Week in review – science edition

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye this past week.

In the news

Why the US desperately needs weather satellite data from China & Russia but Congress says no: [link]

The story of the young researcher who uncovered the fraudulent gay marriage study [link]

Retracted Scientific Studies: A Growing List [link]

A novel way to reduce your personal biases while you sleep [link]

Schoolroom Climate Change Indoctrination [link]

Dr Richard Tol: “Climate change: Mr. Obama, 97 percent of experts is a bogus number” [link]  …

McKitrick’s take on the elusive 97% consensus: [link]  …. Cook’s reply: [link]  … & McKitrick’s rebuttal [link]  ….

Extreme Weather

TX’s state climatologist links flooding to climate change; frequency of ‘heavy 2-day rains’ has doubled [link]

Texas has had dozens of rainfalls over the past 200 years as large or larger than recent ones. [link]

NASA: El Niño driven ‘stagnant upper-air pattern’ made heavy rains in central Texas; no mention of ‘climate change’ [link]

Climate change blamed as thousands die in Indian heat [link]

Lack of electricity, blackouts from excessive demand from air conditioners leading to India heat fatalities [link]

This Indian city developed a heat action plan to protect vulnerable citizens from heat waves [link]

Obama: Climate Change Having ’Significant Effect’ On Making Hurricanes Stronger [link]

Obama : ‘Best climate scientists’ link hurricanes, climate change [link]

“Scientists Don’t Actually Know What’s Causing ‘Extreme Weather’ [link]

Ryan Maue tweets: Academics are trotting out “weather on steroids” argument of climate change. But in many cases it’s more aptly “weather on laxatives”, given the explanations which are like the result of laxatives

New papers

New paper in Nature predicts climate may cool .5C for “a number of decades” due to natural ocean oscillations [link]

New paper finds natural variability of Pacific Ocean oscillation plays “crucial role” modulating ENSO & Asian Monsoon [link]

Ocean impact on decadal Atlantic variability revealed by sea level variations [link]

Global climate on verge of multidecadal change  [link]

New assessment of the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature data [link]

Communicating Uncertainties in Sea Surface Temperature [link]

Are we unnecessarily constraining the agility of complex process-based models? [link]

 

 

 

274 responses to “Week in review – science edition

  1. Would be interested in thoughts about where we are in the CAGW discussions. Although studies occasionally come out supporting one side or the other, by-in-large it appears (at least to me) we are in a stagnant period. Waiting for what? Political change? A definitive scientific study (not very likely)? Or just marking time accumulating more data. It is interesting that Climate Etc. is tending towards being a aggregator on climate change issues. Thanks to our hostess of her excellent blog.

  2. I like the contrast between Ross McKitrick and Richard Tol’s articles on the “consensus.” McKitrick does a good job focusing on the central problem; Tol gets sidetracked into a variety of unimportant issues, including at least one which exists only in his imagination.* It’s a great object lesson of how to (not) write an op-ed.

    *Cook et al never did anything to suggest they looked at 12,876 papers. Tol claims they can’t keep their story straight because of nothing more than his inability to understand a simple numbering scheme.

    • Don Monfort

      Branadoon, the writer of the op-ed generally gets to pick which issues he/she wants to mention. Of course, you are free to nitpick those choices. We already knew that you got a thang for Dr. Tol. His hair scares you?

      Hey, maybe someday you will be invited to write an op-ed. In the meantime, you will have to be satisfied with the notoriety that you achieve with your 99 cent e-books and your nitpicking criticisms of McIntyre, Tol, Fuller-Mosher and others who outshine you as luminaries in the great and often silly climate debate. Keep at it, junior.

      • Really, Mosher one of the luminaries along with McIntyre and Tol? Gimme a f…ing break Don. What is it with you and Mosher and this bromance you got going on?

      • Don Monfort

        Don’t make me start calling you, sillybert. I don’t know how long you been observing here, but I have had to give Steven his share of tune-ups. Por ejemplo, go look at the thread where he announced the publication of the BEST paper in that pathetic pay-for-play journal- of-last-resort. However, Steven is way smarter and far more honest than the average bear. Treat him with the modicum of respect that he is due, ask the right questions and you could possibly learn something.

        As for the previous comment, which you don’t get, I was talking to junior. Junior strives to be what passes as a luminary/shining star, in the great and silly climate debate. He has launched nitpicking attacks on those people I mentioned, because they have reps. With me so far? Junior strives to pump up his rep, which is not shining with much brightness.

        He’s got a blog with about one denizen, 99 cent e-book and a penchant for serial petulant argument on various blogs. Anyway, I am trying to help junior and he knows what I am talking about. So, you don’t need to worry.

      • Whatever, Don, sticks and stones and all that.

        I did/do get your comment re. Brandon. I’ve had my own back and forth with him re. the book “Climate Change, The Facts” which he dismissed out of hand without reading. I even sent him a gift certificate to Mark Steyn’s store for him to get a copy.

        In rereading your comment, I guess you weren’t actually equivalencing Mosher with McIntyre and Tol, so poor assumption on my part.

        As for smart and honest people, I know a lot of very smart people and some of them are even honest, but when they act like jerks I tend to tune them out.

      • Mark Silbert, it would help if you didn’t make obviously untrue claims about people to portray them in a negative light:

        I did/do get your comment re. Brandon. I’ve had my own back and forth with him re. the book “Climate Change, The Facts” which he dismissed out of hand without reading. I even sent him a gift certificate to Mark Steyn’s store for him to get a copy.

        What actually happened is I read a free preview of the book, which contained approximately 20% of the book. I then explained why the text in that preview was bad, concluding it wouldn’t be worth my money to buy the rest of the book.

        You then gave me a gift certificate for the book, I thanked you for it, bought the book and read the entire thing. I then wrote critiques of something like a third of the chapters in the book, explaining why they were bad.

        Portraying all this as me merely dismissing the book out of hand is wrong. It’s not remotely true, and it portrays me in a negative light for no reason. Even worse, it’s silly because of how obviously untrue it is.

      • Don Monfort

        Mark probably isn’t one of the very few folks who look at your blog, Branadoon. He may not be aware of your series of critiques. And you are falsely characterizing what Mark said:

        “which he dismissed out of hand without reading. I even sent him a gift certificate to Mark Steyn’s store for him to get a copy.”

        You did dismiss it without having read it. You may have read a sample, but that ain’t reading it. And Mark did not say that you did not read the book, after he had gifted it to you. And he did not say that you didn’t write a series of petulant critiques, which are quite amusing. Why did you bother?

      • Thanks Don, I think that Brandon’s comment really underscores your comment re. his nitpicking.

        Actually, I have looked at his website and even sprung for the 99 cents to buy and read his ebook ( a Rud he’s not). I mean, I am retired and (try as I may) I can’t play golf, work out or fish all day every day!

        I try to not be judgmental about people I don’t know, but……. Let me leave it at that.

      • Mark Silbert, you portrayed me as having dismissed a book without even looking at it. Nobody would say, “Roger Ebert reviewed that movie without even seeing it” if he turned it off 30 minutes in because it was so bad. When you say someone “dismissed [a book] dismissed out of hand without reading” it, nobody will interpret it as, “He read some portion of the book, but not all of it.”

        You can dismiss that simple point as “nitpicking,” but at this point, “nitpicking” just seems to mean, “Saying things I dislike.” I gave clear explanations as to why multiple chapters in that book are bad, and you haven’t made an effort to show anything I’ve said is wrong. I think people can judge for themselves who in these exchanges are actually trying to contribute.

        Incidentally, while I wouldn’t care to comment on writing style/quality, my eBook doesn’t have silly reference mistakes, misleading figures or basic factual errors. That puts it above Istvan’s work. And it doesn’t rely on completely inappropriate methodologies, nonsensical assumptions and tons of obvious mistakes. That puts it above pretty much anything Tol has ever done.

        Of course, me pointing out these problems in their work hasn’t lead to anything. After all, no matter how serious a problem might be, pointing it out is just “nitpicking.”

      • Don Monfort

        Branadoon keeps whining and parading the same tired and tattered strawman:

        “Mark Silbert, you portrayed me as having dismissed a book without even looking at it.”

        You know that Mark never said “without even looking at it”. Just stop it, junior. You are making a fool of yourself. And don’t forget that Rud is a Harvard man, even though he has stopped paying his dues. What institution of higher learning did your friend webby say that you matriculated from?

    • Steven Mosher

      Focus is good.
      Learn from Ross.

      • Focus is good.
        Learn from Ross.

        Steven makes an excellent point. Only someone with laser-like focus can see the benefits of calling Wagner a “groveling, terrified coward.”

      • I sometimes wonder if Steven Mosher is funny on purpose or by accident. This is a guy who will run from any conversation the moment points are made he finds inconvenient, telling me to focus. If Mosher would take his own advice, maybe he and his pals wouldn’t be criticized so much.

        It’s a lot easier to accuse people of fraud when they run from every inconvenient exchange than when they actually focus on resolving disagreements.

      • Steven Mosher

        Joshua. Ross has focus. That doesn’t preclude him from saying stupid things.
        His focus on the temperature record and on proxies for example got him published. Other people just as bright as Ross haven’t published because they flit from tol to cook to Mcintyre to mosher to Mann. They never make a difference because they lack focus.. And follow through. I could offer them this free advice one hundred more times and they would still miss the underlying complement. I actually want them to make a difference because I believe that they can.

    • It’s amazing how John Cook launched himself as a leading spokesman for climate change, and is the one who spearheaded the “97%” mantra. He was literally a cartoonist before becoming a global warming pundit. He is not a scientist, his title; “Climate Communications Fellow for the Global change Institute at the University of Queensland”, is honorary. It sure sounds better than former cartoonist.

      • McKitrick recommends a very interesting essay by Durante with regards to Cook’s methodology towards the 97% for which he outright judges to be a scam: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-art-of-evasion

      • Sorry I misspelled name, Duarte, not Durante

      • Duarte:
        1) We learned that Cook included psychology, social science, public survey, and engineering papers in their “consensus”. This after they explicitly said in their paper that social science and surveys of people’s views were not included as climate papers. Chalk up another false claim. But, since they included a bunch of invalid papers, this means their author survey included the authors of those papers. This in turn means we can know longer speak of the authors’ self-ratings percentages – those figures have no meaning anymore, given that we don’t know how many were from psychologists, sociologists, pollsters, and engineers.

        2) I pointed out in the report that their counting method is invalid because they count mitigation and impacts papers that have no obvious disconfirming counterparts. For example, if an engineering paper counts as endorsement because it mentions climate on its way to discussing an engineering project, how would an engineering paper count as rejection? By not mentioning climate? If a paper about TV coverage of climate news counts as endorsement (in contradiction of their stated criteria), what sort of study of TV coverage would count as rejection? One that doesn’t mention climate? An analysis of Taco Bell commercials? Where’s the opportunity for disconfirmation? There’s no natural rejection counterpart to such categorization (it won’t matter if you find a mitigation paper that they counted as rejection — this is about the systematic bias, and the endorsements will be far greater than the rejections here as a result.) This all means we won’t care about the authors’ self-ratings, because of this systematic selection bias in the method (anything that biases the selection of articles biases the subsequent pool of authors rating those articles.)

        I also pointed out that we can’t validly measure consensus by excluding the vast majority of actual climate science papers that do not take polar positions of endorsement or rejection, which is what they did. Consensus cannot exclude neutrality. We can’t assume that neutrality represents a consensus, as they do. And we probably can’t count papers to begin with. This is all in the report.

        3) Pointing at squirrels is never good when a study has been rebuked for fraud or invalid methods, both of which are the case here. You cannot redeem the malpractice in the first part of the study — all their false statements about their methods, the invalidity and meaninglessness of their results — by talking about a completely different part of the study. That’s pure evasion. They need to answer for what they did.

        4) There are serious questions about their literature search, such as how it excluded everything Dick Lindzen has done since 1997. There are no results without figuring out what’s going on with that search, how it excluded all the modern work of a seminal lukewarm climate scientist. You can’t just run a lit search based on a couple of terms and then declare that you’ve got a valid, representative sample of studies. No way. Science can’t be so haphazard – you have to try. There’s work involved. New methods need to be validated. We can’t begin to talk about percentages and numbers without first establishing that our data is valid, this this literature search is valid (and dealing with all the other issues, the first of which is the fraud.) The search issue will interact with point 2 above. Validating the search will require careful thinking, testing, etc. Some of the methodological meta-analysis literature will have guidelines. How to do a valid search for this purpose is a nontrivial issue – nothing that happens after the search matters if the search isn’t valid. You have to figure out if there are selection effects, what you’re including, what you’re excluding, especially with respect to your hypotheses, what happened to Lindzen’s papers, and so forth — you don’t just run a search and start rating papers. This is science, not numerology.

      • Don Monfort

        That should be “Climate Alarmism PR Flack for the Global change Institute at the University of Queensland”. When he gets indicted they will claim they never heard of him.

      • Here’s a link to his original “About” page: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213042858/http://www.skepticalscience.com/page.php?p=3
        If you go there now it’s completely whitewashed.

        This link has plenty of citations and chronology of how he advanced himself:
        http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html

        It’s astonishing he gets away with it, that the scientific community didn’t destroy this fraud early on before it reached this point. Now it’s an indictment on a grand scale and the truth dare not be revealed it seems.

  3. Steven Mosher

    “But even before Broockman, Kalla, and Aronow published their report, LaCour’s results were so impressive that, on their face, they didn’t make sense. Jon Krosnick, a Stanford social psychologist who focuses on attitude change and also works on issues of scientific transparency, says that he hadn’t heard about the study until he was contacted by a “This American Life” producer who described the results to him over the phone. “Gee,” he replied, “that’s very surprising and doesn’t fit with a huge literature of evidence. It doesn’t sound plausible to me.” A few clicks later, Krosnick had pulled up the paper on his computer. “Ah,” he told the producer, “I see Don Green is an author. I trust him completely, so I’m no longer doubtful.” (Some people I spoke to about this case argued that Green, whose name is, after all, on the paper, had failed in his supervisory role. I emailed him to ask whether he thought this was a fair assessment. “Entirely fair,” he responded. “I am deeply embarrassed that I did not suspect and discover the fabrication of the survey data and grateful to the team of researchers who brought it to my attention.” He declined to comment further for this story.)”

    Issues: Note the reaction of the expert. He sees a paper that is at odds with the consensus. What does he know? Either the paper is correct, or the consensus is correct. he can at this point make a pragmatic decision to reject the paper without even reading it. It would be a warranted rational decision. One can simply reject novel results on their face. This decision, like all decisions has a probability of being wrong. Instead of trusting this reaction, he notes a single expert on the by line. This appeal to authority
    is also perfectly rational. And here he makes the pragmatic decision to remove his doubt.

    next issue is the co author. Will he get the Wegman treatment?

    Fun set of issues

    • davideisenstadt

      The pragmatic decision would be to suspend judgment until he had read the paper…until then, he would be forming an opinion based irrelevant factors ….the authority of the “supervising” author…the prevailing consensus and so on…to offer an opinion on something he had not read is simply incorrect.
      Mosh: Im surprised you dont see it this way.
      whats so hard about saying “I haven read the article; I will get back to you when I have.”?

      • Steven Mosher

        You still don’t get it.
        There is nothing hard about saying that.
        There is also nothing hard or irrational about saying that the paper is wrong on it’s face.

        When you read a skeptic saying he has disproved the GHG effect you know that he is wrong. You don’t even have to read another word or find his error.

    • SM, with all due respect, you have overplayed your usual weakhand.
      The paper’s data was faked; The poling firm was NOT engaged. The paper has been retracted by Science.
      Pseudointelligence is no substitute for the real deal. Thanks for your demonstration proof of same here.

      • Don Monfort

        Ridiculous comment, Rud. Read harder, before Mosher get’s back. That’s all the help I am willing to give a Harvard man, who won’t cough up his contributions.

      • Steven Mosher

        Read harder rud.
        Yes the paper is fake.
        You could assert that without reading it.
        If I told you that 2+2=5 and gave you 100 pages of proof would you bother reading it. Would you be obligated to find the error. Or could you react as this guy did initially and say… It has to be wrong.

      • Steve Mosher,

        I agree. If I saw a paper titled “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature”, I wouldn’t bother reading further.

        It has to be wrong, doesn’t it?

    • I see the real question here as being why would so many people belive in this report including Green and pder reviewers if it ‘Was unbelievable on it’s face’. My answer would be that they so wanted to believe it to be true.

    • It seems that Studies based on Surveys are just fraught with pitfalls.

      They could save the effort and cut straight to the Models.

    • What would have been the reaction if Broockman were not, himself, gay?

  4. Q: What’s the probability of Houston having a once-in-a-century flood in a given year?

    Q: What’s the probability of some city in the US having a once-in-a-century flood in a given year?

    Q: What’s the probability that Bill Nye doesn’t know the difference between the above questions?

    • Danny Thomas

      Until this personal record, and U.S. record is come close to, no little one or two or 5 day itty bitty 6″ inch rainfall events in the little state of Texas is any more impressive than a cow peeing on a flat rock: http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/the-greatest-24hour-deluge-in/52828

    • fizzymagic | May 29, 2015 at 6:49 pm

      I moved into a new subdivision in the south Louisiana area in 1970 and for the next 3 years had a “once in a century” flood. New bridges and other restrictions downstream blocked water flow while developments, parking lots, and other significant watershed changes upstream increased runoff. Can’t compare yesteryear flooding to flooding today.

    • It’s odd, this tendency to forebode future climate from present catastrophes. Eastern Australia’s driest year was 1902, its wettest was 1950. While the half-century before 1947 was on the dry side overall, and the 1950s found an echo in the Big Wet of the mid-1970s, there were floods and boom years in that drier period and shocking droughts post 1950.

      And what is it with this “record” thing? Texas wilted during the 1950s while Eastern Australia soaked and broke all kinds of flood and rainfall records. Then Texas greened up in the late 50s and Australia entered its longest drought (though not its worst). But if you think there’s a neat ENSO balance operating there, both regions wilted during the 1930s. Maybe it’s a PDO thing or IOD thing. Or maybe we dunno. Don’t forget what flood did to China in the 1930s – makes all our climate probs look small. Confused? We’re meant to be.

      For some reason, around here we got about 19″ of rain in two days back in 1963. In 1929 we copped about 22″ in three days. Yet our worst flood was in 1949, when the rain fell somewhere else. These things happen. They don’t mean. They just ARE.

  5. Dr. Curry, I imagine your plate is full but if you are looking for posting ideas, AR5 Chapter 8 defines “Effective Radiative Forcing” ( as opposed to Ineffective Radiative Forcing ).

    WRT ERF,on slide 4 of this IPCC PDF, Sherwood goes on to say:

    Forcing agents such as carbon dioxide can directly affect cloud cover and precipitation, without any change in global temperature. AR5 recognizes this for the first time, and designates the total forcing including these effects as the effective radiative forcing.”

    I have seen very little discussion of this in the peer reviewed literature or elsewhere and think the topic would benefit from your reflections.

    • David Wojick

      One wonders if the ERF of increased CO2 can cause cooling?

      • Ya – it’s really a loaded concept and I’m surprised there’s no more discussion of it than there is. Conceivably, ‘ERF’ could be zero even though ‘RF’ is the nominal 3.7W/m^2.

        I’m not sure I buy it all, including:

        “Nontrivial fraction of precipitation changes by 2100 driven directly by CO2.”

        If I understand the thought process, this is not a feedback because it’s not a response to temperature change.

      • Conceivably, ‘ERF’ could be zero even though ‘RF’ is the nominal 3.7W/m^2.

        Or, as you point out, could ERF be even less than zero?

    • I wonder what he means by CO2 directly affecting clouds and precipitation even without the warming. The effective forcing is certainly applicable to aerosols, but CO2 and GHGs? What is the mechanism?

  6. It is gratifying to see such a prestigious publication as Nature accepting a paper that concludes what many skeptics have been saying quite awhile. It starts with the first step.

    • Another day, another brief glimpse of the future.

      Does your ability apply to other graphs, say, financial movements?

      It seems odd that you can only foresee the GMST future, and nothing else. I would be most interested in accurate, accountable, forecasts of useful things, if you have any you wish to share.

      • They claim something is going to go down because the AMO is about to go down. The last time the AMO went down, the GMST didn’t even notice it.

        Because ACO2 kicked its butt.

      • JCH,

        Yes, I understand you believe you can predict the future. Can you do so for anything useful?

        Do you understand my question? Should I ask Steven Mosher to rephrase it to make it more comprehensible?

      • Okay, I am not predicting the future. The people who claim the negative phase of the AMO will reduce the GMST are predicting the future.

        I’m skeptical.

      • JCH,

        I see. Who are “The people” who claim to be able to predict the future? Do you have some names? Do you think they can predict anything useful, or do they just guess?

        Like you, I am skeptical of anyone who claims they can predict the future any better than you or I. We are in agreement.

    • JCH here is where I am having trouble. I want the warm phase of the AMO. I want the warm water going North. The Atlantic overturning circulation is declining and the AMO is moving to a negative phase, they say. That’s not supposed to happen yet. A sustained positive PDO seems to be best. Perhaps it’s warm water going North, where it’s supposed to be to cool the Earth, similar to in the Pacific.

  7. The discussion around global warming seems to have shifted a wee bit.

    Initially, global warming was supposed to be due to the “greenhouse effect”, which turned out to be a misnomer. Even the most ardent Warmist finally acknowledged that the warming, supposedly due to CO2 in the atmosphere, did not relate to the method of operation of a physical greenhouse.

    Obviously, no climatologist bothered to check this minor fact early on.

    However, the name was kept. What else could they call it?

    We have moved along since then. Warmists now push the line that man obviously affects the environment in which he lives, and therefore changes the climate. This proposition seems to be unarguable from any reasonable viewpoint.

    What is arguable, though, is the associated Warmist assumption that man made CO2 causes the planet to warm.

    A short example follows –

    A thermometer exposed to the direct rays of a fire under suitable conditions will indicate a temperature rise correlated to the amount of CO2 generated by the fire.

    At least two salient points arise. The air temperature around the thermometer will not necessarily change. John Tyndall showed this experimentally over 100 years ago, and we should all notice that putting up a sunshade “cools things down”, in spite of the fact that the air under the shade has not changed its temperature.

    So the air temperature may tell you nothing about the amount of CO2 generated by the fire, or the fire’s heat output.

    Another point is that is that the CO2 is a byproduct of the combustion process which causes the heat. It is produced after the heat is produced. Should it be drawn off and sequestered immediately, it has no perceptible effect on the amount of heat generated by the fire.

    So we have one cause of warming, which is obvious. Burning lots of stuff. Producing vast amount of both heat and CO2. Now the Warmists may say that all this heat immediately leaves the planet, and vanishes into the cold sink surrounding the Earth. But how can this be? Surely the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are supposed to trap, store, or accumulate LWIR? Or does CO2 ignore heat from objects heated by man, and only interact with heat from objects heated by the Sun?

    And, in fact, measurements both close and remote, show heat, and thus warming, from human activities, occurring 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

    And now to a second, and different, salient point.

    Clouds occur. When climate changes, I assume (reasonably, I hope,) that cloud cover also changes, in line with the changing climate. I might assume that a previously green Sahara, say, had more clouds than an arid, hot present day Sahara. So might it be possible that a change in the cloud regime over temperature measuring instruments might indicate warming as cloud reduction allowed more insolation to reach the surface? Clouds reflect most incoming wavelengths up to the millimetre range quite nicely. This range includes UV, visible, and IR light.

    So rather than continue to push a theory that cannot be demonstrated, and for which no experimental evidence exists, and where all attempts to show the “greenhouse effect” instead show the opposite, maybe other reasons should be sought to explain observations, using scientific methods.

    The “greenhouse effect”, in fact, seems to have stopped working, to the chagrin of the Warmists. They have to resort to ever more complicated explanations, which become curiouser and curiouser by the day.

    In conclusion, climate affected by man? Sure. Implications for humanity? Not so sure at all. Who knows?

    • Steven Mosher

      Years of skeptics theorizing and this is the best they have.
      Good luck.

    • Steven Mosher,

      And what part of observed fact do you choose to deny?

      A highly intelligent and scientific chap like yourself, with loads of technical experience, wouldn’t just be making unsubstantiated assertions, would you?

      You’ll have to dumb it down a bit, of course.

      Just keep your facts simple, and don’t use words of more than five syllables. With your English qualifications, I won’t need to suggest that you keep your explanations clear, concise, and correct, will I?

      There are a couple of minor points. Nowhere did I mention a theory, merely observations, and some experimental verifications to explain certain things.

      Another point it that I am neither a skeptic, nor even a denier when it comes to the chaotic nature of climate, as stated by the IPCC.

      Finally, there is only one of me. Presumably dumber than you, so you might care to expand on your implication that I am a skeptic, and have presented a theory.

      Or do you mean something else entirely, but you forgot to dumb it down for us common folk who don’t believe in things that don’t exist?

    • The CO2 forcing is 2 W/m2. If you take the total over the earth and convert that to heat per person that is over 100kW per person on earth. So if we all burned 100kW all the time, we would be doing something similar to what CO2 is doing all the time. This is why the combustion argument is fatally flawed. It doesn’t stand up to the putting-in-the-numbers test.

    • Jim D,

      I am merely pointing out simple observations. If you wish to claim that creating CO2 by burning stuff, doesn’t create heat, then you may have a theory to support your contention.

      If you are claiming that the heat created by burning stuff cannot have any effect on thermometers, go for it.

      I believe there is no CO2 forcing. This is a theory with no theoretical basis, experimental support, or observational verification. Apart from that, it’s a fine theory.

      Just as a matter of interest, what does your theory say about falling temperatures at night, or in the winter? Does the CO2 forcing vary depending on how brightly the Sun is shining? H2O is a more significant greenhouse apparently, but the highest surface temperatures on Earth occur in arid deserts, which by definition suffer from an acute lack of the greenhouse gas supposedly responsible for the most warming.

      I must admit I would be a little skeptical about your figures, without some experimental support.

      I assume you have plenty.

      • I can see that you are having some trouble comprehending.

      • Jim D,

        I see you are not prepared to support your theory. I thought it was supposed to explain global warming not presently occurring.

        Oh well, maybe I was wrong. Or maybe the non existence of unicorns explains the non existence of global warming, by a chance of around 60%. That is, according to a mathematician who describes himself as a climate scientist, so it must be true.

        Or are you skeptical? I would be.

      • MF, as I said, you were having a lot of trouble with my previous answer, so we will wait for you to digest that first.

      • “This is a theory with no theoretical basis, experimental support, or observational verification.”

        The theoretical basis lies here

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

        The experimental evidence is here

        http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/jang/genchem/infrared.htm

        And the observational verification lies here

        http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/eoc/special_topics/teach/sp_climate_change/p_keeling_curve

        and here

        http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

        There is a theoretical basis for the greenhouse effect, backed by experimental evidence and observations of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere as well as increased global temperatures verify those.

      • bobdroege,

        Your Wiki reference has no relevance. It contains nothing of which I am unaware, and certainly nothing which supports the existence of the GHE.

        Likewise, your reference to the fact that gases (or indeed all matter) can be heated is not surprising. There is no reference to the existence of the GHE in your reference.

        Your attempt to deny the hiatus, slowdown, cessation of warming, whatever you want to call it, is laudable but pointless.

        So GHE – busted, busted, busted.

        If you have something more relevant, please present it. I’m reasonably sure that the GHE theory remains just that, but I am prepared to change my views if new facts are produced.

      • Mike, I guess you don’t realize that the CO2 molecule is a harmonic oscillator.

      • bobdroege,

        And so are many others. Left to itself without an external energy source, CO2, like any other matter, will progressively lose energy and move to a minimum quantum energy state – nominally 0K. It will not magically apply energy to itself and stabilise at any other temperature, will it?

        What is your point?

      • My point is the greenhouse effect is real.

        But CO2 in our atmosphere is not isolated and can get the energy it radiates both from absorbing IR energy as well as from collisions with other atoms and molecules in the atmosphere.

        deal

    • No, but maybe you do believe his its-all-combustion theory.

    • Jim D,

      I am not proposing a theory. I don’t need a theory to explain a lack of current global warming. I don’t need a theory to explain the lack of unicorns, either.

      If you choose to believe in CO2 induced global warming, zero point free energy, or perpetual motion, you may propose all the theories you like.

      I’ll probably believe them when you can provide reproducible demonstrations of their existence. Your belief is not enough to induce me to change my mind.

      But thanks anyway. You have amply demonstrated your inability to answer any questions about your odd CO2 theory, merely repeating assertions that appear to be without scientific foundation.

    • Mike Flynn, of course you are not proposing a theory. Those are well beyond your capabilities. You just want to say “no” to a theory that you clearly don’t understand well enough to judge either way.

      • catweazle666

        “You just want to say “no” to a theory that you clearly don’t understand well enough to judge either way.”

        Oh dear.

        You’re funny!

      • catweazle, (broken thread due to Don M’s efforts) but I will answer anyway. You seem to have a higher regard for Mike Flynn’s knowledge than I if you are defending him on this.

    • Jim D,

      That’s why I suggested to you, previously, that you might care to engage a supremely intelligent communicator of Steven Mosher standard, to dumb down the theory.

      That way, I might be able to appreciate the subtleties of the theory that predict temperatures remaining static, while CO2 levels keep rising.

      I suppose it must be to do with missing heat, or Oscillations, Perturbations, Overturnings or the Poles (maybe the Russians)?

      As you can see, I don’t understand. I’m obviously far too dumb to understand that the Earth is warming, at the same time that record cold temperatures are being recorded in the Antarctic.

      I suppose, now that the science is settled, and the IPCC wg1 has said that future climate states can’t be predicted, I’ll just leave you to disagree with them. Not me, I agree with the IPCC!

      Maybe you’re one of those deniers, but I wouldn’t be smart enough to work that out, would I?

      • You are misquoting the IPCC as usual, denier trick often employed, in a misguided attempt to sound like a sophisticated intellectual.

      • bobdroege,

        You are probably right. It’s well known by Warmists that cut and paste from an IPCC document changes text along the way.

        I’m sure if you cut and paste the same text, it will come out completely different. Give it a try. I’m no sophisticated intellectual, but I don’t think that makes any difference to what is in the IPPC wg1 document that I quoted from.

        So what part of my IPPC quote do you disagree with?

      • The IPCC says “long term” prediction is not possible and what I hear you saying is prediction is not possible.

        ” IPCC wg1 has said that future climate states can’t be predicted”

        Tell the truth now, this was not a cut and paste?

        It is the dividing line between possible prediction and impossible prediction, which we can call the Lyapunov time. That is the crux of the biscuit, chaotic does not mean unpredictable, it means exact solutions are not possible, which does not mean unpredictable.

        The orbits of the planets in the solar system are also chaotic, by your reasoning solar eclipses would not be predictable.

      • bobdroege,

        I’m not sure what you hear me saying, but here is what the IPCC wrote –

        “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

        I agree with what the IPCC wrote.if you don’t, I presume you have reasons.

        Now all you have to do is convince the IPCC is as dumb as you think I am. After all, I am agreeing with the IPCC’s written words. Does this mean hey are

      • This introduces the difference between prediction and projection. Read on.

      • Jim D,

        bobdroege said predictions. The IPCC said predictions. Are you saying both he and the IPCC are wrong, or only one?

      • The quote is from the IPCC TAR. It says you can’t do predictions of climate for those reasons, so you have to do probabilistic ensembles. Here read the rest for yourself. They explain it all.
        http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm

      • Fat finger again. Sorry.

        Does this mean that they are as dumb as me, or that I am as smart as them? I accept that you are smarter than all of us put together.

        However, I wonder whether you are confusing a Lyapunov exponent with something else.

        In any case, you might care to define what you have calculated your Lyapunov time for the Earth’s climate system, defining the time interval between “possible predictions and impossible predictions”. You might care to define your terms so that I have the faintest idea of whether you know what you’re saying or not. Feel free to dumb your answer down, if think I need it.

        From Wikipedia (and I agree) –

        “Generally the calculation of Lyapunov exponents, . . . cannot be carried out analytically, and in most cases one must resort to numerical techniques.”

        You may disagree, of course.

        You may have results which contradict the following results, which relate generally to noisy reasonably complex chaotic systems.

        “All these indicate firmly that, the use of Lyapunov exponents for seizure prediction is practically impossible as the brain dynamical system generating the ECG signals is more complicated than low-dimensional chaotic systems, and is noisy.”

        Over to you.

      • I am only smart enough to bracket the Lyapunov time for the climate system as being between 43 years and 50 million years.

        Again, I agree that exact solution for Lyapunov times or exponents is not possible and anyalytical methods must be used.

        Perhaps that logic could lead to reasons ensembles of climate models are used, are you following?

        When faced with the impossible, sometimes you just have to find another way.

        You bring up seizures, I have been following recent news developments on the treatment of same. Predictability is an issue.

      • bobdroege,

        So you agree that if the Earth is four and a half billion years old, the climate is in a chaotic state, both 43 years and 50 million years having elapsed some time ago.

        The problem with ensembles is as I have stated before. If 100 models (or runs of one model) give different answers, then at least 99% are wrong. Averaging 99 wrong answers does not give a correct answer.

        That is what we are seeing, as more and more IPCC model projections, predictions, (call them what you will), diverge from reality.

        They possess zero utility. By all means find another way. You may accidentally find a way to predict the next fall of a coin, or the spin of a roulette wheel. These are very easy predictions, compared with climate. But I’m only guessing.

      • It is clear as day, you have posted a quote from the IPCC, which I agree with, and you have posted your remembrance of the post, which I quoted above, which I disagree with.

        To be even more clear, this is your quote that I disagree with.

        “” IPCC wg1 has said that future climate states can’t be predicted””

        That disagrees with the above quote

        “In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

        In a previous thread, I posted this source

        http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~eps5/writing_assignment/CLIMATE_BKGD/Sawyer_Nature_1972.pdf

        If Sawyer was playing 501 darts, that would be the equivalent of doubling out from 158.

        I give it to you to find some nice choice quotes in there as well.

        It is loaded.

        The point I am trying to make is that chaotic systems can be predicted out to the Lyapunov time. How long that is for the earths climate is an open question.

      • bobdroege,

        What has darts got to do with what you said?

        Tell me, how far in advance can climate be predicted? A completely unknown time, perhaps? What, a day, a week, a decade, an eon? I suppose you think a climate scientist can make a more accurate prediction than a twelve year old child?

        I’m not so sure, and I’m willing to wager you aren’t either.

        I’ll leave you to it. You may declare you won, if you wish

      • I am saying predictions, or projections for that matter, understanding the difference, are possible for climate, more than 43 years and less than 50 million years. Probably way less than 50 million, but that is based on the predictability of the solar system, earths orbit variations etc.

        As for the darts, Sawyer nailed it, he predicted that when CO2 was 25 % higher, then the temperature would be 0.6 C higher.

        Since he made that prediction before the RSS and UAH satellites were launched, you have to use one of the surface data sets to confirm that.

        So where are you in your spectrum of understanding?
        More than a 12 year old and less than a climate scientist?
        In the same boat as Me?

        I believe I have a positive balance of quatloos at the Blackboard, but she ended the games, and I never knew how much I won on the last bet made.

        There are no winners, only better understanding.

      • bobdroege,

        Well, climate scientists don’t seem to understand that the future is as discernible to a 12 year as to the finest of self proclaimed climate scientists.

        I do, so I understand more than climate scientists.

        I can’t see any evidence of climate scientists actually providing anything of any use to anyone, but I may be mistaken. I have actually provided goods and services to both Governments and members of the public, for payment, and my customers have given me repeat business.

        It is obvious that I have been of more benefit to humanity than all the climate scientists put together.

        If every climate scientist in the world were to vanish in a puff of malodorous smoke, who would be the worse for it? No one, of course! On the other hand . . .

        I admit to one failing – albeit a minor one – and that is being excessively modest. Oh well, we all have our crosses to bear.

      • So Bob,

        If, according to IPCC, “long term prediction of future climate states is not possible” are you arguing that perhaps short term predictions are?

        Because I know there are a lot of folks who would pay good money for accurate short term predictions.

  8. 97% values result of biased recursive sampling. Paper should have been tossed.

  9. Pingback: Week in review – science edition | Enjeux énergies et environnement

  10. “Just like steroids make a baseball player stronger, climate change EXACERBATES many of our weather extremes, making many of them, on average, worse than they would have been naturally.”

    Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418955/scientists-dont-actually-know-whats-causing-extreme-weather-ian-tuttle

    I think this is what the theory says will happen in a warming world with more moisture in the atmosphere. More heat waves, more heavy precipitation events and that the exacerbation will be based on regional climates.

    • I wonder how long Jon Nielson-Gammon will keep his state climatologist job in Texas if he keeps speaking truth to power like this. Yes, rain extremes are getting more common, and yes it is an expected part of climate change, and yes planning for climate change should include this factor.

      • Jim D – he’s nimble on his feet. Dessler is at the same school. Who ever dreamed Texas A&M would became a beacon of climate reason? When I was in college one of the crazies down there tried to kill one of our cheerleaders with his sword. She stepped on the field of honor. When he returned from suspension the student body elected him President of something. The school is in College Station, but it should be in Wakkko.

      • Jim D

        Define rain extremes and document the study or a time series graph will do. I’m counting on you to come through, just like your botched up attempt to explain Antarctica’s contribution to GMSL.

      • cerescokid, maybe this one will convince you. It is one of many such indicators.
        http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/more-u.s.-downpours

      • I’m sure the Californians will be delighted with the news.

      • Jim D

        I will ignore the absence of imprimatur from a government agency for your graph and not even ask if it was photoshopped from a mom & pop operation in Mumbai. You are too good a sport to do that.

        But if it represents a good faith effort by whoever it is that prepared the document, what is striking is how it mirrors the temperature trend….. even with an apparent pause-or a refuge from the deluge, so to speak.

      • cerescokid, you apparently did not read the text that goes with the pictures. Yes, it is not surprising that it follows the temperature. Clausius-Clapeyron has that effect. It is just physics. It puts to rest one of the skeptical talking points at least.

      • Jimd

        Looking back to the British records from the 12th century onwards, it is very noticeable how the extremes of the past were much worse than the extremes of the present. Extremes of rain are the most common feature of past climates, much more so than snow. The destruction of bridges, mills and entire villages are frequently recorded, as are associatd famines as either crops couldnt be planted or they were swept away before harvest.

        The greatest extremes have been during those transitional periods between extreme cold and extreme warmth which typified certain periods of the intermittent little ice age.

        Tonyb

      • The data says we are moving those bell curves and that means the tails amplify in probability the most. Rare events during the millennium will become many times more common. Maybe a once-a-millennium event becomes a hundred-year event.

      • Jimd

        We’ve seen it all before, and much worse.no wonder there are so many sceptics when such extravagant claims are made about the current climate which don’t bear too much scrutiny.

        Tonyb

      • climatereason, it is not “reason” to disregard completely what the statistics are telling you about trends in the last century especially nearer the end of it. Reason dictates paying attention, then understanding why.

      • Jimd

        If you look at the longer perspective we have seen it all before and worse.

        There is no point in anyone saying ‘ unprecedented’ or that extremes are much worse and more frequent than ever before unless they can demonstrate that by looking further back than the 20 th century. The 20 th century is merely yesterday in climate terms.

        If you can demonstrate that the weather or climate is much worse or more frequent than at any time over the last few thousand years then we might start to take notice.

        Tonyb

      • climatereason, how many 1000-year events would you expect to see in the last 30 years? Not many, right? Even if their probability increased by ten, the odds are against them. You are dismissing robust background changes such as the rainfall I showed that are signs that things are shifting in a particular direction on the grounds that we haven’t seen a 1000-year event yet. Your comparison is not a good way to look at extreme events just from mathematical arguments.

      • Jim D | May 30, 2015 at 7:02 pm |
        climatereason, how many 1000-year events would you expect to see in the last 30 years?

        The temperatures get warm about every 1000 years. The correct standard is a 4000 year event.

        If the sea level and temperature isn’t the highest it has been in 4000 years there isn’t any point in making the “extreme climate” because it is simply false.

      • You’re right, Jim D
        Clausius-Clapeyron sees to it that air at -19C holds more moisture than air at -20C, therefore the bell curve has shifted and we;re going to see a lot more extreme downpours over the Sahara.

      • PA, that tactic of using scraps of rumors of the fuzzy uncertain past to discount the present certain measured trends is a typical form of denial to accept what is happening to the climate now.

      • peter, you almost have it right, but think a little harder. If it is just warming where there is no rain, that is not going to help bring rain by itself. It is only where there is rain and warming, you get more rain. Clausius-Clapeyron by itself doesn’t change the relative humidity to give you clouds. Anyway, good try.

      • Jim D, so you agree that it doesn’t really follow the temperature

      • No, I agree with the link. Warmer where it is raining means more rain when it rains. Clausius-Clapeyron. Physics.

      • …except that where it’s warmer and where the rain falls are no necessarily the same places.

      • …and those places are sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler, sometimes a lot warmer, sometimes a lot cooler, or maybe warm or cool for longer or shorter, but, on average, maybe very slightly warmer – it doesn’t necessarily add up to much more rainfall on average.

      • Certainly Texas is warmer and rainier, so it fits in that kind of place.

      • 2011 – La Nina – Texas Drought
        2015 – El Nino – Texas Flood

        El Nino year April-May-June precipitation anomalies – note Texas:
        http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/ENSO/composites/elnino.amj.precip.gif

      • Jim D, I’ll rephrase that – Texas is sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler, sometimes a lot warmer, sometimes a lot cooler, or maybe warm or cool for longer or shorter, but, on average, maybe very slightly warmer – it doesn’t necessarily add up to much more rainfall on average.

      • …or indeed more downpours.

        Also, as you’re talking specifically about Texas, how about producing the relevant precipitation and temperature data for Texas.

    • “Texas’s quick transition from drought hellscape to underwater theme park was egged on by both El Niño and climate change.”
      Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418955/scientists-dont-actually-know-whats-causing-extreme-weather-ian-tuttle
      Texas, El Niño and climate change as living entities, with the latter two talking to the former. Could be. Climate change used to be climate but now has a mischievous alter ego.

      • The prior record for the month of May occurred in 2004, an El Nino year on the way to setting up 2005 as the warmest year EVAhhhhh!!!!!

    • Craig Loehle

      The meme that warming will make wet wetter and dry drier comes from models of the tropical rain belts. Models say the wet tropics will get wetter and the dry sub-tropics drier. However, the models do not agree on this phenomenon and it does not occur in the temperate zone.

    • Joseph,

      “Just like adding more sugar to your tea makes it sweeter . . . ”
      – makes about as much sense.

      Do Warmists have an inexhaustible supply of irrelevant and pointless analogies tucked away with the hidden heat?

      An actual fact, or a bit of science would help. Predictions and computer model outputs are not facts, in my view.

  11. ulriclyons

    “Climate change blamed as thousands die in Indian heat”

    The wrong sign of change to be associated with increased forcing of the climate. Whether it’s an El Nino, a positive Indian Dipole, or a warm AMO, they are all related to negative NAO/AO, increased greenhouse gas forcing doesn’t do that. Increased forcing of the climate would make inland India wetter and cooler:
    http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/coastal-temperature-stations/india-and-pakistan.php

  12. “The story of the young researcher who uncovered the fraudulent gay marriage study”

    From the article”…(It was) reported that a brief conversation about marriage equality with a canvasser who revealed that he or she was gay had a big, lasting effect on the voters’ views, as measured by separate online surveys administered before and after the conversation.”

    My statistics is limited to an undergrad class meant for social sciences majors. And most of that I’ve forgotten. But who needs it? This is entirely absurd on its face for anyone living on planet earth, and should have been seen as such..

    It reminds me of the Rolling Stone piece on the supposes rape at UVA. Another obvious fraud. The libs are absolutely tone deaf when it comes to hearing the truth.

  13. ulriclyons

    New paper in Nature predicts climate may cool .5C for “a number of decades” due to natural ocean oscillations:
    “The observations of AMOC from the RAPID array, over the past ten years, show that it is declining. As a result, we expect the AMO is moving to a negative phase, which will result in cooler surface waters. This is consistent with observations of temperature in the North Atlantic.”

    That is backwards. If you look carefully at the RAPID data series, the low AMOC events clearly occur during negative North Atlantic Oscillation episodes. Increased negative NAO will only warm the AMO. You can see the warming pulses to the AMO following El Nino conditions, which are associated with negative NAO:
    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1995

  14. By comparison, global surface warming is estimated at 0.5ºC per century – a rate twice as slow. …

    The 20th century only warmed 0.5°C?

      • That is interesting. There are a lot of global warmers that seem to think it warmed more than that. 0.65°C for the 20th or a 0.5°C/century is down in the dirt and almost a “don’t care”.

        What exactly are the global warmers getting so lathered about?

      • catweazle666

        “What exactly are the global warmers getting so lathered about?”

        Religion.

      • Jim D | May 30, 2015 at 10:23 pm |
        PA, temperatures lead CO2 in the glacial cycles because they are caused by something else called the Milankovitch cycle. Check it out. It is well known.

        Well, I am aware of Milankovitch – but feel there are solar/terrestrial interactions that we are missing. The numbers and trends, to me, look like there one or more processes that we are missing or don’t understand.

        The GHG down dwelling IR should be changing about 2.4 W/m2 to 3 W/m2 between warm and cold ice age modes. This isn’t enough to force the change from warm to cold and vice versa, but it will act as hysteresis to help keep the earth in its current mode.

      • Jim D, I have to admit I only browsed the mega thread on this a week ago and like you I think there is a middle ground. In glaciation-cycles past I believe CO2 was being controlled by the average ocean surface temp. There is little evidence in the reconstructions to show CO2 accounted for half the warming by positive feedback, as ATTP claims (and probably Real Climate). M-Cycles are not the entire answer for the ice ages either or the reconstructions would show nice gradual waves in sync with the cycles. They don’t. So, a puzzle exists. Ocean dynamics is the big suspect. But cosmic rays, solar fluctuation, volcanic and cosmic collision triggers are all in the lineup too.

        CO2 sinks into the ocean at the cool high latitudes and emits from the tropics. The higher the average global ocean surface temp the more the steady state is shifted in favor of higher atmospheric CO2, all other factors being equal. But, when volcanoes or humans are shifting the atmosphere concentration beyond that point then the oceans are again a net sink. All reactions are sped up with heat so the warmer ocean going to more quickly seek its new steady state, whatever that is. Also, the fertilizer effect should be increasing the fast-cycle sink. But, whereas plants have an optimal CO2 level, which as approached will slow that increase of sink, the chemical sync of the oceans will continue to accelerate. I have seen it voiced that today’s levels of CO2 emission would likely produce a steady-state against the ocean sink at 450-550ppm. That sounds reasonable but I don’t know. The other questions are how much cheap fossil fuel is there and how quickly technology for alternatives will come online. How bad is warming really? Would a multi-trillion-dollar mitigation effort in climate be more productive than the trillion-dollar Obama stimulus effort of 2009? Remember the shovel ready jobs? Cash for clunkers? Solyndra, etc..?

        But, when I hear screaming righteous anger that the science is settled and any dissent is in denial or mentally unbalanced because the policies are obvious my antennae goes up for religious/ideological BS.

    • The temperature rise rate in the last 30 years is double the 20th century average. Same can be said for CO2 rise rate and sea-level rise rate. It is the trends of the trends that matter.

      • Jimd

        Firstly, climate works on centuries long cycles so merely looking at the 20 th century is an Incredibly small and pointless snapshot.

        As regards sea level rise, I have previously quoted Holgate who said that sea levels rose faster in the first half of the 20 th century than the second half, but that the differences weren’t statistically significant.

        Tonyb

      • Jim D | May 30, 2015 at 5:01 pm | Reply
        The temperature rise rate in the last 30 years is double the 20th century average. Same can be said for CO2 rise rate and sea-level rise rate. It is the trends of the trends that matter.

        Trends matter eh?

        Well… environmental absorption is growing 2.2 times as fast as emissions and at with absorption equal to 55% of emissions is currently increasing at 120% of the rate of emission in terms of GT of carbon. We are within 44 years of decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels whether we burn fossil fuels or not.
        Doesn’t seem possible to get CO2 over the 460-480 range.

      • When all of these indicators are at the highest recorded level and still rising even faster, it should be a red flag.

      • catweazle666

        “The temperature rise rate in the last 30 years is double the 20th century average.”

        According to Hadcrut4gl, 1985-2015 0.15077°C per decade, in fact.

        However, the period 1910-1939 – previous to to the commonly accepted commencement of anthropogenic influence – gives 0.133101°C per decade – also approximately double the the 20th century average of 0.0647312°C.

        So your point is?

      • catweazle, yes, a typical meme. Skeptics can’t fathom that the sun was going from a relative minimum in 1910 to a relative maximum by 1950, and that this would add to the CO2 effect. Now we are at another relative minimum but almost a degree warmer than 1910. That’s the puzzler for you people who still have no clue.

      • Jim D | May 30, 2015 at 5:25 pm |
        When all of these indicators are at the highest recorded level and still rising even faster, it should be a red flag.

        We underwent about 200 years of natural warming. Yeah it is going to be warmer than it used to be until it cools off again.

        1. The CO2 is 0.057 (5.7%) of the Cambrian CO2 level – no record there. In fact the absurdly low CO2 level has only been the norm since the Ice Age started.

        http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/images/fig_hist_1.jpg

        http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif

        2. The MWP was warmer (the sea level was 6 inches higher so it must have been warmer). The Roman period was warmer. The pre-Roman warm period whatever it was called was warmer. In fact only the cold periods between the warm periods were colder than it is today.

        3. The sea level dropped about 10 meters over the last couple of millennia so even that isn’t a record.

        The global warmers try to paint average climate as unusual or extreme for some reason.

        Huh?

      • PA, OK, you don’t want to stick with the accelerations I was talking about and prefer paleoclimate, so should I bring up the Eocene which has better matches to prospective CO2 levels exceeding 600 or 700 ppm? Sea levels 70 meters higher and temperatures up to 10 C warmer. Where does that fit in your story? Impossible? It happened, the only difference being the GHG source at that time.

      • Danny Thomas

        Jim D,

        Maybe we know less about Eocene than we do about “today”?

        “An issue arises, however, when trying to model the Eocene and reproduce the results that are found with the proxy data.[19] Using all different ranges of greenhouse gasses that occurred during the early Eocene, models were unable to produce the warming that was found at the poles and the reduced seasonality that occurs with winters at the poles being substantially warmer. The models, while accurately predicting the tropics, tend to produce significantly cooler temperatures of up to 20 °C (36 °F) underneath the actual determined temperature at the poles.[18] This error has been classified as the “equable climate problem”. To solve this problem, the solution would involve finding a process to warm the poles without warming the tropics. Some hypotheses and tests which attempt to find the process are listed below.”

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

      • The Arctic is already warming five times faster than the global mean, which is a sign of things to come. This is consistently underestimated by models, I think. Not good news for Greenland.

      • catweazle666

        “That’s the puzzler for you people who still have no clue.”

        Best you’ve got, Jimbo? Play the man, not the ball? (And no, your solar BS doesn’t cut it).

        Tut tut.

        You will have to do better than that!

      • When I say “no clue” I mean about what caused it to warm 1 C since 1910, but you took it personally.

      • Jim D | May 30, 2015 at 7:14 pm |
        PA, OK, you don’t want to stick with the accelerations I was talking about and prefer paleoclimate, so should I bring up the Eocene which has better matches to prospective CO2 levels exceeding 600 or 700 ppm? Sea levels 70 meters higher and temperatures up to 10 C warmer. Where does that fit in your story? Impossible? It happened, the only difference being the GHG source at that time.

        Well lets look at this statement:
        ” the only difference being the GHG source at that time”

        This is an absolute lie. It is a fib. It is incorrect. It is wrong. It is not true. It is not based on fact.

        The current climate is due to geometric considerations with a divided ocean, the highest subtropical mountain range in history, a semi enclosed arctic ocean, and a large isolated land mass at the south pole.

        The earth didn’t really cold until the circumpolar current got firmly established and had little or nothing to do with CO2. The only similarity between the Eocene and today is that the climate occurred on the same planet. It is hard to find anything else similar between the two periods.

      • PA, so you believe everything that the paleoclimatologists say about the Eemian, but nothing that they say about the explanation for Eocene temperatures and prior eras which went in lock step with CO2 levels. E.g.
        http://www.alpineanalytics.com/Climate/DeepTime/WebDownloadImages/CenozoicCO2-7.5w.600ppi.png

      • Oh dear. Jim D is mistaking the slope of the cycle for the slope of the long term trend line for climate – again!

      • 1940 was already at the upper end of the range of the past few centuries, then it went into a more exponential rise after that and the anomaly tripled. Not a cycle by any stretch of the imagination. More to do with this.
        http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Fig2.png

      • GMSL rise rates were affected partially by accelerated groundwater abstraction in the 2nd half of the 20th Century. Regardless of the specifics attributed to that factor, It has nothing to do with the usual contributions related to AGW. Groundwater abstraction is a wild card and until the precise amount is determined, the rest of the calculations don’t mean much.

      • http://euanmearns.com/the-vostok-ice-core-temperature-co2-and-ch4/

        The CO2 in the Eemian trailed temperature by 8K years. The “CO2 as rear echelon commando” theory violates cause and effect as it is normally practiced in the real world. The global warmers haven’t provided an adequate explanation of how this works.

        As far as the CO2 being higher that it has in a while:
        1. Mostly due to burning down rainforest.
        2. Has increased plant growth 55%.
        3. Has been the single best thing man has done to date and probably compensates for all the other bad things man has done to the planet.

        The planet was dying from CO2 starvation and man saved it. We should all be proud of this achievement.

      • Don Monfort

        Smooth it out on the handle and you got a very nice hockey stick there, yimmy. (maybe Judith won’t delete this one)

      • Try writing “Jim D” instead of yimmy, and I likely won’t delete

      • PA, temperatures lead CO2 in the glacial cycles because they are caused by something else called the Milankovitch cycle. Check it out. It is well known.

      • PA, temperatures lead CO2 in the glacial cycles because they are caused by something else called the Milankovitch cycle. Check it out.

        The spectral description of climate change including the 100 ky energy

        Abstract Core records, both ice and deep-sea, suggest that the dominant character is that of a red-noise process or random walk. Examination of a few typical records supports the inference that the contribution of the Milankovitch frequencies to climate change at most represents only a small fraction of total climate variance. Most spectral densities are sufficiently ‘‘flat’’ that rates of change will be dominated by the highest frequencies present in the forcing. A broad maximum near 100 ky period can be readily rationalized without invoking an oscillator. One need only suppose that there is an approximate threshold beyond which the climate system collapses. The quasiperiodicity is then governed by a combination of the collapse threshold, the system memory time scale, and the intensity of the stochastic forcing. Changes in the forcing intensity would lead to a shift in the dominant time scale. Some inferred spectral power laws may be inaccurate owing to undersampling of the records.

        Quantitative estimate of the Milankovitch-forced contribution to observedQuaternary climate change

        A number of records commonly described as showing control of climate change by Milankovitch insolation forcing are reexamined. The fraction of the record variance attributable to orbital changes never exceeds 20%. In no case, including a tuned core, do these forcing bands explain the overall behavior of the records. At zero order, all records are consistent with stochastic models of varying complexity with a small superimposed Milankovitch response, mainly in the obliquity band. Evidence cited to support the hypothesis that the 100 Ka glacial/interglacial cycles are controlled by the quasi-periodic insolation forcing is likely indistinguishable from chance, given the small sample size andnear-integer ratios of 100 Ka to the precessional periods. At the least, the stochastic background‘‘noise’’ is likely to be of importance.

      • AK, frequency analysis is not a good approach. What you notice by just looking at the record is that all the terminations of glacial phases occur with anomalously high 65N summer insolation. The normal situation for the last million years has been the glaciated state, interrupted by these insolation-induced terminations. You would need a different kind of analysis to show that, but it is visually obvious.

      • JC, I don’t mind the yimmy. It is like a speech impediment. I will just tolerate it.

      • AK, frequency analysis is not a good approach.

        Because it doesn’t give the results you like?

        How many “ice ages” have there been, and what is the probability that all of them terminated close to “ anomalously high 65N summer insolation” by chance? Visual inspection can be very tricky. Which hasn’t stopped me from using it often, but personally, I always add caveats.

      • AK, you can look at it and judge for yourself, I think Milankovitch was onto something even if you think he was wrong about the 65 N insolation. Plus it makes physical sense.

      • AK, you can look at it and judge for yourself, […]

        I have. And I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. But I don’t find it compelling. Given a perfectly good alternative explanation.

        Plus it makes physical sense.

        So does natural variation on a 10,000 to 100,000 year time-frame.

      • What perfectly good alternative explanation? You can see that all the high insolation peaks above a threshold leave a mark on glaciation and there’s about 20 of them. It is not just coincidence.

      • What perfectly good alternative explanation?

        Natural internal variation. It’s intrinsic to almost all hyper-complex non-linear systems, so the default assumption should be that it’s present in something like climate. At scales ranging from sub-annual to mega-years.

        You can see that all the high insolation peaks above a threshold leave a mark on glaciation and there’s about 20 of them. It is not just coincidence.

        Not really. I can see a decent probability that some insolation changes are involved in some of the shorter-term changes, but nothing really stands out as far as the major glacial/interglacial transitions. Perhaps you need to link to whatever you think shows this. Here’s some examples of the best I could find to look at:
        http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/Milankovitch_Variations.png
        https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/milankovitch-cycles-chart-3.jpg
        http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CB_oblicity.png

      • AK, yes, that plot shows it. Take the 20 highest insolation peaks and see how they correspond to warmer peaks. It is not just coincidence. On the flip side, declining periods correspond to none of these peaks. The odds are 1 in 2^20, about 1 in a million, that this is chance.

      • @Jim D…

        Sorry, I just don’t see it. All I see is some hints that solar “forcing” might be involved in some of the process(es). But it’s very clear that there’s no direct connection.

        For my money, the hypothesis that the Milankovitch cycles “explain” the Pleistocene glaciation is really only defensible as a “last-ditch” when no other good explanation exists. But one does: natural internal variation.

        My best guess is that Wunsch is right: there is some involvement, but most of the timing and extent appears “stochastic”: “random” WRT the Milankovitch cycles.

      • That last graph even has the helpful vertical lines. Maxima correspond to rises, minima correspond to drops about 100% of the time for the largest ones.

      • Jim D,
        How do you know you are not just looking at an artificial correlation resulting from orbital tuning?

      • A better statistical analysis would composite on the larger insolation peaks and then for the troughs and see what the glaciation/temperature was doing during those. These would show clear rises in the former and drops in the latter with likely a very significant statistical difference between the two sets.

      • Here’s the one with “helpful vertical lines”, but I’ve added some helpful vertical lines of my own, since the originals seemed mostly to help with self-deception. (You may have to open it in its own window to get enough size.)
        http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G3Z0ye5H2Yc/VWtAIe6xaCI/AAAAAAAAAho/lqpnnkjtZgI/s1600/milankovitch-cycles-chart-3-w-lines.jpg
        There definitely is some correspondence, but it’s clearly partial, which suggests a triggering or something like that by the Milankovitch “cycles”. For instance, my line #28 identifies the onset of the previous interglacial, while #33 is our interglacial. Notice how much lower #33 is than #28, while #29, as high as #33, just produces a small rise and #30, higher than ours, does much the same.

        Going farther back, notice how #23, no higher than #33, produces a full interglacial, while #24, as high as #28, produces something no better than #23’s in the Benthic O18 record, which is almost nothing in Vostock. Notice how #19 produces a full interglacial, while #21 almost nothing in the Benthic O18 and at best a small plateau in the descent in Vostock.

        What I see here is some correspondence, “triggering” activity, but whatever is producing the actual timing of the glacial cycles has nothing to do with the upper 65N Insolation curve.

        Another thing that stands out to me is that there’s a lot more going on here than glacial←→interglacial swings. The differences between the Benthic O18 and Vostock curves simply scream at multiple dimensions. IOW, like the ENSO/”global standing storm” I referenced in another thread, global glaciation is a product wandering around in an n-dimensional space with n being at least 5-10.

        Trying to pin down “causation” while analyzing a single dimension, much less several dimensions schmushed together into one, is a sure recipe for error and hopeful self-deception.

      • These are very much in line with how interglacial periods are triggered by the 65 N insolation as per the theory. Some triggers don’t lead back to a full interglacial, but have a significant effect anyway. As I said, a composite would show this statistically to be significant. Take the 20 highest and 20 lowest 65 N insolations and check the glaciation/temperature trends for them. One would show sharp rises, and the other sharp falls. There are probably other factors, like the sun itself, ocean circulations, and volcanoes, that may modulate the effect, but this one looks dominant in the timing of all the changes.

      • There are some of the longer downward slides with probably such a large albedo feedback that the smaller peaks can’t do anything to stop them, and it needs a large peak to reverse it.

      • Steven Mosher

        Dear god

        Skeptical science at its best.

        definitely some correspondence. Now you know why the skeptics face such a hard time getting peer reviewed.
        the brilliance below is stunning and compelling… Not.

        ‘There definitely is some correspondence, but it’s clearly partial, which suggests a triggering or something like that by the Milankovitch “cycles”. For instance, my line #28 identifies the onset of the previous interglacial, while #33 is our interglacial. Notice how much lower #33 is than #28, while #29, as high as #33, just produces a small rise and #30, higher than ours, does much the same.

        Going farther back, notice how #23, no higher than #33, produces a full interglacial, while #24, as high as #28, produces something no better than #23’s in the Benthic O18 record, which is almost nothing in Vostock. Notice how #19 produces a full interglacial, while #21 almost nothing in the Benthic O18 and at best a small plateau in the descent in Vostock.”

      • Steven Mosher,

        The Australian BOM declared all temperature records prior to 1910 officially unreliable.

        I see people arguing about correlations in graphs compiled about conditions which supposedly existed prior to 1910.

        This is as far as climate science has progressed? It’s of no discernible use now, so I suppose arguing about the past is all that’s left.

      • You think the BOM were talking about ice-core records? Amazing.

      • Now you know why the skeptics face such a hard time getting peer reviewed.

        Both the Wunsch papers I linked were published in peer-reviewed journals.

        Now, I never said my analysis was “peer-review” quality. It was my observation on inspection. Wunsch did the analysis, which IMO pretty much agrees with what I said, as far as I can tell:

        Evidence cited to support the hypothesis that the 100 Ka glacial/interglacial cycles are controlled by the quasi-periodic insolation forcing is likely indistinguishable from chance, given the small sample size andnear-integer ratios of 100 Ka to the precessional periods.

      • It is not clear why Wunsch wanted to find a 100k year relation when it is visually clear that variations near 20k are the drivers.

      • Jim D,

        Now why would you think that? I notice that neither the BOM nor anybody else prefers using ice core measurements to thermometers, on the basis that ice core measurements are more accurate.

        You are assuming that the methods used to determine the temperatures at the time the ice was formed can be accurately determined, and that each year produced one layer of ice.

        You may be right. But are you sure, and how would you know?

        In any case, any graph only show the left hand side. The future is still uncertain. Ask any hedge fund manager or financial analyst of the quant variety, how well the past predicts the future.

        Why not spend the climatology money on finding a cure for disease? Might it not be more beneficial?

      • Mike, OK, then you must have misunderstood what Mosher was referring to when you brought in something about the BOM and the Australian temperature record in response to him. His comment was related to ice-core information, by the way.

      • Jim D,

        I used the word “ice” at least four times. I guess you thought I was referring to something else, although I might have used the word “core” after the word “ice” a couple of times.

        Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. Sorry. Obviously highly intelligent people such as yourself use different words to describe things. You’ll have to dumb down your comments for me.

      • OK, so what was BOM saying about ice?

      • Jim D,

        These paleo charts have to be taken with a grain of salt. There ard plenty of phanerozoic charts where temperature and CO2 diverge greatly:

        http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/climate%20Change/phanerozoicCO2vTemp.png

        http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.jpg

        Then they send you to that article about how scotese was a fine old chap but we really need to update these old hand made records. Mainly to get Skeptics to stop using them.

      • It is not clear why Wunsch wanted to find a 100k year relation when it is visually clear that variations near 20k are the drivers.

        They aren’tthe drivers.” They appear to be involved in triggering interglacials when other conditions are suitable, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with why interglacials come every ~~100,000 years.

        BTW, regarding CO2 and interglacials, I went looking for some graphs, assuming (and you know what that does) that there was some “established” dataset for the CO2/temp graph. I found the following two:
        http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/vostok_temperature_co2.png
        http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif

        It looked to me as though there might be some differences, so I pulled them down, reversed the first one, and matched up the temp curves:
        http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BBYeYetT3t4/VWua8biHIxI/AAAAAAAAAh8/18Hj0ji3gGk/s1600/CO2_Compare.jpg

        I’ve changed the color of the CO2 curve for the second one (not reversed) from red to orange so it would be easier to distinguish. The first graph’s CO2 remains in blue, while the temp curve is mostly red except for a few places where the original purple one from the second on peeks through. Temp matches up fine. CO2…

        Whaat’s Up With That?

      • And that is where we started in this thread. CO2 is only an amplifying feedback in the Milankovitch cycles. It is not the driver. Much confusion arises among skeptics on this point. They think they have found something new, when it is known, and part of the consensus.

      • CO2 is only an amplifying feedback in the Milankovitch cycles. It is not the driver.

        Based on either of the two charts I pulled down it’s hard to say what it is. It looks random to me, although that might be an artifact of the charts I used.

        OK, granted many skeptics don’t understand differences between time-scales (of 1-2 decades, for instance, vs. 8 centuries). But that doesn’t mean the Milankovitch “cycles” are responsible for the temperature changes, or that CO2 played a “feedback” role.

        Given the quality of the “evidence”, perhaps you should link to the comparison that you think demonstrates CO2 performing that role. Then we’ll look at how well it matches the underlying data.

      • It is considered that the changing albedo from the expanding and contracting polar cap is the main cause of the temperature changes in the Milankovitch cycles, but since CO2 changes by 50%, it too has a significant impact. You can go to any source on these cycles to see that explained. The CO2 change can’t do it by itself, so it is not the driver, but just another positive feedback on top of ice albedo.

      • It is suggested that CO2 is a fast positive feedback to ice sheet volume changes:
        http://judithcurry.com/2015/05/06/quantifying-the-anthropogenic-contribution-to-atmospheric-co2/#comment-706997

      • The warming ocean can outgas CO2 at 10-15 ppm per degree. It is just chemistry.

      • You can go to any source on these cycles to see that explained. The CO2 change can’t do it by itself, so it is not the driver, but just another positive feedback on top of ice albedo.

        I went to “any source”. Two of them. Both of their graphs look (to me) much more like semi-random variation of both temperature and CO2 perhaps driven by some other factor. I compared them, and at least one of them is garbage.

        I want a source you consider authoritative, before I waste my time.

        Here is a source, not published with peer-review, that speculatively attributes both the 41KYear and 100KYear to the sun. “Any source?”

        The existing understanding of interglacial periods is that they are initiated by Milankovitch cycles enhanced by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. During interglacials, global temperature is also believed to be primarily controlled by carbon dioxide concentrations, modulated by internal processes such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Recent work challenges the fundamental basis of these conceptions.

      • Are you saying CO2 can’t increase when the ocean warms due to other causes, or that the added CO2 won’t cause extra warming? I don’t know your question.

      • Don Monfort

        yimmy,

        What do you have to say about Dr. Jeffrey Glassman’s “Acquittal of CO2”, in light of the failure of CO2 to do much of anything incriminating, during the famous pause that is killing the cause?

      • He has this self-contradictory sentence. I don’t know what to make of it.
        “Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases”

      • Jim D,

        Obviously I’m not as intelligent as you, so you might have to interpret the following, relating to the sources of CO2 –

        “Climatologists dismiss the oceans as the source. Gavin A. Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, New York; and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, New York.) and his blog group at RealClimate believe …

        “The oceans cannot be a source of carbon to the atmosphere, because we observe them to be a sink of carbon from the atmosphere.””

        So if the oceans cannot be a source of CO2, are all your calculations wrong, or is Gavin Scmidt wrong, or are you both wrong?

        Please dumb your answer down for me, as I often fail to comprehend your logic and assertions.

        Thanks.

      • Dumbed down, the ocean is a net sink, but its effectiveness as a sink is reduced by the warming of the ocean. It is less of a sink in warmer years like 1998, but still a sink.

      • Don Monfort

        How is that self-contradictory, yimmy? Hasn’t the consensus crowd claimed that the excuse for the pause is that CO2 effects have been overwhelmed by other effects? You saying the excuses for the pause are self-contradictory, yimmy? Your handlers will be very disappointed.

      • Glassmann wasn’t talking about the pause, donnie. Read harder.

      • JimD,

        You wrote –

        “He has this self-contradictory sentence. I don’t know what to make of it.
        “Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases””

        I’m obviously pretty dumb, but maybe I can try to help. Why do you find it contradictory?

        Warmists call CO2 a greenhouse gas. What they choose to call it, doesn’t matter. They might choose to call it global warming gas, or magic gas.
        The author is making a statement that it hasn’t caused nor amplified global temperature increases.

        Is he right? I believe so.

        Have I helped you to comprehend the statement?

        If not, what part do you still not understand? Have you asked the author to possibly dumb down his answer, perchance? I don’t know what his PhD thesis was. Maybe you need to ask someone with an English major to help. Have you asked Steve Mosher?

      • No, because he has acknowledged it is a greenhouse gas. What does he mean by that if he is saying it has no warming effect? If I remember, he is one of those saturated band people.

      • Don Monfort

        Yimmy, please explain to Mike how the oceans have been a net sink, yet they have outgassed an alleged 10-15 ppm per 1C degree increase in temp. Show your work. Would we be starving for CO2, if not for the SUVs of the evil rich?

      • So, emissions add 220 ppm, the oceans absorb half of that, and outgas 10 ppm. That still leaves them as a net sink, and the rise is 120 ppm while the ocean acidifies too. It all makes sense.

      • Don Monfort,

        What is your secret? Judith lets you call Jim D, yimmy with impunity while I can’t get away with calling some others putzes. Seems unfair. Is there a seniority issue here or do you have some damning evidence that you hold over her head?

      • I delete the obnoxious stuff when i spot it. if the offending comment also has some worthwhile content, i tend to let it through (depends on my mood).

      • Don Monfort

        You know that I never said or implied that Dr. Glassman was talking about the pause, yimmy Dee. You are being Disingenuous and trying to Divert. Why don’t you actually respond to Dr. Glassman’s case? Just picking out one sentence of Dr. Glassman’s extensive case and making an irrelevant comment isn’t impressive. Do it for Paree, jimmee.

      • So, I answer something about Glassman because you pointed at him, then you raise the pause on my answer, which doesn’t answer my question about Glassman, so I say there is no connection. How is that disingenuous?

      • Don Monfort

        She deletes plenty of my comments, Mark. It gets a little arbitrary and schoolmarmishy. But throw a chart in with your mild rebukes and see what happens.

      • The oceans have been sinking more CO2since since 1950 with a pretty steady and consistent increase. It’s that pressure difference at the surface thingy. I assume their increased warmth is causing more CO2 ocean to atmosphere transport. I feel it’s unlikely part of the cycle has closed or shut down. More CO2 seems to make more CO2 stay in the oceans. I forget where Jim D came down on the monster CO2 thread?

      • Yes, only the ratio is determined by the temperature. This means the oceans can outgas due to warming while being a sink too. The sink is larger because the manmade source is so large. In other situations, like between Ice Ages when there is no other source, outgassing can be the main process.

      • Don Monfort

        Judith apparently feels she has to protect your tender sensibilities, yimmy. Maybe it’s because most of the other alarmist trolls have left. You will have to carry on this foolishness without me. My work is done here.

  15. Pingback: An example of courage and integrity | I World New

  16. David Wojick

    The WSJ “indoctrination” article is important. The existing K-12 science standards in most states only introduce the topic of climate in high school and they take no position in the debate. That is up to the teacher. The new standards apparently teach AGW, beginning in 5th grade. The difference is huge and the Feds are driving it.

  17. David Wojick

    Here is the WSJ AGW indoctrination article:

    Schoolroom Climate Change Indoctrination

    In one assignment, students measure the size of their family’s carbon footprint and suggest ways to shrink it.

    By Paul H. Tice
    May 27, 2015 7:00 p.m. ET

    While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

    The Next Generation of Science Standards were released in April 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted them, including my state of New Jersey, which signed on in July 2014 and plans to phase in the new curriculum beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

    While publicly billed as the result of a state-led process, the new science standards rely on a framework developed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council. That is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences that works closely with the federal government on most scientific matters.

    All of the National Research Council’s work around global warming proceeds from the initial premise of its 2011 report, “America’s Climate Choices” which states that “climate change is already occurring, is based largely on human activities, and is supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence.” From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.

    The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change. To give one example of the council’s reach, these climate-change learning concepts have been incorporated almost verbatim into the New Jersey Department of Education model science curriculum.

    Many of the background materials and classroom resources used by instructors in teaching the new curriculum are sourced from government agencies. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has an array of ready-to-download climate-change primers for classroom use by teachers, including handouts on the link between carbon dioxide and average global temperatures and tear sheets on the causal relationship between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising sea levels.

    Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Energy Department have their own Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, or Clean, which serves as an online portal for the distribution of digital resources to help educators teach about climate change. One such learning module requires students to measure the size of their family’s carbon footprint and come up with ways to shrink it.

    Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.

    This is unfortunate because the topic of man-made global warming, properly taught, would present many teachable moments and provide an example of the scientific method in action. Precisely because the science of climate change is still just a theory, discussion would help to build student skills in critical thinking, argumentation and reasoning, which is the stated objective of the new K-12 science standards.

    For instance: Why has the planet inconveniently stopped warming since the late 1990s even as carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise? How reliable are historical measurements of average global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels when, before the 1950s, much of the data are interpolated from such diverse sources as weather balloons, kites, cloud observations, primordial tree rings and Antarctic ice bubbles?

    How statistically significant is a 1.4-degree Fahrenheit increase in average global surface temperatures since 1880 for a 4.6 billion-year-old planet with multiple ecosystems and a surface area of some 200 million square miles? How dangerous is the current level of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere, when 400 parts per million expressed as a percentage of the volume of the atmosphere would equate to only 0.04% or approximately zero?

    Employing such a Socratic approach to teaching climate change would likely lead to a rational and thought-provoking classroom debate on the merits of the case. However, that is not the point of this academic exercise—which seems to be to indoctrinate young people by using K-12 educators to establish the same positive political feedback loop around global warming that has existed between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities for the past two decades.

    Mr. Tice works in investment management and is a former Wall Street energy research analyst.

  18. Almost unbelievably from the Gay Marriage article: “reliability of feelings thermometers”

    Can’t the data from them just be adjusted, then?

    Gay Science, meet Climate Science.

    Andrew

  19. This story: “Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?” linked above as http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/05/28/can-science-make-you-less-sexist-while-you-sleep/ is unadulterated junk psychology.

    Read yesterday’s column here, in which Richard Horton points out junk medical science consisting of studies “Afflicted…..with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

    The bias-cure study meets the bill on all counts.

    • Psychiatry is unbalanced and has discriminated for decades against anyone with good judgment and common sense. Until psychiatry has the same diversity of viewpoint as society as a whole, their opinions are not to be trusted. Until 40% of psychiatrists are conservative (the same as society as a whole) psychiatrists and psychotherapists should be denied expert witness status in court.

      Junk psychology is the norm (Cook anyone?).

  20. Not sure where I saw this. Apologies if it was at Climate Etc.

    “Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”
    [ … ]
    It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

    Here’s how we did it.
    http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

  21. It’s remarkable how academics are suddenly discovering the linkages of various long-known multidecadal temperature variations and proclaiming that their analyses explain them for the “first time.”

  22. catweazle666

    Jim D: “You seem to have a higher regard for Mike Flynn’s knowledge than I if you are defending him on this.”

    Higher than I have for yours.

  23. Don Monfort

    PS: You don’t seem to lack imagination for the surfeit of Week in review topics, but may I suggest another one:

    Week in review-was it really worth it?

  24. Maxwell Smart said “Missed it by that much”

    For various values of wrong.

    Sometimes there are other choices other than 0%, 50%, and 100%.

  25. All model runs are wrong, let us get that far, yet they are all useful.

    • For what Bob?

      Would policy development be one of those things the models are useful for?

    • bobdroege,

      If 100 climate models produce 100 different answers, 99, at least, are wrong. Averaging their wrongness doesn’t mean you will get a right answer.

      Tell me, what is the usefulness of climate model that give you 99 wrong answers out of 100 at best, and possibly 100 wrong answers?

      Wouldn’t you rather see the money spent on developing clean energy or disease eradication? I would.

  26. Are we unnecessarily constraining the agility of complex process-based models?

    They’re recommending a fatal mistake. Parameters turn the model into a curve-fitter.

    Has anybody done Kalman filtering? It tells you, as data comes in, how to adjust parameters to account for all past information as well as the new information. It’s used for tracking objects with radars and a thousand other things. If you add parameters, it adjusts them too, and fits the data even better.

    But it’s nothing but least squares fitting factored into a useful dynamic form.

    If the underlying parameters (radars might use position, velocity, drag coefficient, thrust) are realistic things, it works. You can use the values to project where the object is going to be later.

    If they’re not realistic but just added on speculation, they make predictions worse while makeing past matches better.

    When the model is dominated by speculative parameters, it turns into nonsense.

  27. EPA Plan to Ban Coal Hits Major Roadblock
    “”We submitted comments for the record explaining that EPA had made a mockery of the interagency review process, ignoring the government’s own experts in order to push an ideological agenda,” Horner said.
    That’s a crucial point because if the EPA is demonstrably not serving as an expert but an ideological actor, it would not warrant deference in court, making its whole global warming agenda vulnerable.”
    “The EPA was caught red-handed faking science and ignoring expert opinion, in effect requiring a technology that they knew did not practically exist.”
    http://townhall.com/columnists/philkerpen/2015/05/23/epa-plan-to-ban-coal-hits-major-roadblock-n2002814

  28. Apart from that his conclusion looks like consensus stuff. What sense do you make of what he is saying?

  29. Jim D,

    Sorry, but the threading was getting a tad tedious.

    You wrote –

    “No, because he has acknowledged it is a greenhouse gas. What does he mean by that if he is saying it has no warming effect? If I remember, he is one of those saturated band people.”

    Well, I’m sure the author could explain, but you seem to a little reluctant to do the obvious – which is to ask him what he meant.

    He merely stated CO2 was a greenhouse gas – that is, used in greenhouses to encourage plant growth. Like me, he is prabably completely bewildered as to the reason it is supposed to have warming properties. A greenhouse doesn’t actually warm anything, particularly at night. He stated fairly clearly that CO2 neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases.

    I grant you, for the benefit of the supremely intelligent Warmists, he might have inserted the words “called . . . by some”, and thus endeavoured to satisfy your desire for comprehension. I don’t know, maybe he accidentally deleted those words. Why don’t you ask him?

    As to oceans, correct me if I’m wrong, but your theory goes something like this –

    CO2 raises the temperature of the ocean.
    The ocean’s solubility drops, and it emits more CO2 whilst simultaneously absorbing more because the ocean’s solubility is increased because the temperature fell as it was rising. It thus remains a net sink.

    The ocean is removing CO2 from the atmosphere, which reduces the temperature of the ocean, which increases the solubility. A tipping point is reached, and the oceans get colder and colder, owing to the ever increasing amounts of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, and the ensuing reduction in global warming.

    Pardon me for being dumb, but I don’t believe a word of it. CO2 concentrations are rising. Global temperatures are not. You may call CO2 a greenhouse gas, and it is. It is added to commercial greenhouses to improve plant growth.

    It warms nothing at all, apart from the superheated imaginations of those afflicted with Warmism.

    I hope Prof Curry will not think me too uncivil for indulging in a bit of pointed, but light hearted, badinage.

    Over to you, Jim D.

  30. russellseitz

    Monckton & Soon’s celebrated Science Bulletin modeling paper has just imploded .

    • Well, given that the paper is paywalled and some authors are activists, there are reasons to be skeptical.

      We’ll see how it holds up to skeptical analysis.

      • From Greg Laden

        The way they approached the problem of climate change was odd. The Earth’s climate system is incredibly complex, and climate models used by mainstream climate scientists address this complexity and therefore are also complex. Monckton et al chose to address this complexity by developing a model they characterize as “irreducibly simple.” I’m not sure if their model is really irreducibly simple, but I am pretty sure that a highly complex dynamic system is not well characterized by a model so simple that the model’s creators can’t think of a way to remove any further complexity.

        A Red-Banner Day when I find myself agreeing with something Laden says. Of course, with with a few minor adjustments, the same thing could be said about the whole collection of GCM’s used (by the IPCC among others) to predict various climate “disasters”. I doubt he would agree with that, though.

      • I will have a post on this tomorrow, along with new paper from NCDC, plus Nic Lewis new paper