1998:
“The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for August 2014 was record high for the month, at 0.75 C (1.35 F) above the 20th century average of 15.6 C (60.1 F) topping the previous record set in 1998”.
See my link above to NOAA
Oh nevermind, I see it says land. My bad!
http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20RSS%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
Don’t see the warming.
You must be looking at NCDC temperatures… Just tilt the RSS graph 10° counterclockwise.
Given that the NCDC is running warmer than GISS – they are drifting off into pure fantasy. The only way NCDC won’t hit a record this year is if their computers crash and they have to use real data.
Thanks for posting that, I wondered the same below. See my link above for the noaa land and sea temps from stations. Of course there was a whole argument in past threads about how they do their data.
It is also fairly revealing that NOAA put out a spokesman climatologist trumpeting this information to the public (I heard it on the radio) with no mention at all of the satellite data.
Well the NCDC has a computer program that tilts the temperature graph.
Climate4you tracks the data maturity. Since 2008, January 1915 has gotten 0.12°C colder than January 2000. The difference was originally 0.39°C and now it is 0.51°C. They started the adjustments around 2001 so this isn’t the full extent of the damage.
If it isn’t done by computer, then they have gone back in time and captured better data for 1915.
Bidding 10 degrees, bidding 10 degrees. Do I hear 15 degrees?
============
PA, thanks for the web site. I looked under the heading global temperatures list of contents and ‘Estimates of recent global air temperature change’ and it shows graphically exactly what your talking about. I guess Eric might think that’s conspiracy theories but it looks good to me.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t live where RSS measures what it does measure, but I do live where NCDC and GISS measures and they do measure temperature.
The TLT (lower trophosphere) includes altitudes of zero to about 12,500 meters and is most heavily weighted to altitudes of less than 3000 meters.
BD, unless you live next to a weather station RSS measures temperatures closer to you that NCDC or GISS.
UAH covers 97-98% of the globe (missing a small circle at each pole), and RSS covers slightly less.
PA
What part of microwaves are not temperature do you not understand?
And it looks to me like it’s fifty fifty above and below 3000 meters.
“removing most of the stratospheric influence”
Means to me that there is some stratospheric influence to the RSS product and since stratospheric cooling is part of the evidence for AGW, their not removing all of it means that the RSS product is bogus for discussing temperatures where humans live.
http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature
And why is there such disagreement between RSS and UAH?
The trends from RSS and UAH are almost opposite from 2001 to 2014.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2014/trend/plot/uah/from:2001/to:2014/trend
Well, BD you should really write a note to NOAA telling them all their work orbiting advanced microwave radiometers is wasted and that they should go back to guessing at the weather.
Seriously, measuring a trend is about consistency, precision, and coverage. Three bullseyes for satellites. They match well against balloon data (IE they are measuring what they claim they are measuring).
GCHN global coverage – number of stations, coverage map:
http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/all-raw-station-count-ghcn-cru1.jpg
http://www.hashemifamily.com/Kevan/Climate/Stations.gif
Land measurements on the other hand collect some data to 1°C accuracy, have “zombie” stations created by computer, has never been the same network 2 months in a row (probably not even two weeks in a row) with stations moved/added/changed/deleted/missing, all the data is “adjusted” to what personnel think stations ought to have measured, collects data at random times of the day, does anomalous things like extending the land data over the arctic (1200 km), etc. etc.
Oh, gee you must be right, land measurements are better, because guessing is way better than actually measuring something.
@ PA
Does anyone other than me think it a bit odd that at the beginning of 1998 (precisely) there was an abrupt step upward of around 0.5C in the anomaly graph and that at the end of 1998 (precisely) there was an abrupt step downward of around 0.5C, while during the entire year of 1998, the anomaly profile remained ‘noisily’ flat, pretty much like any other individual year?
And that if you removed that 0.5C step up/down at the beginning/end of the year, 1998 would have blended in seamlessly with the remainder of the graph and would have been otherwise unremarkable?
You have to wonder about their data when you look at their satellite UAH shows a completely different story. The Satallite shows that August dropped from July and is nowhere near 1998. Mixed signals from the agency maybe they should have a food fight next lunch period.
You don’t have to wonder about the satellite data.
RSS is a regional series. Mildly interesting at most. UAH wants to be like it.
The satellites sample a lot more of the Earth’s atmosphere than the land/ocean-based instruments. It may not cover everywhere, but it’s a damn sight better than anything else.
JCH that is exactly right.
You really have to wonder about the surface data because it is such a moving target. I have never seen dead data move around so much.
“You don’t have to wonder about the satellite data.”
I think GISS Jan thru August is also around .65C, which is also likely 3rd warmest in their record.
Warmest August on record. So much for the pause continuing until the 2030’s. Does this call into question the predictability of the stadium wave?
Eric you are looking at the surface temperatures.
The climate models for the 20th century basically look like a ramp that turns up at the end of the century and continues rising in the 21st.
The actual data looks like 1 1/2 saw teeth followed by a leveling off.
The climate centers are busily and steadily converting the real data to a ramp by reducing the late thirties/early forties warming and adjusting modern temperatures upward.
Since the climate centers believe the models are right they are correcting the “bad” real world data to match the models (the real world is wrong).
The low troposphere temperatures although they are more volatile than the surface temperatures – uniformly cover the whole earth (more or less) and should be increasing more than the surface temperatures according to AGW theory. Further – they don’t subtract UHI (the warming of the planet from urban centers that is completely unrelated to CO2).
So in theory the lower troposphere temperatures are better measure of global temperature (because they are actually global and not a hodge podge of local heavily adjusted surface temperatures) and should show a HIGHER warming trend than properly adjusted surface temperatures.
Since this is not the case this would lead one to suspect the surface temperatures are not being properly adjusted.
Sorry PA. I am not into conspiracy theories.
Yep, Eric, I agree; those records change quite spontaneously. No human agency required.
=============
How could it be wrong when the money is so good.
http://www.businessinsider.com/currency-traders-have-already-voted-soaring-pound-says-scotland-will-vote-no-2014-9
Better to bet on black, instead of the red. Smart.
It isn’t really a conspiracy theory. More like extreme confirmation bias.
There was a couple of threads on the subject:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/
http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/01/ncdc-responds-to-concerns-about-surface-temperature-data-set/
http://judithcurry.com/2014/06/28/skeptical-of-skeptics-is-steve-goddard-right/
The problem isn’t the adjustments per se – but that the temperature difference between two years (say 1935 and 1998) should stay the same permanently. The data is dead, it isn’t moving. The scientists are shooting at a stationary target. The adjustments in 2008 for 1935 should be the same as the adjustments to1935 in 2014.
This doesn’t seem to be the case. If it isn’t the case, the data processing is indisputably wrong.
Eric, It’s not a conspiracy theory it’s just a matter of where the data comes from and how it is handled:
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Estmates of recent global temperature change
Another zero fact based diatribe
from Fanboy.
Fan, check back in a decade. At that time you will have something much more solid.
Oct 6-17: Nanjing, China
The issue is not really climate, rather, a long history of Imperial Japanese and the “Rape” of Nanjing during WW II. The Americans, who flew the “hump” over Burma to Chongquig (further up the Yangzte River) are still appreciated with a memorial for those aviators who help stem the Japanese tide into China. Although the American effort was in support of Chiang Kai-shek the Nationalist’s leader, the people of Chongquig still remember Americans fondly.
A tip of the hat to that period of Chinese history may be appreciated. Not so much if there are Japanese present.
Sing Soong, Sister.
========
WHTSeptember 18, 2014 at 2:17 AM
Since this was a national press club event, did any reporter ask her about her crackpot IronSun-like theory of cloud nucleation?
http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/04/thermodynamics-kinetics-and-microphysics-of-clouds/#comment-624713
Of course webbly was comment 1 on some stupidly irrelevant rant from sou from who gives a rat’s arse. By all means check out the link. Water molecules are bosons and Bose-Einstein stats apply at normal atmospheric temps.
http://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/be-stats.png
The iron sun theory is of course something not even remotely connected with cloud nucleation -http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iron-02a.html – it is as stupidly irrelevant as anything from pig iron headed sou. They don’t find these people they make them in a stupid factory.
Predictable, incompetent and reprehensible would about describe webbly’s ongoing behavior in this.
Taz, Funny how you and your denier “colleagues” go on and on about applying Bose-Einstein statistics to matter in the quantum degenerate limit without understanding the first thing about statistical mechanics.
WebHubTelescope: Taz, Funny how you and your denier “colleagues” go on and on about applying Bose-Einstein statistics to matter in the quantum degenerate limit without understanding the first thing about statistical mechanics.
That is nonsense. But I think I finally appreciate that you never care whether anything you write is true or false, as long as it is either (a) self-aggrandizing or (b) insulting to another.
Even though you do not know how increasing CO2 or warming will change the hydrologic cycle, and even though you make elementary errors in statistics and probability, and even though I basically have faint praise for your csalt model (i.e. it hasn’t been tested or disconfirmed by out of sample data), I stipulate that you know more of just about all of physics than I do.
Marler, big difference between a statistician and a statistical mechanic. It is you that is the poseur. Had enough with your passive/aggressive insulting style, BTW.
‘The climate system is characterized by a strong external forcing and dissipation, making it a system for which the standard assumptions of equilibrium statistical mechanics do not hold. We therefore have to make use of the techniques developed in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to describe the statistical properties of the climate system. Many promising advances have been made in this field, although a general mathematical description of non-equilibrium states has not been found yet.’
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/Statistical.7077.0.html?&L=3
There is one thing to understand about webbly – he is a poseur with zilch understanding of the climate system. There is so little relevance of statistical mechanics and what little there is he woefully misconstrues. You think he understands physics? I think it is all braggadocio with so little substance and so little relevance.
As opposed to aggressive/aggressive? Webbly anger and resentment seeps through unmistakably. Why do we have to put up with this through lax moderation?
Now that’s a question I have been asking for years.
WebHubTelescope: Had enough with your passive/aggressive insulting style, BTW.
You know what? Nobody cares.
WebHubTelescope: Pointing out mistakes in basic physics is vindictive?
You made two false claims about the text, and then dug in your heels and insulted the authors and wrote a bunch of innuendoes. You were just plain wrong.
Not really. If this book actually had gone through a decent peer review by actual physicists they would have caught the error and the B-E passage wouldn’t have been included. Any mistakes by the reviewer are irrelevant to the process, unless they turn out to be incorrect. The author usually thanks the reviewer because THEY ARE NOT PAID. Or at best they get an advance copy. But all I had was a window through Google books, and I decided against spending $70 based on the garbage that I read.
But as is usually the case with a bunch of psychologically-projecting wingers, they frame the argument as an attack on the reviewer.
I thought Pekka explained the fallacies in your f00lishness over at theresphysics. So you come over here and start over?
‘Atmospheric and oceanic forcings are strongest at global equilibrium scales of 107 m and seasons to millennia. Fluid mixing and dissipation occur at microscales of 10^−3 m and 10^−3 s, and cloud particulate transformations happen at 10^−6 m or smaller. Observed intrinsic variability is spectrally broad band across all intermediate scales. A full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology. No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
There is no statistical mechanics of climate. Degenerate matter is also utterly irrelevant.
‘Degenerate matter[1][2] in physics is a collection of free, non-interacting particles with a pressure and other physical characteristics determined by quantum mechanical effects. It is the analogue of an ideal gas in classical mechanics. The degenerate state of matter, in the sense of deviant from an ideal gas, arises at extraordinarily high density (in compact stars) or at extremely low temperatures in laboratories.’
There is nothing to suggest that degenerate matter is a factor. The statistics are calculable at temperatures found in the atmosphere – I do it above. The statistics and the condensate are two separate things. Bose-Einstein condensation – which I suppose is what he refers to as quantum degeneracy – happens at ultra low temperatures. It is utterly irrelevant to cloud nucleation and the derivation of the analytical solution that I am not across. Webbly hasn’t even tried – merely repeated ad nauseum his malign and malicious slander.
Webbly is both dishonest – an exemplar or bad faith – and utterly and eccentrically off track technically in just about everything. He is also an irredeemable schmuck.
Taz, Who is this webbly of which you speak? Is that perhaps Peter Webbly, the guy who can’t figure out ENSO?
All Webby’s ranting about B-E has achived is to convince those of us who weren’t quite sure that he is indeed a self important ass with a vindictive streak a mile wide.
Pointing out mistakes in basic physics is vindictive?
You should probably ask if professors are vindictive when they have to flunk out students who can’t make the grade.
The authors are on record that Bose-Einstein statistics were not used in the book:
“However, we emphasize that these sections 8.2.3 and 8.3.2 with Bose-Einstein statistics are NOT used in any calculations in the book.”,
and were merely mentioned for completeness.
So… someone has a reading comprehension problem.
Criticizing the book for using Bose-Einstein statistics is like saying the author’s theory is wrong because they picked a book jacket color you don’t like.
PA speaks mistruths:
Yet B-E statistics are used in the book and the authors actually crow about it.
Sounds like they want to do a revisionist history, and claim not to have made a bone-headed mistake of immense proportions? Can’t have it both ways I am afraid.
No matter what yous say, they can’t walk that one back and rationalize that it was the equivalent of an innocent remark on a blog. This gaffe is for the ages.
It’s actually a perfectly valid speculation. And quite likely to stimulate work in this direction.
What I wonder is why Webdummy panicked?
(Wayback)
AK, in case you didn’t notice, any statements I make on a blog are not PUBLISHED, and I didn’t make the mistake of putting it in print where future atmospheric physicists will chuckle over the assertion. The O-Man and Chief Taz have used the same formulation and we know whut kind of kranks they are, eh?
”
Thus, if in the future, B-E statistics will appear to be valid for nucleation at low T, the first reference will be this book.
“
Like I said, someone has a reading comprehension problem.
The referenced quote posits that B-E statistics may be applied to low temperature nucleation in the future. Since the book wasn’t written in the future B-E statistics weren’t used in the book.
WebHubTelescope: any statements I make on a blog are not PUBLISHED,
that’s why I encourage you to publish your csalt model. Otherwise, it’s as if it hasn’t even been written.
pot: kettle: black.
BTW, good FOMBS imitation. Birds of a feather…
Low temperature is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to use BE statistics. Other conditions have to be satisfied too, and the case for those other conditions is weak, the main one being indistinguishable particles, which fails when so many vibration and rotation states are available at the temperatures being discussed.
You are so behind the times. We are working from an open-source model, where the physics research collaboration is done in real time and the checks and balances are done in real time, 24×7
see http://azimuth.mathforge.org/
Not sure what the point of publishing his model would be, everybody knows that if you take a sandbox of data, you can make curves from it, and if you add data to the sandbox, you can make new curves.
Jim, what part of the difference between ‘can’t use’ and ‘don’t have to use’ is causing you so much confusion? If there is a place where you can’t use B-E statistics show me where it is on the chart Rob posted.
If the particles are distinguishable you use Boltzmann statistics, no matter how cold it is.
Jim, where on the chart is it appropriate to use Boltzmann statistics and not B-E statistics for a boson? A simple question. The way I read it there isn’t such a place.
steven, it isn’t one-dimensional like that. You have to consider the number of quantum states those bosons have available to them, and for temperatures much above a few K, they have many rotational states and even some vibrational states, each with quantum numbers that can distinguish them, then it is Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. BE applies only when so few quantum states are available that many particles become identical.
Jim. it seems to me that your description gives the case where Boltzmann and BE give the same answer in which case they would both be appropriate. I am looking for that situation where Boltzmann is appropriate and BE is not. It seems you are still stuck in the ‘don’t have to use’ being the same as ‘can’t use’ frame of thought to me and if you could just show me on the chart where that spot is it will help my understanding considerably.
lil steven, they screwed up but they won’t admit to it.
They have to go through hoops of rationalization to even start to defend their decisions on applying B-E statistics in the degenerate regime. And then they put a disclaimer that if they do turn out to be right, they will be the first !
#comical
Webeddy, I read the free sample from the book. It described all three statistical methods in it including how they all merge to give the same answer. Is that not true? They stated under certain conditions you may have to use BE. Is that not true? It had a graph that looked similar to the one Rob posted. Why don’t you tell me where on that graph the Bolzmann statistics will give you the right answer and BE statistics won’t. As far as I can tell the best, as in most biting, critique you could have made was that it seems unlikely that it would ever be required to use BE and not that using BE was wrong. The fact that they included it just seems like a way to make sure to be complete to me.
Since I have bothered to not ignore you lets go back to our old topic. I asked Dallas why he thought you might be using Fick’s law of diffusion for mixing. You gave a clear description of diffusive mixing which would be fair out of context. The problem is the context was eddy diffusion which is not diffusive mixing. Would you like to try that one again?
steven, as I said, the criterion is the number of particles that have identical quantum numbers. It is very hard to get molecules into these degenerate states because they have those extra degrees of freedom that single-particle bosons don’t. For molecules they have to be in a state where they are hardly moving which must be at only a few K, if even that, because it takes very little energy to rotate them with one quantum of angular momentum, and at normal temperatures they have many such states to distribute over.
Steven, ” I asked Dallas why he thought you might be using Fick’s law of diffusion for mixing. You gave a clear description of diffusive mixing which would be fair out of context. The problem is the context was eddy diffusion which is not diffusive mixing. Would you like to try that one again?”
Good luck with that. What webster and Hansen were doing is estimating an “effective” diffusivity. That would vary the different factors that influence the mixing efficiency such as average surface wind velocity changes, regional surface wind velocity changes, sea ice extent, sea ice distribution (as in which pole and which areas), saliniity as well as temperature differentials, basically anything that can influence the THC.
Remember that webster doesn’t consider ocean heat transport worth bothering with, so he can just approximate the oceans as a block of copper.
lil steven said:
Of course eddy diffusion is diffusive mixing, otherwise they wouldn’t call it diffusion.
Where do they find these people?
It’s turbulent mixing. Now explain how you apply fick’s to turbulent mixing.
Jim, you are giving the criteria for when you have to use BE statistics. The question is when you can’t use them. Since at high energy states BE and Boltzmann statistics (and FD for that matter) give the same answer it seems like never is the correct answer. I am still waiting for you to point out to me on the graph where you can’t use BE for a boson.
steven, I can only repeat what I said above. The graph is a necessary, but not sufficient condition. You need to also know how many distinguishable states are available, e.g. rotation states. At these kinds of temperatures, and they are talking about near 200 K, those molecules are rotating like heck if they are in a vapor, or at least oscillating a lot if in a fluid because of all the thermal energy, but supercooling to those temperatures without freezing is unlikely. Anyway, there would be so many energy states available, the odds are against two occupying the same state, while application of BE needs those odds to be high in the first place.
Jim, you are right. You are only saying the same thing over and over. I don’t know how many times I can say that BE statistics give the same answer as Boltzmann at high energy states before you address that issue.Instead you seem quite determined to state over and over when Boltzmann isn’t appropriate as opposed to when BE isn’t.
BE isn’t applicable when the particles can be distinguished in any way.
Jim, BE statistics go long after you can start Boltzmann. It just gives the same answer and Boltzmann requires less data input. Just because one equation is more convenient than another doesn’t make the other equation wrong. So it is applicable but it isn’t necessary. Big difference between being extra work and being wrong.
The Boltzmann probability ratio between two states does not revert to a B-E form if these states themselves are much higher than kT even if the difference is smaller than kT. You can’t just convert a Boltzmann form with delta E into a B-E form by adding the -1 in the denominator. If you start with B-E and do this ratio, the final result looks like Boltzmann under these high-energy conditions.
I’m not sure what your argument is anymore, Jim. But this is what the text book (Judith’s) says about it. Predictions coincide sums it up as far as I’m concerned. But it is late and I am tired, so if I am wrong and it is only that the text and the graphics seem to indicate they give the same answer but they really don’t for some mysterious reason, so be it. I’m done with this one unless you find a reference stating the predictions don’t coincide under high energy conditions.
As is the case with BE statistics, if (EK-U)>>KT,then 1 in the denominator of (eqn 3.2.37) can be neglected and we obtain the boltzmann distribution.Thus, FD statistics is another generalization of the boltzmann distribution in agreement with the correspondence principle, and all the predictions of all 3 statistics coincide for the case (EK-U)>>KT.
steven, I don’t pretend to understand the derivation in the book, but to the extent their formula with delta R is using an energy difference, and then applying the B-E formula to that, it may well be wrong. You can’t do that in physics.
Jim, Since this is all new to me I am stuck between taking published literature at it’s word or taking Jim D at his. Which would you pick? Get a reference. Since you know you are right it should be fairly easy to point it out to me in the literature.
steven, if someone can tell me whether their delta R is an energy difference between two states (which is what the name makes it sound like), I can say mathematically B-E won’t make sense for this formula. That is where I stand on this.
JimD, “steven, if someone can tell me whether their delta R is an energy difference between two states (which is what the name makes it sound like), I can say mathematically B-E won’t make sense for this formula.”
We are all eyes, type away. It would probably be easier to use something else, like a Raleigh distribution, but if you are trying to extend to Boltzmann distribution to lower temperatures, B-E would provide some continuity. If you just leave the region where Boltzmann doesn’t work alone, we could call it the webster catastrophe zone and maybe put neat little dragon pictures on the graphs. Right now though about 8% of the mid-level clouds are super cooled liquid topped rascals that appear to be a negative feedback.
captd, you can do it for yourself. Start with the B-E probability for two different states E1 and E2, both much larger than kT. Take the ratio of these probabilities and you get a formula extremely close to Boltzmann and not at all close to B-E for the term delta E/kT = (E2-E1)/kT. Try for yourself and report back.
JimD,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/d/a/b/dab04979d14282a51441678ded8baa4e.png
That is the differential equation for Differential Enthalpy provided WordPress shows it. Someone wanted an equation for differental enthaply, that is what they can up with. It likely match the distribution in their data. The is nothing magical about a Raleigh or a B-E distribution, lots of things in nature share or can be made to share a familiar statistical distribution. You have already been given several other examples of where B-E is used in “analogous” situations. If you can modify the basic equations to fit your data, do it. Since super cooled water doesn’t magically nucleate when you might expect, based on Boltzmann, perhaps a little creativity could be a wonderful thing.
Creativity btw along with optimism, seems to be in short supply on certain sides of the never ending debate.
Jim, all the references I can find state that BE reduces to MB at high temperatures or low density. It’s been a while since I’ve had math classes but from what I remember reducing means part of the equation doesn’t affect the answer and can be eliminated. There are none that state BE is now wrong so switch to MB. If you look at the equations you can see why this is so as you deal with larger and larger numbers in the denominator and are only changing it by 1. You are confusing don’t have to use with can’t use. I have provided a reference. I patiently await your reference showing I’m wrong. That is a strength of written debate after all.
I assume the link to a Hot Whopper article was an attempt to add humor to the post.
Articles on Hot Whopper are extremely biased, and are indeed “Hot Whoppers”.
It would not take much editing to turn Hot Whopper articles into “the Onion” style satire.
FOMD commends unperturbed equanimity is the face of even the most egregious personal abuse … an equanimity which Judith Curry and James Hansen alike display admirably well.
Good on `yah both, Curry and Hansen!
Boo on `yah, Sou from Boudanga!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Boo on `yah, Sou from Boudanga!
I didn’t think much of Sou’s commentary either.
Hmm. Well, I might actually agree with you FOMD.
While I believe Hansen is wrong – he comes across as sincere.
FOMD being incredibly insightful? Wonders never cease. Good on ya FOMD.
Sou from Hot Whopper claims to be “about”:
Yet Sou cannot stand contrary evidence, moving it to HowWoppery.
So much for the objectivity of those “who have eyes but cannot see”
Not much humor there either.
The big question for Sunday is how many will march in Manhatten? Ten thousand is trivial. A hundred thousand is important,
100,000 is 0.03% of the population of the US. I’m not feelin’ it.
Who cares, it’s like a party for these people. Whatever happened to the occupy movement? Nada. I wonder if they will ride their bikes to the event. Not!
I bet many will go for FOMO (fear of missing out) – who knows, it could be the next Woodstock
Surely it’s really an anti-war protest. What ever happened to those folks?
Turns out those folks were right. War was not a solution.
War is a precipitate?
War isn’t a solution, but neither is peace. It’s a bit of a conundrum.
Perhaps we in the West need to start fighting wars like our ancestors. Balls to the wall and let God sort em out? No worries about collateral damage or a surgical war. That was the only way one of the Axis powers FINALLY surrendered and it changed the entire culture.
More and more, it appears that’s what’s needed in the ME.
Eric | September 20, 2014 at 5:04 am |
“Turns out those folks were right. War was not a solution.”
Depends on what war. US Civil War solved slavery. WWII solved Japanese and German ambitions to take over the world.
Georges Clemenceau, put it well.
“War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”
Statement to Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference (12 January 1919)
Who pays, who benefits?
George Turner and Jim2, in regard to the efficacy of violent methods of conflict resolution, the recent cogent analysis of the military-oriented web-site Duffelblog is commended to your attention:
*THESE* realities of violent conflict-resolution methods are evident to *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
FOMBS – without all those wars, that would have left all the religious fanatic militants in the East to turn their total attention on the destruction of the West. Those wars could be a blessing in disguise. You just don’t know.
Another zero fact based diatribe
from Fanboy.
It’s taken nearly a decade to get design approval for Nuclear power plant though the US Nuclear ‘Rejection‘ Commission. It is any wonder nuclear is many times more expensive than it should be?
Good point, that. Imagine all the much better designs on the table now.
I am big fan of an MSR (molten salt reactor) using the brayton cycle.
Most articles critical of MSR are nonsense. For example:
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-8-msr-lftr/8-9-the-brayton-cycle-and-msr-reactors/
An MSR should have an inert gas secondary loop that drives Brayton cycle turbines, the tertiary cooling loop could drive Rankine cycle steam turbines.
The MSR eliminates a number of problems. The used fuel pellets from current reactors (after processing to convert the uranium oxide to uranium tetrafluoride) could just be dumped in the molten salt. Since the reactor isn’t pressurized not much happens in case of a accident or a leak (you just scrap off the hardened salt and throw it back in).
Jim2,
I agree. Just imagine if we leveled the playing field for all energy – removed the subsidies and removed the unjustified irrational impediments on many technologies, but most notably nuclear energy.
The impediments stopping the world from having low cost nuclear power and retarding progress are many. The licencing costs and delays through Nuclear ‘Rejection’ Commission is one. But there are many others. Imagine the effect on public opinion, on the actual cost of accidents like Fukushima, and on the ability of the anti-nukes to continue to have such success with their doomsayer propaganda if the allowable radiation limits were raised to ‘as high a relatively safe’ (AHARS) as justified based on scientific evidence, rather than being set ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ (ALARA) as they are now. They could be raised, in steps over time, by a factor of 10 to 100 compared with what they are now. http://home.comcast.net/~robert.hargraves/public_html/RadiationSafety26SixPage.pdf
See this excellent video by retired Oxford Professor Wade Allison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6aL3wv4v0
If we removed the impediments on nuclear power the cost of electricity from Small Modular r\Reactors (SMR) could decrease at a rate of 10% per doubling of capacity. That’s a moderate learning rate. At that rate, starting with first completion in 2022 and at a 2 year capacity doubling rate, LCOE of SMR’s would be cheaper than electricity from coal in Australia before 2030 and half the cost of coal by 2045 (coal generation is cheap in Australia). At that rate no one would consider coal and the world would be much wealthier and get all the benefits that brings.
The CAGW alarmists should redirect their advocacy skills to getting John Holdren and the rest of Obama’s advisers to stop trying to regulate to make coal generation prohibitively expensive and, instead, focus on removing the impediments to nuclear power.
Still beating the dead nuclear horse?
We need to revive the nuclear horse and then ride it. Humans are all about creating order out of chaos, anti- entropy machines, and to exist we need ever more power. Fortunately, the gradients are there to be exploited, but the biggest impediment is the demon haunted inner world in which so many people live.
Planting MSR facilities like weeds would do more than any other “green” initiative.
Wind and solar all cause more emissions to produce the facility than a nuclear power plant. 2000 MW of wind (a typical nuclear plant) which operates at 25% of capacity (8000 MW nameplate rating), requires 800,000 tons of mostly stainless steel (100 tons per megawatt) and 2250 tons of rare earth metals. It is an environmental disaster particularly if you live in China.
Green advocates do not like getting into honest discussions of the environment impacts of production and deployment of wind and solar since that would require honesty and a discussion.
PA – wind and solar all cause more emissions….
True. Wind and solar require ready-to-use back-up power, usually coal or natural gas. The back-up plants are not run at full efficiency, so more carbon is emitted. This was the case in Denmark, where a concerted effort to use renewables did not reduce carbon emissions. My understanding is that this is a result of the efficiency of a heat engine, that is equal to (1 – TempLow/TempHigh). To be efficient, the plants need to run as hot as possible for as long as possible, not cycled on and off to accommodate intermittent wind and solar plants. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Justin
Justin,
On of the best recent studies is “Quantifying the CO2 savings from wind power”: http://docs.wind-watch.org/Wheatley-Ireland-CO2.pdf
It’s an excellent empirical study of EirGrid, the all Ireland grid. It shows that wind power was about 53% effective at reducing emissions for every 1 MWh wind generation. (This is at 17% of electricity generated by wind for the year 2011.) On that basis, the CO2 abatement cost with wind is about 2x what is claimed.
I am in favor of the GE reactor.
Not a huge fan of ALARA, all depends on what one thinks is reasonable, yours may be much different than mine, but do keep exposure with current limits, raising the limits to 500 Rem per year, or 5 Sieverts per year is koo koo for cocoa puffs.
So now we have 4 approved large reactor designs for the US, looks to me like regulatory approval is no longer an impediment, maybe the real issue is capitol investment and construction lead time.
bob droege,
What the links I gave are arguing for, are for ALARA and LNT to be dumped and replaced with AHARS. What do you mean by “keep exposure withing limits”? What limits? Reasonable limits based on the best available scientific evidence, or limits based on scaremongering and superstition? If you support the latter you are assisting to make nuclear far more expensive than it could and should be, and indirectly causing over 1 million avoidable fatalities per year. That is the consequence of the irrational, unjustified limits based on ALARA.
One leads to the other. We have not resolved the licensing delay issue. The development doesn’t stop at gaining licenses for four old designs. The 43 small modular reactor designs cannot proceed because it costs far too much to get them through licencing. The financial risk is far too high. So the licencing issue needs to be sorted out.
I agree with you “the real issue is capitol investment and construction lead time”. This is in part a consequence of the licencing and designs, and unjustified excessive safety requirements. The licencing process is preventing development and competition and moving to smaller units.
Furthermore, according to Allison, half the cost of electricity from nuclear plants can be attributed to safety requirements. This is ridiculous given that it is preventing the world from having far safer electricity than what they have now.
Peter, can we build one of those in Brazzaville?
Too big for the local grid. Need Small Modular Reactors. Tell Obama to remove the US blocks to progress. Tell Hon Holdren too. Better still, tell Obama to sack Holdren and appoint an Energy adviser that has a balanced understanding or energy requirements, rather than one who shares Holdren’s life-long fear and loathing of nuclear power.
Peaking power is required every day and is typically provided by gas powered plants that can cycle up and down relatively easily. Theoretically wind or solar could be used for this if available – and should taken up preferentially as the marginal (mainly fuel) costs are minimal. There should not be a problem with this if the market is not distorted by subsidies. If they can make it work without subsidies I certainly have no problem, Say very cheap panels (when available) to power office air conditioning – for instance.
In the US the levelised costs of generation by gas is cheaper by far – so the question doesn’t arise.
“Renewables or nuclear electricity for Australia – the costs”
http://oznucforum.customer.netspace.net.au/TP4PLang.pdf
The WSJ piece by Steve Koonins is excellent. A true scientist. I loved it.
But it only really covers part of the climate change problem, the define the problem part. The what do we do about it part is much more complicated. That is why climate change is such a wicked problem.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/sinquefield_cup_one_of_the_most_amazing_feats_in_chess_history_just_happened.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/sinquefield_cup_one_of_the_most_amazing_feats_in_chess_history_just_happened.html
Willard,
Great article! It was probably the first article I have ever read about chess and it was engrossing! One of the cool things about ClimateEtc is the exposure to lots of interesting ideas, events, and issues. Smart, skeptical people can be very interesting.
Justin
Koonins certainly checks off all the talking points of the one side. Didn’t see anything new there.
Compare and contrast:
http://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/do-not-panic/
Excellent blog entry : spare and content dense. I especially thought this link was interesting:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/03/stealth-issue-advocacy.html
>Didn’t see anything new there
You don’t need to. Just refute his points with empirical evidence … that will do it
Indeed, empirical evidence from the future is all we need to quench Mr. T’s thirst for certainty.
Jim D
Maybe nothing new but little by little with each such piece from a credible source the edifice of a consensus crumbles. It is the cumulative effect that should worry you. As the observational data mounts new voices will come forward. I sense a momentum and it is not in your favor.
Join Mr. T’s bandwagon, Jim D!
Koonins does seem to realize that scientists have to be honest about the uncertainty. Coming from someone like him, it means a lot. That is something of a new development, or at least another step in the right direction.
Scientists have lost credibility by asserting with certainty that this or that catastrophe will happen, then it doesn’t. Or just this or that event, like the Arctic death spiral, which probably wouldn’t be a catastrophe of any sort, will happen; then it doesn’t.
If scientists stick to the knowns, their credibility will return. If they don’t, people will ridicule them and ignore their advice.
I think this is big stuff. This is a man emerged from the belly of the beast, Obama’s administration and BP renewables. Apparently he has a lot of credibility and is in a venue with a lot of credibility, the APS. That he would indicate that the science is not settled and that the models are inadequate for policy work is stunning.
I think I’m gonna go check up on Noah. There’s lots of metaphors in the deep, blue, sea.
============
> scientists have to be honest about the uncertainty
Indeed, scientists ought to admit that nobody knows the future and that the future is uncertain. Except perhaps the Google, who lives in the future.
By chance Mr. T is there to make scientists walk the line.
Who is Mr. T?
It is highly likely :) that the giant plume of oil from the BP leak was consumed by microbes. What a catastrophe for the Luddites! It was hard, but not impossible, to get that bird soaked in oil photo. Maybe they used a file photo. Nowadays, to get a good dead bird photo you have to trudge about on some noisy wind mega farm where you can see lots of shredded eagles and bats, if you don’t get arrested for trespassing.
Justin
Think of it, we wouldn’t get all those shredded eagle pics if we hadn’t “banned” DDT.
And is there a correlation between sea level and ice free conditions in the Arctic?
Koonin raises three questions. Is climate changing? Are humans influencing the planet? How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?
The first two are yes-no questions. The last one is a how question. This question conceals a yes-no question: will AGW be bad?
To see the effect of that concealment, let’s go back in 2010:
Is there a spill at Deepwater Horizons? Are humans influencing that spill? How will that spill and other natural factors change the Gulf of Mexico over the next century?
Mr. T ought to have taken care of the spill.
Wave your wand as you will, there’s no rabbit in that hat.
==========
“Scientists think the algae forms into balls to protect itself from fish and other predators or so that they can roll back into the sea when washed ashore”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2763283/Where-did-green-alien-eggs-come-Scientists-baffled-UFOs-Unidentified-Floating-Objects-washed-Sydney-beach.html#ixzz3Dre5MvzG
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The Deepwater Horizons accident put about 4-5 times the annual NATURAL gulf seepage in the into the water. The big difference is the annual seepage doesn’t put detergent in the water and is spread over a much larger area.
The oil eating microbes were already on the scene.
Long term Deepwater Horizons will have zero impact. Really short term it was an awful mess. Estimates are 22K tons of oil hit the beach. At this point (4 years out) opinions and studies vary. The activists are dancing around saying the detergents are cytotoxic and genotoxic. Nobody is mentioning the oil very much, even activist articles acknowledge the oil is “largely dissipated” and that finding the finger print of current oil effects on coral is hard because the oil is gone
It even looks like deep sea fishing does more damage to coral than Deepwater Horizon.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/32/11744
I don’t know about no effect. I will fertilize the ocean some.
Jim D > Koonins certainly checks off all the talking points of the one side. Didn’t see anything new there.
Yes, the “side” of truth. Anathema to those more accustomed to bending science to politics.
Thanks for the editorial from Koonin. It will be interesting to see who attacks him and the degree of ferocity.
usually he is among the watchdog, so I interpret his position as “IPCC is dead”
As of this moment, not Joe Romm. And it’s been 35 hours. “Climate Science Rapid Response?”
David Atkins, @ the Political Animal blog of Washington Monthly calls the Koonin editorial an ‘obfuscatory piece’. The commenters have their hate faces on. Hee, hee, hee.
=================
Atkins:
[…]
Koonin:
[…]
[…]
[…]
[…]
[…]
“Obfuscatory”? For Atkins perhaps. The actual message: don’t blame science for you policy agenda! (IMO.)
Forgot to say: all bolding mine.
Dr. Curry,
I’m getting addicted to your Week in Review feature. What a wonderfully eclectic mix of links. Thanks especially for Steve Koonins’ piece, replete with the kind of nuanced analysis I like to believe created my skeptical position on CAGW. Mark Steyn’s tomfoolery puncturing Dr. Mann’s self promotion on Twitter provided plenty of guilty pleasure for my reptile brain. But, thanks especially for leaving the best to last, a link to a Sewage overflow, where you were roundly castigated. It was an act of true altruism to send a few of your multitude of readers to her bilious Sad Sack site. I’ve often said we are defined by those we hate almost as much as by those we love. I suspect the corollary of that, i.e. who hates and loves us, are almost as relevant to that definition. P.S. WHT please stop slumming and get back to your rightful place here, you’re an important part of the balance I value at this site.
I predict incompetent nonsense.
Taz hates it when somebody discovers important results in his own backyard:
http://contextearth.com/2014/09/16/using-tidal-gauges-to-estimate-enso/
I almost uncovered the ,a href=”http://www.smh.com.au/national/terror-raids-the-rising-fear-in-sydneys-suburbs-20140919-10jctz.html”>terrorists while I was at it :)
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img538/1953/itXH4n.gif
webster, “Taz hates it when somebody discovers important results in his own backyard:”
You definitely have to publish now. Who would of thought that tidal variations in the western Pacific could possibly be related to ENSO? Pure genius.
Willy discovered curve fitting at an early age. His parents and teachers ignored it. Now, he can’t help himself. Over-fitters anonymous?
I was not that precocious, Don Don, but it was fun.
WebHubTelescope: http://contextearth.com/2014/09/16/using-tidal-gauges-to-estimate-enso/
More unpublished blog writing that can be ignored? Please let us know when you publish it so that we can attribute it properly.
Marler said:
#OwnGoal by Marler.
The difference is that I do everything in the open and in collaboration with folks such as at the Azimuth Forum — http://azimuth.mathforge.org/
In contrast, Curry did her krank theorizing in the dark, and then sprung it on the unsuspecting public in a published textbook !!!
Fer shame !
Sorry willy, I meant webby. You’re not that silly.
I think you are referring to Peter Webby, who is the guy that can’t figure out ENSO.
No, I am referring to webby the curve fitting clown.
Name some scientific process that can’t be represented by a curve, Don. Either through physical behavior or through statistical ensembles, the result can always be conceptually viewed as a curve in some manifold.
Otherwise, you are fitting to a dot.
Yea, that’s the ticket — Dot Dot Don.
WebHubTelescope: The difference is that I do everything in the open and in collaboration with folks such as at the Azimuth Forum — http://azimuth.mathforge.org/
I understand now. Some of your blog writing counts, and some doesn’t. Your repeated misrepresentations of K&S don’t count because you say so post hoc, even as you repeat them from blog to blog.
You started your K&S critique in error, and then shifted your ground to baseless calumny.
Calumny — there’s that word again. You guys sound like you come from some Victorian age. Little wonder that no one understands where you are coming from.
Welcome to the world of the internet, where it takes effort to beat back the pseudo-science.
Webby, look at yourself. You are nothing more than a third rate scientist at a third rate university lashing out over nothing more than your inadequacies. Have you no shame?
WebHubTelescope: Calumny — there’s that word again.
Yes.
Is there a link between warming data and climate conferences? this seems to be the third time that we have warmer months near a conference although it might have been on different data sets.the sea ice extent was headed back to median a couple of years ago and then was conveniently hijacked.
Thanks, Judith. I missed many of those in my browsing. And thanks for posting your schedule of speaking engagements.
Cheers.
love this blog site
can’t stay away – so many informative comments
what the heck is up with the bizarre vilification of mild mannered scientist Judith Curry?
she indicates in her press club talk that it began after Katrina as a result of her Hurricane paper …?
whose kitten did she run over?
can anyone provide a couple more details about how this witch trial stuff started
thanks
(I know Mann and Gavin take a lot of heat, but they make really strong pronouncements the would naturally draw fire, plus lawsuits and refusal to debate – JC’s only crime as far as I can tell is saying “not enough good data – we don’t know”)
History shows us plainly that depending on the circumstance, the assertion ‘not enough good data – we don’t know’ can amount to:
• a valid scientific opinion
• a gross scientific error
• organized racketeering
• an agency of mass casuality
Observation I The Marshall Institute web-sites links (at the bottom) to other web sites that do not enjoy a good reputation within the scientific community (e.g., “Energy Insider”, “Energy Facts”, “Fuel-Fix”).
Observation II Every element of Judith Curry’s “uncertainty monster” is comparably likely to make AGW worse than IPCC projections, as to make AGW better. Yet this even-handedness is invisible in Judith Curry’s slides. Ouch!
Conclusion Judith Curry’s own scientific reputation is unlikely to be elevated by Judith’s associating her name to institutions whose scientific reputation, technological assessments, astro-turfing track record, and predilection for one-sided analysis all are dubious (to say the least).
Be careful, Judith Curry!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: History shows us plainly that depending on the circumstance, the assertion ‘not enough good data – we don’t know’ can amount to:
• a valid scientific opinion
As it is in Prof Curry’s case. Beyond any reasonable doubt.
Observation I The Marshall Institute web-sites links (at the bottom) to other web sites that do not enjoy a good reputation within the scientific community (e.g., “Energy Insider”, “Energy Facts”, “Fuel-Fix”).
Observation II Every element of Judith Curry’s “uncertainty monster” is comparably likely to make AGW worse than IPCC projections, as to make AGW better. Yet this even-handedness is invisible in Judith Curry’s slides. Ouch!
I. If Marshall has the good sense to invite Prof Curry, but Prof Mann and Dr Schmidt vilify her, then why do you care that Prof Mann and Dr Schmidt and others do not respect the Marshall Institute? This is as stupid a mode of “reasoning” as inferring false motives to someone who joined the NAACP or the anti-VietNam War movement because a few of their other members were communists. Prof Curry’s talk hews more closely to the science than the catastrophism of the Union of Concerned Scientists. If the Marshall Institute respects her and the UCS doesn’t, then it is the UCS who ought to lose credibility, not the Marshall Institute.
II. You can not back that up with evidence. In particular, the unknown changes in the hydrological cycle more likely support the idea that temperature change will be less than forecast by the IPCC. In addition to that, their actual forecasting record is overpredicting the temperature increase, not underpredicting it.
The most discouraging aspects of this debate are the loose language, loose reasoning, and willful disparagement of evidence and dissent by the people supporting AGW catastrophism.
What’s the best summary of evidence to date?
1. Warming from 1850 to 2014 has had neutral to beneficial consequences.
2. Nothing bad (tornadoes, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea level rise, the epizootic that decimated the stands of American chestnuts, the distemper epizootics in seals and African lions) has been consistently related to CO2 increase.
3. No quantitative model that fits recent data predicts catastrophic warming over the rest of the century.
4. Increased warming will increase evaporation and precipitation rates.
5. Increased evaporation and precipitation rates are not likely to produce decreased cloud cover; other than that, net H2O feedbacks are unknown.
6. Continued increases in fossil fuel use are unlikely to result in a doubling of CO2 concentration from its present value of ca. 400 ppm.
I look forward to reports of the results of careful studies addressing these and other reports. Worshipful expressions of faith in the Idols of the Tribe and the Idols of the Marketplace, not so much.
FOMD’s Cost-Accounting Exercise
Step 1 Assign a number
as the fraction of the the motivation for the Gulf War/Iraq/Afghanistan conflict associated to protecting Carbon-Energy interests.
Step 2 Compute
. This is the cost to date to the United States (in dollars) of the national carbon-energy addiction.
Step 3 Compute
. This is the cost to date to the United States (in hero’s blood) of the national carbon-energy addiction.
Conclusion The costs of carbon energy already are far more than the United States can reasonably afford. And the costs of rising seas, stronger storms, and more frequent droughts are only beginning to be accounted.
*THESE* carbon-energy truths are evident to *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
Erratum Step 1 should read:
That the fraction
is substantially greater than zero is evident to *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
Well heck! Try this equation-formatting:
Hopefully, the third time’s the charm!
‘Observation I The Marshall Institute web-sites links (at the bottom) to other web sites that do not enjoy a good reputation within the scientific community (e.g., “Energy Insider”, “Energy Facts”, “Fuel-Fix”).’
The link to “Energy Insider” is a link to the National Journal’s energy page and an article by Okeefe the Marshall institute the CEO.
The NJ looks like a policy journal not hard science – I guess if your scientists were rabid environmental activists they wouldn’t like it.
But the solution for rabid environment activists is simple – the condition is treatable at the doctors office – and they prefer you bring the animal that bit you if possible.
John Smith
The motto of the Royal Society roughly translates from the latin as ‘Nobodys word is final’
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
Scientists should question the status quo but that principle seems to have been set aside when it comes to climate, a young and brash branch of the sciences that thinks it is uniquely qualified to believe the science is settled.
In reality we have little idea of what makes the climate tick. Rumsfeld’s words could have been written to accentuate how little we know
‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.’
I have likened climate to a 5000 piece jigsaw of which most pieces are missing and we have no picture on the box to illustrate what we should be building.
The uncertainty and plain don’t knows I have been pointing out are all very well. As just one example; ‘How we can know an average global sea surface temperature back to 1850 when so much of the world was unexplored let alone its oceans measured’ should be just one example that should make scientists question whether the models they build are actually using reliable data, or whether they think they already know the answer and therefore just use data that supports it, no matter its doubtful provenance.
These sort of questions can be safely ignored coming from someone like me, but when a bona fide climate scientist such as Judith- who has always been firmly on the consensus side- suddenly starts expressing doubt then such dissent must be squashed as it can’t be ignored..
There are a small number of climate science activists and a much larger number of non scientific environmental activists who have the ear of governments and who push the warming agenda. I heard both at arecent climate conference I attended at Exeter recently.
When we enter the realm of politics other factors come into play. Combined, these forces are powerful and unforgiving.
Judith was very brave to speak out and is perhaps now realising what sceptics have had to put up with, most, but not all, of whom merely want to get to the truth, wherever it lies.
That the climate was highly variable in the past appears to be ignored. The paleo proxy reconstructions such as the Hockey stick (which uses various proxies) are inadequate representations of the past and miss out on annual and decadal variability. Anyway, why on earth should a tree ring from a tree with a short growing season and its own micro climate be a worthwhile thermometer. However this has become an icon which in its various forms has acquired almost religious significance to believers.
I don’t know where Judith’s journey will end and I suspect she still believes that co2 is the dominant factor, whereas I and others believe it is important at low concentrations but is overwhelmed by natural variability..
However, it is an interesting journey but one on which those not supporting the consensus will have a rocky ride. If its any consolation to her she is at least upholding the scientific principle made 350 years ago by the Royal Society which seems to have become rather unfashionable
tonyb
tonyb
Thanks for the lucid discussion. John Smith, Discover magazine hosted a discussion set of papers from Mann and Judith Curry. Mann name calling in the article was disturbing but the restrained logic from Judy convincing. The CAGW then had to drown out her voice with loud accusations.
Dr Koonon and APS policy review are extremely important.
Scott
Assertions by TonyB, corrections by FOMD.
In further news, the George C. Marshall Institute has just hired a new executive director (John B Sheldon) who apparently has *NO* formal training in *ANY* STEM discipline.
Observation The STEM-literacy, mathematical maturity, and reasoning capacity of climate-change skepticism/denialism is decreasing year-by-year.
Why is this? The world wonders.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: In further news, the George C. Marshall Institute has just hired a new executive director (John B Sheldon) who apparently has *NO* formal training in *ANY* STEM discipline.
That’s as empty as pointing out that Al Gore has no formal training in any stem discipline. John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich do have formal training in STEM, and their policy recommendations are always wrong. In this debate, merely toting up the college degrees does not get us far in evaluating the scientific evidence or the policy recommendations.
Fan
you seem to have forgotten the link you yourself posted which demonstrated that borehole temperatures had been rising for 300 years and superimposed on it was a graphic from you showing the highly variable temperature so what’s your po9nt?
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/climate/gst5.gif
I replied to your original borehole graph here
http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/11/fraudulent-hockey-stick/#comment-627276
tonyb
The point Among scientists who study climate-change “hockey-sticks”, historical records of land-temperature carry relatively little weight (compared to boreholes, limnology, isotope ratios, tree-rings, etc.) for the following objective reasons:
(1) the heat capacity of the air is low compared to the heat-capacity of the seas (giving more weight to aquatic and borehole measures), and because
(2) daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute fluctuations in air-temperature are far larger than than climate-change effects (again giving more weight to aquatic and borehole measures), and because
(3) the historical temperature-record lacks global spatial coverage (giving more weight to ocean-sediment and borehole measures), and
(4) the historical temperature-record has relatively poor calibration (giving more weight to isotopic and borehole measures), and
(5) much of the historical temperature-record is anecdotal rather than quantitative (regarding which ships-logs, etc., are seldom as rigorous as scientists would like).
Conclusion TonyB, although everyone appreciates and respects your passion and diligence in regard to the historical climate-record, passion and diligence are *NOT* sufficient to remediate these deficiencies.
Fan
You post this in response to my reproducing your own link to borehole data showing that temperatures have been rising for over 300 years. As I continually point out, both Giss and Hadley are merely staging posts for a warming climate NOT the starting post;
‘The point Among scientists who study climate-change “hockey-sticks”, historical records of land-temperature carry relatively little weight (compared to boreholes, limnology, isotope ratios, tree-rings, etc.) for the following objective reasons:’
So Mosh has obviously been wasting his time. The Met Office might as well archive their records. Hansen’s Giss is made obsolete. What an extraordinary thing for you to say. Novel proxies trump instrumental records.
Lets home on in tree rings. These have samples typically taken at the beginning and end of a short growing season. They are highly susceptible to their micro climate. They give a 50 year smoothed signal that completely misses the ups and downs of annual and decadal variability.
Perhaps you would link to an explanatory paper to explain exactly why it is you think that tree rings make such great global thermometers accurate to tenths of a degree?
Then you can tell me why we have been warming for 300 years and whilst you are about it the reason for the significant cooling prior to that and the hundreds of years long warming prior to THAT?
tonyb
“The point Among scientists who study climate-change “hockey-sticks”, historical records of land-temperature carry relatively little weight (compared to boreholes, limnology, isotope ratios, tree-rings, etc.) for the following objective reasons:”
Actually the point is that comparing proxies, which represent attenuated and averaged temperature signal to modern surface temperature data is just invalid. You can compare proxy data from the past to similar data from the present. The tree rings for example don’t show that modern temperatures, post 1960 are unusual.
If you want compare modern temperatures to borehole temperatures you need to dig a 100 foot deep hole, drop in some instrumentation with low thermal conductivity wires in the hole, fill the hole back in and collect your data. You would be 100 years to late to catch the 20th century warming but data could be collected for most of the 21st century.
tonyb
your comments (and your article I read here on CE)
are among the most persuasive to me
anecdotal?
please see my comment to FOMD below
thank you
John, Judith has made accusations against the scientific mainstream that they only appear so certain, not because of the scientific evidence, but through group-think and peer pressure. Some don’t take kindly to that. Her accusations may seem subtle to you, but they are attacking the scientific integrity of the majority, so you can see that some of them respond in kind.
Yes by all means get out the 30-1 spray!
The 1 is accusing the 30 of being dishonest.
The 1 is right.
Jim D
thanks
it seems to me that science is often moved forward by one dissenting voice
I don’t quite hear JC questioning their integrity, just their evidence and methods
(except in that “hide the decline” thing where integrity, I think, was a serious issue)
For Mann and GS, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence
I don’t think the response is in kind
perhaps we are all now rendered myopic by our politics
FOMD
I’m not yet convinced that select proxy evidence is that less anecdotal than other evidence
“anecdotal” I hate that word, it was invented by technocrats :)
Still curious about what went on with Dr. Curry’s hurricane paper, isn’t that where the trouble started? She mentions something about getting burned by a journalist
tonyb, JimD, PA, Scott (even FOMD)
you guys are fierce
man, can’t tell ‘ya how much I enjoy reading this crazy sh*t
also, very liberal friend mentioned Koonen WSJ piece, her opinion was changed by it, could be a turning point
John Smith, you can also take the warming rate since 1950 as an example. Judith is effectively saying that just because it agrees with the consensus transient sensitivity doesn’t mean the consensus is correct, and not only that, she asserts they can’t be correct, and bases this on the “pause” that came after a steep step in 1998. It’s not only models, but decades of warming data that support the consensus, but they have people believing it is just models, and only want to talk about the last 15 years of data.
JimD
I appreciate this point
Its seems like failure of the models does count just as matter of scientific debate (especially since the predictions called for extreme changes)
but I hear what you’re saying and will consider your point as I gradually learn more about this issue
well stated, even though it lacked bold typeface for emphasis :)
Anyone who challenges the orthodoxy must be silenced. If they can’t muzzle her, the they will discredit her. It’s Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” in action.
There’s been a humorous new development in the consensus debate this week. Yesterday, Skeptical Science strongly condemned describing the results of their study as:
Even though Dana Nuccitelli, the guy who created the scale used in the paper, said:
It turns out skeptic criticism of the paper is exactly in line with what the person who designed the measuring system said about it. The only people who disagree with Nuccitelli’s vision for the measuring system are… Nuccitelli and his friends.
It’s surreal.
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/surreal/
> Yesterday, Skeptical Science strongly condemned […]
Brandon can’t even provide the link.
Hyperreal.
willard, this is a stupid response given the link is in the post I wrote about this topic. Sure, I could have remembered to add the link in this comment too, but the fact someone doesn’t provide a link every time they talk about something in no way implies they “can’t even provide the link.”
The normal response for someone quoting something without a clear reference is to say something like, “What’s your source for this?”
> Sure, I could have remembered to add the link in this comment too.
Of course Brandon could have. And AK and Don Don would have thanked him instead of thanking me.
It was not a question, BTW.
Brandon does that all the time.
I think maybe I should upgrade my notion that SKS is a false-flag operation from “speculation” to “theory”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t they get burned before with unsecured data? Data of some sort anyway?
It’s almost like they deliberately left it out there to be found…
The truth is out there, AK.
Reading that discussion suffices to show that Brandon’s lulz may not be warranted:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-24-Defining%20the%20scientific%20consensus.html
Brandon, an IT guy, has not even sanitized the emails and the IPs.
Hyperreal.
AK, I don’t think these guys are competent enough for that. I’d like to, because it is depressing a group so ridiculously incompetent can have such an influence on the world, but foolish optimism is a bad thing.
I think we have to be realistic here. These guys are just that bad.
Thanks for the link, willy:
“dana1981
Dana Nuccitelli
dana1981@yahoo…
69.230.102.70
There aren’t a lot that specifically quantify AGW, but there are a good number that essentially endorse the IPCC report, which is equivalent to endorsing AGW as greater than 50%.
I just really want to avoid the assumption that if a paper says ‘humans are causing global warming’, for example, that they’re saying humans are causing the majority of the warming. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. If we assume they are, we’ll get busted. So if your consensus is ‘humans are causing most of the observed warming’, then you need the papers that don’t somehow quantify the effect in a different category, because you then have to add an assumption in order to get an endorsement for your consensus definition.
But like I said, you don’t have to be totally literal and only accept if they quantify it. For example, endorsing the IPCC is a consensus endorsement.”
Thank you for the link Willard…
(dana1981 2012-01-24 16:29:47)
Why’d you say Oops?
> I just really want to avoid the assumption that if a paper says ‘humans are causing global warming’, for example, that they’re saying humans are causing the majority of the warming. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. **If we assume they are, we’ll get busted.**
Which is exactly what Will makes Russ assumed:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=7&t=348&&n=1994#106735
Or how to force a quantification where there is none.
Incidentally, Tom refers to his previous comment where he recalls how this strawman was given so much ice time. He recalls Pop, Nicola, and Richard:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1994&p=7#106668
Another case where Brandon paraphrases for the sake of unjustified lulz.
Hyperreal.
OTOH…
Looking farther (H/T HOCKEY SCHTICK), I find:
But David Henderson and David Friedman appear to be responding to a comment:
I’m sure there’s an explanation for this…
> I’m sure there’s an explanation for this…
What’s “this,” AK?
The first three bins form a two-level binary tree.
I got the impression that the “erl460291datafile.txt” file was left available by a slip. But Crok says SKS made their data available “in a searchable database.”. Different data?
Didn’t you notice the OTOH I started off with?
> Didn’t you notice the OTOH I started off with?
Yes, AK, you clearly announced you were about to throw a squirrel around, but that does not tell which explanation you’re looking for. Or perhaps the “slip” was the explanation you’re looking for?
Compare the two files, and report.
No, the “slip” was what I was questioning. If the two files are identical, there was no slip.
AK:
The file you refer to was the archived data hosted by the journal. It does not provide the same information as the searchable database provides. Primarily, it provides data for 11,944 papers while the searchable database provides for data for 12,280 papers. Strangely, the page for the searchable database claims to provide data for 12,465 papers (as opposed to the 12,280 it does provide) even though there were actually 12,464 papers in their data set.
No explanation has ever been provided as to why the full data set has 12,465 papers, the searchable database has 12,280 papers and the archived data has 11,944 papers. Instead, Cook et al have just repeatedly insisted all their data is available.
Additional data in other files was discovered by yours truly. This data was also only for 11,944 papers. It did, however, contain columns not present in any published file. The full data for the 521 papers has never been published, and no data for 185 papers was published at all. Not even their titles have been published.
I broke it all down on this page. Unfortunately, I forgot about the project it was for and have never gotten around to writing up a full description of a number of other issues.
@Brandon Shollenberger…
Thanks. It would be interesting to understand what’s going on there.
AK, no prob. I wish I understood it myself.
http://webofknowledge.com
Brandon, do you agree that only 1.6% would put the human contribution at over 50%, or would you go more with Bart’s poll where 50% of the the top two quartiles of climate scientists put it at greater than 75%? These numbers are quite disparate. Which do you trust more?
Look! A squirrel!
Jim D, I don’t agree with either number. I think the Cook et al paper is trash and can’t tell us anything of value. I think Bart Verheggen’s polling was likely better, but I don’t feel comfortable forming an opinion on his conclusions until I examine his data. Last I heard, that data isn’t available.
That said, if I had to pick one or the other, I’d definitely go with Verheggen’s. Even if I found things in his data that made me disagree with his results, I can’t imagine they’d be anywhere near as bad as the problems with the Skeptical Science group’s work.
What’s your point, jimmy? That there’s a consensus to be found somewhere between 1.6% and 50%? Are you giving up on the 97% BS, jimmy dee?
Some aspects of Bart’s results are here. Not as complete as I would like, but better than nothing, and much more detailed than anything Cook showed. Many of them are sorted into quartiles according to climate publishing amounts. There is a trend towards higher attributions with more publishing.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/es501998e/suppl_file/es501998e_si_001.pdf
Don M, the point is, according to Bart’s poll, the median is above 75%, and that is if you include the don’t knows as part of the lower 50%.
What’s the consensus, jimmy? Don’t give me that vague crap? Define the consensus.
Jim D, I won’t dismiss those results out of hand. I’ll give them the chance to convince me of what they have to say. Convincing me of something takes more than just saying it though. If people aren’t willing to publish their data, I’m not willing to assume it says what they claim it says. That’s especially true if people like John Cook are authors on the paper.
Even if I ignored everything about his consensus paper (and his follow-up publications which misrepresent it), this is a guy who has fabricated quotes on multiple occasions. It’s so bad the Skeptical Science team had to go back through over a 100 quotes he posted to check them for accuracy because they were worried some of them might have been fabricated.* And even after they did that, he wound up fabricating new quotes so more corrections had to be made.
I’ll trust their claims if they make their data available. And when I say “make their data available,” I mean make their data available. None of this nonsense like with the Cook et al paper where they claim to have made all their data available even though it clearly is not. For instance, they’ve simply chosen not to publish the data for 521 papers they rated. They haven’t even published the names of the papers.
*There’s a topic in the leaked forum about this. I can find it if anyone doubts me.
> Look! A squirrel!
I thought it was “looking farther,” AK.
> Jim D, I don’t agree with either number.
Well, here was Brandon, a while ago:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/
The consensus must have whispered this in Brandon’s ear.
AK doesn’t want to look at Bart’s poll. Of the 80% who had a quantitative opinion, 90% said more than 50% was anthropogenic and more than 60% said more than 75%. These numbers increase with climate publishing too.
If he won’t release his data and methods, it is not science.
This just one more circular attempt to bootstrap a position without finishing the science.
First, as documented in climate-gate, and seen many times since, you gate keep the journals, attack dissenters mercilessly, smear them for any connection, no matter how tenuous or incidental to bogeymen of your own invention, then use citations to “prove” your case.
If this is how the “New Enlightenment” works, we have actually seen it before, lots of times, and it doesn’t turn out well, even if we don’t end up sacrificing thousands of captives at the top of a pyramid to make the climate better, lots of bad things happen with ratiocination is replaced by rationalization.
&willard (@nevaudit), Jim D…
For me, the issue is the behavior at SKS. Call it ad hominem if you like (I don’t), but this sort of stuff goes to discredit anything they say.
I don’t care about “consensus”.
The “consensus” of archaeologists is still sure (AFAIK) that there was a dark age separating the Mediterranean Iron Age from the Late Bronze.
The “consensus” of anthro-palaeontologists is still sure (AFAIK) that the common ancestor of humans, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas looked like a chimp.
So I don’t see anything wrong with the “consensus” of “climate scientists” thinking that much/most of the recent warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2. And I strongly suspect that most of that same “consensus” of “climate scientists” would agree with me that there’s some chance that:
• The recent rise in pCO2 isn’t really the result of fossil carbon emissions.
• The recent rise in pCO2 isn’t really the result of any anthropogenic activity (really slim chance here, I agree).
• The recent warming was entirely due to natural variation.
There might be some disagreement about the probabilities. There would certainly be disagreement about the relative value of looking into those possibilities. But I doubt more than a tiny fraction of “climate scientists” would insist that there was no chance whatsoever.
“Of the 80% who had a quantitative opinion, 90% said more than 50%”
So jimmy, is the broadest consensus 72% of climate scientists agree that humans are responsible for >50% of recent warming?
Commit to something, jimmy. You are all over the freaking map.
Don M, that’s what the poll says. Are you having difficulty with that? I don’t.
OK, jimmy. Let’s stipulate that BV is relatively honest and competent. I accept that his results are probably a fair approximate representation of climate scientists’ opinion. That should put the 97% consensus BS to rest, right jimmy?
Cook’s abstract said “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” I am not so sure I would dispute that, because it is a very weak statement. The flip-side is that the 3% really are the don’t knows and deniers.
> the issue is the behavior at SKS.
Ze issue, again. There are lots of issues, like Brandon’s lack of decency regarding emails and IPs, Brandon’s ridiculous caricatures, and an academic you even cite who smears C13.
There are lots of issues.
You are being disingenuous, jimmy. You know the alleged consensus that has been promoted by the Cook paper’s authors and fellow travelers is that 97% of the climate literature supports the contention that >50% of CO2 in the atmosphere is of human origin. The BV led paper directly refutes that B S. Doesn’t it, jimmy? Can you give us one straight answer, jimmy?
Sorry, that should be >50% of recent warming.
One common problem with discussing work whose data hasn’t been released is it often makes it difficult to track down where numbers come from. Jim D says:
I don’t see such numbers in the link he provided (copied here). Table S3 says 1868 people responded to question of whether or not the “contribution of greenhouse gases exceed[s] 50% of recent warming.” 407 gave a non-quantitative answer, giving 1461 responses with a quantitative answer. 1461/1868 = 78%, which is close to the 80% Jim D cites.
However, the table clearly says only 84% of these respondents agreed to the question. It even gives an uncertainty range of 82-86%. Jim D’s 90% doesn’t come close to falling in that range.
Perhaps Jim D found his values somewhere in that document other than the table I cite. Perhaps he made a mistake. I don’t know. What I know is it’s a real pain to try to discuss what the “right” answers are when you can’t look at the data.
Plus, it’s hard to see why we should trust results if the person asking us to gives us wrong information about them.
Brandon, my numbers only come from eye-balling Figure S3, and are rounded to a 10% multiple. Go by what S3 says, not what I say. It is worth studying that graph.
Don M, Cook’s paper has been widely misquoted by both sides, but the paper itself is pretty tame. Perhaps their press release incited some people. They were interested in the consensus gap, because the public have a perception that the percentage of scientists who think Man has been responsible for any warming is much lower (57%). The consensus gap was the point as is clearly seen in the video Cook released with the paper.
JimD: seems to me we are debating which guesses on what number of scientists are accurately guessing an answer in response to a question for which there is not enough data available for anyone to have a verifiable opinion. The implication is that these scientists are somehow immune to peer pressure, faulty logic, bias, insufficient information, and lack of familiarity with all the research that has been done on what is an largely under-researched field. In short, it’s an appeal to authority in a field where there is no actual authority due to all the uncertainty.
I’m sorry, but that really has nothing to do with science.
Jim D, I’d rather not try to guess numbers by eyeballing a graph when I can read numbers from a table. That’s espsecially true since the figure you cite doesn’t even show results for people as a whole in any legible fashion, but instead has multiple lines you’d have to try to average.
You might want to note the fact the post I linked to above shows the authors of the paper are misrepresenting their own results. And they’re complaining when their critics describe their results the way they said the results should be described.
Apparently people were supposed to describe their results one way until Cook et al saw those results and realized how embarrassing they were. Then it was important to describe them a different way.
> The BV led paper directly refutes that B S.
Show me, Don Don.
IOW ALL global warming is caused by humans. That’s not what they said, but that’s how many/most uninformed readers will take it. As everybody knows.
Designed to be misunderstood.
Nobody knows. Real scientists know they don’t know. Depends on how people interpret the questions on the polls. That’s one reason I don’t participate in such things.
Brandon, as I said at the top, I would have liked more, but they certainly provided a useful graph in Figure S3. This answers a lot of questions people have by itself.
Look! A bunch of squirrels!
So, since Figure S3 shows roughly quartiles, you can take the unweighted average of the four lines for the approximate total.
You are being disingenuous, jimmy. And apparently willy is joining you. The Cook 97% paper was designed and constructed in what was a premeditated, non-scientific and dishonest attempt to make the public believe that there is a nearly unanimous consensus among climate scientists that humans have caused from >50% to 100%, of recent global warming. According to your own eyeballing of BV’s far more credible paper, it’s actually a far from unanimous 72%. You clowns will never admit that the Cook paper is dishonest BS. Your credibility will consequently remain in the toilet.
A lot of the discussion on the Cook paper has been on points it didn’t even make, and it misses the point that it did make, the consensus gap. I think it is just one big rhetorical detour in the blogosphere.
> Look! A bunch of squirrels!
If you wish to focus on “ze” issue, AK, here’s a reminder of that sub-thread:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/19/week-in-review-27/#comment-630698
I can play squirrels too, AK: archeologists, bonobos, SkS, etc.
That’s deliberately evasive BS, jimmy dee. You are just sinking deeper down the toilet. Bon voyage.
Don M, I don’t engage in misinterpreting papers and then arguing about the misinterpretations. Complete waste of time.
Oh really, jimmy? How do you interpret this:
“Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Did the SkS kidz intend for the public to think that deliberately vague BS means humans are causing a little bit of global warming? I know you won’t tell the freaking truth for a change.
You don’t have the sense or the common decency to admit to even the most obviously dishonest alarmist BS.
But I do, Jim D. Provide evidence that this is what C13 claims, Don Don:
> there is a nearly unanimous consensus among climate scientists that humans have caused from >50% to 100%, of recent global warming.
As if C13 was responsible for your misrepresentations.
ShowThat’s not what C13 claims
> How do you interpret this: “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
C13 found that among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. That interpretation works by disquotation, in case you want to learn a new word, Don Don.
They also found something like that among the ones who wrote these papers, something you omitted to mention.
This is a test of your integrity, willy:
“Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Are they talking about a little bit of the global warming? There is a lot of context as to what they meant, willy. I will be more specific;
Did they mean to convey that humans are causing less than half of global warming?
Do your best to be decent, willy. Like you were before you got mixed up with the wrong crowd.
Jim D:
It’s “a useful graph” we can’t verify. We can’t even do basic checks to see if the responses people gave which the graph is broken down into are realistic.
You say this, yet you’ve consistently avoided discussing the point I brought up – that forum discussion shows Cook et al are misrepresenting their results while their critics are accurately portraying those results. That’s true whether or not the paper made any particular points.
The paper has been represented by the authors of the paper in a certain way, and their discussion when designing the project shows that representation is deceptive. That’s a topic well worth discussing.
Besides, if you read the post I linked to, the forum discussion shows the paper itself misrepresented their results by conflating two different positions as the “consensus” position.
> Did they mean to convey that humans are causing less than half of global warming?
You go first, Don Don: tell me where you got that “there is a nearly unanimous consensus among climate scientists that humans have caused from >50% to 100%, of recent global warming.”
Reading the page Brandon did not cite here but where he revealed all the IPs and the emails (as an IT, he should know better: this is stuff over which one could get fired) would suffice to answer your question, BTW.
You have it all backwards, Don Don, and no, appealing to Pekka won’t help you.
You failed the test, willy. Bon voyage!
> that forum discussion shows Cook et al are misrepresenting their results while their critics are accurately portraying those results
The first claim is false, or worse absurd, if we consider that misrepresentation is a public matter. The second claim is misleading at best, and rests on misrepresentation of Tom Curtis’ comments.
I already answered your question, Don Don. In my first comments in this thread. On the other hand, you have yet to substantiate your crap you’re throwing at Jim D.
Jim D will ignore that crap. Just like Pekka would. This may explain why you’re asking me to be more like Pekka, and why I won’t.
The Cook paper was on (correcting myself slightly) the fact, from a previous poll, that 57% of the public did not know that scientists overwhelmingly agreed that human activity was causing global warming, while the actual scientists are 97% in agreement on that statement. It is a little complex to understand, which may be why the point was missed, and people started attacking the paper for something else entirely.
willard –
==> “The second claim is misleading at best, and rests on misrepresentation of Tom Curtis’ comments.”
Brandon has made it quite clear that it doesn’t matter what people say. What matters is how Brandon interprets what they say.
For example, Brandon has interpreted that Dan Kahan says that “you’re an idiot” if you don’t think that the universe began with a huge explosion. Of course, Dan never said that, but Brandon interpreted Dan as saying that, and therefore claimed that’s what Dan said.
See, it doesn’t matter what someone actually says. What matters is Brandon’s interpretation.
Here’s another example:
Brandon interprets what Neil deGrasse Tyson says to mean that he’s an atheist – so Brandon calls DeGrasse an atheist.
But DeGrasse doesn’t say that he’s an atheist. DeGrasse says that he does not accept the label of “atheist.” But DeGrasse says that if he had to assign a word to his stance on god, it would be “agnostic.”
So you see- it doesn’t matter what DeGrasse actually says. What matters is how Brandon interpret what he DeGrasse says.
I hope that I’ve cleared that up for you. I could provide more examples if you’d like. I tried to give links to clips where DeGrasse contradicts how Brandon misinterpret’s Degrasse’s beliefs, but Brandon put me into moderation at his blog when I did that. I’m guessing Brandon doesn’t like it when I provide links that show that his interpretations of what people say are in contrast to what they actually say?
willard –
==> “The second claim is misleading at best, and rests on misrepresentation of Tom Curtis’ comments.”
Brandon has made it quite clear that it doesn’t matter what people say. What matters is how Brandon interprets what they say.
For example, Brandon has interpreted that Dan Kahan says that “you’re an id*ot” if you don’t think that the universe began with a huge explosion. Of course, Dan never said that, but Brandon interpreted Dan as saying that, and therefore claimed that’s what Dan said.
See, it doesn’t matter what someone actually says. What matters is Brandon’s interpretation.
Here’s another example:
Brandon interprets what Neil deGrasse Tyson says to mean that he’s an atheist – so Brandon calls DeGrasse an atheist.
But DeGrasse doesn’t say that he’s an atheist. DeGrasse says that he does not accept the label of “atheist.” But DeGrasse says that if he had to assign a word to his stance on god, it would be “agnostic.”
So you see- it doesn’t matter what DeGrasse actually says. What matters is how Brandon interpret what he DeGrasse says.
I hope that I’ve cleared that up for you. I could provide more examples if you’d like. I tried to give links to clips where DeGrasse contradicts how Brandon misinterpret’s Degrasse’s beliefs, but Brandon put me into moderation at his blog when I did that. I’m guessing Brandon doesn’t like it when I provide links that show that his interpretations of what people say are in contrast to what they actually say?
This is really very simple. The C13 paper abstract claimed that “97.1% endorsed the consensus position…” What consensus position? Here is a hint, from C13:
“Explicit endorsements were divided into non-quantified (e.g., humans are contributing to global warming without quantifying the contribution) and quantified (e.g., humans are contributing more than 50% of global warming, consistent with the 2007 IPCC statement that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations).”
It’s the IPCC statement. The IPCC statement is quantified-most of the global warming. In C13 they lumped quantified and unquantified ratings together and employed other dubious shenanigans to get the meaningless 97% consensus BS. There is no data supporting a 97% consensus that humans have caused >50% of the warming. Period. Everybody knows it. Case closed.
> The Cook paper was on (correcting myself slightly) the fact, from a previous poll, that 57% of the public did not know that scientists overwhelmingly agreed that human activity was causing global warming, while the actual scientists are 97% in agreement on that statement.
Yes, Jim D. From the horse’s mouth:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
More than a year-and-a-half after the publication of C13, we still encounter readings that goes against the very first paragraph.
Also notice the sentence that elided Brandon:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-24-Defining%20the%20scientific%20consensus.html
Dana simply wanted to avoid an assumption that he accepts anyway.
Hyperreal, I tell you, Jim D.
***
I see that Brandon has yet to sanitize the IPs and the emails.
Joshua is giving a very dishonest portrayal. I generally don’t bother responding to it when he does, but since he’s accusing me of abusing moderation, I will. He knows by saying:
People will get the idea I used moderation for some nefarious means. In reality, I told Joshua he needed to make on-topic, constructive comments if he wanted to continue posting. I told him if he would not, he would be placed on moderation.
After being told this, he posted links to videos without even trying to explain what the links showed. That is not making a constructive comment. If someone wants to use evidence to contradict a point, they need to discuss what the evidence says. Posting a link to support what one says is fine, but it is not enough on its own.
Moreover, Joshua acts as though being placed in moderation prevents him from making a point. This is not true. My moderation policy does not prevent him from posting anything at all. All I’ve done is say he must post anything he wants to say in a specific thread, to which he may link in any other topic. That means he can keep commenting as much as he wants, but people won’t have to see it unless they choose to.
The remainder of Joshua’s comment is wrong as well, but I don’t care to demonstrate that. Joshua has a long history of creating issues to criticize people in smear campaigns like this, and he rarely shows any interest in having his smears be accurate. I think the fact he grossly mischaracterizes the moderation situation to paint himself a victim and me a dishonest bully should suffice.
Seriously. Ask yourself this. How many people would like the option not to have to see Joshua’s comments? That’s what I’ve done. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would be happy if the same was done here.
They describe their meaning of consensus in their abstract “the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. They don’t say most and they don’t mean most either. AGW says that human activity can cause global warming not that it has to cause most global warming in whatever timeframe you care to choose. Most scientists actually agree with that. Oddly CO2 and fossil fuels are hardly mentioned and not invoked in human activity here either, just AGW which perhaps conventionally implies that, but some may interpret it as land-use change only. Depends what you mean by AGW.
> There is no data supporting a 97% consensus that humans have caused >50% of the warming.
C13 claims that there is, Don Don: the ABSTRACTS that endorse the IPCC’s position, and the authors’ ratings of the PAPERS.
You’re just equivocating with a stronger meaning of “supporting” that C13 requires.
You seem to have forgotten that we’ve been through all this more than a year ago, e.g.:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/consensus-behind-the-numbers/#comment-18899
Brandon –
==> “After being told this, he posted links to videos without even trying to explain what the links showed.”
I explained why I linked the videos. You didn’t understand my explanation. I suggest that when you don’t understand someone’s explanation, you ask for clarification.
==> “Moreover, Joshua acts as though being placed in moderation prevents him from making a point. ”
Not at all, Brandon. I was able to make my point quite clearly. That is why you responded here – because I made my point quite clear. You putting me in moderation has little impact on whether I am able or not able to make my point. You putting me in moderation has more to do with your habit of confusing your opinion with fact – in this case, your opinion that I didn’t provide an explanation being conflated with a statement of fact that I failed to provide an explanation.
And besides, Brandon, the bottom line is that the more substantial point in my comment – that you seem to think that your misinterpretation of what someone says = what they said.
I normally try to ignore the things willard posts, but I find it amusing to be criticized for not covering/noticing/whatever this comment:
In reality, willard is just cherry-picking quotes. While it is true Dana Nuccitelli said that in one comment, the point was discussed further. Ari Jokimäki said:
Dana Nuccitelli responded:
Anyone who checks the guidelines they agreed to will find Nuccitelli’s understanding is correct as they specifically say:
It is only via tactics like cherry-picking quotes people like willard can challenge what I’ve said. Any genuine attempt to analyze what I said will find it is accurate.
Brandon –
==> “How many people would like the option not to have to see Joshua’s comments?”
This is quite beautiful. So, after saying that you put me into moderation because I linked to a clip w/o providing an explanation (actually, I did provide an explanation – you just didn’t understand my explanation) – you then make it quite apparent that there was more afoot.
==> ” That’s what I’ve done.””
==> “I’m pretty sure a lot of people would be happy if the same was done here.”
So they would be happy to see me placed into moderation here for failing to provide an explanation for a link I made? Or, to be put into moderation so people “do not have” to see my comments?
Don’t ever change, Brandon. That was just beautiful!
Oh, and don’t forget – each time you read my comments it’s because I’m forcing you to waste your time!!!!1!!!!!
==> “I normally try to ignore the things willard posts, ”
Made obvious by the fact that he often responds to willard’s posts.
> the consensus position that humans are causing global warming
Yes, Jim D, but then they clarify what they meant by this in the paper:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
That’s the second paragraph in section 2, entitled Methodology. Numbering paragraphs would have helped online exegeses.
So we need to distinguish AGW theory and the current statement by the IPCC.
***
As an aside, let’s consider the (Don Don’s?) assumption that to have an opinion on AGW, you need to have a crisp attribution statement. That is, to hold AGW, you need to establish how much A there is. Now, consider Spencer’s position: he claims believing in AGW, but ignoring how much A there is. Could be 1%; could be 100%.
This assumption and Spencer’s stance might not be compatible.
Joshua:
I don’t agree this is true as your comments were things like:
And:
Which I don’t think any reasonable person would consider an explanation. Even if they did consider it an explanation though, that doesn’t affect what I said here. Explaining why you link to a piece of evidence does not make a comment constructive. You need to discuss what the evidence shows.
Which is complete BS. I don’t do this. You just like to intentionally misunderstand what people say so you can criticize them. For instance, I said you act as though being placed in moderation prevents you from making a point. I said that while explaining how you could still comment at my site. That makes it abundantly clear I was referring to what you could do at my site, not all sites in general.
There is no way anyone with basic reading comprehension skills would misunderstand that. You, however, chose to so you could say I was wrong:
Which I think is a sign you’re intentionally trolling people. Other people might think it’s a sign you’re just really that incompetent. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to tell who is right.
For people wanting to judge the situation for themselves, here is the post where I placed Joshua on moderation. I don’t intend to discuss it further here as I don’t think Judith Curry wants her blog filled up with this sort of exchange. If people want to talk about it, I invite them to do so at my site instead.
I remember that , willy. this is what nuttticelli was responding to:
” Wouldn’t it be interesting to see how many responses were in categories 2 and 3 and were therefore “assumed” to endorse the >50% human contribution plank of the alleged expert consensus.?. I bet they will DENY your request.”
I badgered the clown into giving me the numbers. You do admit that categories 2 and 3 were assumed, without any freaking basis, to endorse the alleged >50% human contribution consensus?
If you look through those discussions some more, I am sure you can find that little dana clearly maintains that the 97% consensus is that humans are causing most, if not all of the warming. You can find him repeating the same story on his little BS guardian blog.
What would be the freaking point of trumpeting a 97% consensus that humans were causing some unspecified amount of warming that could be anything between just above zero and 100%? You are shameless, willyboy.
Why don’t you post all that you are whining about here, joshie? Judith let’s you get by with just about anything. Or put on your big boy pants and stfu.
Brandon –
Do you see how easy it is for me to force you to waste your time. I have so much power over you, don’t I?
Let’s look at what you left out of your explanation of what happened.
I quoted you as saying the following:
Immediately after quoting you, I provided a link to a video clip of Tyson saying things that were not “in line” with the your characterization of his opinion – that “religious people are crazy”
I then said:
I think it is pretty clear that my explanation for the clip was that it underscores what I describe – that you think that you have the wisdom to understand that people mean what you interpret them to me rather than what they say
Now maybe my explanation wasn’t clear to you. If so, you could have asked for clarification. But the explanation was there. The explanation was hat you confused your incorrect characterization of Degrasse’s beliefs with the fact of what deGrasse has said about his beliefs. I’d say that the explanation should have been clear also because I have explained before that tend to conflate your opinion with fact.
But at any rate, Brandon – this is all a bit of a side issue. The more important issue is that you continue to conflate your opinion with fact. As you did with Kahan, as you did with deGrasse, and as you do many times over.
That’s the point, Brandon. That you put me in moderation is silly – except that it shows, once again, your pattern of error.
Anyway, have a nice night. I’ve made my point – no need to keep discussing it on this thread. There will be other threads in the future where I’ll be able to point to your pattern of error, I’m sure.
Thanks for the link to that thread, willy:
Dana said:”Note that if a paper said humans are causing less than 50% of global warming, or that another factor was causing more than 50% (or ‘most’, or some similar language), we put it in our rejections/minimization of the human influence category. Our basis was the IPCC statement that humans have caused most global warming since the mid-20th century. But if a paper simply said ‘human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming’, that went into the endorsement category as well. After all, there’s no reason for most climate research to say ‘humans are causing >50% of global warming’ (except attribution research), especially in the abstract.”
You clowns call that science.
God knows you do badger, Don Don. I hope your kids don’t badger you the way you badger others.
BartV told the story in his post:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/consensus-behind-the-numbers/
Perhaps BartV forgot to take into consideration the slicing of badgers.
***
How Spencer, Scafetta and the like get into 5-6 is because they minimize AGW as presented by the IPCC. They don’t get to claim endorsing an AGW theory where A is more than 1%.
The best you can get out of this, Don Don, is that C13 should have hired editors to clarify what they mean. Or that the notion of endorsement is quite moot. That does not justify your badgering, to say the least.
It’s not that complicated.
> What would be the freaking point of trumpeting a 97% consensus that humans were causing some unspecified amount of warming that could be anything between just above zero and 100%?
Ask Spencer, Don Don. He’s on record saying that he believes in AGW and yet he does not know how much to attribute to A. Not even a ballpark like the IPCC provides.
Tell me more about Spencer, Don Don.
You work with what you got, willyboy. I have had a lot of training and experience in extracting information out of miscreants, who don’t want to give it up. There are much more effective means than long distance badgering, but I didn’t have little dana in my physical presence.
Why are you bringing my kids into this, willy? I didn’t read further. I assume it is the usual claptrap.
Cuz he’s nasty and mean-spirited, Don. Look at the ‘I hope’. Pfah.
==============
Spencer? A wise man not to guess about attribution when it is still so unclear. But his work with clouds suggest that he’ll eventually come down on the side of low sensitivity and small attribution of warming to man.
====================
Don Monfort:
Do you really have to encourage him? >.<
You could always go over to Skeptical Science and try to get them to explain how it is “incoherent” to describe their results the way Dana Nuccitelli said he envisioned they would be described. I still can’t believe Tom Curtis and Rob Honeycutt walked into that one.
Yes kim, it looks like willy is trying to get meaner. I hurt his feelings when I announced that he is just a minor annoyance. He is trying to upgrade his rep. Pathetic. I am putting him on my ignore list of those partisan hacks, whose comments lack any redeeming value. Up to now, only fanny the gaudy clown had earned that ignoble distinction. Nasty webby goes in that bin now, also. Little joshie and jimmy dee are on the verge of being consigned, but they could save themselves by becoming slightly more amusing.
Don, Jim D helps me understand climate, as does Pekka and several other alarmists. Joshua and willard are no help, and show no evidence of ever becoming helpful.
Please come back, Human Carbon Volcano; all is forgiven.
============
Brandon, I am increasing feeling like it’s not worth my time to discuss anything with these dimensionless alarmist hacks. They are impervious to anything that doesn’t support the dogma. If they won’t admit that Cook13 is pile of crap, they are in too deep to pull out. Let them sink. Ridicule is all they deserve.
Don Monfort, but if nobody discussed things with them, they’d never be provoked into giving us more fodder to ridicule them over. Just think, we now have a clear explanation for why they feel it is okay to claim the “consensus” they found is humans cause 50+% of global warming. A week ago we didn’t.
If people didn’t engage with them, we’d never have been able to show they’re directly contradicting their own stated standards!
Kim, kindly alert me when jimmy dee says something worthwhile. I tend to skim over his schtick his comments have the appearance of alarmist slogans he has copied onto a cardboard sign with a fat crayon.
Yeah, I didn’t think I would miss Mr. Human Volcano, but he has demonstrated by his absence that he is not quite as offensive as those who didn’t have the decency to leave.
I might change my mind Brandon, but for now I think I’ll spend more time on my drinking.
Don Monfort, I don’t get your response. It sounds like you’re saying your drinking time is not your commenting time. That’d mean you normally respond to these people while sober.
How is that possible? How can you read what these guys have to say without the assistance of booze? That doesn’t make sense!
I kid, of course. It’d probably be better for me if I ignored these guys. I know it’d be better on my liver.
Oh. Maybe that means I wasn’t kidding about needing booze to tolerate them. :P
> I think I’ll spend more time on my drinking.
Words of wisdom, Don Don, words of wisdom.
Please don’t spend time reading what you’re trashing. Or consider that John, Rob, Dana, Ari had to reach some agreement on what to do, which is not even contradicted by the finished product. That they thought aloud in a private forum, a forum Brandon promotes, with the IPs and the emails. That Tom Curtis is not part of that project anymore. That he still maintains a stronger interpretation of that project, an interpretation that resembles mine. Anyone who read that forum, the paper, and the project should be able to see that, except parsomatic artists like Brandon.
Cheers,
w
> Just think, we now have a clear explanation for why they feel it is okay to claim the “consensus” they found is humans cause 50+% of global warming. A week ago we didn’t.
More than a week ago:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-24-Defining%20the%20scientific%20consensus.html
More recently:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/consensus-behind-the-numbers/#comment-18786
In the quote above, “Chewbacca” refers to Brandon. I’m starting to regret having retired that nickname. It still fits him quite well.
The 1.6% is the number of abstracts that explicitly stated that humans cause >50%, correct?
Bill, yup. 1.6% (~65/4000) of the papers which were rated as expressing any opinion were rated as explicitly endorsing the idea humans cause 50+% of global warming.
Koonin article, when you know his CV, means IPCC theory is dead at medium term.
His article is the only one that will make me believe IPCC ;-). But that would be ad hominem.
independently I expect his credibility will fall below the one of Seralini soon, but that is insider trade. Too bad.
John Smith,
Here is a link to the Discover article.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-its-gettin-hot-in-here-big-battle-over-climate-science
Scott
JC seems to have given a fairly informative and from what I can tell accurate interview.
I would be interested in whether JC believes that the complete interview was printed (what was cut?) and whether she was quoted accurately.
Scott – thanks
Scott
just read the JC and Mann articles
JC comes across reasoned and clear
Mann not so much
I can follow her logic train, his just seems like it has a couple bent rails
maybe the brain structure of the species is diverging
Are we looking at an example of cause and effect? We don’t need the scientific method to observe that fear of global warming is a Left vs. Right issue. Do we simply right off this relationship as “largely enigmatic” and fail to see the real causes underlying attacks on America from jihadists to climatists?
Maybe this is how we became, Blue or Red? Normally Red is for the Left. How could political scientists be 180 out? It’s not like them.
Didn’t Eisenhower warn us about this?
I watched the Marshall Institute video, and the interesting part was the 45 minutes of questions Judith had to field, including some fairly astute and pointed ones at Judith’s positions. This was clearly not a soft-ball audience for Judith.
But Koch! Koch Bros!
Meanwhile Mann goes on twitter announcing that he will aggressively bloc any question that don’t pre-suppose he is correct, because those questions would be in “bad faith.”
But don’t worry, you are probably on the right side of the debate, because people with the facts on their side are always covering things up.
The audience clearly was not only the Marshall Institute members, especially the ones that asked questions. When one says he has been to Greenland and it is even worse than the climate scientists are saying, and another asks why she is only applying uncertainty to the consensus view and not her own, and another asks what her actual change to policy-making would be, it is a tough audience.
The conference was held at the National Press Club, which I believe is open to the general public.
‘because those questions would be in “bad faith.”’
TJA, Of course Mann is going to say that. He is a member of the Cult of Anthropomorphic global warming and isn’t going to debate theology with unbelievers.
“…another asks why she is only applying uncertainty to the consensus view and not her own….”
Dr. Curry doesn’t acknowledge that her view on uncertainty is uncertain?
The equivalent is a man (or woman) who says “I don’t know.” To which a warmist genius asks “Why don’t you admit that you can’t be certain about uncertainty. We need an Uncertain Uncertainty Monster.”
And all the good little CAGW drones nod their heads at the perspicacity of the questioner. (After they look up perspicacity.)
And all the normal people wonder why the CAGW genius doesn’t get the redundancy of his knuckle headed question.
GaryM, no, Judith has asserted some things with almost no uncertainty applied to them. For example she is pretty sure that no more than 50% of the warming is due to CO2, and especially unlikely is 100%. For this assertion, she has to assume positive natural warming (by some undeclared mechanism) with extreme confidence. She usually complains about confident statements, but this is one of her own. That was a good question by the audience member.
The mechanism has been declared. Read the Stadium Wave paper. Or even look at the pictures.
AK, the stadium wave is in a cool mode to explain the pause, but doesn’t explain the 0.7 C rise since the last time it was in this phase. The thing about the wheel is it just keeps turning and doesn’t go anywhere unlike what the climate is actually doing. They never tried to explain the 60-year warming with the stadium wave, only the pause.
The BIG question is why the pause 1940-1976 is so much warmer than the pause prior to 1910. The answer is NOT AGW. So the key question is convincing why the mechanism causing the warming between the two earlier pauses was not operational in the warming between the two latter pauses.
Figure 1 (middle) shows that these climate mode trend phases indeed behaved anomalously three times during
the 20th century, immediately following the synchronization events of the 1910s, 1940s, and 1970s. This combination of
the synchronization of these dynamical modes in the climate, followed immediately afterward by significant increase in the fraction of strong trends (coupling) without
exception marked shifts in the 20th century climate state. These shifts were accompanied by breaks in the global
mean temperature trend with respect to time, presumably associated with either discontinuities in the global radiative
budget due to the global reorganization of clouds and water vapor or dramatic changes in the uptake of heat by
the deep ocean.’ http://www.leif.org/EOS/2008GL037022.pdf
Clouds and water vapor or changes in ocean heat uptake? The data suggests that late century warming was mostly clouds.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2008GL037022.pdf
The turn of the century climate shift seems to have involved a step shift in cloud cover as well.
http://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/earthshine.jpg
‘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.’
Jim D:
“AK, the stadium wave is in a cool mode to explain the pause, but doesn’t explain the 0.7 C rise since the last time it was in this phase.”
https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b99a743ffa4142d9d7f1978d9686.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/32076/area14mp/6rqm2y5q-1380278533.jpg
1. The IPCC makes the gratuitous assertion that 110% (their PDF says it could be more), of post 1950s warming is anthropogenic. The PDF allows significant chance of values up to 150%.
2. They assume that other human forcings (land use, aerosol etc. aerosol, cloud response to aerosol, etc.) combined are a net negative. greenhouse gas forcings are positive.
3. Changes in solar irradiance have little effect.
How do you take this forcing chart and get a 16+ year pause?
Judith –
I just saw the you were quoted as saying that:
Did you really mean to say that or was it just a slip of the tongue? Do you really think it is foolish to think that CO2 influences the climate on centennial time scales?
I mean first, I assume that you mean anthropogenic CO2, not just CO2? Is that right?
And second, I assume that you mean dominates, not influences, is that right?
This was an unscripted response to a question. Should have been ‘dominates’ not influences.
Two essential points are:
1) When energy balance is certainly a limiting factor, one warming step is much more likely produced by natural variability than two successive steps.
2) The second step was predicted as an outcome of additional CO2 before it took place.
Large uncertainties remain, but that’s exactly the reason for the wide uncertainty range of climate sensitivity acknowledged by IPCC. More than that is not justified.
Yes, the Wally Broecker (1975, Science) paper, the first to mention global warming, predicted the second phase of warming before most of it happened, just based on a sensitivity and CO2 growth as estimated at that time. Broecker also put the 1910-1940 warm phase in the context of 80- and 180-year natural variability cycles that are typical of what had been happening over the past 800 years according to Greenland records. He predicted a 2010 temperature that was unprecedented in those records, and it happened.
==> “This was an unscripted response to a question. Should have been ‘dominates’ not influences.”
So, then, you are saying it is “foolish” to think that more than 50% of the warming over the last century is attributable to anthropogenic CO2.
Not just that it is unlikely that, or unknown whether, more than 50% of warming over the last century is ACO2 caused.
If I’m not mistaken, then that is something new from you. I mean it seems that you are quite certain there. If I recall correctly, you previously felt that there is a non-negligible possibility that more than 50% of warming over the last century is attributable to AC02.
I guess you still think it’s possible, but that it would be foolish to think it might be true?
Looks like Mr. Monster is getting awfully small in your perspective.
The forcing change under BAU in the 21st century will be 2.5 times that in the 20th century, so even if it was (dubiously) only 50% then, it will be that much larger going forwards, and should be easily the dominant effect on climate.
Jim D: The audience clearly was not only the Marshall Institute members, especially the ones that asked questions. When one says he has been to Greenland and it is even worse than the climate scientists are saying, and another asks why she is only applying uncertainty to the consensus view and not her own, and another asks what her actual change to policy-making would be, it is a tough audience.
Add to that it was the National Press Corps, and those lectures are frequently broadcast nationwide by NPR. I wonder if that one will be broadcast nationwide.
Have I created a monster by introducing with Jimmy Dee to this 1975 paper by Wally Broecker?
The ideas are essentially right – as I keep saying. We have both natural variability and presumably some anthropogenic warming. Wally was wrong on the post 1975 detail. Natural warming kicked in in the 1976-1977 climate and turned down again in the 1998-2001 shift. These are chaotic shifts in the internal balance of the system in response to changes in control variables – solar UV and the polar annular modes I would suggest.
I have not much clue about the earlier 20th century warming – TSI is not an explanation. Neither – btw – is sulphide cooling an adequate explanation of the mid century cooling.
My working theory is that there is a solar amplification mechanism working through clouds and ocean and atmosphere circulation patterns. The current pattern is for cooling for 20 to 40 years from 2002. The solar amplification mechanism – the only real candidate for this vigorous decadal to centennial variability – suggests further cooling this century.
Jim D: The forcing change under BAU in the 21st century will be 2.5 times that in the 20th century, so even if it was (dubiously) only 50% then, it will be that much larger going forwards, and should be easily the dominant effect on climate.
Since you are in your forecasting mood, maybe you could address some other aspects of the future:
1. Over what time span will the concentration of CO2 double from its present value of about 400 ppm?
2. Over what time span will the global mean temperature rise 1C?
3. What will be the net change in rainfall in consequence of CO2 and temp increases by 2100?
4. What will be the next effects of increased CO2 on agricultural and forest productivity, and other vegetation?
Just curious. I sort of “keep score” on the evidence in a “sequential analysis” mode. For 1 I expect at least 150 years, and it may never happen as fossil fuel use declines (BAU) in the second half of the century.
For 2 I have about 100 years.
For 3, I have a net increase, but with much regional variability. In the US since 1950 the region between the Rockies and Appalachians experienced a net increase in max rainfall of about 7% (but the baseline varies throughout the region.)
For 4, I think the evidence supports a net increase in vegetative net primary productivity.
I should modify this:
==> “So, then, you are saying it is “foolish” to think that more than 50% of the warming over the last century is attributable to anthropogenic CO2.”
Obviously, It isn’t really warming over the last century, but warming over the past 5 or 6 decades or so, projected to a centennial scale.
I would appreciate it if someone could tell me what sensitivity figure would equate to 50% of warming over the past 5 or 6 decades if projected to a centennial scale.
Would the resulting number be included in Nic Lewis’ 90% CI that goes up to 3.0°C per doubling?
My 2.5 factor in forcing change came from just under 700 ppm by 2100, which is possible under moderate BAU. Your questions.
1. I don’t know when it will reach 800 ppm. I predict that by the time we get to 500 ppm people will have realized the stupidity of CO2 emissions enough to prevent us ever reaching 800 ppm, and possibly we won’t reach 600 ppm either.
2. If you mean 1 C over the 2000 temperature, that could happen around 2040 which only requires a very plausible 0.25 C per decade.
3. Rainfall, I have no idea. Some areas will be severely dry, and others will have increased flooding.
4. Agriculture, equally hard to predict. Lots of crop adaptation and moving around likely needed. Forests generally would be supported further into the Arctic areas where the tundra permafrost melts. This darkens albedo in another positive feedback, of course.
Jim D – Wally Broecker is abused enough around here by the water boiler. He says his 1975 paper embarrasses him. I think you need to search Google and figure out why he says that.
Today Broecker is very concerned with CO2. He is not some moron holding out abrupt climate change in the manner seen here.
There are three steps in succession, Pekka, suggesting natural variability for all three, particularly since we have the 60 year cycle of the oceans in explanation. The slope of the three rises is identical, CO2 rising only in the last, suggesting a weak effect for AnthroCO2.
=================
Judith –
JimD makes a really interesting point:
==> “The forcing change under BAU in the 21st century will be 2.5 times that in the 20th century, so even if it was (dubiously) only 50% then, it will be that much larger going forwards, and should be easily the dominant effect on climate.”
So apparently you are pretty much certain that the rate of anthropogenc CO2-caused warming over the past 5 or 6 decades would not = more than 50% of warming if projected on a centennial scale (so certain that it would be “foolish” to think otherwise)… but the effect that you do think is attributable to anthropogenic CO2 will obviously increase proportional to a greater rate of CO2 emissions.
So then, since you don’t doubt that ACO2 affects the climate, you only doubt how much, it would seem that theoretically at some point in the future, if the rate of increase in emissions continues apace, you would agree that ACO2 would “dominate” climate? Can you give me a sense of when, according to your calculations, ACO2 emissions would dominate? In 200 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years?
My guess(calculated) is never. The CO2 effect seems small and we haven’t that much fossil fuels. In comparison, the range of natural variability is much larger, and will dominate.
=========================
kim –
Thanks,
==> “My guess(calculated) is never. The CO2 effect seems small and we haven’t that much fossil fuels.”
So you don’t doubt that there is an effect – which given that there is an rate of increase in emissions means that if continued in perpetuity it would eventually dominate. But your (calculated) guess is that we would run out before that would happen. So the question is, when do you calculate that we’ll run out? Based on that, you should be able to calculate a sensitivity range that would preclude “dominance” ever occurring.
I’m wondering what that range would be? Would it fall into Lewis’ 90% CI? ‘Cause if so, then by extension, you might be calling him “foolish.”
You’re a math guy/gal. It all goes back, then, to your calculations for when we’ll run out, and based on your calculation of when we’re going to run out, what sensitivity range would support your guess of “never?”
The BIG question, Judy, is explicated by millennial scale changes. To the extent the recovery from the LIA is one of these ‘cycles’, so natural, so will temperature trend follow, and there doesn’t seem to be deviation from this ‘natural rise’, neither in the temperature record, nor in sea level rise. I think the BIGGEST question is whether or not this ‘cycle’ has peaked, and we’re about to descend again.
==========
Desperately linear thinking, there. I can’t wait for Robert Ellison to come along and hole it below the waterline, and righteously.
=============
‘Perpetuity’, Joshua? Please, re-enter the real world. Max Anacker and others have demonstrated peak CO2 well under two doublings and anything like 1 degree C/doubling leaves AnthroCO2 effect weaker than natural variability.
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
============
Speaking of desperate, Pekka, that is just an awfully poor answer to Judy. Review her comment and yours again. You don’t even address her point.
========================
kim –
==> “Desperately linear thinking, there.”
Let’s just say theoretically. Obviously, to have your opinion, you must have done the calculations. So how about if you just share what they are?
Even if there are sudden shifts, they must also occur on some time scale. So if you are arguing that a “never” conclusion is justified because of sudden shifts occurring before a linear progression would lead to “dominance” you must have some time scale in mind for those sudden shifts.
Of course, you might also just throw up your hands and cry “chaos. There will be sudden shifts that are completely unpredictable.” But if so, then you can’t know that they wouldn’t occur before “dominance,” and of course also…..
==> ” I think the BIGGEST question is whether or not this ‘cycle’ has peaked, and we’re about to descend again.”
wouldn’t seem to make much sense.
By the way, Joshua, I’m kind of proud of you. You are demonstrating real understanding of the question of attribution.
Let me put it this way. The more you attribute warming to man, the colder we would now be without man’s effect, and we have only so much more hydrocarbons left to release. You had better hope the temperature recovery has been dominated by nature.
======================
I take it back, Joshua. Your 8:25 still demonstrates massive confusion. And Pekka just comes across as disingenuous.
=============
kim –
==> “Max Anacker and others have demonstrated peak CO2 well under two doublings and anything like 1 degree C/doubling leaves AnthroCO2 effect weaker than natural variability.”
So you’re saying that there is no uncertainty w/r/t Max’s calculations?
That kind of just seals the deal then, doesn’t it? Why aren’t SWIRLCAREs just making Max’s argument and leaving it at that. There’s no chance of damaging climate change – because we’re certain to run out before that might happen. Cut and dried. No need to mention uncertainty.
Of course, if I’m not mistaken, Lewis extends his 90% CI to 3.0°C. So, given the rate of recent warming projected to a centennial scale, would a rate of 3.0°C dominate before we run out according to Max’s unquestionable calculations? Or is Lewis “foolish” according to Judith’s logic?
Ponder this, J. Ignore the millennial at your perennial.
============
It all comes down to sensitivity, thus attribution, and millennial scale natural variability, about neither of which do we know very much. On present evidence, the CO2 effect is weak.
======================
Judith Curry wrote: “The BIG question is why the pause 1940-1976 is so much warmer than the pause prior to 1910. The answer is NOT AGW.”
The change in greenhouse gas forcing from 1900 to 1950 is just about the same as the change in solar forcing over the same period. Each one of those accounts for 0.2°C of warming and there indeed occurred about 0.4ºC of warming. So, that would seem to answer your question. The change in solar forcing from 1950 until now is essentially nil, while the change in greenhouse gas forcing fully accounts for the further 0.7°C warming (while ENSO + solar accounts for the recent slowdown).
You see that, moshe? Joshua thinks I’m a math type. Out of the mouths of babes.
===========
relatively speaking, kim, relatively speaking.
JimD: that could happen around 2040 which only requires a very plausible 0.25 C per decade.
Is 0.25 C per decade from 2000 to 2040 plausible given the record of 2000 – 2014? Even if 2014 ends as “the warmest year on record” the record over the 15 year span is nearly flat.
The land rate since 1980 has already averaged 0.25 C per decade so it is not a stretch to apply that to global temperatures going forwards.
Jim D: The land rate since 1980 has already averaged 0.25 C per decade so it is not a stretch to apply that to global temperatures going forwards.
For a claim of close to 0.8C total land mean temp increase since 1980, I would like to see a reference.
Judith –
So someone has answered my question – VTG over at ATTP:
So, if VTG’s calculations are correct, then it is as I speculated above: You are saying that both you and Nic are “fooling [your]selves”
Even changing the term from “influence” to “dominate.” Even taking into consideration a misstatement and clarification, it seems that your public response to the question was quite misleading w/r/t even your own scientific viewpoint.
Unless VTG’s math was wrong, of course. Was his math wrong?
That’s of course nonsense Jim D, Dr.Curry always gets relative softball treatment from skeptics because she doesn’t appear angry and radical. It’s why society sinks, conservatives are content with spineless middling while left wing fanatics never forget the cause…..global socialism:
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/09/21/capitalism-in-crosshairs-as-socialism-promoted-at-opening-event-of-people-climate-march/
She seemed a bit angry at the Greenland remark, where her response was mostly “Climate is always changing!” which is a pretty good catch-all phrase to use when in doubt.
Jim D, maybe you were thinking of this: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/
From that, I do think it is a “stretch” to anticipate a 1 C warming of global mean temp from 2000 to 2040. But I guess it isn’t impossible if the “hiatus” ends soon enough and the subsequent change is dramatic enough warming.
I see a lot of hand waving about these supposed natural cycles as an explanation for warming, but little evidence for any of them. Anyone who suggest that they are happening should at least give them a name, so we know which “cycle” we are talking about.
“Natural variation” isn’t all about cycles. It’s about how, in (almost) any hyper-complex non-linear system (HCNLS), any particular metric tends to wander around in a pseudo-random fashion. Sometimes it looks like “cycles”, sometimes it doesn’t. Over any finite time-scale, it will be indistinguishable from the sum of a bunch of “cycles”, even when no cyclical “forcing” is present. (Thus allowing Fourier analysis.)
Now, in any non-degenerate HCNLS, there’s a tendency for such activity to be self-similar between scales: variation on longer scales will be similar (in many ways) to variation on shorter scales. Which means if you observe the variation on small scales, you can make predictions about variation on long scales. Predictions which tend to be correct. But not always.
So, in looking at the “climate”, anybody familiar with how such HCNLS‘s work will treat the existence of “natural variation” as a default assumption. OTOH, people familiar with only linear systems will tend to assume that “perturbations” are additive, pushing the system away from some sort of “equilibrium”, to which it will try to return. That “equilibrium” represents their default assumption.
But “equilibrium” is a myth, when studying HCNLS‘s.
Hmmm. Helpful, AK. Sailors are sealing bulkheads.
======
The warming since the LIA low point (~1600 – 1700) to the mid 20th century, when the postulated AGW became significant is clearly natural.
The Holocene in general shows both a long-term trend (cooling) and millennial and centennial/multidecadal time-scale variability.
“Natural variation” is even more ephemeral than saying that it is due to cycles. What “natural variation” are you referring to that is responsible for the warming?
@Joseph…
You’re just trying to waste my time.
Given that EPA has extended the comment period on its coal plant attack regulations, my blog post on how to comment seems timely:
http://www.coalblog.org/2014/07/30/how-to-comment-on-epas-proposed-coal-killing-co2-control-rules/
Here’s a site of interest:
https://www.data.gov/climate/
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset?q=total+precipitable+water+vapor&sort=score+desc%2C+name+asc
Koonins editorial may be the most important of these. It appears to be a harbinger of the committees findings.
Koonins’ editorial comprises compelling reasons to *SUSTAIN* NASA/NOAA/EPA investments in satellite altimetry (rising sea-level and ocean-currents), gravimetry (melting polar ice-caps and ocean-currents), carbon dioxide (residence-times), and ozone studies, and to *EXPAND* NASA/NOAA/EPA participation in aerosol studies and Deep ARGO.
Hopefully the science-respecting wing of the Republican Party — does it still exist? — will be on-board with these programs.
That these global-scale climate-science programs are a tremendously *WISE* investment is apparent to *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
Common sense Knowledge beats ignorance … and *THAT’S* why denialist institutions consistently seek to curtail investments in science.
Note James Hansen has strenuously advocated all of these investments, consistently through many decades.
Good on `yah, James Hansen!
Yes, Trenberth’s often-quoted “travesty” was the lack of data to pin down the global energy budget as accurately as he would like.
“Koonins editorial may be the most important of these. It appears to be a harbinger of the committees findings.
Agreed, this could have a big impact. Finally, one of these prestigious professional societies stepping back and saying, “Hey, we’re not so sure after all” is something the consensus mongers won’t be able to ignore. Konnin himself is highly respected based on what I can find.. (NYU refers to him as a renowned physicist. http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2012/04/23/nyu-names-renowned-physicist-steven-koonin-director-of-new-center-for-urban-science-and-progress.html)
And there’s more than a tinge of delicious irony that he was involved with the Obama administration.
My guess is that he was appalled there.
================
Fanny as usual here tries to pull the old trick beloved of intellectually bankrupt alarmist bigots, by pretending there are only CAGW consensus truthers and deniers, no skeptics/thinkers. We ignore his ignoring and continue.
Most hilarious all is his would-be suggestion that skeptics don’t want measurements! As if the stooge Consensus likes measurements rather than inept expensive models, that nevetheless do their masters bidding and produce the *politically* correct answers.
> *THAT’S*
> why denialist institutions consistently seek to curtail
> investments in science.
No, that’s just the ususal strawman put up by blinkered, lying, politically-motivated alarmists. What Fanny calls “anti-science” is of course anti-CORRUPT-science — the bedrock of the stooge Consensus. As the Democrats as a whole love so much.
> Note James Hansen has strenuously advocated all of these
> investments, consistently through many decades.
> Good on `yah, James Hansen!
Ah right, so the only sensible and honest thing he he ever did is recommend is what every skeptic does. So please, Fanny, get get your lying mouth off his John Thomas and browneye, and get a life. Perhaps even take an interest in science for its own sake – a revolutuionary concept for a politico like you, I know, but I recommend it nevertheless.
I’m not sure those are sit ups.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/slide15.png?w=750&h=563
I believe he is tired of hearing about global warming and is covering his ears.
Denizens might be interested in advancing science:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-do-armchair-penguinology-for-science-and-so-can-you
Willard,
Living in California, I’m afraid I might be breaking the law by giving these paid researchers the benefit of my free time in competing with other grant-seeking researchers. The following story in the news this week illustrates the danger I might face. ““California has a state law that prohibits for-profit companies from using volunteer labor.” That spelled doom for little Westover Winery in Castro Valley, which cleared around $11,000 in profits a year for its owning couple and used unpaid volunteers, many of them amateurs who wanted to learn the wine business. The state hit the business with $115,000 in fines and wiped it out, to the unhappiness of some of the displaced volunteers.”
And even if it is not a crime in Oxford’s area, I’m afraid California’s felony conspiracy law might apply to my actions: As stated in California Penal Code 182 PC, a criminal conspiracy takes place when one
1.agrees with one or more other people to commit a crime, and
2.one of them commits an overt act in furtherance of that agreement.
Any member of the conspiracy may commit the overt act…which doesn’t need to be criminal in and of itself. But does need to be performed before the commission of the agreed upon offense.”
I think I’ll just play it safe this weekend and instead watch grown men running around with an odd-shaped ball, maniacally smashing into each other before they head home to beat various family members.
Are you suggesting the project is for profit, JohnV?
Tomorrow is the “Great Climate March.”
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140919/making-great-climate-march-last-more-just-one-day
Of course we will get conflicting reports about the numbers. Still, this is not trivial, although most denizens here seem to be oblivious to what is actually happening in the world outside. Funny that.
No, I agree with you. If they get 50-100,000 that’s a big deal from a public relations standpoint. Going to be a splashy photo in the Monday NYT’s.
50-100,000 a big deal? The far from successful Newcastle United get a full-house of 52,000 masochists every game.
David Wojick: Of course we will get conflicting reports about the numbers. Still, this is not trivial, although most denizens here seem to be oblivious to what is actually happening in the world outside. Funny that.
I do not infer a lack of awareness from a lack of comment. Will the “Great” climate march attract as many people as an average NFL football game?
Also, will the marchers embarrass their cause with their usual display of conspicuous fossil fuel consumption?
Here at 9:50 PDT, I read that the London march had 10,000 show up.
Update: Organizers, using data provided by 35 crowd spotters and analyzed by a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University, estimated that 311,000 people marched the route.The signs that marchers held were as varied as the movement: “There Is No Planet B,” “Forests Not for Sale” and “Jobs, Justice, Clean Energy.”
To me, that sounds like a good turnout.
That’s a lot of climate activists. They must have needed to change a light bulb.
35 spotters plus MATH. It’s gotta be right, see the 3 significant digits?
==================
Kim: It’s gotta be right, see the 3 significant digits?
You can imagine how it must have hurt them to round to 3.
Will they poop on cop cars, get really stoned, and assault the women?
Please, Gaia, let Gore march.
=========
In the antipodes, it’s Great Climate September. Not yet stinking hot or raining torrentially.
AK, in case you didn’t notice, any statements I make on a blog are not PUBLISHED, and I didn’t make the mistake of putting it in print where future atmospheric physicists will chuckle over the assertion. The O-Man and Chief Taz have used the same formulation and we know whut kind of kranks they are, eh?
I have pointed out that this is simply a lie. My only reference to B-E was that it was not B-E juggling wot caused the notch as webbly insisted. B-E condensates may form in super dense conditions. Do these apply to star matter? Don’t know. Does it have any relevance to the iron sun theory? Don’t know. Is the iron sun theory wrong? Don’t know. Unlike webbly I don’t know a lot. Is it relevant to cloud nucleation at low temps and high surfactant load? Probably not. It is really just super dense posturing from webbly and now Jimmy Dee I see. .
I noticed earlier something to do with Sydney tides and ENSO?
Taz hates it when somebody discovers important results in his own backyard:
http://contextearth.com/2014/09/16/using-tidal-gauges-to-estimate-enso/
I almost uncovered the ,a href=”http://www.smh.com.au/national/terror-raids-the-rising-fear-in-sydneys-suburbs-20140919-10jctz.html”>terrorists while I was at it :)
I almost thought that there might be a connection between Sydney tide gauges and ENSO through the east Australian current. There seems nothing g in the literature. Against my better judgment – I did a quick run through. It is not the tide gauge data – it is some strange concoction fitted to the SOI apparently. I predicted incompetence and am not disappointed.
What we have with webbly is 10th rate science on a lonely blogospheric outpost – combined with a truly astonishing malice and resentment.
It all comes back to the groupthink dynamic. There is far more relevant science than webbly’s silly little sideshow – but anything not consistent with the groupthink memes is cognitively dissonant. Dynamic sensitivity – climate shifts – the impossibility of climate prediction – practical and pragmatic mitigation. It is all evidence – it seems – of a perfidious moral lack. Any lie, any defamation is fair play in defense of the memes. Even uncertainty is a threat to the equanimity of the poor little things. They are not arguing from a full deck.
Let me fix the formatting.
AK, in case you didn’t notice, any statements I make on a blog are not PUBLISHED, and I didn’t make the mistake of putting it in print where future atmospheric physicists will chuckle over the assertion. The O-Man and Chief Taz have used the same formulation and we know whut kind of kranks they are, eh?
I have pointed out that this is simply a lie. My only reference to B-E was that it was not B-E juggling wot caused the notch as webbly insisted. B-E condensates may form in super dense conditions. Do these apply to star matter? Don’t know. Does it have any relevance to the iron sun theory? Don’t know. Is the iron sun theory wrong? Don’t know. Unlike webbly I don’t know a lot. Is it relevant to cloud nucleation at low temps and high surfactant load? Probably not. It is really just super dense posturing from webbly and now Jimmy Dee I see. .
I noticed earlier something to do with Sydney tides and ENSO?
Taz hates it when somebody discovers important results in his own backyard:
http://contextearth.com/2014/09/16/using-tidal-gauges-to-estimate-enso/
I almost uncovered the ,a href=”http://www.smh.com.au/national/terror-raids-the-rising-fear-in-sydneys-suburbs-20140919-10jctz.html”>terrorists while I was at it :)
I almost thought that there might be a connection between Sydney tide gauges and ENSO through the east Australian current. There seems nothing g in the literature. Against my better judgment – I did a quick run through. It is not the tide gauge data – it is some strange concoction fitted to the SOI apparently. I predicted incompetence and am not disappointed.
What we have with webbly is 10th rate science on a lonely blogospheric outpost – combined with a truly astonishing malice and resentment.
It all comes back to the groupthink dynamic. There is far more relevant science than webbly’s silly little sideshow – but anything not consistent with the groupthink memes is cognitively dissonant. Dynamic sensitivity – climate shifts – the impossibility of climate prediction – practical and pragmatic mitigation. It is all evidence – it seems – of a perfidious moral lack. Any lie, any defamation is fair play in defense of the memes. Even uncertainty is a threat to the equanimity of the poor little things. They are not arguing from a full deck.
steven, as I said, the criterion is the number of particles that have identical quantum numbers. It is very hard to get molecules into these degenerate states because they have those extra degrees of freedom that single-particle bosons don’t. For molecules they have to be in a state where they are hardly moving which must be at only a few K, if even that, because it takes very little energy to rotate them with one quantum of angular momentum, and at normal temperatures they have many such states to distribute over.
Bosons are bosons and fermions are fermions. The difference is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Does Jimmy Dee have another silly narrative? He should really learn some basics first.
Water molecules have rotation lines in the microwave wavelengths, which is how microwave ovens work. The energy for these wavelengths corresponds to temperatures down to a fraction of a Kelvin. At 100 K these molecules have so many rotation states available that having any two in the same state has a vanishingly small probability, and you should use classical Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics for distinguishable particles otherwise you would be wrong.
What Jimmy Dee is saying is that microwaves cause water molecules to vibrate. Energy and frequency is related via the Planck constant. Higher frequencies have higher energies and are emitted at a higher temperature.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/em_spect.jpg
A weird odd narrative – strangely distorted – that suggests that Bose-Einstein statistics happen only in Bose-Einstein condensates – not true.
://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/be-stats.png
And that B-E condensates are at all relevant. Not merely utterly unproven but fantastically misguided.
Let me try that one again.
http://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/be-stats.png
I suggest you move on Jimmy Dee – because this is just too silly.
Rob Ellison, you misunderstood. Try again. At, for example 100 K, do you think that all the H2O molecules in any proximity are distinguishable by their rotational quantum numbers or not? Do you think BE statistics applies to distinguishable particles or not?
Taz doesn’t get it. He just spins out of control when you push the right buttons.
Photons straightforwardly obey B-E statistics because a photon, having no mass, is indistinguishable from another photon. And the fact that h𝜈 is often around kT, the degeneracy conditions are easily met.
But for massed particles, the situation is completely different.
I understand perfectly Jimmy Dee – amongst your many errors in this – and I did link a very nice little youtube presentation to enable some progress – I that you mistake integer spin for quantized rotation.
‘One essential parameter for classification of particles is their “spin” or intrinsic angular momentum. Half-integer spin fermions are constrained by the Pauli exclusion principle whereas integer spin bosons are not. The electron is a fermion with electron spin 1/2.
The spin classification of particles determines the nature of the energy distribution in a collection of the particles. Particles of integer spin obey Bose-Einstein statistics, whereas those of half-integer spin behave according to Fermi-Dirac statistics.’ http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/spinc.html
That fermions form a Fermi Gas and bosons form a Bose-Einstein condensate at low temperatures is still not relevant to anything of any interest. Like webbly you are merely parading your ignorance and prejudice.
Rob Ellison, you only get BE statistics when you have limited quantum states available to your bosons, which does not happen at normal temperatures or even 100 K. To even consider BE statistics, significant numbers of the molecules have to be identical in their whole quantum description including their rotation state which is not the same as spin. These things are just too macro in degrees of freedom available for that to even happen.
JimD, you are completely missing the gist of possible applications of B-E statistics.
“The evolution of many complex systems, including the World Wide Web, business, and citation networks, is encoded in the dynamic web describing the interactions between the system’s constituents. Despite their irreversible and nonequilibrium nature these networks follow Bose statistics and can undergo Bose–Einstein condensation. Addressing the dynamical properties of these nonequilibrium systems within the framework of equilibrium quantum gases predicts that the “first-mover-advantage,” “fit-get-rich(FGR),” and “winner-takes-all” phenomena observed in competitive systems are thermodynamically distinct phases of the underlying evolving networks” Wikipedia
What you are doing is the equivalent of saying Boltzmann’s entrophy equation can’t be used in information systems. For clouds, -43C would be analogous to absolute zero as an example. The k in kT is R/Na so a :packet of supercooled liquid water or supersaturate water vapor could be an indistinguishable “particle”.
Taking everything to literally can really strangle creativity though it does make for some great flame wars.;
‘The Einstein-Bose and Fermi-Dirac distributions differ from the classical Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution because the particles they describe are indistinguishable.
Particles are considered to be indistinguishable if their wave packets overlap significantly. This kind of consideration comes from the fact that all particles have characteristic wave properties according to the DeBroglie hypothesis . Two particles can be considered to be distinguishable if their separation is large compared to their DeBroglie wavelength.
For example, the condition of distinguishability is met by molecules in an ideal gas under ordinary conditions. For oxygen gas at STP, the molecules have a separation on the order of 3 nm and DeBroglie wavelengths on the order of 0.03 nm, a factor of a thousand smaller. On the other hand, two electrons in the first shell of an atom are inherently indistinguishable because of the large overlap of their wavefunctions.’ http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/disene.html
Ultra low temperatures are not required for Bose-Einstein statistics to apply – although it is required for a condensate. This seems to be the fundamental misunderstanding from the peanut gallery.
The suggesting is that Boltzmann statistics apply generally to cloud nucleation – and that in some circumstances it may behave more like Bose-Einstein.
It may be purely statistical for all I know.
‘Viewed as a pure probability distribution, the Bose–Einstein distribution has found application in other fields:
In recent years, Bose Einstein statistics have also been used as a method for term weighting in information retrieval. The method is one of a collection of DFR (“Divergence From Randomness”) models,[5] the basic notion being that Bose Einstein statistics may be a useful indicator in cases where a particular term and a particular document have a significant relationship that would not have occurred purely by chance.
The evolution of many complex systems, including the World Wide Web, business, and citation networks, is encoded in the dynamic web describing the interactions between the system’s constituents. Despite their irreversible and nonequilibrium nature these networks follow Bose statistics and can undergo Bose–Einstein condensation.’ Wikepedia
This discussion is informed by half arsed misunderstanding of the issues and motivated by having a personal axe to grind.
Rob Ellison, in usual form you quote something that agrees with what I have been saying all along, and then go on to conclude the opposite. Distinguishability is a very hard thing to remove. It takes extremely controlled conditions for molecules, most likely near 0 K.
Sorry – they used Boltzmann statistics for the derivation but suggested that Bose-Einstein may be appropriate in some circumstances.
That it is not at normal atmospheric temperature a Bose-Einstein condensate is not now or ever has been a relevant factor.
Although we do seem to get a ‘boson peak’ on a 20K substrate.
e.g http://www.researchgate.net/publication/30412378_The_first_observation_of_Boson_peak_from_water_vapour_deposited_amorphous_ice
The circumstances included low temperature and high surfactant load. But the Boltzman formulation seems more relevant generally – which is what they do.
The real question is how well the formulation does against reality. You remember reality don’t you Jimmy Dee?
The problem is that Taz is trying to play catch-up, while we learned all this when we took courses in Statistical Mechanics when we were still in school — so we understood the limits of applicability of B-E already way back when.
Watch Taz spin.
http://en.gtwallpaper.com/fondecran/taz/taz_12.jpg
There is no statistical mechanics of climate. Boltzmann is used to derive the Planck function for a blackbody which in turn can be used to derive S-B. The latter suggest a negative feedback with exponentially increasing (to the power of 4) emissions with increasing temperature. This is so far from being a complete description of climate that it is laugable.
I have studied maths, physics and chemistry amongst other things. I have read independently Einstein, Planck, Hawking, Everett, Feynman, Lorenz – the big ideas. Time dilation, chaos, quantum entanglement, wave/particle duality, Schrodinger waves.
Webbly is a total pratt who imagines that the formation of a Fermi Gas or a Bose-Einstein depending on the allowable occupation on energy states in accordance with the Pauli exclusion principle is conceptually difficult.
Here’s what you need to know webbly – you obviously need a refresher.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wF_CVuWyEg.
As for the generalization of classical nucleation theory – about which he has not the slightest clue.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/19/week-in-review-27/#comment-630967
What is evident is that he lacked any substance, more than the merest grasp of reality and was driven by personal animosity. A deep seated resentment expressed in the clearest terms and without either the balls to address his superficial whines in the appropriate post or to resile from his stupendous and embarrassing meltdown.
I repeat again Judy – why do I need to put up with this type of comment again and again year after year? Nothing ever changes. There is no purpose other than to disparage, disrupt and divert. Seriously – what is the story?
Taz bragged:
Pomposity is favored by the AGW deniers, because they have nothing else to lean on.
Jim D: Rob Ellison, you only get BE statistics when you have limited quantum states available to your bosons, which does not happen at normal temperatures or even 100 K.
As shown by the examples that Rob Ellison and I quoted from wikipedia, entities have B-E distributions when the empirical evidence shows that they have B-E distributions. It was the empirical evidence that led to the B-E derivation in the first place; the reconsideration of which “states” had equal probabilities led to the investigation of how that might be modeled.
The germs of the cloud condensation nuclei do not “have” any of the distributions that have been recommended for them. They are heterogeneous in size, shape, and composition, which makes thinking about them even more difficult than if they were homogeneous (as modeled.) Since pure ratiocination has not produced a sufficiently accurate distribution for them yet, it’s possible that a sufficiently accurate distribution will be found, if at all, by trial-and-error fitting. The B-E distribution is as reasonable an alternative to try as any other. Indeed, in this whole discussion, none other has been suggested for a try.
I answered to steven somewhere else on this page that, to the extent that their delta R really is an energy difference between two energy states (and I don’t know if it is), each much larger than kT, B-E is not appropriate no matter how small that difference. It can only be used for population distributions.
JD, the difference between you and the apologists for Curry’s B-E cloud nucleation theory is that you actually have studied statistical mechanics, and it shows !
With webbly any semblance of rational discourse goes out the window.
He accuses me of playing catch up in something that is marginally relevant – then accuses me of boasting when I explain that I have some interest in the big ideas of physics.
We all know about the empty braggadocio of webnutcolonoscope – the aggression and insults – his 10th rate unscience on a blog site that no one ever visits – the substance less commentary – the unfounded aspersions – the superficial and profoundly eccentric assertions.
Why is such an empty vessel permitted to pollute the site like this so frequently and so persistently?
WegHubTelescope: JD, the difference between you and the apologists for Curry’s B-E cloud nucleation theory is that you actually have studied statistical mechanics, and it shows !
It is useful now and then to recall exactly what K&C wrote: two half-page suggestions that the B-E distribution might be used. And it is useful to recall K’s comment, which pointed out that there was no accurate model for the nucleation germ growth. You would not want to fall for the false idea that someone actually knows more than K&C about the germ nucleation growth statistics.
For most phenomena where statistical models (or probability models, if you prefer) are used, the mathematical derivation of the “correct” probability distribution has almost never been either adequate or necessary to establish the most accurate distribution to use. The exact mathematics works only for a few select systems, mostly in laboratories, and for everything else some combination of heuristic simplification and empirical model fitting has been necessary.
> It is useful now and then to recall exactly what K&C wrote:
That would be great.
Please do.
WebHubTelescope: Pomposity is favored by the AGW deniers, because they have nothing else to lean on.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Coming from Paul Pukite, that is funny.
Marler wrote:
This is not dreamed about by climate scientists but is actually measured via in situ lab experiments by material scientists and physicists. Like the stuff I used to work on.
Do you not comprehend the sweeping statements that they are making?
That B-E statistics presumption would be laughed out of the building in any condensed matter physics environment. Do experiments or do molecular dynamics simulations would be the first step. One does not just assume B-E statistics in cloud nucleation and put that in a textbook. That is so ridiculous it is funny.
… a Bose-Einstein (condensate) depending on the allowable occupation…
As to the occupation by these Einsteins’, you know it when we all see it.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/09/far-left-climate-geeks-leave-mountain-of-trash-for-cities-to-deal-with/
This is all about saving the planet? A picture is worth a thousand words…
how stupid can they be? At least SEIU was there.
I think Koonin’s report as chair of the AP society’s committee is the most realistic I have read so far on climate. However it is not their final report which hopefully will spell out where the R&D dollar should be spent.
We now know that there are some 50 ( different? ) models with some support from the IPCC. I suspect that they all are basically variations on the Hansen theme, although transparency is not a feature of the models.
My own view remains that we need to explore further the role of carbon isotopes in energy absorption by CO2. They could explain the on/off behaviour of global climate, that and the time taken by the oceans to respond to atmospheric temperature. See my web site underlined above.
Alexander: “However it is not their final report which hopefully will spell out where the R&D dollar should be spent.”
Koonin’s committee is not working on a report, but rather the APS Climate Statement. It will probably only lay out the status of climate science, and probably will not be much different than the WSJ piece. However that piece does lay out some deficiencies in the science that could be used for a roadmap, for future climate science expenditures. He mentions the need to improve observational capabilities and the need to better understand feedbacks and the oceans.
‘Better understand feedbacks and the oceans.’ Synonymous
fer ‘ observational data lacking fer that pesky man-made human warming.’
O/t. RS, I have the Tononi book ‘ u recommended, ‘Voyage
from the Brain to the Soul.’ Thx, makng the voyage now.
bts .
Beth: Right on. It appears he is saying that we need greater understanding of feedbacks and oceans through improved observational capability.
Hope you like the book; about the brain,written like a novel. I think it will be most enjoyable to you and others with a love for literature.
Richard,
The book is wonderful, including production values, print,
paper, images. Worthy of inclusion in the Library of Alexandria.
bts.
Dear Dr. Curry,
Thank you for the link to Steven Koonin’s essay. It is incredibly important as you said, I am sharing it with others.
So, would Koonin be in the 97%? I think you can see that the question makes mincemeat of the 97% claim. Besides, his title is ‘The Science is not Settled’. So, there it is.
=======================
It’s also a title at RealClimate.
Ig Noble Prizes 2014
How far has “climate science” descended?
ARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.
REFERENCE: “Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edgeøya,” Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 483-9.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Eigil Reimers, Sindre Eftestøl
Abstract
Read Koonin. The rabid alarmists are hysterically throwing themselves on the pyre which will soon become the ash heap of history.
==========
You may be right. Perhaps some advance knowledge of what’s going on with the APS review was behind Webdummy’s breakdown.
JC says “The BIG question is why the pause 1940-1976 is so much warmer than the pause prior to 1910. The answer is NOT AGW. So the key question is convincing why the mechanism causing the warming between the two earlier pauses was not operational in the warming between the two latter pauses.”
Long-term records from Greenland and other places show warmings similar to 1910-1940 throughout the millennium, followed by coolings. This one wasn’t followed by a cooling, as Broecker indicated, because by then CO2 was already starting to take effect, so a cooling became a pause, and then as the CO2 effect became stronger more warming was added, even without any hint of a solar forcing increase. This is Broecker’s 1975 graphic. Probably larger natural variation than actually occurred and a predicted drop to a minimum that may be too early, but with the CO2 effect separated out.
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Broecker_Prediction.png
Do you know what sensitivity he used?
================
0.3 C for 10% which works out to 2.2 C per doubling, which is why it works out so well, because in retrospect this is the effective warming per increase. He also predicted emission rates well and estimated 50% would stay in the atmosphere, also not bad.
Jim D, I’m not even sure what you’re actually testing there.
Typically, when we are testing for the existence of a knee-point, we break the data into two equal length but non-overlapping intervals. For example, if we wanted to test whether 2000 were a knee point, the longest period of time we can look at is [2000,2015) or roughly 15 years.
So you’d compare [1985,2000) to [2000,2015). If I do this I find:
SERIES 1985-2000 2000-2015
CRUTEM3 0.294 0.006
NCDC 0.217 0.046
HadCRUT 0.227 0.037
GISTEMP 0.211 0.059
HadCRUT+C&W Krig 0.232 0.101
HadCRUT+C&W Merra 0.230 0.092
The trends are in °C/decade.
If I compute the uncertainty in the trends using a Monte Carlo analysis that realistic simulates natural variability, and apply a one-sided test (we are testing whether it is “slowing down”), for all of thees major surface temperature series, I find that all of the series show a changes in slope post 2000. For HadCRUT, CRUTEMP and NCDC, these changes are significant at better than the 95% CL, and for GISTEMP and HadCRUT + C&W, they are better than the 90% CL.
What this almost certainly means is there is natural variability at play (rather than anything wrong with the assumption that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would tend to warm the planet). It also means this natural variability is larger than many people had anticipated prior to say 2005, when the warming was described as “unstoppable”. But that doesn’t just affect the interpretation of the data post-2000, it also has implication that part of the warming from 1980-2000 could be due (and likely is due) to natural variability as well.
It’s been noted on this thread, that the period circa 1915-1945 (and as well the prior warming period circa 1855-1885) is dominated by natural variability. It’s a plausible suggestion that there might be a similar magnitude of natural warming say from 1975-2005. That could indicate that as much as 2/3s of the warming since 1975 is due to superimposed natural variability.
If you detrend based on an assumed periodic variation of 60-years (the “AMO”), you find this:
If I fit the interval [1980,2000), I find a slope of 0.165 °C/decade with the original series and 0.04 °C/decade with the one with the “AMO” subtracted out. This reduction in trend is significant at better than the 95% CL.
Now, we can’t rule out that this recent “knee-point” is due to an other explanation ( 2 1/2 cycles isn’t enough to rule out that the 60-year oscillation is spurious). Some of the explanations given, amount to unphysical curve fitting, so I don’t find them plausible.
But if as much as 2/3s of the recent warming is explained by natural variation, obviously this has important policy ramifications.
Here is the link to the graphic. Apparently I haven’t quite mastered how to put in-lines into Judith Curry’s blog yet:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4520911/Climate/60Yr/hadcrut4.60y.compare.pdf
Thanks, C. Lucid.
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Carrick, if you make your image a .bmp, .png or .gif file, WordPress will embed it so it’s visible in your comment. I’m pretty sure some other types will embed as well, but I don’t know which ones.
You need a title or something between the anchor tag and its close. Pull up the comments feed and look at some that worked.
Like this? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4-IEWgJ9R_WRzY2MW13Q1ZpRWM/edit?usp=sharing
Carrick, I am not sure which post you replied to, but how would you test the significance of a deviation from a long-term trend like this? I am not convinced it is doing anything it hasn’t done several times before in this warming period.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/trend/offset:0.1/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/trend/offset:-0.1
Let’s use 1975 instead. Same question.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/trend/offset:0.1/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/trend/offset:-0.1
Brandon—I’ll try it out here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4520911/Climate/60Yr/hadcrut4.60y.compare.jpg
(Yup that worked.. too simple.)
Jim D, I linked to the wrong sub-sub-thread. This is the comment I was referencing.
What I do is use a Fourier-based approach to model the internal variability of the data. Lucia uses an AR-based approach, and gets similar ranges of uncertainty.
But the issue you raise is a good one–can we see how typical this knee point is?
I went back and looked at this question, and the only period where was bigger since 1900 was in 1942, I checked with land-only as well as land+ocean, and the peak is the same year. Here’s the figure I generated:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4520911/Climate/60Yr/hadcrut4.kneepoint.jpg
(HadCRUT gets very noisy prior to 1900, due to the paucity of data, so I clip it off at 1900.)
The year you selected, 1975, corresponds to a positive “knee-point” (an acceleration). The last time this happened since 1900, was in 1910.
Note that the frequency of these occurrences is too large to easily be explained by random fluctuations. Looking at the distribution of “knee-point index”, what I found was a non-Gaussian looking distribution.
If the knee-points are driven by random-fluctuations, you should see a “Gaussian-like” distribution centered around the most likely value. Instead, what I saw here was a “double-peaked” distribution.
This is symptomatic of an underlying oscillatory behavior, including the interval between adjacent maxima and adjacent minima.
Again, though you’d like to have more than 2 1/2 cycles of observations, so the interpretation in terms oscillatory behavior rather than random fluctuations should be viewed with caution.
By the way, Jim D, have you read Koonin’s essay? I recommend it.
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I commented above. To me, it looks like he went through and checked all the boxes that other skeptics have mentioned before. Nothing new. No insights. Very disappointing.
So, you agree the science is not settled?
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Lol. It just cannot get more ridiculous.
Koonin was dubious all along. He would be to invite 3 skeptics along with 3 mainstream scientists to formulate a statement that they all agreed on. The outcome would be obvious in advance. However, he still has to convince his other committee members and maybe the APS membership, so maybe there are checks in place against extreme statements coming out of this process.
Heh, you think he’d publish that if he didn’t already have a pretty good idea of the final report?
So, do you, Jim D, think the science is settled?
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kim, it could be a minority dissent opinion. We’ll see.
Specifically which settled science are you asking about?
That the CO2 rise is mostly due to Man?
That warming is happening?
That adding more CO2 causes more warming?
Jim D: I commented above. To me, it looks like he went through and checked all the boxes that other skeptics have mentioned before. Nothing new. No insights. Very disappointing.
Does that mean that you found no important errors? There isn’t much new in AGW either, except the multiple explanations of the lack of recent surface W. (That is, the theory is mostly based on equilibrium approximations, there is vagueness as to how much and how fast the CO2-induced warming will be, and there are unsubstantiated claims that every change has been and will be horrible. No matter why the hiatus occurred or how long it lasts, the results of CO2 increases will be truly awful by 2100. FOMD goes on to assert just as Hansen predicted way back when.) The important thing is that it was written by a scientist of unimpeachable credentials who is chair of the committee charged to revise the APS position statement. For people who are interested in appeals to authority and actual statements what the scientific consensus, that is an important consideration, and new. Unless it is given a thorough, accurate point-by-point debunking with respect to lots of evidence, it is bound to have an impact. The “Bengtsson Strategy” of calumny (that word again!) is not going to work.
He admits to a 1-2% change in the greenhouse effect, or forcing. Imagine what would happen if the sun changed by 1-2% in this century. This is twenty times the difference between its active an inactive phases during the millennium, and the effects of those are seen in the temperature record. I don’t think he had the background to evaluate the potential consequences of that number he threw out in comparison to anything, so I don’t blame him. It’s what you get with these external statements. We can hope that perhaps others at the APS know more about the sun’s influence on climate.
A 1-2% change in the greenhouse effect is 1-2% of 33K, or 0.33-0.66K
A 1-2% change in the sun is a different matter entirely.
Jim D, define “extreme statements”
IIRC that statement is completely untrue. Is it a lie? Or did you really not bother to read and remember the truth?
So dumbunny claims (3rd hand):
> The “Bengtsson Strategy” of calumny (that word again!) is not going to work.
His victim playing was not that bad. He should have named names. That makes for better calumny.
AK, the transcript of the meeting is available. Judith was there. Koonin was trying to get points of agreement from that meeting. Maybe the APS statement will be independent of those points of agreement, but I suspect the 3 skeptics had an influence. The points of agreement were basically, yes the earth is warming, yes CO2 has an effect, yes man is dominating the addition to CO2. Not much beyond that, especially about the future, so that is what a statement, if only based on that meeting, probably will say.
Well, seems to me that’s about all the “97%” agree on. But technically, it’s the committee that decides what statement to propose to the membership, not the experts. We’ll see what comes of it, but my guess is either the editorial signals what the committee decided, or Koonin’s going out with a blast. The latter would be pretty embarrassing for everybody, but that seems to be what dumbunny’s suggesting.
The other deliberate downplay by Koonin is this.
“Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years”
In the last 25 years 1980-2014 it has increased 0.9 F (0.5 C) too, but he didn’t say that, and it is more relevant. The 25-year rate has not relented since 2000.
Correction. Actually 0.35 C since 1990 (25 years). 0.5 C since 1985 (30 years) based on HADCRUT4.
And 0.6 C for CRUTEM4 (land) since 1990. No slowing there.
Here’s where we can find the transcript:
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/climate-review.cfm
For comparison, here’s the 2007 version:
Jim D: He admits to a 1-2% change in the greenhouse effect, or forcing. Imagine what would happen if the sun changed by 1-2% in this century. This is twenty times the difference between its active an inactive phases during the millennium, and the effects of those are seen in the temperature record. I don’t think he had the background to evaluate the potential consequences of that number he threw out in comparison to anything, so I don’t blame him. It’s what you get with these external statements. We can hope that perhaps others at the APS know more about the sun’s influence on climate.
What are “external” statements?
You affirm that Koonin’s editorial might not stand without revision as the APS formal statement, but have no important criticism of it other than that the treatment of the sun might be inadequate? Imagine what would happen if the sun changed by 1-2%.
He admits to a 1-2% change in the greenhouse effect, or forcing.
Effect or forcing, which are you addressing? If the “greenhouse effect” to date is about a 33K increase in global mean temp, 1-2% of that is not worth worrying about.
You see the problem with paraphrase in place of exact quotation. For “preaching to the choir” it hardly matters, as the choir will sing along; but for debating among people with diverse perspectives who are not yet committed, when you paraphrase no one knows what exactly it is that you are agreeing with or disagreeing with.
Koonin’s essay is very good. I would expect that by now every member of both houses of Congress has it, or his or her staff has it, and is incorporating it one way or another into campaigns. Unless there is a substantive and formidable point-by-point rebuttal, I expect it to have an impact.
> Unless there is a substantive and formidable point-by-point rebuttal, I expect it to have an impact.
It already has an impact. Not because he says anything new, but because he’s Koonin. Speaking of whom, I’m not sure he could claim being a physicist for 40 years, as more than 25 of them have been in admin and project lead.
All his talking points are known, and have been rebutted. Of course we don’t have evidence about the future: it’s the future, for Arthur Prior’s sake! The point is not about scoring unrebutted points, but to hammer them over and over again in places the have the most impact.
The only interesting part is his 1-2%, where he stretches the limits of justified disingenuous to a level only Dick himself has gone before, in his heydays.
None of them were ever “rebutted”. All there is is specious arm-waving, usually at the end of five reference links.
Matthew R Marler wrote:
“Unless there is a substantive and formidable point-by-point rebuttal, I expect it to have an impact.”
Willard wrote:
“It already has an impact.”
Being noticed is not an impact, being incorporated into campaigns is not an impact. Here impact can only be demonstrated over time and must bring about some substantive change in the character of the debate. By standards you expressed almost any event is an impact.
Like you both–Willard once gave me a pyramid hat and I grok on a lot of the same wavelengths as Marler. But you’re straining at gnats. ;O)
Sure they’re known talking points, how else could he have derived them from the six consultants? Who doesn’t know is hoi polloi, marching ignorantly in the streets, er, on the astroturf.
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> By standards you expressed almost any event is an impact.
Which standards have I expressed, again?
> None of them were ever “rebutted”.
Of course they were. Innumerous times. In almost every thread arguments and evidence is being presented. If these talking points could be considered empirical. They’re mostly judgement calls.
Perhaps AK means “rebut” as in “to refute”? A Kuhnian appealing to Popper clap traps. How interesting.
Must be a paradigm thing.
Willard asks, “Which standards have I expressed, again?”
Fair enough. You may have gotten me. Let me try… In your statement:
“It already has an impact. Not because he says anything new, but because he’s Koonin,”
I inferred that your implicit standard is ‘the/some opinions of persons of certain unspecified stature or standing have impact’. If you are uncomfortable with that I will be happy to say that you have no standards. Regards.
You do realize the camp spring cycle doesn’t go negative until about 2030 and that this theory only explains 1980-2000?
Broecker’s Camp Century data from Dansgaard goes negative by 1975. It captures a likely mid-20th-century solar peak and declines from there.
JIMd
Fan refuses to tell me either why the temperature has been rising for 300 years or what 30 year period we should dial back to as being typical of the climate equilibrium you both believe we have destroyed.
Perhaps you might like to answer these presumably very easy but fundamental questions?
tonyb
Borehole data is very diffusive. It would spread a much shorter sharp rise over a longer period. You can tell from the data how diffused it looks.
jimd
That does not answer either of my questions does it? Perhaps you would like to be more specific?
There has been a long slow thaw over the past 300 years fully captured in CET and mostly captured by BEST which does not go quite as far back.
It is also confirmed by boreholes.
Mind you if you want to admit that the various paleo proxies used by Dr Mann to concoct his hockey stick are not reliable I will concede that we should discount the use of paleo proxy reconstructions altogether. Is that what you are saying? So, three answers then Jim, if you would be so kind
tonyb.
I am just saying don’t count on the boreholes. The global temperature rise in the last 100 years of 0.8 C is larger and faster than anything in the record, and 0.7 C of that is since 1950, 0.5 C since 1985. These are fast unprecedented rises, not to be minimized.
jimd
The rise during the period 1695 to 1739was the fastest in the record. It caused Phil Jones to write a paper on it and admit that natural variability was greater than he had hitherto realised when 1740 brought it to a screeching halt
So now you’ve rubbished proxies perhaps you would confirm this ideal 30 year period of climate that our policymakers should be aiming to get back to?
tonyb
The limitations of boreholes have always been understood. They can give you long-term means in the shaft of the hockey stick, but not details. I doubt if your previous fast rise was 0.8 C and extended over a century, while accelerating towards the end. This one has very different characteristics from that.
JimD: I doubt if your previous fast rise was 0.8 C and extended over a century, while accelerating towards the end.
Was the recent increase of 0.8C that extended over a century rising at the end? The data show early and late increases within that century at the same of increase, with most recently a nearly flat line.
I have said it before. The “pause” is in the statistical noise around a steady trend.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/mean:12
jimd
whilst you continue to think about the ‘ideal’ 30 year period we should all be aspiring t you can tell me what you think about the other paleo proxies used in the most influential climate icon of all time.
Trees are typically sampled twice in the very short growing season. They are hugely susceptible to micro climate which can mean that for part of their life they may be competing for space whilst at other times they are growing freely and at others they may be shaded from sun, wind or moisture thereby radically altering the signal..
Perhaps you would like to link to a paper confirming how tree rings produce global temperature signals accurate to tenths of a degree going back 1000 years. More or less accurate that bore holes which you have confirmed really shouldn’t be taken too seriously?
tonyb
tonyb, I don’t think tree rings can be used alone. There are other better long-term average proxies like O18 in glaciers, and I would only trust any proxies to the extent they agree with each other and give independent confirmation.
IMO, ice cores have not been vetted enough to show beyond a reasonable doubt that they DO NOT suffer from diffusion issues. There may well be papers that prove diffusion is not an issue since I have no subs to journals. But if anyone knows of such papers, I would be happy to read up on it.