by Judith Curry
Heat waves are the new polar bears, stoking alarm about climate change. Climate scientists addressing this in the media are using misleading and/or inadequate approaches. How should we approach assessing whether and how much manmade global warming has contributed to recent record breaking temperatures? Read on for some outside-the-box thinking on this.
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Much has been written in recent weeks on the record-breaking heat wave in the US Northwest and Canada
There have been four categories of scientific contributions to answering this question, that have appeared in the media, blog posts and publications:
I. Hot air: scientists spouting off in the media
Climate scientists are writing op-eds and spouting off on twitter, about AGW causing, or at least exacerbating, the heat wave. Scientists in this category are those who spout off on the topic, use heat waves to advocate for their preferred climate policies, without having done any actual work on the topic.
For one high profile example, see this article in the NYTimes by Michael Mann: Climate change is behind the heat dome.
One argument in the hot air line of reasoning is based on this diagram: as the average temperatures increase, then the frequency of heat extremes increases also.
However, analysis of historical data belies this simple interpretation:
The changing shape of Northern Hemisphere summer temperature distributions
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2016JD025292
Need for caution in interpreting extreme weather statistics
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/28/23/jcli-d-15-0020.1.xml
For an easier to read summary, see this report by Prescient Weather, which shows that the higher moments of the temperature distributions are critical also, and that the variance may be decreasing.
The other piece of the hot air argument relates to a hypothesis that the jet stream is made ‘wavier’ by global warming, an argument made by Michael Mann among others. There is a ton of recent papers debunking this idea, and some recent papers even suggest that high-pressure domes such as occurred during the heat wave will weaken under global warming.
It is intellectually lazy for scientists to spout off on this (or any other topic) without actually having done some work on the topic or at least having read and analyzed recent research on the topic. A convenient, but unjustified, storyline that supports your activism and preferred policies is not helpful.
II. Scientists analyzing historical data
John Christy has provided the following analysis of historical data, included in Cliff Mass’ blog post:
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html
(did i tell you i HATE the new wordpress editor. See Cliff’s post for the figures prepared by Christy)
<begin quote>
As shown below, there IS NO INCREASING TREND for more record high temperatures over our region (Oregon, Washington) during the past century. In fact, the past decade (2011-2020) had no all-time records.
Average number of days with temperatures above 99F in OR, WA? Also no trend.
These results are consistent with what others have found. For example, the U.S. National Climate Assessment found the warmest day of the year over the Northwest actually COOLED between a historic (1901-1960) and a contemporary period (1986-2016).
Dr. Nick Bond, Washington State Climatologist, said that he and Associate State Climatologist Karin Bumbaco found similar results, published in a peer-reviewed paper.
<end quote>
A single heat wave event can be evaluated against the historical record of previous historical heat waves (e.g. past ~100 years). Apart from some technical disputes surrounding which data set, the perils of homogenization, etc., what exactly is the logic for using historical temperatures records in heat wave attribution arguments?
A. If a record is set, does that lead to a necessary conclusion that AGW was a major contributing cause?
B. If a record is not set, does that lead to a necessary conclusion that AGW was not a major contributing cause?
C. If there is an underlying trend in heat wave frequency at that location, does that lead to a necessary conclusoin that AGW was a major contributing cause for a single heat wave event?
D. If there is no underlying trend in heat wave frequency at that location, does that lead to a necessary conclusion that AGW was not a major contributing cause for a singe heat wave event?
E. If there is a global trend in frequency/severity heat wave events, does that say anything conclusive about a role (or not) of AGW in influencing a single local heat wave event?
F. Does the magnitude by which a temperature record is broken say anything at all about a role (or not) of AGW in influencing a single local heat wave event?
While providing a historical context for a local heat wave event is critical for understanding the situation, the answer to each of these questions is ‘no.’ A, C, E and F, in combination, would stack the deck in favor of a ‘yes’, but data does not provide a quantitative answer to how much warming from the heat wave was caused by AGW. Getting to an unequivocal ‘no’ answer simply from analyzing the temperature record is more challenging. But if a local heat wave record is set, it is worth digging deeper to try to understand the proximate (weather) causes and any underlying climate influence (multi-decadal natural variability and/or AGW).
III. Scientists conducting climate model-based attribution analysis.
As described by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate : https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/07/rapid-attribution-of-pnw-heatwave/#.YOYxqur28iM.twitter
“The way that climate-model based attribution for extreme events works (as discussed previously on RealClimate here and here etc.) is that you look at the situation with and without the anthropogenic global warming signal and calculate the ratio of probabilities. If an event is say, twice as common with the GW, then one can give a fractional attribution of 50% to anthropogenic forcing and the return time is half what it used to be. If it is five times more likely, the attribution is 80% = 100*(5-1)/5 and the return time is a fifth of what it used to be. In this case, we are seeing probability ratios of 150 to 1000s, suggesting that these, improbable, temperatures can be almost entirely attributed to global warming. Without the anthropogenic signal, temperatures this extreme wouldn’t have happened in thousands to tens of thousands of years.”
The rapid report from the European team is found [here]
This effort involves a massive amount of number crunching.
This report has gotten a lot of media attention, as an example see this article from Time. https://time.com/6079744/climate-weather-attribution/
So, what’s wrong with this picture?
1. A time series of order a hundred years (from observations or a model simulation) is insufficient to develop meaningful statistics about being a 1 in 10,000 year event.
2. The atmospheric dynamics in global climate models are fairly ‘blah’; the coarse resolution of climate models is fundamentally unable to capture the kind of blocking events that causes heat waves, or resolve hurricanes, or resolve extreme convective events that cause flooding, etc.
3. This approach implicitly assumes that all climate change is caused by emissions, and ignores or mischaracterizes multi-decadal natural internal variability (since climate models do not have the correct phasing and amplitudes).
Cliff Mass has done a masterful job of critiquing the report from the European group. I don’t disagree with anything he says.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-report-leads-to-false.html
This entire climate model-based approach to extreme event attribution is fundamentally flawed. Until climate models are able actually resolve circulation features (requiring a horizontal of resolution of ~20 km), they simply are not useful for attribution of extreme weather events.
IV. Scientists conducting process-based analyses
NOAA scientist Marty Hoerling has likened extreme weather event attribution to conducting an autopsy. You have some clues, but the conclusion requires linking them together in a mechanistic sequence of events.
Cliff Mass has provided the best autopsy report so far on the heat wave.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html
He provides the follow summary of the proximate sequence of events leading to the heat wave:
“Record amplitude of a ridge/high pressure over our region, forced by a tropical disturbance in the western Pacific, that produced a downstream wave train. An environment that allowed the resulting wave to amplify. The ridge had to be in exactly the right position relative to our terrain. An upper-level trough had to develop in just the right location offshore and move in the optimal direction to cause strong southeasterly flow, fostering the supercharger noted above. We needed a period when the sun was very strong. And a summer stretch without smoke, which has a profound cooling effect.
The meteorological dice had to come up all sixes. And they did.”
Process-based analyses are different from hand waving ‘story lines’. Here is what Mass considered:
1. The state of Washington has warmed by 1.5C over the past 120 years
2. Whether the drought and dry soils contributed to the heat wave (no, as per regional model simulations and the fact that there is no trend in drought in the Pacific northwest)
3. Whether global warming produces stronger ridges of high pressure (no, as per data analysis and climate model simulations)
4. No observed trend in heat waves (Christy’s analysis)
5. Use of regional climate model (no, CO2 doesn’t produce more heat waves)
6. Analysis of regional weather dynamics supported with regional climate modeling results shows a paradoxical pathway for cooling in the region
So do we have an unambiguous ’cause of death’ here, i.e. an unambiguous ‘no’ answer to the question as to whether AGW was the cause, or at least had an influence, on the heat wave?
A simple consilience of this evidence does not lead to an unambiguous ‘no’ conclusion. However Cliff’s analysis is arguably sufficient to infer that CO2 was not the sole, or even dominant, cause of the record temperatures.
V. A fifth way
We need a better logic for attributing extreme weather events to global warming, and some outside-the-box thinking on how to attribute the causes of extreme weather events.
Considering the strategies described above, I and III are unsatisfactory, and frankly not at all useful. Especially for III, a massive amount of resources and brain power are wasted on this approach, for which global climate models, at their current resolution, are simply not fit-for-purpose.
II is very useful, but the logic in evaluating this information for attribution is ambiguous. IV provides useful insights, but doesn’t provide a quantitative answer regarding attribution or a clear role of CO2‘s contribution.
We need a fifth way, that builds on II and IV, provides a better logic for conducting the autopsy, and considers some new approaches.
Extreme weather events can be extreme in terms of the magnitude of individual events, the frequency of events crossing some threshold, or clustering of extreme events. It needs to be acknowledged that extreme events are by definition rare, and short historical records (even century long records) are insufficient for formulating meaningful statistics about return times.
A thermodynamic and dynamical storyline of the extreme event needs to be assembled, similar to how Cliff Mass framed the problem. Here is an alternative approach for understanding and quantifying the effect of an increase in CO2 on severe weather systems. The example provided here is targeted at NW US heat wave.
Single column models of the atmosphere coupled to the land surface can provide a quantitative assessment of the direct contribution of CO2 forcing to the surface temperatures. This is a better approach than looking at the historical record of annual average surface temperatures, and assuming that any increase is caused by CO2 and would increase the magnitude of any heat wave by that same amount.
Experiment #1. For this particular event, on the day of the maximum record breaking temperature, a local vertical profile of temperature and humidity can be obtained from a radiosonde or the operational analysis from numerical weather prediction centers. This can be run through an atmospheric single-column model with radiative transfer model and land surface model to calculate the surface temperature in response to pre-industrial CO2, current levels of CO2, future levels of CO2. This is a simple calculation that answers the question: all other things being equal, how much difference have emissions for the past 100 years made to the surface temperature for the heat dome event that emerged, just through the radiative effects of the CO2? Cold, dry situations with no clouds amplify the impact of CO2 on the surface temperature. It is fairly easy to calculate exactly what effect the increase in CO2 would have on surface temperature under the local conditions for Portland, OR. Without having done the calculation, an outcome of 1-3 F wouldn’t surprise me.
Experiment #2. This experiment builds on #1 to address the impact of the fast thermodynamic feedbacks on the surface temperature change. This can be accomplished by using the shape of the temperature profile and relative humidity from the original radiosonde or operational analysis to adjust the temperature and humidity profiles to the resulting surface temperature for the calculations in experiment #1 for altered CO2. This provides a better assessment of the direct radiative effects of altered CO2 in this particular weather system.
The next set of experiments address the dynamical effects of increasing CO2 on the particular weather system that influenced the record high surface temperatures.
This heat wave was exceptionally well forecasted as much as 10 days in advance by global ensemble weather forecast system. Global ensemble weather forecast system with high resolution (at least 20 km) can be used to simulate the daily forecasts from 14 to 1 days in advance of the event, with a CO2 concentration of 300 ppm. Not clear at this point whether a single forecast simulation at each lead time is adequate, or whether the full ensemble is needed.
Experiment #3. Make no change to the weather forecast model except to the CO2 concentration. Compare ‘forecasts’ with altered CO2 concentration with the original forecasts: 500 and 850 mb geopotential heights and temperatures in the vicinity of the heat dome, also the surface temperatures in the NW US and SW Canada. It may turn out that Experiment #3 is sufficient to infer the role of more/less CO2 on the evolution of the omega block, heat dome and record high temperatures. But experiments #4 and #5 should be considered, since there are caveats to interpreting experiment #3.
Experiment #4. Alter the global sea surface temperatures (SST) in a way that preserves the global pattern of SST for this period, but have magnitudes more consistent with a 300 ppm climate. I would use NOAA’s 20th century reanalyses for this
Subtract the annual average (or summer average) SST for each ocean grid point for a 300 ppm climate (around 1910) from the current gridded values; subtract the gridded difference from the SST field for this case used in the weather forecast models. Run the same set of experiments as in #3; compare with the original forecasts and the reduced CO2 forecasts from #3. Note: not clear how quickly the initialized atmospheric temperature profiles will adjust to the altered SST, and how much this would influence the evolution of the atmospheric dynamics.
Experiment #5. For Experiment #4, the initialized atmospheric temperatures are too warm and specific humidity is too high relative to the lower SST values. Humidity initialization doesn’t really matter, since the model rapidly creates its own humidity field. However, the initial temperature field may matter. Its the temperature gradients that influence the circulations. During summer, the pole-to-equator temperature gradient wouldn’t change much between high and low CO2; melting Arctic sea ice would be just underway at the end of June in 1910, whereas it is well underway in June in the current climate. Convective lapse rates would also be different for high vs low CO2. I’m not sure how quickly the atmospheric temperatures would adjust to the altered SSTs in #4. Initialized atmospheric temperatures would be out of balance with the colder surface temperatures, making the marine atmosphere too stable. Somehow initializing with atmospheric temperatures more suited to 1910 while preserving all of the temperature gradients would be ideal. The team doing the 20th century reanalyses could maybe figure out how to do this.
What this set of numerical experiments would do is allow for inferences to be made that compare the thermodynamic and dynamical effects of reduced/increased CO2 on the surface temperatures and the dynamics of the heat dome. The exact logic of how such inferences should be made, with what caveats and uncertainties, would require more attention than I can give it here.
Such an analysis would only take us so far: the question remains as to whether increased CO2 is changing the overall hemispheric dynamics, making such heat dome events and omega blocks more or less frequent. Experiments with high-resolution (20 km horizontal resolution) coupled global climate models with increased/decreased CO2 can provide some insights (the essential ingredient is for the model to have sufficiently high resolution to resolve blocking patterns).
Analysis of global reanalysis data (ERA5 back to 1950, 20th century reanalysis actually back to the 19th century) can provide some important insights:
- Is increasing CO2 changing the multi-decadal ocean oscillations? I’ve done a literature survey and there is no evidence of this yet.
- Is additional warming changing ENSO? I’ve done a literature survey and yes ENSO has changed since 1950; whether these changes are CO2 caused is debated.
- Are the atmospheric teleconnection regimes (e.g. AO, PNA etc) changing? This is something I’ve looked at (since 1950), and no changes apart from minor variations associated with multi-decadal climate variability.
With regards to the wavy jet stream hypothesis and its influence on blocking, I follow the literature on this topic, but haven’t done a formal literature review on this. Basic dynamical reasoning does not support the wavy jet stream hypothesis. There is more theoretical research to be done, and the ERA5 and 20th Century Reanalysis should prove a good data set for this, but the value lies in how these data are interpreted.
And finally, machine learning and network based methods are increasingly being used for attribution analyses in a range of different fields.
So I’m tossing these ideas out for discussion, I look forward to your further outside-the-box ideas on how to approach this problem.
Heat versus cold
And finally, I address the alarm over heat waves. I was in Utah in late June, where the local temperature reached 112F. It is not pleasant. Fortunately I could mostly stay inside where it was cooler. There is no question that excessive and unusual heat causes health problems. People have adapted to very hot temperatures (see this article about Pakistan) . This issue is unexpectedly hot temperatures, for which broad segments of the population are unprepared for and have no experience in dealing with. By this standard, the record breaking temperatures in Portland were more difficult to deal with than the relative routine and substantially higher temperatures in Pakistan.
While heat kills, cold temperatures kill more than an order of magnitude more people than heat. Pat Michaels has been on this issue for decades, and its not particularly controversial. This recent article in the Guardian is interesting:
Title – “Extreme temperature kills 5 million people a year with heat related deaths rising study finds”
Subtitle – “More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years but climate change is shifting the balance.”
The only conclusion I can draw here is that global warming is associated with fewer temperature related deaths. Which is completely at odds with the impression the Guardian article is trying to make with its alarming headline.
Average number of days with temperatures above 99F in OR, WA? Also no trend.
It’s absurd to look at Cliff Mass’s graph for this statement and claim there is no trend — you can see there’s a positive trend just by looking at it, as Gavin pointed out on RealClimate. (Cliff didn’t have a good response to that.)
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/07/rapid-attribution-of-pnw-heatwave/#comment-792678
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/07/rapid-attribution-of-pnw-heatwave/#comment-792733
Also, why doesn’t Cliff link to the data he used so we can check his work on this? That’s standard for a blog post.
The World Weather Attribution paper is a much more serious and thorough analysis of this event.
BTW, the death toll from the PNW heat wave is now up to 686, according to my records.
We discussed this graph on my blog a few days ago, where Willis digitized it and gave the data (it’s in the comments).
The trend is +0.42 C/decade.
You can calculate the uncertainty of the trend in various ways, of course. With rank-1 autocorrelation, the uncertainty is 0.37 C/decade, making the trend’s statistical significance 74%. Not much to quibble over.
DavidA, It appears Cliff Mass got his statistical information from Christy and the state of Washington climatologist in a peer reviewed paper. He appears to not have rerun the statistics. Gavin’s claim however that there is an increasing trend in the 99+ temps has no statistical analysis so he has no way to know if its statistically significant.
The in line replies at RealClimate are a particularly annoying concensus enforcement and make give and take impossible.
There also seems to be to be some world class evasions on the climate model resolution issue. They claim that models miss many of these blocks and so the real situation may be worse than the model shows. But this is I think very weak inference. For CFD specialists the finding would be that the models are inconclusive until resolution is adequate to reduce numerical errors to a small fraction of the signal being sought. In fact underresolved simulations often find spurious features, such as spurious separation reported long before it really occurs. If the BL is too thin, the inviscid flow will have exaggerated features.
Judith’s point is a fair one. It is scandelous how much money and time is spent running these models given their well documented deficiencies. There are scores of papers on the SST pattern misses causing ECS to be higher than observations suggest.
Cliff is an honest , if opinionated analyst.
I wish his fans ,were too, but their views exclude so charitable a characterization
Russell commented: Cliff is an honest , if opinionated analyst.
The scientists who wrote the World Weather Attribution paper are no less honest.
But had the advantage of checking each other’s work as they went along.
And they’re quite a bit less opinionated. They’re content to let others judge their work in the traditional scientific context. If Cliff ever turns his blog post into a real and proper scientific paper the scientific community will do the same.
The other thing that I observe is that Mass has a literal avalanche of data including data on high pressure events. Schmidt picks one graph, without doing a balanced assessment of all the data. And the ad hominems are childish. All in all this episode exemplifies what is wrong with climate science. Especially with respect to models its just a bunch of amateurs speculating about things that are quite underresolved.
“It is absurd … ” This sort of statement conveys no information. Please plot the data used by Cliff Moss and then draw a polynomial curve through it to make your conclusion. In your reply please show this graphical result. State how many parameters this polynomial contains and the sum of squared differences between fit and data.
In comments at Cliff’s blog, he asserts that the >99 temp chart shows no trend over the last 50 years when there would be an influence from global warming. Perhaps we need to not place too much importance to the multiple readings of this single chart.
David….look at the last 50 years when GW is supposedly happening…there is no trend. And even over the entire period, the trend is not significant. So come on…your argument is without merit…cliff mass
> Perhaps we need to not place too much importance to the multiple readings of this single chart.
Good point. Let’s look at others:
https://www.realclimate.org/images/fig4_pnw-e1625674013256-1536×739.png
A pity it does not go back to Kristallnacht.
Did similar events in 1898 and 1928 leave Oregon hotter than in 2021?
Irregular observations and no observations of the upper air will leave the question open.
But there is evidence in the surface record of past such events:
file:///home/smcgee/Pictures/Climate/HCN_OR_TMAX.gif
Ask Judy to delete your comment, Teddie.
Or reconfigure your personal computer.
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/hcn_or_tmax.gif
Willard, Your graph when 2021 is omitted shows pretty much the same thing as Cliff’s graph. Over the last 50 years, there is not much of a trend. What remains is that Schmidt in typical fashion kind of put words in Cliff’s mouth using the execrible in line comment feature they have devised to ensure the message is not polluted by actual give and take.
CLIFFORD MASSDavid….look at the last 50 years when GW is supposedly happening…there is no trend.
There is a positive trend Cliff — for the last 5 points I get a trend of +0.20 C/decade.
Then we can talk about problems calculating a trend with just 5 data points.
I have a spreadsheet of the monthly Tmax numbers for Oregon from 1895 to Oct 2020. Taking the annual averages, the trend of the last 50 years is +0.29 C/decade.
For Washington state I have the equivalent data up through 2018, and for the last 50 years there I get a trend of +0.21 C/decade.
So assuming “Pacific Northwest” means Washington+Oregon, I’m not at all convinced there is no trend in PNW global warming in the last 50 years. Try doing proper statistics as Tamino suggests — for one thing, stop grouping by decades and use all the data available, which can give you annual averages.
I liked the assessment made by Chuck Wiese on Ed Berry’s blog.
In particular this part where he demonstrates why the record June temperatures just recorded relate to the seasonal position of the sun:
Phillip, this is numerology at its best! Why didn’t Wiese include differences in solar irradiance, changes in downward IR from greenhouse gases, or more cooling from more pollution over Portland? The urban heat island effect? And on and on. Weise obtained a number he liked and stopped there without considering anything else. That’s not science.
It is hot air.
David,
In my opinion Chuck Wiese applied the null hypothesis when making his analysis.
YMMV
I would opine that 1910 is an inappropriate date to begin making comparisons. It is in a cyclical cooling regime, while we are now coming out of a cyclical warming regime. Some year in the 1930’s cyclical warming regime should be more appropriate.
Dave,
Australia’s BoM starts their official homogenised ACORN-SAT temperature data set in 1910 for all of Australia. We have no choice of other than a 1910 start, except to revert to the data as collected, earliest of which on the official record is Melbourne 1856 IIRC. Geoff S
Great post. Thanks.
See also
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/12/25/what-if-science/
This is an unimportant aside:
Dr. Curry, this is the first time you’ve sent (almost) your entire post via email… (I can appreciate your frustrations with the platform!) Is there something else we should know? :)
Climatologists may cavil, but rest assured Josh and Lords Lawson & Monckton will find no fault with your analysis.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/07/lord-lawson-gets-f-for-hiring-josh.html
You have nothing to fear. The vast majority of climatologists being state-funded, they will find no fault with the alarmism that advances the vested interest of their paymaster.
Judith Curry, thank you for the essay.
The other piece of the hot air argument relates to a hypothesis that the jet stream is made ‘wavier’ by global warming, an argument made by Michael Mann among others. There is a ton of recent papers debunking this idea, and some recent papers even suggest that high-pressure domes such as occurred during the heat wave will weaken under global warming.
For that, could you list the 5 best or most recent publications?
Similarly for other assertions that refer to publications?
If a process is stationary, the observed maximum will get larger over time. Noting that a selected process has just achieved the maximum or near maximum after a short (ca. 100 year) observation period doesn’t imply much.
There are thousands of time series of many kinds that have been observed for about 150 years or less. A better approach is to select some of them at random at the start of each year, a different random draw each year, and then do the same kind of analysis on each one at the end of the year.
fwiw, I liked your suggested experiments, but I still recommend that series be sampled randomly at the start of each year, instead of being selected after it is known that they have a recent, possibly local, extreme.
It takes a lot of work, including computing time, but non-random or convenience sampling slows the rate at which accurate, or true, results can be obtained, There isn’t a justification for choosing a method that will almost certainly be biased, when unbiased procedures are available. I wrote a similar comment about the use of placebo-controlled blind clinical trials with random assignment for assessing treatments for COVID-19, All this time later a more clear result would likely be available if researchers had started at the beginning with the most reliable method.
> The meteorological dice had to come up all sixes.
How many dice were there?
The number of dice is important but so are the number of rolls. If you have 10,000 possible 1/10,000 events per year then you can expect one yearly.
An unnamed Texas Climatologist tells me (pers. comm.) that his return rate for Forks (WA) is 33K.
That’s more than 6 sixes in a row.
A town of less than 4000 can’t take up much space. There must be quite a few chunks of Earth divided up by that size.
Your incredulity is duly noted.
Perhaps climate, like history, doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
https://turbulenteddies.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/hcn_or_tmax.gif
As Bender would say, “needles in the eyes.”
With less needles in the eyes, and without the 2021 spike:
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/yearlymaxt.jpg
Source: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2021/07/16/northwest-heat-wave/
Judith, I’m not sure about your modeling ideas. My guess is that the best shot would be the weather models even though as you point out there are some big issues involved in proper initialization for the low CO2 simulations. Weather models at least have the resolution to be skillful regarding Rossby waves.
It is hard to understand heat waves when you work with daily data. Why don’t readers here do some of the simple math for their own regions, by looking at the average Tmax over 3, 5, 10 consecutive days, as I have for Australia’s State capital cities? Data tells a better picture than natter does. It throws a whole new complexion on what you are encouraged to believe.
Here is but one example, from Sydney, Australia, using BoM official adjusted Acorn-Sat v.2 data for 3-day heat waves.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/black_swan_heat.jpg
Points of note.
1. The USA 1930s heat waves were not strong in Sydney, suggesting local not global mechanisms. Years 1934, 1936 and 1939 barely made the Top 40.
2. The intensity of 3-day Sydney heat waves has been dropping, not increasing with time, since 1910 when these records start. Same with 5-day and 10-day events.
3. Sydney probably has UHI influence in recent years, making the drops more severe than the graphs show.
4. The heat wave in 1960 is like the black swan event claimed for N-W US earlier this year. The Sydney average temps from the graph were about 7 degrees C (12 F) hotter than the average of the next 40 hottest heat waves, or about 30 degrees C hotter than Jan-Feb long term average Tmax in Sydney.
The worst heat waves in Sydney and Melbourne develop 1,000 miles away in Central Australia and come sweeping in on occasional, rare, North-Westerly winds. The past weather records in Syd and Melb have little relevance to how long or hot the heat waves there are. That is set more by the strength and heat of these N-W winds from the Centre affecting how long and how hot it gets 1,000 miles further on. (This is not the same mechanism for the NW US heat waves of a few days ago).
Meanwhile, up North of Sydney, on the Gold Coast, we have some more black swan events to confuse the experts with new things happening every day. Geoff S
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x318270
Oh bother,
These links work fine when I test them alone, but do not want to link when I insert them into the Climate Etc blog. Please copy them into your browser and control-click if they are troublesome. Geoff S
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Dr. Curry, thanks for the very interesting post.
A scientist friend of mine believes the “more wavy jet stream” theory and I took him at his word. Thanks for the clarification on that issue.
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Not only is there record breaking heatwaves in the US Northwest & Canada, cold temperatures in Texas but now devastating floods have hit Germany and the Netherlands. The scenes have been compared to those of WWII.
When it’s closer to home, it’s much more alarming, that’s for sure.
Germany and flooding
https://notrickszone.com/?s=Germany+
Yes of course floods have happened in the past but the MSM is summing up all the world news events into something extraordinary happening. I agree that it’s overhyped but still believe extreme weather events are slightly more common, especially in the Northern hemisphere:
The southern annular mode with low solar activity and high polar surface pressure currently pushing a cold front onto South Australia and spinning up the South Pacific Gyre.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-222.54,-75.50,297
The emerging La Nina will intensify and increased domain albedo will cool the planet. I predict that we will lose much of the warming of the past 120 years this century with a good chance of a grand solar minimum and amplifying feedbacks in wavy polar vortices in both hemispheres.
e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
Climate is more likely than not to remain relatively balmy with a chance of blizzards and heat waves. The future will resemble the past – merely more extreme over longer reference frames. The argument about attribution will go around in circles with little more sophistication than seen today. Nothing is certain but that the same stories will be repeated endlessly.
I doubt that this story will turn around until emissions have turned around. Politicians would be well advised to get on the populist side of it with pragmatic policies that reduce emissions and preserve economic freedom and growth.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/climate-change-american-mind-march-2021-3.1-1536×1084.png
RIE, #comment-955556
A few comments before yours I gave data from 110 years of obs showing that 3-day heat waves in Sydney are not becoming more extreme. Indeed, the hottest by far was in 1960.
There are many more examples, particularly from Aust State Capitals, where there have been no increases to cause fear from “more extremes” in the future. There are also cases like Perth that show rather more of a drop in heat wave intensity for 3, 5 and 10-day heat waves (worst in 1933 and 1956). Conversely, some like Adelaide that show an upward pip since year 2000 (worst 1939, 2009, 2014).
What is wrong with accepting that much of Australian capital data comes from where the records are longest, best managed, where there is most of the national population, where most hospitals are there to treat hot and cold ailments – then looking at the data in detail like I have, to conclude that heat wave threat in Australia is simply a product of vivid imaginations for most Australians?
There is no credible basis for fearing future extremes of hot or cold, of flood or drought. I have not yet read a paper that stands challenge to such claims based on past data rather than future assumption. Have you?
Geoff S
It is not the point of my original comment. The was about the public discourse not turning around anytime. Politicians would be well advised to get on the right side of it and proffer pragmatic responses. Not pay heed to such as Geoff endlessly repeating their stories about how it ain’t happening.
But I suspect that his heatwave is a lot less rigorous than it should be.
…. that’s heatwave definition….
Future uncertainty is the range of past extremes – and that is broader over longer periods.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/koutsoyiannis-2010.png
And if you need reminding of the last time CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere was in the order of 1000 ppm.
https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/inline_all/public/climateqa_hottest_comic.png
But the nation has warmed and we might reasonably expect more frequent hot days. Whatever the source of warming is.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/temperature/
As for relevant papers – we can compare and contrast this balanced effort to you amateur shenanigans.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720340432 .
But the point you missed in a deliberately ironic comment was the unsophisticated voter and the futility of conceited contrarians like you arguing your nonsense endlessly in interweb echo chambers.
RIE, “But the nation has warmed and we might reasonably expect more frequent hot days.”
No matter what the BoM says, the data I am talking about shows that it is quite unreasonable to expect more frequent heat waves. We are not talking about hot days, but about heat waves that endure for several days.
Even if the baseline has shown warming of 1 deg C per century, this does not come through as heat waves being 1 deg C hotter in most of the cases I’ve analysed. Quite different time series patterns to hot single days. And, in these data sets, no sign of any reason to panic if, in the past, you predicted the future to the Positive Now.
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now,
Because she’s unable to postulate How
Geoff S
The maps are from 1910 to date – and it comes through in number of hot days in Queensland in the period of recent warming. Three or more hot days are classed as a heat wave – as is pretty much the opening statement in the linked paper. They extrapolate to modest future warming.
Far from not being able to postulate as to causality – the past is discussed in terms of known mechanisms. These mechanisms as I said persist into the future.
You are quite simply incorrect and irrationally so. More hot days not translating into more heat waves is a fantasy of an ossified brain looking for confirmation and repeating endlessly your bias in comments dripping with misplaced conceit and condescension.
“Future uncertainty is the range of past extremes.”
In very bad models.
The future is incalculable but climate can always revisit past states. Very bad modelers underestimate uncertainty.
Robert I. Ellison | July 16, 2021 at 4:35 am |
Robert writes “it comes through in number of hot days in Queensland in the period of recent warming.”
Heat waves calculated for 3, 5 and 10 consecutive days for Brisbane Queensland show no such relationship over time. There is no startling change of character sine the start of the data set. Boring.
I have already noted that single day data patterns are not similar to heat wave patterns.
Brisbane is the only Queensland site I have brought to presentation standard. Should I do more to illustrate the clear point that heat waves in Australian State capitals mostly DO NOT show the official mantra of getting hotter, longer and more often? Of course, I have read the relevant BoM etc. papers. I find some fundamental misconceptions, which I why I am clearly illustrating what happens in reality.
Geoff S
http://www.geoffstuff.com/brisheat.jpg
And I have already noted that warmer temps increase the number of hot days necessarily. You start with misguided preconceptions and imagine that I should prefer your homework to that of competent specialists. Defying common sense – although not that I have seen much of that from you.
You should graduate to more comprehensive coverage and include 2020.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0048969720340432-gr1.jpg
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/13886.tmax.2020.aust.HOR.png
Robert I. Ellison | July 17, 2021 at 12:09 am |
Robert requested “You should graduate to more comprehensive coverage and include 2020.”
……….
Robert, that is a bit hard to do.
Melbourne regional 86071 closed a few years ago.
Sydney Observatory 66062 closed 30 Aug 2020.
Addition of 2019 and 2020 to other State capitals does not significantly change the trends. They were not hot enough to make Top 40 hottest heat waves. (Though Sydney 2020 part-year just made it as a low Top 40, decreasing the trend.)
You really should attack the data, for that gives insight.
Attacking me does not change the findings. I know these heat wave matters thoroughly.
Geoff S
Robert I Ellison: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720340432 .
Thank you for the link.
Robert I Ellison: I have given you numbers, maps and competent, published analysis that unlike yours passes a simple sanity test.
from the paper by Trancoso et al: (rtwt):
The dynamical downscaling was performed following the Hoffmann
et al. (2016) approach where monthly sea surface temperatures from
GCMs were bias corrected for mean and variance and used to force
the global variable resolution Cubic Conformal Atmospheric Model
(CCAM) in downscaling experiments (McGregor and Dix, 2008;
Katzfey et al., 2016; Syktus and McAlpine, 2016; Grose et al., 2019;
Chapman et al., 2020). Table 1 lists the CMIP5 models used for downscaling under high-emissions scenario using the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) radiative forcings. In order to assess
heatwaves under 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 °C of global warming, a warming
rate of at least 3 °C by the end of the century is required. The RCP8.5 scenario is the only Representative Concentration Pathway where ensemble runs consistently meet this condition, producing global warming
in excess of 3.7 °C by 2100 In addition, projections were tailored to support climate adaptation policies in Queensland, such as the Queensland State Heatwave Risk Assessment.Assessments of future risk usually assume worst-case scenarios to avoid neglecting unknown risk and build appropriate community resilience and preparedness.
Dynamical downscaling is generally performed over a limited region,
using high-resolution Regional Climate Models driven by initial
and boundary conditions from a host GCM to derive smaller-scale information and is considered a more robust approach to obtain high resolution climate simulations from GCMs than statistical downscaling
(Giorgi and Gutowski, 2015). In our approach we used global variable
resolution climate model driven by sea surface temperatures and sea
ice from selected CMIP5 GCMs to produce high-resolution regional projections for Queensland centered over the 9.5–32°S and 132–158°E domain (Fig. S1). We use a two-stage dynamical downscaling approach,
which allows a gradual increase in spatial resolution in order to achieve
physical consistency in simulations. First, 11 CMIP5 models were downscaled using bias corrected sea surface temperatures and sea ice and RCP8.5 radiative forcings as prescribed by CMIP5 experimental protocol (Taylor et al., 2012) to produce a set of CCAM global 50 km uniform [continued at great length]
That heavily model-based approach does not pass a “simple sanity test.” Such a test would be passed by Geoff Sherrington’s analysis based on observed data only.
‘We used interpolated daily temperature surfaces (minima and maxima) with 5 km spatial resolution for historical records (period 1950–2016) for the entire Australia obtained from the Australian Water Availability Project – AWAP (Jones et al., 2009; Raupach et al., 2009).’
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmax.aus.0112.42219.png
Blah, blah, blah.
Robert I Ellison: ‘We used interpolated daily temperature surfaces
Indeed they did!
And what use they made of‘ interpolated daily temperature surfaces: a method that passes a simple sanity test? No, merely adjusting the GCM outputs not to be too inaccurate.
No – they used the historic data to conclude that heat waves increased in the past 67 years. As common sense with a warming continent would dictate. No model needed for the past.
It is interesting that the maps of Au. temp anomalies from 1910-2020 are based on a reference range from 1961-1990…. Why those start and end years for comparison? Why does the 29 year reference range begin after the midpoint of the period? That would seem to paint an inconclusive result.
That graph shows anomalies – the difference from average temps in the reference period. No great mystery there.
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Dr. Curry, I share your frustration with the new wordpress block editor. I have taken to making the first block in a post a classical format, which then allows me to cut and paste as I have in the past. Some care is required not to have a new block inserted, as it will be in the default block edit format if not again set as a classical one.
They are discussing protectionist policy in the EU parliament and riots in the US Congress. Therefore, for the next couple of weeks, Portland Oregon must be hotter and safer than ever before, even though neither is true.
If rising CO2 has a positive influence on the Northern Annular mode, then by default it should intensify positive NAM driven heatwaves of typically longer duration, and reduce the brief hot plumes which are dependent on neutral to negative NAM conditions. If NAM was strongly positive the circulation would be more zonal, inhibiting brief plumes.
The brief Saharan plumes in the Summer of 2019 in Europe were dependent on strongly negative NAO conditions, so they are predictably more common during centennial solar minima. The 1880-1890’s has several similar examples:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetdl1772on.dat
(Sorry Friederike Otto)
Maybe the critical question with the US west coast brief hot plume, given that NAM was around neutral, is what caused the warm SST anomaly driving the blocking pattern?
Today’s WSJ …
“The floods coincide with a bout of severe heat and drought in parts of the U.S. and Europe, and some scientists say there is evidence of extreme weather events becoming more frequent as climate change progresses.
An October 2020 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found that the number of major natural disasters in the period 2000 to 2019 had risen 74.5% compared with the period 1980-1999, with a large part of the difference accounted for by weather-related events such as floods, storms and droughts.
While not all extreme weather events can be explained by climate change, many scientists have warned that global warming would lead to more unpredictable weather patterns and an increased occurrence of extreme events, according to Mr. Marx, the Helmholtz-Center researcher.
Mr. Marx noted that Germany had experienced similar disasters in the past 15 years and that it is difficult to establish a clear link between individual events and global climate change.
“But it is also true that such events are expected as the climate changes: a heated earth surface means more water in the atmosphere, and that can lead to severe rains and we are seeing this take place now,” Mr. Marx, who specializes in drought research, said.
There is clear evidence that extremely wet periods that regularly take place are getting wetter, while extremely dry periods are becoming drier due to climate change, he said.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/floods-in-germany-belgium-leave-at-least-100-dead-as-rescuers-race-to-find-survivors-11626427590
This is a very interesting discussion. I am by no means an expert in climate modelling, but I have worked on a number of global industrial pollution models underpinning both stationary and mobile source emissions regulations.
(So I know that the relationships between even simple models, and complex reality are “interesting” to say the least.)
So what?
My take on the dialogue above is that it argues “it is extremely hard to prove that temperature events limited to a few day’s duration, and small parts of Earth…result from systemic changes in the Earth’s atmosphere….caused by human behavior….that is only “milliseconds” long in geological time.”
I could be dead wrong, but that’s my gestalt reading.
But even if I am wrong, here are facts from the part of human behavior and industrial reality….that I do know intimately.
Covid induced the largest single, almost instant drop in worldwide DRIVING since automotive transport was invented.
Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) dropped worldwide about 50% to 70% for the first time in modern automotive history.
Especially notable is that VMT collapsed to even lower levels in most of the “urban heat islands” of the world.
This is also notable, because the modern vehicle fleet of approximately 1.4 to 1.6 Billion vehicles is a much larger pollution-generation device than the automotive fleet (parc) pre-1950.
So the current collapse in VMT is a huge event – in terms of the ratio of environmental insult (driving) to the total global “atmosphere”
This may be a crude layperson’s language – but my math is correct. The emissions mass of the modern global vehicle fleet is a much larger percent of “the atmosphere” than it was even 70 years ago.
So such a sudden collapse for 6-8 months should be noticeable on the widespread, highly sophisticated, earthbound and satellite-based, sensors that can track human effects on the atmosphere.
In addition global air traffic dropped by more than 90% – and stayed at that level for months – for the first time in modern aviation history.
Air traffic collapse is also important, because many pollution experts argue it it ‘injects the bad stuff”…directly into “some of the most sensitive parts of the atmosphere”.
(I am paraphrasing the scientific regulatory documents submitted to government regulators here. Those regulators who argue that climate change is caused by humans are asserting that air travel is especially dangerous.)
So what?
Unlike the temperature sensors of 150 years ago, modern human society has one of the largest, most sensitive, globally dense system of sensors – in human history.
We have them on Earth and in space.
Climate warming advocates cite this amazing array of technology as the most credible source “proving” human effects on the atmosphere and (long term) climate.
And….
…I can’t find any source, anywhere that is commenting on this historic, global collapse in the human pollution emitted by 7 billion people.
Might be there.
But I can’t find it anywhere.
So what?
Hypothesis:
If the densest global array of sensors tracking human emissions and resulting insult to “the environment” – in history did not record this inadvertent human “global human emissions reduction experiment”…..
….then why in the world should 7 billion people believe the assertions of a few thousand humans – who assert that they have special knowledge of the human effects on the climate…
…when they seem unable to detect, process, or discuss….
…what may have been the largest human climate dynamics experiment in modern history?
I’m just a poor country boy in this world.
But I do know that the vast array of atmospheric sensors around the world should have been able to detect the largest emissions experiment in human history.
Until I see papers emerging on this….or until my county-boy observations are proven irrelevant…
….I’m not sure we should bet $ Trillion global infrastructure changes…
….based on the assertions of a few thousand researchers….
….who seem to have ignored the data emerging from ground-level transportation monitors…again…in what is perhaps the largest in vivo global pollution experiment in history.
Just sayin’
So you imagine that a 6.4% drop in global emissions can be seen in the atmospheric record?
https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-021-00090-3/d41586-021-00090-3_18770678.jpg
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3
https://research.noaa.gov/Portals/0/easygalleryimages/1/843/2020-global-monthly-mean.png
RIE “So you imagine that a 6.4% drop in global emissions can be seen in the atmospheric record?”
Robert, can we then, logically, expect a 6.4% INCREASE to show? Geoff S
Not in itself – but decades of exponentially increasing emissions are noticeable.
Excellent points! I agree that advancements made with data collection might have been able to illustrate a change. We are naming tropical weather that would not have been possible to name before (which I also question)…
Transportation is a significant part of the largest piece of the energy pie. I would think manufacturing emissions were reduced as well since the economies slowed.
Great questions for the political narrative of reducing C02 by a certain amount by a certain time frame. The alarmist in media is always quick to point out the warming anomaly associations – the media mostly avoids that when the opposite.
I remember when NOAA’s IR temperature satellite was touted most accurate temp measuring device. It was going to be the “proof” – then they omitted the data due to “cloud cover”……
A decade or two of no heating and/or global cooling means nothing to the climatists who will obsess about a heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere because, where Western Leftists live, any heat wave is by definition a runaway heat wave– a ball of fire coming out of the depths of the ocean to consume all life.
Adding to my comment above.
I know there is not a direct connection between my observations of the short term global transportation collapse and “the climate.”
A 14 month event can not possibly change the climate, even though in terms of pollution sources, this collapse was historic, measurable, and even quite visible to non-scientists who were seeing clear skies for the first time in decades
My expertise is not in forecasting the climate.
It is in tracking the effects of global human behavior on natural resources, transportation, communication, waste, recycling, other human networked behavior, etc.
I know for example that the primary ENVIRONMENTAL effect of Electric Vehicles will not be in terms of mobile source emissions. It will be in terms of the massive mining, smelting, water use, electricity source use, and scrap and recycling.
I also know that few of the policy advocates for EV’s have measured the global effects of such transportation ecosystems. The IPCC documents contain nothing resembling professional assessment of these post-use networks.
And it is clear to those of us who track these systems on the ground that the rule in myopic blanket policy implementation is UNINTENDED consequences, not the intended ones.
But – the collapse in global traffic mobile source emissions is unprecedented.
Climate regulators might argue that the drop in a few billion or trillion miles of driving is not so significant now….
….because these climate regulators had the foresight to put catalysts on cars for decades, etc.
But then one can read the assertions by these same regulators that even though petrol cars have cleaned up most of their sulphur, nitrogen, etc emissions…
…they are still “very bad actors” …because they still emit CO2!!
Think about this.
The “policy industry” always needs a villain to slay, or they are out of business.
So over the years, they have moved from sulphur, nitrogen, carbon particulates as villains (because they were reduced by vehicle technology changes)….
…and if it were not for the remaining villain of CO2….they would not have a global enemy to justify billions of dollars of funding.
So my observation is very simple.
The massive, historic, global drop in Vehicle Miles traveled is unprecedented.
It is not a theoretical modeling event
It was the sudden cessation of 50-70% of CO2 emissions for the entire global transportation sector.
For scientists this is a godsend.
How often can you reduce by 70% the (arguably) “largest threat to Earth’s climate”…CO2…
…IN VIVO…
….not in some lab experiment…combined with some limited models…edited by editors with vested interest in funding?
To those of us who drive long distances, the lay person’s eye could see the smog above cities was almost gone last year.
Is this science? Perhaps not.
But it might be similar to the Apple on Newton’s nose.
Or Einstein’s fantasy looking out the window at trains while operating a telegraph.
(I am not arguing that I’m like Einstein – not in any way)
But as one who helped create the fuel economy and emissions regulations – and who witnessed the back room, real world negotiations on those rules….
….it is clear that an honest assessment of global human behavior with respect to both atmosphere and climate…
…should at least include some analysis of the global transportation collapse…
…which at the very least represents proxy data that might be woven into increasingly more sophisticated environmental science and policy.
Who cares whether or not 2020’s car and airplane transportation pause had any kind of measurable impact on the earth’s climate system?
What is far more measurable and is far more important as a question to be answered is the effect the 2020 transportation pause had on the world economy’s ability to support our current human population.
It is clear from the 2020 experiment that the world and our human population can get by reasonably well without cars and airplanes. It is also reasonably clear that we cannot get by without farm tractors, cargo ships, and freight trains.
Take the farm tractors, the cargo ships, and the freight trains away and the world’s human population is in deep trouble.
The drop in emissions in 2020 was some 6.4% Hardly a blip. There is a much bigger picture. EV batteries can be recycled – the problem is to scale up and automate. And battery chemistries are evolving constantly. The underlying imperative is to supply enough power. With cheaper, safer, less wasteful and proliferation resistant nuclear energy anything is possible. Population management, fueling economic growth, meeting energy demand and ensuring food security. In the interim there are sufficient fossil fuels to power progress.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0959378016300711-gr1.jpg
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016300711
Carbon sequestration in soils has major benefits in addition to offsetting anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion, land use conversion, soil cultivation, continuous grazing and cement and steel manufacturing. Restoring soil carbon stores increases agronomic productivity and enhances global food security. Increasing the soil organic content enhances water holding capacity and creates a more drought tolerant agriculture – with less downstream flooding. There is a critical level of soil carbon that is essential to maximising the effectiveness of water and nutrient inputs. Global food security, especially for countries with fragile soils and harsh climate such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cannot be achieved without improving soil quality through an increase in soil organic content. Wildlife flourishes on restored grazing land helping to halt biodiversity loss. Reversing soil carbon loss is a new green revolution where conventional agriculture is hitting a productivity barrier with exhausted soils and increasingly expensive inputs.
Increased agricultural productivity, increased downstream processing and access to markets build local economies and global wealth. Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon and reduce the health and environmental impacts, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking with wood and dung with better ways of preparing food thus avoiding respiratory disease and again reducing black carbon emissions. A global program of agricultural soils restoration is the foundation for balancing the human ecology.
The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year. To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy. If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15. If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall. Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity. Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day. Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible. Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective economic governance of free markets.
‘According to Edmunds, this vehicle would go on to fail because of the fact that its steering wheel would fall off into the hands of its driver and additionally, it was also prone to electrical fires—a scary fact that is also ironic given the car’s name. At the end of the day, it is clear that this was a major lemon.’ https://www.hotcars.com/ranking-the-biggest-lemons-of-all-time/
Some of these entries are as funny as Al.
Electric Buses in Philadelphia.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/report-philadelphias-proterra-fleet-in-complete-shambles/
….
More than two dozen electric Proterra buses first unveiled by the city of Philadelphia in 2016 are already out of operation, according to a WHYY investigation.
The entire fleet of Proterra buses was removed from the roads by SEPTA, the city’s transit authority, in February 2020 due to both structural and logistical problems—the weight of the powerful battery was cracking the vehicles’ chassis, and the battery life was insufficient for the city’s bus routes. The city raised the issues with Proterra, which failed to adequately address the city’s concerns.
The city paid $24 million for the 25 new Proterra buses, subsidized in part by a $2.6 million federal grant.
….
Yes, this exemplifies the ludicrousness of the RIE approach to reality.
Curious. Have voters reached a point of frustration with climate change spending?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-summit-cop26-cost-esg-carbon-11626297240?st=jpn3nthpuvdtkx1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
You could say, Noah’s flood was ’caused’ by the acts of man, which in fact is part and parcel of the biblical account but then, you’d have to believe that acts of man caused the melting of the glaciers, too. While true for some it’s not a very scientific view of the nature of things. Doesn’t it seem more likely that the climate change that caused the melting of the glaciers had nothing to do with acts of man?
‘By ‘Noah Effect’ we designate the observation that extreme precipitation can be very extreme indeed, and by ‘Joseph Effect’ the finding that a long period of unusual (high or low) precipitation can be extremely long. Current models of statistical hydrology cannot account for either effect and must be superseded. As a replacement, ‘self-similar’ models appear very promising. They account particularly well for the remarkable empirical observations of Harold Edwin Hurst.’ Benoit B. Mandelbrot, James R. Wallis, 1968, Noah, Joseph, and Operational Hydrology
The ice on Greenland, Antarctica and other Glaciers and ice sheets are always flowing and thawing and pushing ice on land and into oceans and causing cooling.
In cold times when the polar oceans are covered with sea ice, the sequestered ice on land dumps into the oceans and cools them and supports the sea ice. When the land ice is depleted, the warm tropical gulf stream thaws the sea ice and evaporation and snowfall rebuilds the sequestered ice on land. Warm times with sea ice removed is necessary to rebuild and maintain the sequestered ice on land in polar regions.
This is simple common sense knowledge supported by ice core records.
Lake effect snow falls on Buffalo New York when Lake Erie is Thawed.
Lake effect snow does not fall on Buffalo New York when Lake Erie is Frozen.
Ocean effect snow in polar regions works the same way.
It snows and rebuilds sequestered ice in warm times when the sea ice is gone. In cold times the sea ice prevents evaporation and snowfall and the sequestered ice on land flows into the oceans an keeps it cold enough to support sea ice until the sequestered ice is depleted.
This explains why the polar regions promote alternating warm and cold periods.
This is simple, easy to understand stuff, all supported by ice core records.
Ice accumulation is most in warmest times and least in coldest times.
AGW?
A low falling from the north will bring relief to the west coast of North America.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/webAnims/tpw_nrl_colors/namer/mimictpw_namer_latest.gif
The spots currently on the Sun continue to show very weak magnetic activity (weak flares). The current solar cycle promises to be extremely weak, much weaker than the previous solar cycle, which was also weak.
https://i.ibb.co/4Wzjg95/AR-CH-20210715-hres.png
JC … If I were a graduate student I’d take you up on your experiment suggestions. Ever the educator, you continue to share and show the way. This was an excellent post. Thank you.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-report-leads-to-false.html#comment-form
Follow up post from Cliff on the attribution paper highlighted at Real Climate.
Did you catch the irony of Cliff criticizing the WWA report because it was rushed and wasn’t peer reviewed!
Only David Appell can criticize a report for not being peer reviewed.
Mr. Appel, Cliff has been tending his specific garden (NW climate) for decades now. He has the data, the context and the background to provide very quick analyses of the situation.
With all the goodwill in the world, the 27 scientists you reference may not have been able to get up to speed as quickly or as thoroughly as Cliff.
As a fellow (retired UKMO ) meteorologist:
My conclusion is that it is difficult to attribute the Meteorological set-up that provided the heatwave – but that (and I believe he thinks the same) there was at least an extra 2C added to the extreme because of AGW.
In the end you cannot divorce weather from climate (in the sense of it proving the energy available for weather to ‘happen’.
Curious George: Only David Appell can criticize a report for not being peer reviewed
So someone can miss the irony of Cliff Mass criticizing a report for not being peer reviewed.
I stand corrected.
Peer Review, that is the 97% practicing, you scratch my back and I will scratch your back. You write stuff that conforms to consensus and it will be approved. If you are on the 97% list of approved experts, your stuff can almost be sure to be rubber stamped. Just write it complicated enough that no one could understand it anyway.
Perhaps but that’s mostly irrelevant. The criticisms he presented looked correct to me. It is more telling that RealClimate, a site designed to further political goals and which has beaten the weak filter of peer review drum for decades now goes with a hasty non-peer reviewed and flawed report. Cliff’s most telling points are about the authors apparent lack of knowledge of NW weather and climatology. It would have been simple enough to send it to someone who had that detailed knowledge before release.
Some of it is very striking such as the admission that the models used didn’t find any nonlinear changes to weather patterns over the NW. But as Cliff points out, the models would be expected to be completely incapable of finding those things anyway even if they did exist. The use of models for regional climate I thought had been conclusively shown to be not useful.
The most convincing argument to me is that its temperature gradients that control how severe the weather is. With global warming the pole to equator gradient will go down. That might account for example for the way severe tornadoes have been in a strong decline in the US.
dpy, so you too criticize the WWA report for being “hasty” and “non-peer reviewed,” while accepting the same in Cliff’s blog post.
Very telling.
dpy6629 wrote: Some of it is very striking such as the admission that the models used didn’t find any nonlinear changes to weather patterns over the NW. But as Cliff points out, the models would be expected to be completely incapable of finding those things anyway even if they did exist. The use of models for regional climate I thought had been conclusively shown to be not useful.
Cliff is hardly an expert on climate models, but if the models can’t find nonlinear changes, which isn’t too surprising to anyone, climate scientists have been talking about similar things for at least 20 years, then they can’t find nonlinear changes. No one claims models are perfect. This is a worrisome development, if the heat wave in the Pac NW is in fact some new nonlinear development, and/or the extreme rainfall in Europe, some new climate domain, then we’re in trouble, with climate weirdness going on that we can’t model. What’s your point?
OK, you are pointing to issues of form. How about the substance.
We are back to the pseudo-scientific observation that a rare event happened. As Cliff points out such regional events happen every few years somewhere on the planet.
Cliff has access to regional high resolution models that I believe he referred to in his post. Those would have a better chance of resolving any nonlinear changes.
But even more telling is that climate models have little skill at predicting patterns of change and therefore are unreliable indicators of things like ECS.
Whether climate models can model nonlinearities *is* substance.
Whether we should believe Cliff’s hasty blog post, or a 10-day deep dive by 27 other scientists, let’s talk about that. Cliff was very quick and on his own — this big group in effect peer reviewed each other. You presumably know how it is when a big group works together, versus a lone individual.
Hasty. Non-peer reviewed. Yeah.
Heat and cold waves are perfectly visible in the lower stratosphere. During periods of very low solar activity the distribution of ozone over polar circle is very uneven. This leads to an inhibition of the latitudinal circulation in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere. The stagnation results in the formation of stationary jet current loops in the mid-latitudes. This leads to both prolonged heat and prolonged precipitation.
https://i.ibb.co/cJXgVsq/gfs-o3mr-150-NA-f120.png
https://i.ibb.co/9V003jY/gfs-toz-nh-f00.png
Record breaking heat may result in both record breaking cherries, and a record breaking rise in temperature record cherry-picking
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/07/cherry-picking-record-is-latest-heat.html
Record breaking heat may give rise to record breaking cherries and a record breaking rise in temperature record cherry-picking.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2021/07/cherry-picking-record-is-latest-heat.html
Tamino posted a thorough and independent analysis: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2021/07/16/northwest-heat-wave/
Is European flooding another 4-sigma event?
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/17/1017256168/europe-germany-floods-death-toll-water-receding
Was the record snowfall in Wyoming a few months ago a 4-sigma event?
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/mar/14/record-breaking-snowstorm-blankets-wyoming/
Was the record flooding in Australia a few months ago a 4-sigma event?
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/mar/24/40000-evacuated-at-least-2-dead-in-massive/
Continuing in this vein, how many rare events have happened so far in 2021? How many rare events will happen in the rest of the year? Where will the rare events happen?
Can Mann and company tell us? For one high profile example, see this article in the NYTimes by Michael Mann: Climate change is behind the heat dome.
Why or why not? Can we prepare now to start assessing the models’ accuracy?
Was the record-breaking widespread winter storm in the US last February a 4-sigma event?
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/feb/16/winter-storm-not-over-yet-for-much-of-the-country/
To interested readers: How many other rare events can you find from scouring the news? Any in Central Asia or S. America?
oops, I forgot to mention the oceans.
I live in Chile and haven’t heard of anything super inusual here or in nearby countries, although so far winter has been cold but very, very dry both in here and in Argentina. Sadly it has been that way for the past few years :(
More hot air.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/563399-a-failure-to-act-on-climate-is-not-an-option
DPY: On the now-closed COVID origins post, you asked for proof that masks actually work in communities, a subject I hoped we might be able agree upon after some discussion. The CDC’s review of 11 papers that show that masks are useful in this pandemic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536
Four of these papers show 70% or higher reduction in infection for those who wear masks. I was hoping that we could agree upon the following points 1-4:
1) N95 and foreign equivalent masks (when used properly) block transmission of SARS2.
2) The effectiveness of lower-quality masks depends on how tightly they fit (what fraction of the air inhaled and exhaled passes through the mask), how effectively they filter out viruses, how long they maintain effective filtration, and what fraction of transmission is by sprayed droplets vs aerosols. Ordinary cloth mask provide little or no protection against aerosols, but surgical masks meet the same filtration standard as N95s, but lack a tight fit.
3) Masks only work when they are worn. Before COVID, surgical masks were shown to protect individual student volunteers who wore masks regularly from seasonal influenza, but compliance was so low among most volunteers that masks provided no significant protection for the community of volunteers. Studies showing that masks haven’t worked – without taking into account actual compliance – don’t tell us anything about whether masks CAN work.
4) If you look at ourworldindata.org, you can see that the reproduction rate for most of this pandemic has been between 1.3 and 0.7. Last fall’s surge in the US was driven by a reproduction rate of 1.3 (people being infected by each average currently infected person). January’s decline was associated with a reproduction rate of 0.7. Even a small change in transmission (say 30% less transmission) due to masks can make a significant impact on the course of the pandemic. High quality masks worn by most citizens could make an even bigger difference.
5) If an increase in social distancing in January (compared to the Thanksgiving/Christmas season) reduced transmission by another 30%, the entire fall in new cases in January could have been due to changes behavior and not to approaching herd immunity.
6) At the end of the Jan-Feb rapid decline in new cases about Feb, 20, 8.5% of Americans had tested positive. If there were 6 undetected infections for every one detected by PCR, half of Americans would have been immune, cutting the reproduction number in half. However, if the CDC’s estimate of 3.2 was correct, only 25% of Americans had become immune through infection. Given that cases surged weakly in the US at the same time the most Americans were getting vaccinated and didn’t unambiguously begin their “final” nationwide decline until May
7) In March 2020, the reproduction rate (R_0) was 3.5. The fact that R dropped to about 1 by April 15 and remained near there was due to government policy and changes in individual behavior – the much maligned non-pharmaceutical interventions. We weren’t far from ending the pandemic in the US. In Germany, the reproduction rate was modestly lower (0.65-0.9) from early April to early June, allowing Germany to experience 10-20 fold reduction in cases and deaths than the US. Masks, better masks or social distancing could have lower transmission by this much. One might speculate that if the US had a President who promoted the use of masks and social distancing (rather than conspiracy theories), many of the 150,000 Americans who died between mid-May and the end of October (when there were a negligible number of deaths in Germany) might still be alive. Many of these deaths occurred in red states (though hot weather may have driven more people inside in these states too).
8) By fall, the virus had evolved into the alpha variant which is roughly 50% more transmissible (R_0 now 5, herd immunity at or below 80% immune) than the Wuhan strain (and/or weather kept more people inside or made aerosols more persistent). The same interventions could no longer keep the pandemic under control and new cases began rising in both Europe and the US. In spring, vaccinations allowed the US, UK and Israel to reach herd immunity vs the common variants. In all three countries, the recent rise in new cases was associated the appearance of the delta variant. This can be seen most clearly in Israel, where 60% of the population was vaccinated by mid-March (10% had been infected earlier), new cases fell to 5/million/day by April 1 and 2/million/day through early June. New cases began rising began rising as the delta variant rose IN TWO WEEKS in mid June from 10% of cases to 98%. (The delta variant can infect and be transmitted by those who have been vaccinated.)
The worst known flood in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages is the most telling argument one can find to refute Anthropogenic Global Warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary_Magdalene%27s_flood
Very interesting – thx. The date of 1342 and the accounts of the preceding & following extreme weather puts it in the poorly named Little Ice Age. I interpret this as evidence of the millenial climate cycle, being an overall increase in tidal energy from the Sun, which is the phenomenon humanity is slowly entering into today.
Alan Lowey: The date of 1342 and the accounts of the preceding & following extreme weather puts it in the poorly named Little Ice Age. I interpret this as evidence of the millenial climate cycle, being an overall increase in tidal energy from the Sun, which is the phenomenon humanity is slowly entering into today.
1) It’s well established that the LIA wasn’t global
2) There is no evidence for an “overall increase in tidal energy from the Sun,” and you’ve never provided any.
The LIA was global – but just why is another story.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/pages.png
Robert I. Ellison wrote: The LIA was global – but just why is another story.
“There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age….”
— “Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geosciences, April 21, 2013.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/abs/ngeo1797.html
The ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica do show that the warm and cold cycles did not match. The Little Ice Age was in the Northern Hemisphere and data in the Southern Hemisphere cycled differently. This is recorded in the Ice Core Records.
“The Little Ice Age was in the Northern Hemisphere and data in the Southern Hemisphere cycled differently. This is recorded in the Ice Core Records.” – Herman
Yes, there’s certainly evidence of a shift in emphasis between the hemispheres in both the millennial climate cycle and glacial cycle. It was referred to as a “see-saw” effect in ice age theory.
This points to an orbital driver imv, with the Sun’s core tilting above and then below the plane of the planets to give the millennial cycle.
The orbit of Earth itself would go above and then below the plane of the planets to account for the 100kyr glacial cycle.
(Due to climate change being currently more pronounced in the Northern hemisphere it suggests the last millennial cycle was more pronounced in the Southern hemisphere – unless current climate change is due to a smaller ~215yr cycle for example)
It sure looks global on Figure 2 of the “Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geosciences, April 21, 2013 – that I linked earlier. And with a hint of antiphase polar temperatures.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/pages.png
Setting aside the AGW issue, this from the Wikipedia article.
“ The volume of the eroded soil during this short incident (a few days) is determined to be more than 13 billion metric tons,[2] a volume that is washed away under normal climate conditions over a period of 2,000 years.[3]”
If close to accurate, what an enormous impact. Fascinating.
Claude Guyot-Sionnest commented: The worst known flood in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages is the most telling argument one can find to refute Anthropogenic Global Warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary_Magdalene%27s_flood
Was that flood worse than today’s? I’ve seen today’s described as a 1-in-1000 year event.
In any case, it doesn’t refute AGW, it provides evidence for it. It’s very unlikely that such another severe flood would be happening again, *now*.
According to the Wikipedia entry, the 2002 floods wasn’t as bad, but close. Now again we have flooding as bad(?), nearly as bad(?), worse(?).
Twice in 20 years? That’s very suspicious.
It indicates something new is at play, some new factor.
The obvious new factor is AGW, with which more extreme downpours are obviously expected (since more water vapor is in the air — observed), and for which there is evidence:
Papalexiou, S. M., & Montanari, A.(2019). Global and regional increase of precipitation extremes under global warming. Water Resources Research, 55,4901–4914. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR024067
David
When are you going to stop coming up with whiffs?
From IPCC5. 2.6.2.2
“ In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low con- fidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
Science, David, Science. Try it sometime.
> From IPCC5. 2.6.2.2
Why not quote it in full. It’s 3 paragraphs long:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
Not sure how it relates to David’s point, persuming he has one, but if Denizens RTFR, who cares?
Persistence in hydrological series in not at all surprising. There are decadal regimes in both evaporation and precipitation – but no trend. My guess is that there is no reason for increased water vapor in a warmer atmosphere to not stay there.
https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/24/3899/2020/hess-24-3899-2020-avatar-web.png
https://www.moviebytes.com/scifi-screenplay-contests.cfm
Ckid, the Papalexiou & Montanari 2019 paper came out (obviously) after the IPCC AR5, so it wouldn’t have been included in it.
Climate science is a rapidly changing field. Let’s see what the AR6 says.
“Other studies for Europe show evidence for upward, downward or no trend in the magnitude and frequency of floods,”
OMG… It’s worse than we thought! Up, down, and no trend – all clear and convincing proof!
Behold.. the existential threat is here, the Swedish teenagers will see you now.
The hypothesis of climate change being due to increasing tidal energy from the Sun, which has unexplainable gamma-ray anomalies, has supporting evidence from extragalactic gamma-ray research:
….
The finding raises questions about our fairly simplistic model of how gamma-ray bursts are produced, suggesting more complex physics may be at play . “If that suddenly gets question marks, then it’s really exciting,” said Reville.
..
Scientists hope to clarify, too, whether the object produced at the center of a gamma-ray burst is a black hole or a neutron star.
..
Half a century after their accidental discovery, we are now beginning to study these events like never before. “We’re learning very quickly,” said Taylor, “and what we’ve learned in the last 20 years has not shown any evidence of stopping us being surprised.”
..
https://www.wired.com/story/what-causes-gamma-ray-bursts-their-ultrabright-flashes-hold-clues/amp
Alan Lowey commented: The hypothesis of climate change being due to increasing tidal energy from the Sun, which has unexplainable gamma-ray anomalies,
Alan, you get more ridiculous every day, which is saying a lot.
Gamma rays have nothing to do with tides.
Do you have any evidence of “increasing tidal energy from the Sun?” If not then stop it.
Radical environmentalists who have found a welcome home on the Left are the new Neanderthals of the 21st century. “Don’t be fooled by the fanfare in Paris,” says Mario Loyola (Twilight of the Climate Change Movement)
Many comments here suggest reports of the old Neanderthals ‘ extinction may have been somewhat exaggerated..
Here is what I posted at Real Climate:
There have been a number of extreme events so far in 2021. Here is a short list:
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/17/1017256168/europe-germany-floods-death-toll-water-receding
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/mar/14/record-breaking-snowstorm-blankets-wyoming/
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/mar/24/40000-evacuated-at-least-2-dead-in-massive/
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/feb/16/winter-storm-not-over-yet-for-much-of-the-country/
Have there been more? Can you do the same kind of analysis on these (and others) as described in the rapid attribution paper? Can that combination of modeling and statistical analysis be used to forecast the extreme events likely to occur in the remainder of 2021, including their geographic distribution?
For 2022, instead of waiting for an extreme event to occur and then doing the rapid attribution analysis for it alone, could you select at random at the start of the year some 20 or so regions of equal size and perform the rapid attribution analysis on them all at year-end?
And for every year after, sampling places randomly with replacement as the models are improved?
The authors write as though the models are reliable enough for the results of the analyses to be believed, but I think a more systematic approach as I outlined would be more informative. Right now I am doubtful that such analyses are sound enough to be relied upon, but I am hopeful of seeing actual accurate predictions (without post hoc excuse mongering) in my lifetime (I am 74.)
Thanks to the site managers. I saw the rapid attribution paper elsewhere first, but I am thankful that it was linked here. It repays close study, and is, I think I hinted, a good method to repeat in the future.
Science shows just how uncertain the future is. Hurst’s statistical analysis of the long Nile River record revealed structure in the data – long term persistence and transitions – that was not independent or random Gaussian white noise. Dimitris Koutsoyiannis has dubbed it Hurst-Kolmogorov stochastic dynamics.
e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02626667.2015.1125998
‘Climate dynamics is characterized by high complexity since it involves the spatio-temporal evolution of numerous geophysical variables (i.e., multivariate stochastic processes) interacting with each other in a nonlinear way, forming, among others, the hydrological cycle. Nevertheless, even if we could determine a set of physical laws that describe in full detail the complexity of climate dynamics, it would be impossible to combine the equations for the purpose of predictability due to the existence of chaos, i.e., a nonpredictive sensitivity to initial conditions.’ https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5338/8/2/59/htm
The spatiotemporal evolution of Earth’s flow field has many characteristic nonlinear globally coupled oscillators seen as ocean and atmospheric indices. If the flow is perturbed these turbulent patterns – governed by the incalculable 3-D Navier-Stokes partial differential equations – may change a little or a lot. Future uncertainty encompasses all past variability.
Pragmatic policy responses ‘would be to approach the object of emissions reduction via other goals, riding with other constituencies and gathering other benefits…
The Paper therefore proposes that the organising principle of our effort should be the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.’ The Hartwell Paper, 2010
Robert I. Ellison commented: The spatiotemporal evolution of Earth’s flow field has many characteristic nonlinear globally coupled oscillators seen as ocean and atmospheric indices. If the flow is perturbed these turbulent patterns – governed by the incalculable 3-D Navier-Stokes partial differential equations – may change a little or a lot. Future uncertainty encompasses all past variability.
Yes yes yes yes yes you’ve been saying ad nauseum. To no effect whatsoever.
Everyone knows this. Everyone.
Meanwhile the rest of us live in the real world, where we’re living with 0.30+ C of land surface warming every decade.
We can all just sit back and count our chickens until a dear Robert’s Glorious Tipping Point(tm) happen, if it ever does this millennium, or we can get on with the hard work of shoving these prickly theoretical types aside and starting cutting emissions drastically until we live in a sustainable, carbon-free society where just maybe Wall Street profits might have to take a little bit of a shave on next quarter’s profits oh my oh no what a huge terrible disaster let the rich have to sell maybe just one of their spaceships.
He’ll squawk just a little bit but it’s nothing we can’t live with and put underfoot very easily in the name of true human progress.
David abuses science by recycling – ad nauseum – fixed ideas in pursuit of a socialist cultural agenda. He squawks a lot.
My comment develops ideas in climate science that David doesn’t approve of, quotes a new paper and spells out a new notion – to me – of future uncertainty.
Finally it quotes again from the 2010 Hartwell Paper on pragmatic responses that are the basis for real world progress.
He may try to cancel me all he likes but he is a hopeless monomaniac.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2021/05/01/capability-browns-oblique-approach-to-climate-policy/
For RIE, it’s a “socialist agenda” to simply want to reduce carbon emissions and hence global warming.
Which displays a (willing) ignorance about the socialism already in place that props up the fossil fuel economic system, and the market and capitalistic possibilities behind a carbonless, renewable economy.
Why would someone deny the latter? One reason could be that they have economic interests of their own in the fossil fuel economy. Just one.
In any case, it’s a stunning lack of knowledge, foresight, interest and concern for the future to dismiss out-of-hand a sustainable future because one can’t admit that fossil fuels have done great damage to the environment over the last 150 years, pushed by the profit motive-at-any-cost imperative of capitalism. No wonder RIE wants to ignore external costs — admitting them raises questions he is in no way prepared to address.
It is how they see it happening that is ideology and science is used as a stalking horse for invidious aspirations. I have asked David to come clean but he didn’t. A cultural agenda that dare not speak its name. A myopic vision involves narratives of moribund western economies governed by corrupt corporations collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions – leading to less growth, less material consumption, less CO2 emissions, less habitat destruction and a last late chance to stay within the safe limits of global ecosystems. And this is just in the scholarly journals.
He obviously doesn’t read my comments. I have interests in a Chinese EV maker, I am long in metals like copper for the inevitable energy transition, I have shares in companies providing equipment for precision agriculture including John Deere, I have a bit of Dominion Energy. To cover my bases I have a bit of Chevron – because I expect prices for fossil fuels to rise with exponentially growing demand. US gas by the boreal winter – with low storage and an increase in US exports of 20-25% this year.
‘Dominion Energy is building a clean and sustainable energy future for
our customers, communities, and you, our shareholders. Whether through the largest offshore wind development in the Western Hemisphere, or an
ambitious solar and storage buildout, or the nation’s largest investment
in renewable natural gas, your company is committed to combating
climate change and serving 7 million customers safely and reliably while
keeping rates affordable. Onward to net zero: We have cut enterprise wide carbon-equivalent emissions by about 55%.’
https://s2.q4cdn.com/510812146/files/doc_financials/2020/ar/Dominion_Energy_2020_Summary_Annual_Report.pdf
Can they do it? They have a comprehensive package – including extending operation of their current nuclear fleet and ultimately deploying advanced nuclear reactors. I’m betting they can.
Energy is the cornucopia that makes civilisation possible. Whatever David imagines it costs the truth is that it is worth much more. I am all for an orderly transition to low cost low carbon energy but we are not technologically there. There should be R&D on technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry. But there is no justification for deploying technology that cannot work at the scale required or at a reasonable cost. That cannot solve the problem and impoverishes us all.
The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year. To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy. If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15. If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall. Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity. Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day. Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible. Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective economic governance of free markets.
Cheap and abundant energy powers economic growth. Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon and reduce the health and environmental impacts, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking with wood and dung with better ways of preparing food.
My cultural bias is freely admitted. The rule of law (property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness), government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health), regulatory efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom), open markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom). The rights bestowed on humanity by God. In concert they provide guidelines for human progress.
Robert Ellison: My cultural bias is freely admitted. The rule of law…government size…regulatory efficiency…open markets…The rights bestowed on humanity by God. In concert they provide guidelines for human progress.
By God. Does this God say “business freedom” mean they can pollute the air, water, and atmosphere, killing people, sickening people, changing the climate for the next 100,000 years?
Is that part of human progress? Or does progress stop once we learned to burn fossil fuels? What’s the next step to overcome the very serious *problems* burning fossil fuels are causing and will cause more of?
And who is going to stop them? Regulate them? God? Or governments, i.e. the people? Do the people have a right to insist on clean air, clean water, a stable climate, one where heat waves don’t kill hundreds or thousands, where wildfires don’t burn down town or run so amok there’s no hope of stopping them until winter does it for us (hopefully)? Where the world’s coastal cities aren’t slowly drowned? Ecosystems ruined, species driven to extinction?
Take you eyes out of your Ayn Rand books and look at the world around you. Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics is your neat and tidy answer to everything yet it explains nothing, has no evidence behind it and most of all, helps no one deal with the problems “open markets” — neoliberal unregulated global capitalism, which is not your father’s capitalism — have and are causing.
We’ll have 2 C of warming. Would you like 3 C? 4 C? When will you wake up? Your God is not going to save anybody.
Or does progress stop once we learned to burn fossil fuels? What’s the next step to overcome the very serious *problems* burning fossil fuels are causing and will cause more of?
Elsewhere RIE has written in support of small modular reactors, and much else of value like improved water management and soil restoration.
Actually, David, progress took a GIANT LEAP when we learned to burn fossil fuels. Fossil fuels fuel our progress even today. And will continue to do so in the future.
@David Appell
“Meanwhile the rest of us live in the real world, where we’re living with 0.30+ C of land surface warming every decade.”
Where do you get 0.3+C per decade? According to UAH it’s about 0.15C per decade, HADCRUT 4 about the same, BEST is about 0.2 per dec, GISStemp is a bit less than 0.2.
Agnostic commented: Where do you get 0.3+C per decade? According to UAH it’s about 0.15C per decade, HADCRUT 4 about the same, BEST is about 0.2 per dec, GISStemp is a bit less than 0.2.
UAH measures the lower troposphere, not the surface, and is an outlier even among the three groups measuring the LT. Among the groups measuring the global mean surface temperature, the global mean surface land temperature is increasing about 50% faster, so 1.5*0.2 C/decade = 0.3 C/dec.
CO2 is a trace gas 400 ppm in the very thin Earth’s atmosphere.
A trace gas with a very large infrared cross section because of the large number of vibrational modes of a triatomic molecule.
John
“A trace gas with a very large infrared cross section because of the large number of vibrational modes of a triatomic molecule.”
CO2 is a trace gas 400 ppm in the very thin Earth’s atmosphere.
A trace gas that keeps the planet warmer.
Robert
“A trace gas that keeps the planet warmer.”
Please, Robert, prove it.
Please prove that CO2 trace gas 400 ppm in the very thin Earth’s atmosphere…
” keeps the planet warmer.”
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Wot you got Christos?
https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/321/Harries_Spectrum_2001.pdf
It is a Link to a very good paper!
Thank you Robert.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Christos, thanks for the link to your blog. I did a post attempting a synopsis of your findings.
https://rclutz.com/2021/07/21/how-to-calculate-planetary-temperatures/
Judith – I hated the new editor too so I downloaded and activated the “Classic Editor” plugin on my own blog. Everything went back to normal.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science has found that 85% of the Great Barrier Reef has increased in hard coral.
https://youtu.be/1vsTrf0GlP8
Judith, if you permit, this story partly continues comments above with Robert I Ellison, who occasionally posts here.
I was trying to make the point that simple analysis of 6 Australian capital city heat waves using little more than adding and subtracting numbers does not support the official mantra that heat waves are becoming hotter, longer and more frequent; that the patterns in heat waves of 3,5,and 10 days duration have different time series patterns to single day values; and do not seem to show the alleged national warming of 1 deg C or so per century. One can get different patterns by using tailored, new definitions of heat wave indices that involve, for example, minimum temperatures whereas mine are all based on maximums. Modelling introduces more uncertainties than simple addition and subtraction and creates greater scope for cherry picking.
Brisbane, Queensland was discussed. This top graph of 5-day heat waves, using raw T data as recorded, showed a big event in 1968. Put the raw data through a type of model to homogenize it, then the 1968 dominant peak disappears and the linear trend goes from horizontal to increasing warming. All done by homogenizing some 2 deg C out of the raw data for the dates of 17—21 Nov 1968.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/brisadj.jpg
There is no doubt that a heat wave happened. This next graph of raw CDO shows daily Tmax for 5 locations near Brisbane, all less than 70 km away, through November.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/brisneigh.jpg
In summary, there was a heat wave in 1968 in Brisbane that was the strongest in 70 years of analysis. There is no warming trend in this 5-day heat wave time series.
After homogenization modelling, the 1968 peak has been disappeared by the ACORN-SAT process of the Bureau of Meteorology, by subtracting 2 deg C from each of the 5 hottest days of the heat wave. The trend line now shows a warming. The idea of global warming seems confirmed!
Procedures of this type abound. It takes hours of diligence to reveal the true story, then nobody wants to hear about it. Geoff S
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I’m just saying, has anyone like, looked at what the sun did prior to that…coz I warned a plant researcher in Canada about a week before that.
But then, it’s also kinda difficult to dismiss other effects, which would certainly get my labelled as a conspiracy theorist. And I’m not even talking about HAARP.
So anyone been checking the EMF… and some *cough* how would I say, subtle, easily dismissed, difficult to track, very common elements…perhaps even glamourized in society in sanitation?
Coz I also noticed the birds are dying from a combination of what I mention there.
But hey, I’m just a crazy antivax antiscience conspiracy theorist ex-physicist, geometer and such.
There was a solar storm which appeared responsible for the disappearance of 5000 racing pigeons. It shouldn’t be held directly responsible for the extreme weather events though.
Additionally, I’ve been wondering about the reports of all those exploding greenhouses utilizing co2 with runaway temperature increases.
Huge amounts of irrefutable data there, if you think about it.
Let us practice our utmost willful ignorance and remember that other elements in the atmosphere have no thermal transfer capacity and such.
Can anyone solve this astronomical mystery?? (It seems obvious to me after a few moments of consideration):
a
….
An international collaboration of astronomers, including scientists from India, has identified a curious occurrence of nine stars like objects that appeared and vanished in a small region within half an hour in an old photographic plate.
Scientists from Sweden, Spain, the US, Ukraine, and India investigated an early form of photography that used glass plates to capture images of the night sky from the 12th of April 1950, exposed at Palomar Observatory in California, US, and detected these transient stars which were not to be found in photographs taken half an hour later and have not been traced since then.
….
https://www.livemint.com/science/astronomers-identify-appearing-disappearing-stars/amp-11626432720092.html
Alan Lowey: Can anyone solve this astronomical mystery?? (It seems obvious to me after a few moments of consideration):
https://www.livemint.com/science/astronomers-identify-appearing-disappearing-stars/amp-11626432720092.html
Alan, unfortunately this article has some very bad reporting, as these transient objects aren’t stars at all. The paper says the distance to them is less than 0.02 light years from Earth, which is 1,400 AU or about 35 times the distance to Pluto.
Whatever they are — maybe fireflies — they’re not stars.
Germany experiences ‘once-in-a-millenium’ floods, which have extended to neighbouring countries and are not receding quickly:
https://youtu.be/kfcJjh2q8s0
13. August 2002 once-in-a-millenium in Dresden
7. April 2006 once-in-a-century in Hitzacker
6. Juni 2013 once-in-a-century in Wien
.. and these are just random searches for “Jahrhunderflut” and “Jahrtausendflut”, I am pretty sure there are more in Europe over the last 20years..
In August, we will hit the 40-year anniversary of the publication of a paper in the journal Science entitled “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.213.4511.957), the abstract for which said:
“Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.”
40 years ago!
A couple of weeks ago, following weeks of drought there was a heat wave in western North America. Where I live in BC, Canada, we recorded the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada — three days in a row. In Lytton, BC (before it was all but burned out of existence), it was hotter than the hottest temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas.
Then a team of scientists ran some models (using peer-reviewed methods) and assessed that climate change made the “Heat Dome” 150 times more likely (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/).
Prediction. Realization. Attribution.
In the face of that science and empirical evidence you provided this: “Cliff Mass has provided the best autopsy report so far on the heat wave. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html“.
I was almost convinced you were right when I saw that reassuring picture of an arrow with the word “TRUTH” on it. That’s much more convincing than references to peer-reviewed science (didn’t see any of those). That blog post was a roundup rant of “common sense” climate science — the closest thing to science in it were the repurposed charts and meteorological graphics.
We can agree that in recent years there have been several very severe weather-related events that have been very costly in lives and property. The North American food supply is threatened by the current drought. The question for policy makers is: Is climate change the cause and will rapidly reducing our dependence on fossil fuels help?
They could base their decisions on a massive body of scientific evidence showing a clear 40-year sequence of prediction to realization to attribution.
Or they could listen to you and Cliff: “The meteorological dice had to come up all sixes. And they did.”
Science has come a long way in 40 years.
The fundamental mode of the Earth system is shifts in globally coupled patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation driving changes in ice, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cloud and biology. Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics superimposed on which is greenhouse gas warming. Way back in 2002 the NAS said that this may trigger unwelcome surprises.
Can we distinguish an intensification of the hydrological cycle against a backdrop of intense variability?
e.g. https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/24/3899/2020/
Or indeed AGW from natural variability?
e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0044-6
But the real question is what you imagine these policy makers should do about it?
“Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include (1) the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, (2) erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and (3) opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.
40 years ago!”
We are only starting the 21st century, and I don’t feel qualified at this stage to tell which of the three predictions you quote might come true. So far, all of them are hidden in noise. Do you believe that the current drought is worse than the 1930s dust bowl?
While it was undeniably hot in Lytton, BC (116F), a record for Las Vegas is 117F.
Regarding peer-reviewed methods, a couple of excerpts:
“This assumes that the influence of natural forcings—variations in solar radiation and volcanic eruptions—is small compared to the anthropogenic ones, which is usually the case.” Quite an assumption.
“As climate models usually have biases, we define the event by its return period and not by its amplitude. ” For this event, they apparently broke the peer-reviewed methods.
“[We] combine all observational estimates under the assumption that they are highly correlated, as they are based on the same observations of the same sequence of weather… Finally we combine observations and models.”
I am not sure what the observational estimates might be. I am not impressed by peer-reviewed methods.
mdander,
My studies of global warming span only 30 years and have a different viewpoint.
The standard of science has been poor. Sure there are some high quality papers, but many simply chase research grants, often by making links between natural events and climate change mantra. (e.g. High quality papers have proper estimates of uncertainty, not numbers from an Excel plot.)
Most of my work is for Australia. We have enormous $$$ going to barrier reef research, to climate modelling, to elimination of fossil fuels, to weird educational policies that will cripple the intellects of some children.
The underlying driver is a thought process that CO2 affects global temperatures, so that materials or processes that are sensitive to temperature change are therefore affected by CO2, hence we must condemn fossil fuels.
This elementary logic is unsustainable.
.Over the last 3 decades there has been a drift in errors. Current temperature trend estimates do not reconcile with old observations. Nobody is much interested in this widening gap, which is partly from the imagination of people following the herd and the $$.
In Australia at least, we cannot reconcile 1850-1950 near-surface land-air temperatures from then-official publications with modern versions. Ditto for sea temperatures around places like the Reef. Ditto for old heat waves. Sure, there has been some gentle land-air warming, maybe 0.4C per century at most, not the claimed 1.2C. That claimed figure has a lot of one-sided estimation, where it is ok to add new work to the old average provided it shows more warming. This creep accumulates to gives a rate of warming large enough to alarm alarmists.
Reality is, modest beneficial warming.
Reality is, no need to curtail fossil fuels.
Correction is taking too long.
If you start with wrong data you will reach wrong conclusions.
Geoff S
mdander wrote ” If the drought had been a little less severe and the heat wave had been a few degrees less hot, Lytton would not have burned.”
You have no basis whatsoever for that claim. Then, you talk about ‘uncertainty’.
I have been trying to show that heat wave intensity in cases I’ve examined carefully has not been increasing over the last century, therefore bushfire intensity should not be increasing if it is related to heat waves. There are many covariates with bushfires that make correlations hard, not the least incidence of arson.
I am not interested in criticisms of the style of authors when one can find reasons to question measurable quantities and their interpretations. Geoff S
Try it again? Unless you in the right theoretical ballpark it will never make sense. Reality is that climate change has only just kicked off, uncertainty is a Hurst-Kolmogorov certainty and Geoff and George have a snowball’s chance in the US NW of predicting the future. Actions have consequences and the future matters. Unless they are #&*% sure I suggest they pull their heads in.
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/images/18.66e0efc517643c2b8109ac/1607769322818/planetary-boundaries-cover-1620.jpg
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html
Curious George: To declare – forgive me for using my own words – that the warming up after the Little Ice Age will continue well into the 21st century – contributes nothing to an understanding of anything.
CO2, methane, N2O — they’re greenhouse gases. They absorb the infrared radiation given off by the Earth’s surface. More of them in the atmosphere, and more water vapor, absorbs more infrared radiation.
This is basic physics that was known in the 19th century. By now the physics has been worked out in enormous detail. And it keeps getting warmer with no natural cause in sight.
To deny this is to deny the basic laws of physics. Why would you possibly want to do that?
David invokes radiative physics of greenhouse gases as the only explanation for climate change. Recent climate change in the Earth system as a whole is observed in changes in radiation at TOA.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’
TAR s3.4.4.1
It is unequivocally observed in cloud in the right region. It suggests positive cloud feedback to SST – but oddly he still doesn’t get it.
e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5939/460.abstract
CERES confirms it.
e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62
Limiting climate to the physics of greenhouse gases is an astonishing ignorance of the Earth system.
You have seen me dissing those who deny greenhouse gas physics. There are other things going on – but you don’t know what they are – do you David Appell?
Robert I. Ellison You have seen me dissing those who deny greenhouse gas physics. There are other things going on – but you don’t know what they are – do you David Appell?
Give it a rest. EVERYONE knows there are other things going on. If you think radiative physics is all that goes into climate models you are sadly mistaken. But the energy balance of the planet is primarily determined by the enhancing greenhouse effect and its feedbacks. Maybe there’ll be one of your beloved nonlinearities as a consequence of that. Maybe there already has been.
But it’s nothing you can forecast or project or predict or warn about. You can only hope. Meanwhile the rest of the planet has to deal with the consequences of continued warming, which climate models are projecting quite well.
This is basic physics that was known in the 19th century. By now the physics has been worked out in enormous detail. And it keeps getting warmer with no natural cause in sight. David Appell
He has an exceptionally short memory on top of a far too narrow view of Earth sciences.
Brian Rose has a model exercise that shows that conditions ranging from snowball earth to ice free earth are all possible with today’s insolation and GHG forcing by changing ocean heat transport.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs2015jGRD..120.1404R/abstract
Link doesn’t work but the title is Stable “Waterbelt” climates controlled by tropical ocean heat transport: a nonlinear coupled climate mechanism of relevance to Snowball Earth
Here’s a link to the Brian Rose paper Steve mentioned:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2014JD022659
Thanks for noting the paper, Steve.
Thanks for posting a good link!
Robert I. Ellison commented:David invokes radiative physics of greenhouse gases as the only explanation for climate change. Recent climate change in the Earth system as a whole is observed in changes in radiation at TOA.
…
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades…
**DECADAL CHANGES**
Decadal changes. Everyone knows this!!
Everyone knows that on a decadal scale there are many things going on that affect climate — solar fluxes and cloud changes and the PDO and AMO going up and down and ENSOs and yadda yadda. Young people fall in love and make families.
Your problem is that’s ALL you seem to know.
The long-term climate of a planet is set by its energy imbalance, and in our case that will be set by our emissions of GHGs. Over the long-term, i.e. many decades (a century or so), changes in the sun’s irradiance are zero or miniscule compared to our emissions, the PDO and AMO and ENSO average to zero, cloud changes will be mostly determined by climate feedbacks, etc. Yes yes yes there’s a lot of stuff rolling and turning in the atmosphere and ocean, fluid dynamics and all that, it’s complicated, etc., but the energy imbalance and hence climate change will be determined by GHG radiative forcing.
Maybe we pass a tipping point somewhere, or more, maybe we don’t. Nobody knows how to predict that now, including your messiahs Hurst and Kolmogorov. Parroting their names every chance you get impresses no one and is of no practical use whatsoever.
The Pacific state doesn’t sum to zero over any timeframe. It’s Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and not Gaussian white noise.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/moys-2002-2.png
Moy et al (2002) present the record of sedimentation shown above which is strongly influenced by ENSO variability. It is based on the presence of greater and less red sediment in a lake core. More sedimentation is associated with El Niño. It has continuous high resolution coverage over 11,000 years. It shows periods of high and low El Niño activity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance some 5000 years ago that was identified by Tsonis 2009 as a chaotic bifurcation – and is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high ENSO activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010). The red intensity in excess of 200 at times. For comparison red intensity in 97.98 was 99.
The state of the Pacific modulates the global energy budget through demonstrated cloud feedback. Satellites since 1980 show warming in shortwave dominates cooling in infrared. The start of the 20th century saw a transition to a warmer Pacific that has persisted for 120 years in this the modern climate optimum. Anthropogenic warming has barely kicked off – we may trigger a tipping point. Much more likely at 1000 ppm CO-e in the atmosphere than 400 ppm. But something to be kept in mind.
Robert Ellison: The Pacific state doesn’t sum to zero over any timeframe. It’s Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and not Gaussian white noise.
What does this mean?
How can it be deduced from the figure you provided?
Define “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics.”
Robert I. Ellison commented: The start of the 20th century saw a transition to a warmer Pacific that has persisted for 120 years in this the modern climate optimum.
Where is the data showing that?
Anthropogenic warming has barely kicked off – we may trigger a tipping point. Much more likely at 1000 ppm CO-e in the atmosphere than 400 ppm.
Everyone knows this. Everyone.
I go away for half an hour and come back to multiple comments directed at me from David. I gave him a 360 page book as homework. Surely he gave it not a glance. Supposedly I have to prove what is fundamental knowledge without which it is all just pisin’ in the wind.
Hurst used a statistical rescaling procedure on almost 1000 years of recorded Nile River levels. ‘Alternative names for Hurst phenomenon are Hurst effect, Joseph effect, Long term persistence, Long range dependence, Scaling behaviour (in time), Multi-scale fluctuation, etc.’ The essence is persistence in hydrological regimes – a behaviour familiar to hydrologists. The corollary is abrupt transition. The Hurst exponent defines divergence of geophysical series from Gaussian white noise.
Nile River basin precipitation emerges in large part from the state of Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
‘Climate dynamics is characterized by high complexity since it involves the spatio-temporal evolution of numerous geophysical variables (i.e., multivariate stochastic processes) interacting with each other in a nonlinear way, forming, among others, the hydrological cycle. Nevertheless, even if we could determine a set of physical laws that describe in full detail the complexity of climate dynamics, it would be impossible to combine the equations for the purpose of predictability due to the existence of chaos, i.e., a nonpredictive sensitivity to initial conditions.’ https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5338/8/2/59/htm
Understanding the Lorenzian model of the Earth as a coupled, nonlinear chaotic system reveals the origin of regimes and transitions. It remains incalculable.
‘Perhaps we can visualize the day when all of the relevant physical principles will be perfectly known. It may then still not be possible to express these principles as mathematical equations which can be solved by digital computers. We may believe, for example, that the motion of the unsaturated portion of the atmosphere is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations, but to use these equations properly we should have to describe each turbulent eddy—a task far beyond the capacity of the largest computer. We must therefore express the pertinent statistical properties of turbulent eddies as functions of the larger-scale motions. We do not yet know how to do this, nor have we proven that the desired functions exist’ Edward Lorenz
To paraphrase Feynman – honest dumb is OK wilful ignorance is not.
Robert I. Ellison commented: I go away for half an hour and come back to multiple comments directed at me from David. I gave him a 360 page book as homework
LOL. Links are easy. I give you links to radiative physics and never hear from you again.
Given a process defined by a parameter X as a function of time t, X(t), specify how to determine whether it follows “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics,” a phrase you smugly enjoy throwing around here at every opportunity.
Prove that your so-called “climate regimes and transitions” follow Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics as defined above.
Show observational evidence that any climate parameter follows Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics, as defined above.
What are the practical consequences of this idea towards solving the climate change problem?
The difference is that I have studied atmospheric radiative physics – you remain wilfully ignorant of hydrodynamics.
https://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/849/
Robert Ellison wrote: Understanding the Lorenzian model of the Earth as a coupled, nonlinear chaotic system reveals the origin of regimes and transitions.
What does this mean – “reveals the origin of regimes and transitions?” Show this mathematically. Not in some toy model.
It remains incalculable
LOL. People are calculating this stuff every day. And quite well. And not just in climate science.
But you once read the same paper by Lorenz that everyone reads, and came across the phrase “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics” that you think makes you sound smart, and want to tell the rest of us that therefore nobody knows anything and we should all just sit back and watch Australia burn and the world fry and say,
‘darn, we mighta put this thing out if it wasn’t for Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics!’
‘nobody said there could be tipping points until that guy starting going on about Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics!’
‘I blame Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics for that last flood that took my ’72 Chevy down the creek. I just put a new clutch in that thing!’
What a very odd rant.
Robert I. Ellison commented: The difference is that I have studied atmospheric radiative physics – you remain wilfully ignorant of hydrodynamics.
It doesn’t matter what you studied as a kiddo, it matters what you know, and you haven’t shown you now know anything at all about radiative physics.
All you keep harping on are decadal changes and imagined “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics” that you can’t even define in your own words, let alone show what use they are.
But you have links!
No. I have references to scientific literature that you are incapable of even considering and 1000’s of years of data on various things. You have absurd rants about 130 ppm of extra CO2 burning up the planet.
The replies to my comment kind of miss my point.
I referred to the paper by J. Hansen et al, not because it is exemplary of excellent climate science, but to reference the enormity of effort that has gone into establishing the likely effect of GHG emissions on our climate over four decades. This blog makes it a sport to hunt down the mistakes and bits of bad science, but it barely scratches the surface.
I’m not interested in defending peer-reviewed science by countless credentialed (and I’m sure mostly ethical) climate scientists — or indeed defending the peer-review process.
I’m just here to call Judith Curry out for highlighting that blog post by Cliff Mass (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html). Let me explain another way.
Cliff Mass writes:
“This concurrence of a number of factors coming together at one place and time was why the extreme heat occurred, with a very small assist from global warming, which added a few degrees to an already extreme event.”
How many is a few degrees? What does he think the attribution study is saying?
There are three things that contributed to the severe forest fire that almost completely destroyed Lytton, BC.
1. An intense heat wave (max 121.3F, not 116F).
2. Intense and persistent drought conditions.
3. Poor forest management (that is true of BC in general, but maybe not near Lytton, not sure).
The heat wave and the drought were exacerbated by climate change. If the drought had been a little less severe and the heat wave had been a few degrees less hot, Lytton would not have burned.
My problem with Cliff Mass’ post is not that it is incorrect — I’m not the one to judge that. It is that it is not science and it does not properly refer to any science. Find me some climate science that properly reviews and references the science that the attribution study does and comes to a different conclusion (note: I didn’t say “refutes”).
There’s one more thing that I want to call Judith Curry out about.
How many times have we seen her write about climate “uncertainty”? How does deep uncertainty apply to narratives that she agrees with? How does deep uncertainty apply to Cliff Mass’ blog post? It doesn’t seem that Cliff Mass or Judith Curry are the least bit uncertain about any of it.
Personally I think that Judith Curry is losing her edge. Maybe she should spend less time moonlighting as a maverick COVID-19 scientist and stay on task as a maverick climate scientist.
Well said, mdander. Always funny to see the so-called skeptics criticising others for relying on data, etc. without any reference to uncertainties, etc. Here she is praising Cliff Mass and his supposed certainties – “This…was why (it)…occurred,…” “…a few degrees…”. Very certain, isn’t he? And Judith seems to be certain that he “has provided the best autopsy report so far on the heat wave”!
Perhaps Judith could tell us, after having judged this to be the best report (relying, as I’m sure she does, on the analysis of the data provided) how she is certain that Cliff is correct as to why the heat wave happened and how many are “a few degrees”?
“The heat wave and the drought were exacerbated by climate change. If the drought had been a little less severe and the heat wave had been a few degrees less hot, Lytton would not have burned.”
You are entitled to your opinion. But it is just that, not a science. Hourly data from Lytton on June 30 show the maximum temperature 36.8C at 16:00, end of data, the station probably burned down. The temperature on June 29 reached 47.7C.
Hi Curios George.
I purposely made the assertion that you quoted (just like Cliff Mass did when he said “The meteorological dice had to come up all sixes. And they did.”) hoping that someone would notice how useless a statement like that is without numbers to back it up.
Cliff Mass’ assertion is one that begs for a statistical analysis. Exactly how likely is it for the all the meteorological dice to come up sixes?
The attribution study that Judith Curry has criticized above — saying that Cliff Mass’ analysis is so much better — IS that statistical analysis.
It said that all the meteorological dice are 150 times more likely to come up sixes with the effects of climate change than without. It is a quantitative result.
To dispute the accuracy of the result, you can say you don’t like one assumption or another used (a common Judith Curry tactic), but it is simply not effective unless you provide an alternate quantitative analysis of the data.
Judith Curry and/or Cliff mass need to say “all the meteorological dice are x times more/less likely to come up sixes with the effects of climate change than without” where x is something other than 150. And they need to show their math.
Four decades after we started to understand this problem, that is the minimal effort and complexity required to do this kind of climate science. Judith Curry and Cliff Mass clearly are either not willing or are not capable of doing that.
“Four decades after we started to understand this problem”.
That’s where our opinions differ. To declare – forgive me for using my own words – that the warming up after the Little Ice Age will continue well into the 21st century – contributes nothing to an understanding of anything. We are still at the stage of rolling dice. You think that we are past it. I envy you.
https://wwwbeaufortwater.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/coulthard_hydrological_processes2015.pdf
Severe drought doesn’t appear to be unusual in BC. Perhaps they should be better prepared for it.
“Judith Curry and/or Cliff mass need to say “all the meteorological dice are x times more/less likely to come up sixes with the effects of climate change than without” ”
Actually they don’t ….. in their world.
It’s about keeping doubt going – amongst the faithful.
How many myths are there out there that have been debunked with decades/centuries old science?.
Yet the faithful keep spouting them.
Science just doesn’t come in to it.
FI: Roy Spencer recently did an “analysis” of CMIP6 model runs which had fundamental problems.
Nick Stokes pointed these out (on WUWT and on Spencer’s Blog).
Roy? ZERO comment.
SO it stands … amongst the faithful.
Ideological motivation is a powerful thing.
Like, You know:
There really, really is a baby- eating paedophile ring operating out of a pizza restaurant that Trump was (secretly) trying to eliminate.
SEZ Mr/Mrs Qanon.
Commenting on extreme events being caused by CO2 is a joke unless you can show statistically they are occurring at an unusual rate. Nobody even has a clue as to how many are possible. This idea of waiting until it happens and then pointing at it is about as convincing as saying you knew that lottery number would come up after it already has.
They are using a microscopically small slice of history in using these analyses. The use of the word “ever” IS a total joke.
When they can show it’s significant during the Holocene they will have something. They don’t have reliable paleo data so all they have is wishin’ and hopin”.
CKid, I’d like to see some paleo data that even supports the premise that climate is more extreme now. Everything I’ve seen so far indicates exactly the opposite. As far as I can tell they are just going off the instrumental record which is a joke when you are talking about extreme events.
mdander: “Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.”
Those were not predictions; they were forecasts, scenarios, extrapolation, etc. This has often been explained to us when so-called “predictions” have not come true.
Yes. Thanks for the correction Matthew R Marler.
mdander: Yes. Thanks for the correction Matthew R Marler.
You are welcome.
There are many other events that didn’t happen after forecasts/scernarios/non-pedictions: No more heavy rainfalls in Queensland; flooding of Manhattan’s Eastside Expressway; ocean acidification decimating the population of coccolithophores; snow will be a thing of the past; there will be hurricane Katrinas every year; mass starvations decimating the human population after crop failures; vast increases in malaria and other vector-born diseases. The list is quite extensive.
I am a bit over this new blog format.
Judith, have you published anything since 2011? Your cv looks a bit dusty in your bio.
OMG, Sue!!! If she hasn’t published anything recently, she might as well not exist!! Right!!!??? Nevermind she is using her knowledge to help save human lives! Of course that is worthless since it’s not in the academic domain!!! How could she?? (I’m betting she is accomplishing far more than you ever will)
Your business customers do not count your publications. They want to know that you can solve their problems. And nothing more.
The increase in SOI has been followed by a decrease in Niño 3.4.
https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/soi/
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/ocean/
The abnormal heat has covered not only the American continent, Europe also suffers from such high temperatures …
Is Germany already warned of another wave of heavy precipitation?
https://i.ibb.co/3rSvPwv/hgt300.png
My condolences to the people of Germany. The latest events and abnormal precipitation are very impressive …
Bezos.returns. Another magnificent achievement through Free Market Capitalism.
Bezos’ mission relied on *decades* of government-funded research into physics, rocketry, and space travel. Without that they’d still be paving the launch pad.
Right on cue. Just as expected.
Solutions to whatever CO2 related problems the world faces will be found by innovation and invention through Free Market Capitalism. Government will be paralyzed by its permanent inertia and won’t be able to get out of its own way.
CKid commented: Solutions to whatever CO2 related problems the world faces will be found by innovation and invention through Free Market Capitalism.
So where ae these solutions from the free market?
Are you really trying to deny that Bezos’ company relied on decades of basic research and space flight engineering funded by government, paid for by taxpayers?
The government centric mindset is so predictable and is one factor in a priori skepticism of global warming. This constellation of views will be subject of social psychological case studies for generations to come as they perform autopsies on the CAGW induced global hysteria we now have.
Ckid: But are you denying that Bezos’ company and his accomplishment has utilized and relied on decades (if not a century) of government sponsored research in fundamental and applied science?
That what he did today would never be possible without all that work by government funded scientists and engineers and many other government employees paid for by taxpayers?
CKid wrote: The government centric mindset is so predictable and is one factor in a priori skepticism of global warming.
Do you suppose “THE GOVERNMENT” has been altering the absorption frequencies of carbon dioxide, do you?
Or maybe an Executive Order changed the value of Planck’s constant because secret administrators decided you must — must!! — be seen driving a pretty pink little EV with your nose squashed up against the windshield? No soup for you!
The top down approach that is why Kyoto failed and every COP since deadlocked. Rinse, repeat and expect a different outcome. Just what would you have governments do – in this your stubborn silence is not golden it is contemptible.
A brilliant illustration you provided for the Planet Surface Rotational Warming Phenomenon!
Yes, thank you Robert!
Homer: “… in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!”
Even Homer claims that.
Rotational Warming obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
Thank you Robert!
You always accepted – from the very beginning – and you always supported the New physics about the planet surface temperatures.
You even – jokingly – lovingly – called the Rotational Warming a Planetary Rotisserie Phenomenon.
I know, you did it to help readers understand the very essence of what is going on with the planet surface temperatures development. You resembled a rotating planet with a chicken on rotisserie as a populistic approach to a very serious scientific issue.
Thank you for your help. I hope you will continue propagating the New Planet Rotational Warming Theory by always sharing and widely spreading the basic ground:
Rotational Warming obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
Thank you again Robert!
You are the hope for the New knowledge to become widely known and thoroughly explained to the wide range scientific community…
Ok, it is one step at the time. Our truth will eventually prevail, because of its rightness.
And always we shall have you Robert by our side. We are together in the New science’s fortresses!
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Being psychologically dissected like a frog by social scientists in these inevitable post mortems to find out why otherwise reasonable people had to be talked down from the edge of the ledge isn’t the worst legacy for someone, I guess. In time, this whole issue will be as much about social science as about physical science.
RIE, CKID: Government put men on the Moon 50 years ago. They defeated fascists. They built the US interstate highway system. They provide homes and businesses with water and sewage and regulated electricity. They provide national defense and local police and fire protection. They deliver the mail. They fund enormous amounts of fundamental and applied science, subsidize new businesses, and provide tax advantages to businesses and corporations everywhere.
Private corporations exist in this context. Set a young Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk down in the middle of Somalia and they’d still be trying to build a decent structure to live in, if roving gangs hadn’t already killed them by now.
I’ve long suspected there was an association between the level of affinity for government and the level of affinity for Che’s Corps. More recently I’ve wondered about the level of affinity for the Grand AGW Narrative and Government and thus by extension parallel affinities for the Grand AGW Narrative and Che’s Corps. Some would say a Trifecta of misguided views, or even a Tripartite Pact redux.
CKid commented: I’ve long suspected there was an association between the level of affinity for government and the level of affinity for Che’s Corps.
Is that honestly the best you can do? LOL
One thing we should have learned from battles with SARS-CoV-2 is that when we change our human behaviours suddenly because of our assessment of risk of damage, the resultant effect of that sudden behaviour change has an impact upon what happens next. Did the variants appear more rapidly because we changed behaviours, would they have happened anyway, or would the whole event have played out differently?
Is it likewise with climate change? What is the effect of sudden change in what we burn (even in constructing alternatives etc.) to produce energy, where, and when? Has anything we have done in the past eighteen months changed anything and how long will it be before we know it?
When you go into orbit, you will see how weak man – he is as weak as the earth’s atmosphere is thin as seen from orbit.
Yes, earth’s atmosphere is very thin. Earth’s atmosphere is not capable to develop any greenhouse warming effect.
They believe in that very mistaken narrative – they believe Earth without atmosphere would have been a snowball…
Moon is in our immediate neighborhood. But Moon is not a snowball.
Moon has very high daytime temperatures and very low nighttime temperatures, but snowball it is not.
And Moon does not have atmosphere…
What then?
Then the Planet Surface Rotational Warming Phenomenon has been already discovered.
The Rotational Warming is what makes the Earth’s surface on average a warmer than Moon planet.
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
A brilliant illustration you provided for the Planet Surface Rotational Warming Phenomenon!
Yes, thank you Robert!
Homer: “… in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!”
Even Homer claims that.
Rotational Warming obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
Thank you Robert!
You always accepted – from the very beginning – and you always supported the New physics about the planet surface temperatures.
You even – jokingly – lovingly – called the Rotational Warming a Planetary Rotisserie Phenomenon.
I know, you did it to help readers understand the very essence of what is going on with the planet surface temperatures development. You resembled a rotating planet with a chicken on rotisserie as a populistic approach to a very serious scientific issue.
Thank you for your help. I hope you will continue propagating the New Planet Rotational Warming Theory by always sharing and widely spreading the basic ground:
Rotational Warming obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
Thank you again Robert!
You are the hope for the New knowledge to become widely known and thoroughly explained to the wide range scientific community…
Ok, it is one step at the time. Our truth will eventually prevail, because of its rightness.
And always we shall have you Robert by our side. We are together in the New science’s fortresses!
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Science is more than irrational bubbles.
Free markets do not imply carte blanche David. Markets exist – ideally – in a democratic context. Politics provides a legislative framework for consumer protection, worker and public safety, environmental conservation and a host of other things. Including for regulation of markets – banking capital requirements, anti-monopoly laws, prohibition of insider trading, laws on corporate transparency and probity, tax laws, etc. A key to stable markets – and therefore growth – is fair and transparent regulation, minimal corruption and effective democratic oversight. Markets do best where government is large enough to be an important player and small enough not to squeeze the vitality out of capitalism – government revenue of some 25% of gross domestic product. Markets can’t exist without laws – just as civil society can’t exist without police, courts and armies. Much is made of a laissez faire concept of capitalism – but this has never ever been a model of practical economics.
In a practical way there is need to consider climate policy in a broad context of economics and democracy, population, development, technical innovation, land use and the environment. There is a stark choice in which narratives of catastrophe and economic, environmental and social collapse have no place. Which future is for you and your children? Economic collapse, civil strife, war – or prosperous and resilient communities in vibrant landscapes?
I am trained in engineering and environmental science and have spent decades in environmental planning and management. I ask them – these paragons of science and morality – what it is exactly they have in mind. To be met with silence or yet more sententious piffle.
“I ask them – these paragons of science and morality – what it is exactly they have in mind. To be met with silence or yet more sententious piffle.”
I am afraid that the silence is the best available description.
“Economic collapse, civil strife, war – or prosperous and resilient communities in vibrant landscapes?”
Have you seen “progressive” cities in the US lately? They already chose the former, we’re just quibbling at this point about the degree of expansion.
Speaking of economics and markets, the news this week is that the Biden administration dropped all objections to the new Russian gas pipeline to Europe. Just in time for Germany’s approved plan to switch its largest factory to run on gas. This is an example of a government (Germany) interfering with the market in order to make its economy reliant on an autocrat. The government’s rationale for this is the simple fact that using gas emits less CO2 than coal- an undeniable truth except when the topic is an American gas pipeline built by Americans in the US to benefit the US economy, in which case it is bad and must be stopped.
If gas improves the economy of a democratic, capitalist nation- it’s bad for the climate. If gas funds the army of an autocrat, it’s good for the climate. That’s your “science” lesson for today. Oh, and don’t forget, the New York Times will happily tell you that the $11 billion spent on Nord Stream 2 and the half billion spent to switch Wolfsburg transition was entirely unnecessary- they could have done it with solar panels on the roof cheaper and more reliably. But they were prevented from doing so for no other reason than Greta doesn’t get enough attention.
Robert I. Ellison: Free markets do not imply carte blanche David. Markets exist – ideally – in a democratic context
And that’s exactly what isn’t happening in a world dominated by global corporations, where they pick and choose what country in which they will pay (viz. avoid) taxes, where political “contributions” (unlimited in the US) ensure corporate interests come first in any legislation, where armies of lobbyists and check writers see that corporate interests are always first in legislators minds.
That’s your “democratic context” in many of today’s democracies — or what’s left of them.
Meanwhile there’s still no constrain on carbon pollution, over a century the link between CO2 and global warming was established scientifically and 30 years after James Hansen announced that warming was rising above the background rate.
Your idealized notion of regulated open market capitalism is not what we have today. We have neoliberal, raw, crony capitalism where the interests of the public come second and the human race a distant last. Greed and profits rule and corporations are more powerful than ever and their power rivals if not exceeds governments.
With respect to fossil fuel pollution and it’s just as corrupt in Australia as it is in the US. Meanwhile there is no substantial action on cutting carbon emissions nationally or globally, and warming will continue.
“Ideally.” LOL.
“And that’s exactly what isn’t happening in a world dominated by global corporations, where they pick and choose what country in which they will pay (viz. avoid) taxes, where political “contributions” (unlimited in the US) ensure corporate interests come first in any legislation, where armies of lobbyists and check writers see that corporate interests are always first in legislators minds.”
This is mind-numbingly ridiculous when the offered “alternative” is a political system where the unelected politicians and owners of industry are one in the same – China, Cuba, etc. etc – and everywhere this is the case, the least cost, dirtiest forms of energy production are used. China is coal powered, Cuba – situated in the trade winds with abundant sun – is powered by diesel fuel.
There is nothing to tax in an economy that doesn’t produce. This is why I keep banging on about Germany- it’s the economic engine of the EU and its only hope of providing all those glorious social programs and unfunded pension obligations is to make and sell a whole lot of Volkswagens. That can’t happen if you tax or regulate the Volkswagens to the point where nobody will buy them. The first iteration of “climate policy” was to build them in China and hope everyone would be cool with Germans enjoying the fruits of Chinese labor. The second iteration was to ignore the climate glitteratti and cement the dominance of natural gas, in the EU, for the next 40 years. Good job.
‘Today, we live in the most prosperous time in human history. Poverty, sicknesses, and ignorance are receding throughout the world, due in large part to the advance of economic freedom. In 2021, the principles of economic freedom that have fueled this monumental progress are once again measured in the Index of Economic Freedom, an annual guide published by The Heritage Foundation, Washington’s No. 1 think tank.’ https://www.heritage.org/index/about
Some countries more than others.
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
We get an idea of where David is coming from with his narratives of moribund western economies governed by corrupt corporations collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions – leading to less growth, less material consumption, less CO2 emissions, less habitat destruction and a last late chance to stay within the safe limits of global ecosystems.
In a reality David has departed from only democracy and free markets can drive peaceful transitions to prosperous, resilient and sustainable communities in vibrant landscapes.
So we get an idea of where David is coming from with his narratives of moribund western economies governed by corrupt corporations collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions – leading to less growth, less material consumption, less CO2 emissions, less habitat destruction and a last late chance to stay within the safe limits of global ecosystems.
In reality a peaceful transition to prosperous, resilient and sustainable communities in vibrant landscapes is possible only with free people in free markets.
‘Today, we live in the most prosperous time in human history. Poverty, sicknesses, and ignorance are receding throughout the world, due in large part to the advance of economic freedom. In 2021, the principles of economic freedom that have fueled this monumental progress are once again measured in the Index of Economic Freedom, an annual guide published by The Heritage Foundation, Washington’s No. 1 think tank.’ https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
DA
I have lived in Australia since the 1940s.
In that time, I have been unable to find a single piece of harm or detriment to me or to others, from climate change.
That beautiful sun rises on cue each morning, some days get hotter than others, surfing at the beach is just as pleasant as ever ….
Just give me one example of how my country has suffered from climate change, so I can start to become a believer.
I do not want examples like cyclones. They happen. Or more frequent cyclones – no evidence. I want examples where the writer has actually been hurt, as in injured or had to go to hospital or moved to another place to avoid intolerable climate change developments. Real harm, not computer modelled projections.
Nobody has ever said to me, face to face, that they have been harmed by climate change. Geoff S
“Today, we live in the most prosperous time in human history. Poverty, sicknesses, and ignorance are receding throughout the world, due in large part to the advance of economic freedom….”
“U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans,” 7/21/21
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/american-life-expectancy-report.html
31% of UK children live in poverty
https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures
19% of Scots lived in poverty, before the pandemic
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/almost-one-fifth-scots-living-114218825.html
I can’t provide any more links (a dumb policy), so here are just headlines:
31 million Americans don’t have health insurance
“US ranked among worst countries to raise a family, study says,” 7/23/20
“Ratings of Black-White Relations at New Low,” Gallup 7/21/21
“The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016”
“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011. Tesla founder Elon Musk’s income tax bill was zero in 2018. And financier George Soros went three straight years without paying federal income tax”
“The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%,” [1975-2018]
US: “top 0.1 percent hold roughly the same share of our wealth as our bottom 90 percent.”
In short, global neoliberal capitalism works for some. It does not work for all, and of necessity it leaves many behind. And this doesn’t even consider the underdeveloped world.
Geoff Sherrington:DA
I have lived in Australia since the 1940s.
In that time, I have been unable to find a single piece of harm or detriment to me or to others, from climate change…..
Just give me one example of how my country has suffered from climate change
I’m not going to do that, Geoff.
You are apparently so uninterested you won’t even do this tiny bit of research for yourself. Two seconds for a Google search. Everyone interested in climate change knows the answer to your question and all you’ve done is show your willful ignorance on the topic.
jeffnsails850 wrote: This is mind-numbingly ridiculous when the offered “alternative” is a political system where the unelected politicians and owners of industry are one in the same – China, Cuba, etc. etc
I don’t know who offered you that alternative or why you ever thought it was the only one, except that it’s convenient for your ideology to think so. But you display a dreadful lack of imagination.
‘In short, global neoliberal capitalism works for some. It does not work for all, and of necessity it leaves many behind. And this doesn’t even consider the underdeveloped world.’
The US may not be the best example of free markets – but it is the best you have.
‘The United States’ economic freedom score is 74.8, making its economy the 20th freest in the 2021 Index. Its overall score has decreased by 1.8 points, primarily because of a decline in fiscal health. The United States is ranked 3rd among 32 countries in the Americas region, and its overall score is above the regional and world averages.’ https://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates
The long traditions of classic liberal markets have worked spectacularly well for much of the world. That there are pockets of disadvantage even in developed nations is not a case for dismantling capitalism. Nor are whines about the rich not paying taxes. I’d look for some more objective reporting before throwing the baby out.
forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2021/06/08/richest-americans-including-bezos-musk-and-buffett-paid-federal-income-taxes-equaling-just-34-of-401-billion-in-new-wealth-bombshell-report-shows/?sh=1524c5ed7fe1
Robert Ellison wrote: The long traditions of classic liberal markets have worked spectacularly well for much of the world. That there are pockets of disadvantage even in developed nations is not a case for dismantling capitalism. Nor are whines about the rich not paying taxes. I’d look for some more objective reporting before throwing the baby out.
Why is it “whining” to insist the rich pay taxes?
How is the reporting now objective?
Why hasn’t modern free market capitalism solved anthropogenic climate change?
David
If the last few months of UAH data have triggered these recent frenetic rants, I can only imagine what kind of behavior we can expect when the near zero warming continues for oh, say 100 to 150 months. There goes all those equations out the window.
You’ll always have low frequency internal variability to fall back on, if things fall off the track.
First, they had to get rid of the MWP. Then they had to get rid of the hiatus. Then they had to get rid of the AMO. Then they had to get rid of the forest fire graphs. I imagine all those tidal gauge graphs showing insignificant rise will be next. I’ve printed a bunch, just in case.
You’ll always have your faith to fall back on, if the cognitive dissonance gets too troublesome.
“You’ll always have your faith to fall back on, if the cognitive dissonance gets too troublesome.”
David’s faith is in the physics he has been taught from when he was a schoolboy. He follows it unquestioningly, just like someone of high theism, of whom he’s quite willing to disparage.
“Heaviest rainfall in 1000 years” in central China. Shocking scenes which are destined to become much more familiar unfortunately:
https://youtu.be/1BPk7cUv5Is
When air temperatures are high and there are no strong winds in the upper troposphere, water remains in gaseous form. When a jet stream pulls air from the tropical ocean, precipitation can be extremely heavy.
AL
Much more frequent via what specific, demonstrated mechanism?
(Dreaming excluded). Geoff S
Rainfall continuing in central China with a years worth falling in 3 days. A 20m breach in a major dam doesn’t bode well with the forecast of more flooding and water rising in next 3 days:
https://youtu.be/2SH0c0HIr6Y
A tropical storm with massive rainfall is approaching eastern China.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/webAnims/tpw_nrl_colors/wpac/mimictpw_wpac_latest.gif?fbclid=IwAR1ygkiLeUtYe0WNWPJC3fREEENRSz5r8ozJemQNOK01FgOn61v-M5bCX8A
“Global satellite data shows clouds will amplify global heating,” 7/19/21
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-global-satellite-clouds-amplify.html
paper:
Observational evidence that cloud feedback amplifies global warming, Paulo Ceppi and Peer Nowack, PNAS July 27, 2021 118 (30) e2026290118;
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026290118
from the abstract:
“We show that global cloud feedback is dominated by the sensitivity of clouds to surface temperature and tropospheric stability. Considering changes in just these two factors, we are able to constrain global cloud feedback to 0.43 ± 0.35 W⋅m−2⋅K−1 (90% confidence), implying a robustly amplifying effect of clouds on global warming and only a 0.5% chance of ECS below 2 K.”
Thorium Nuclear Reactor News:
https://newatlas.com/energy/china-world-first-thorium-nuclear-reactor/
A story to follow.
A shame the Chinese had to be the first. I’ve been looking forward to this development for quite some time. Thanks for the article.
It is unsurprising to find a few advocates for a strong free market economy here.
I prefer my science to be as politics-free as possible.
Right leaning politically motivated climate science enthusiasts tend to favour one of four broad categories of arguments:
1. AGW is not happening
2. AGW is not as bad as is claimed (Lukewarmers)
3. The science of AGW is not conclusive / flawed.
4. Mitigating AGW is too hard / costly.
Whether or not you believe any one of these arguments is valid, they do all act to politically polarize policy discussions around climate change, resulting in weaker government regulation.
I come to this site because I have yet to see a post by Judith Curry that doesn’t forward some nuance of arguments 2, 3 or 4. Her “Deep Uncertainty” narrative masterfully combines 3 and 4. If a scientist consistently and frequently makes arguments that conform to a particular political agenda, it is suspicious and probably not good science.
It is not surprising that this blog makes its way into the filter bubbles of so many free market advocates.
Here’s the thing:
In the free market, innovation needs two things: a problem to solve and money.
Judith Curry and others like her have done such a great job of minimizing the threat of AGW that the problem does not seem urgent.
Also, if you’re an old person with money invested, raise your hand – now, if you’re a millennial who doesn’t own a car and lives in a rental apartment, raise your hand. The filter bubbles that feature this blog surround much of the money that fuels the free market.
Judith Curry is an anesthetic for climate change innovation.
Policy is determined on a far broader basis than science. Pragmatic policy must be considered in a context of economics and democracy, population, development, technical innovation, land use and the environment.
Global warming can be solved. Electricity is 25% of the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Wind and solar can’t turn that around – let alone address the other sources of greenhouse gases. Advanced nuclear reactors might. Mitigating greenhouse gases requires a multi-gas and aerosol strategy – CFC’s, nitrous oxides, methane, black carbon and sulfate. Along with ongoing decreases in carbon intensity and increases in efficiency and productivity. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry. It can best be done by free people in free markets.
Climate is dominated by Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamic on which is superimposed greenhouse gas warming. Future possible climate states include all past climate states -and the future is incalculable. It is the basis for ‘tipping points’. This is the mainstream climate science paradigm.
Your science is crap and your policy driven by a misbegotten cultural identity whether you recognise it on not.
Robert I. Ellison: Your science is crap and your policy driven by a misbegotten cultural identity whether you recognise it on not.
Wow. Hurtful.
I haven’t done much science since I published a paper while writing my MSc Physics thesis. I designed and ran numerical iterations of systems of nonlinear differential equations, so I know how climate models work. I didn’t win the Nobel prize and I’m sure “your science” is much better than “my science”, but calling it crap isn’t very sporting.
As for my policy being driven by a misbegotten cultural identity … um … I’m a middle-aged male WASP. Not sure what you’re getting at. I don’t have a political affiliation if that’s what you mean. I vote purely based on what I assess to be the most potentially effective climate change policy … and I don’t generally like the party that I vote for. I believe that we need both regulatory and free market solutions.
As for your mention of the “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamic”, could you please just refer to “Deep Uncertainty”? Dropping names doesn’t make your point more clear.
Judith Curry’s blog posts on Deep Uncertainty are designed to create uncertainty in policy makers. When faced with deep uncertainty, the proper action is not to throw up you hands and say “let’s see what happens”, it is to do analysis, determine the best action and act. In case you were wondering, that is what the IPCC was designed to do. You can blather about the flaws in the IPCC all you want, but at least it wasn’t designed to help policy makers feel okay about doing nothing and saying “let’s see what happens”.
Once more I will emphasize that Judith Curry and others like her have not only managed to polarize and weaken efforts to create climate policy, they have also disrupted the normal response of the free market to the biggest engineering challenge that humanity has faced. No matter how bad you think the effects of climate change will be, in the last decade Judith Curry has only acted to slow our response to it from every direction — and both the environmental and economic consequences will be worse as a result.
Having run hydrodynamic models for decades – I understand that climate models are based on discretized simulacra of partial differential equations. And of course that is very different to the spatiotemporal chaos of the Earth system. This is the source of what Harold Hurst observed in the almost 1000 year long Nile River instrumental record – linked to what Andrey Kolmogorov observed in early studies of turbulent flow. To reduce it all to 4 facile categories is indeed crap science. It is the basis for the real climate risk – in the Lorenz model of abrupt climate shifts – AKA tipping points. More likely at 1000 ppm CO2-e than 400 ppm. AGW has only just kicked off.
It leads to incalculable future climates that really could be anything seen in the past few million years.
Pragmatic responses don’t seem to be what the IPCC is meant to do. But have it your way. Tell me what is it you envisage – way beyond science as I said – is the way forward. In enough detail to be meaningful and without the political waffle.
In the interim – there are many other critical problems to be getting on with.
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/images/18.66e0efc517643c2b8109ac/1607769322818/planetary-boundaries-cover-1620.jpg
Robert Ellison wrote:
Climate is dominated by Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamic….
Prove this and show the supporting evidence.
IF AND ONLY IF you can, explain its practical significance in dealing with the problem of climate change.
Prove that the Earth system is a fluid flow problem governed in principle by the nonlinear set of Navier-Stokes partial differential equations 3 dimensions?
Stop being foolishly obtuse. It is elementary flow dynamics.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/equirectangular
Robert Ellison: Prove that the Earth system is a fluid flow problem governed in principle by the nonlinear set of Navier-Stokes partial differential equations 3 dimensions?
Prove that it contains Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics.
Show the observational evidence.
IF AND ONLY IF you can, explain its practical significance in dealing with the problem of climate change.
Prove that there are climate regimes and transitions coincident with changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature? Why are these things so difficult for him?
https://teara.govt.nz/files/g-7788-enz.gif
‘The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is a natural variability in climate, including sea temperature, over decades. This graph shows the variations in the index derived from global sea surface temperatures. New Zealand experienced significant climate cooling in 1950 and again in 1977, after which the pattern shifted to a warmer phase.’
Robert I. Ellison wrote: Prove that there are climate regimes and transitions coincident with changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature?
No.
Define “H-K dynamics.”
Prove that these “climate regimes and transitions” follow H-K dynamics.
Show the observational evidence that supports your proof.
If proven, explain the practical consequences.
Robert Ellison wrote: ‘The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) is a natural variability in climate, including sea temperature, over decades. This graph shows the variations in the index derived from global sea surface temperatures. New Zealand experienced significant climate cooling in 1950 and again in 1977, after which the pattern shifted to a warmer phase.’
Oh I thought we were discussion global climate.
But now you’re just in one tiny little corner.
OK.
So then H-K dynamics means (?) the IPO goes up and down and so does New Zealand’s temperatures.
And this is your big huge insight??
One tiny little corner? Your a bad joke. The eastern Pacific warms over most of the global tropics and subtropics and the planet warms – oceans and atmosphere with cloud feedbacks. But I thought you wanted proof of persistence and transitions – the essence of Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and decadal shifts are most relevant and obvious to all but the most obtuse.
But it happens at all scales – https://judithcurry.com/2021/07/15/heat-waves-and-hot-air/#comment-956028
Robert I. Ellison commented: One tiny little corner? Your a bad joke. The eastern Pacific warms over most of the global tropics and subtropics and the planet warms – oceans and atmosphere with cloud feedbacks.
Oh, OK — New Zealand warms the planet. I see.
Now then.
Define “H-K dynamics.”
Prove that these “climate regimes and transitions” follow H-K dynamics.
Show the observational evidence that supports your proof.
If proven, explain the practical consequences towards solving the climate change problem.
That was the caption on the diagram. But the world was warming in the period. I assumed you knew that.
As for the rest – feel free to educate yourself.
http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/getfile/2000/15/documents/StochasticsOfExtremes1.pdf
Oh and… yes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3304
Robert I. Ellison wrote: As for the rest – feel free to educate yourself.
You can’t even define “Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics,” a phrase you smugly enjoy throwing around here at every opportunity.
You can’t prove that your so-called “climate regimes and transitions” follow Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics.
You have no observational evidence that you can show supports your claim of Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics.
Nor can you say anything whatsoever about the practical consequences of this idea towards solving the climate change problem.
Four strikes. All you have is an empty phrase.
Robert I. Ellison commented Oh and… yes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3304
LOL. You’re fooled again by decadal changes.
“Here, our model experiments with multiple ocean sea surface temperature (SST) forcing reveal that, although the Pacific SSTs play essential roles in the GW rates, SST changes in other basins also exert vital influences. The mid-twentieth-century cooling results from the SST cooling in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic, which is partly offset by the Southern Ocean warming. During the recent hiatus, the tropical Pacific-induced strong cooling is largely compensated by warming effects of other oceans. In contrast, during the acceleration periods, ubiquitous SST warming across all the oceans acts jointly to exaggerate the GW.” (Abstract)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3304
Robert I. Ellison commented: Global warming can be solved…. And technical innovation across sectors – energy, transport, industry, residential and agriculture and forestry. It can best be done by free people in free markets.
So why isn’t it being done? Global emissions have never been higher (excepting the pandemic).
So if anyone consistently takes the opposing view of 2, 3, and 4 they are making arguments that conform to a particular political agenda and aren’t likely to be doing good science?
Exactly, Steven.
Anyone who favors the survival of our species can’t be objective enough to do any good science.
Willard, you of all people I would expect to see how ridiculous the comment was. Basically anyone that agrees with me is pure of heart and those that don’t just aren’t. Losing you basic logic skills?
Steven,
My point was to show how ridiculous your rhetorical question was.
Next time, don’t argue by rhetorical question.
Climate is predictable and catastrophic therefore we need poor wee willies economic AI overlord.
We need moar straw, Chief.
Freedom is at stake!
Not exactly, Steven.
Good science does not presuppose a political point of view.
You can indulge in all the whataboutism that you want, but this blog by Judith Curry exhibits a clear, consistent political bias.
My point is that her bias not only achieves its purpose (to weaken government legislation), it inadvertently weakens free market innovation.
How else does an Elon Musk have an entire decade to innovate, build EVs, improve the accompanying software and establish a massive proprietary charging network while the rest of the auto industry goes “huh?”
Poor wee willies economic policy is to hand decisions on what and how much to produce to a computer. I suppose anything is possible in a socialist theocracy but it’s a pretty weird idea.
mdander, if you have a problem with a particular point of view Judith has then spell out what it is and why she is wrong instead of trying to assign motives. (Like that better, Willard?)
Indeed I do, Steven. Thanks!
And I even agree with you. The Contrarian Matrix needs no motive:
https://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/
Speaking of AI overlords Robert…
www . hpcwire . com/2021/07/13/quantum-roundup-ibm-rigetti-phasecraft-oxford-qc-china-and-more/
“July 13, 2021
IBM yesterday announced a proof for a quantum ML algorithm…
We’re excited to announce a quantum kernel algorithm that, given only classical access to data, provides a provable exponential speedup over classical machine learning algorithms for a certain class of classification problems.” Classification problems, of course, are one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning…
Wonder how long it will take till the Chinese duplicate it now they have taken the world record for Quantum Supremacy?
“The computational cost of the classical simulation of this task is estimated to be 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the previous work on 53-qubit Sycamore processor (Google). We estimate that the sampling task finished by Zuchongzhi in about 1.2 hours will take the most powerful supercomputer at least 8 years. Our work establishes an unambiguous quantum computational advantage that is infeasible for classical computation in a reasonable amount of time. The high-precision and programmable quantum computing platform opens a new door to explore novel many-body phenomena and implement complex quantum algorithms.”
Finally, we are getting close to bioengineering our way out of classical evolution. Why not will leverage the biosphere itself to solve our climate problems:
www . nature . com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
science . sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/07/19/science.abj8754
‘Good science does not presuppose a political point of view.’
Still he attempts to redeem the irredeemable. Judith has a more profound understanding of climate than most. Certainly more than the run of the mill climate activist.
Uncertainty implies taking pragmatic action just in case. And despite Elon Musk – EV’s are not ready for Broadway. It is a high end early adopter model. But there are many other approaches.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2021/05/01/capability-browns-oblique-approach-to-climate-policy/
Willard, I like rhetorical questions. It’s a quick and easy way to show someone how ridiculous their position is. By the way, there are probably a whole lot of people that think they are trying to save the world from the people that are trying to save the world.
Steven,
Arguing by questions can be fine from time to time, but it can be annoying as hell. It’s just better to state one’s point.
Recall how it ended with Socrates?
mdadnder
Which is the single, specific harm from man-made climate change that causes you most fear? In which way have you been harmed already?
You see, until you can describe specific present harm, you have to be driven by imagined or predicted future harm.
I am afraid of snakes. There is hard proof of their harm. I have no fear of alleged man-made climate change because I have seen no proof of past harm. Geoff S
https://media.tenor.com/images/7d467f5d7037691907e8a73f85d85950/tenor.gif
mdander: 2. AGW is not as bad as is claimed (Lukewarmers)
3. The science of AGW is not conclusive / flawed.
4. Mitigating AGW is too hard / costly.
Whether or not you believe any one of these arguments is valid, they do all act to politically polarize policy discussions around climate change, resulting in weaker government regulation.
I come to this site because I have yet to see a post by Judith Curry that doesn’t forward some nuance of arguments 2, 3 or 4.
I think your polarization claim is off: advocates of expensive climate policies polarized the policy discussion before there was much study of 2, 3, and 4. Now there is lots of evidence supporting 2, 3, 4 (and much dispute), so reminders of the scientific bais of 2,3, 4 are an essential part of public policy dialogue.
People here frequently dispute Dr Curry, and some provide links to informative counterarguments.
Ultra shocking footage of passengers submerged to the shoulders in subway train in floodhit central China:
https://youtu.be/EIQG87c8GlI
Temperatures above the 80th parallel have already reached their maximum this year.
Daily Mean Temperatures in the Arctic 1958 – 2021
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2021.png
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/sea/CICE_map_thick_LA_EN_20210720.png
Clearly there has been discouragingly insufficient political courage and will to properly act upon the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming and climate change. ‘Liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ are overly preoccupied with vociferously criticizing one another for their politics and beliefs thus diverting attention away from the planet’s greatest polluters, where it should and needs to be sharply focused. (Albeit, it seems to be the conservatives who don’t mind polluting the planet most liberally.)
Still, there’s hope for spaceship Earth and therefor humankind due to environmentally conscious and active young people, especially those who are approaching/reaching voting age. In contrast, the dinosaur electorate who have been voting into high office consecutive mass-pollution promoting or complicit/complacent governments for decades are gradually dying off and making way for voters who fully support a healthy Earth thus populace.
fgsjr2015,
Please list the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming and climate change of which you write.
If a particular mechanism troubles you, must be able to say what it is and why it troubles you, otherwise you are just riding on the back of a populist movement. It also helps to explain its validation. So, what do you fear most? I have zero such fear.
Do please recall that nobody has been able to agree on the most fundamental number for manmade go bal warming, namely the sensitivity linking a change in atmospheric CO2 with a change in global air temperature, or the reverse.
I do not find it strange, as a scientist, to question a mechanism for which the most fundamental parameter is missing. Like (E=m?squared). How do you explain away that basic impediment? FWIW, I am helped by an analogy with the tulip collecting mania of many decades ago. It also passed without substantial permanent harm to mankind. Geoff S
“Albeit, it seems to be the conservatives who don’t mind polluting the planet most liberally.”
World’s biggest polluter, the one that added more coal power last year than the entire rest of the world combined? China.
It’s okay, one day you might care enough about climate change to actually think about it. Today is clearly not that day. When you get around to it, give us a call.
Jeff, China emits more CO2 because it has more people. It is supposed to apologize for that?
The US emits more per capita. It’s emitted twice as much in total. It has emitted far more than developing countries, yet most of them will suffer more.
Have you thought about that?
Appell replies with a meaningless statistic and, charitably, an incomplete story..
China emits more CO2 because it’s been growing its economy like gangbusters. In part thanks to the cheap electricity, but also due to the slave labor that’s always present in “communal” political/economic systems and the efforts of the “climate concerned” to force western industry to move east and be powered by dirtier energy.
Per capita? The atmosphere doesn’t care about per capita, it cares about total global emissions. If the climate concerned’s claims about the abundant availability of “cost competitive” alternatives to fossil fuels were even partly accurate, there would be no need for Chinese emissions to rise either in total or in per capita terms. If the climate concerned’s claims that capitalism is at the root of emissions were even partially true, Chinese emissions wouldn’t be growing. But the climate concerned haven’t said anything accurate about economics or alternatives for many, many years now.
Jeff you avoided any discussion of population and the hard questions and instead choose to take meaningless potshots at ideological targets.
China emits more CO2 because it has a larger population. Should it apologize for that?
Should the US apologize for emitting more CO2 than Tuvalu?
Should the US apologize for having already emitted twice as much CO2 as has China?
The atmosphere doesn’t care about per capita emissions. But ethics and environmental justice does.
Appell, I’m being nice to you.
“China emits more CO2 because it has a larger population.”
That statement isn’t true.
Chinese emissions were lower than those in the US as late as 2004. Lower than the EU as well. China had a larger population at the time.
What changed? They decided to have an economy. The climate concerned decided to help them grow their economy by moving western industry from cleaner energy grids to dirtier Chinese grids. Anti-capitalist climate activists sought the growth in communal slave labor.
This chart is courtesy of “climate action.” Great work guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#/media/File:World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png
Jeff,
Is the US allowed to have an economy?
Is China allowed to have an economy?
China emits more because they have a larger population. They emit less per capita than the US.
*WHO* decided to move western industry to China? It wasn’t the CEOs of the individual industries? Those concerned about climate forced them to move? Ridiculous.
“Those concerned about climate forced them to move? Ridiculous.”
It’s such a “ridiculous” claim that the US Senate had to pause to vote unanimously to specifically tell climate campaigners to stop doing it. And yet they still do it today.
Even the Guardian admits this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/18/britain-outsourcing-carbon-emissions-china
The Senate
https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-resolution/98
But thank you for stating that emissions=economy and no emissions=no economy.
Jeff, it’s noticeable you avoided the questions on the issues of population and economies and ethics, so I’ll assume you don’t have any good responses there.
Jeff, your Guardian link is meaningless. Recall what you wrote:
The climate concerned decided to help them grow their economy by moving western industry from cleaner energy grids to dirtier Chinese grids.
That’s not what the Guardian article supports. No one made a conscious effort to send business to China to outsource carbon emissions. They did it because manufacturing is cheaper in China.
What you wrote is still ridiculous — there was no such “decision.”
Australia is castigated for selling coal and natural gas to India and China. While at the same time being a world beater in emission reduction on a per capita basis – and not too shabby otherwise. We have done everything we said we would and more. The goal posts keep moving. It’s a monumentally irrational monomania.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2019/04/25/100-renewables-by-2030-and-no-adani-mine-groan/
Collective human existence has for far too long been analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it — all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated. Yet, stupid-sounding catchphrases are frequently uttered/regurgitated, like “It’s the economy, stupid!” (Seriously, what exactly is that line supposed to mean?)
Wow. Not only are the manmade global warming crowd pointing out that wild boar need to be kept under control but also men in general:
….
FIVE WAYS MEN CONTRIBUTE MORE TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS THAN WOMEN
How they travel, what they eat and how they spend their money all play a role.
According to researchers in Sweden, single men emit over 18 per cent more greenhouse gases than women.
….
The key to the problem with men is the word ‘single’. 😉
All other things being equal dice fall as they choose to fall … Cliff Mass makes a comment about all the dice coming up sixes and people jump all over him. No wonder he is sceptical.
How long have humans desired to harness energy and, like a rich business owner, reach outer space? Who knows where the first firework shot straight up into the sky like a rocket to encourage that desire? Observation of the ‘exact first’ event may or may not have been witnessed. It may or may not have been recorded. The person could have been a celebrity – at another time. And, all of this, determined by chance alone.
Two to three thousand years ago, over a period of months of daily positions, plotted on parchment, an observer recorded retrograde motion of a planet in the night sky, somewhere in modern day China, but it took a very long time for western civilisation to catch up with what that motion would prove to science in general. We still cannot be sure what it meant to those who recorded and witnessed this movement at the time because it will always be just a plot of forward, backward, forward motion on a piece of paper. Was it even the first time such motion had been observed? Did the observer comprehend what it could mean? Was this record treated as just another case of a planet misbehaving, the usual random background noise of objects moving in the night sky? Or, was it treated as a potential problem because discovery can sometimes cause a whole heap of trouble unless kept quiet. If you know how badly people deal in new knowledge and the trouble it can cause you may not want to share anything. Ditto, In modern times – for the right or the wrong reasons – even when we are politely asked to, There is very good reason not to be as open as we may feel the need to be. And are we all guilty of this or is it really just a conceited few for whom decits and deceptions appear to work very well for when it comes to money matters?
Infinity can eat itself an infinite number of times and still be empty … randomness occurs everywhere when logic fails … blindness happens whenever we blink … records are missed when witnesses don’t make them … records are made when witnesses do make them and even when they didn’t happen. Logic and illogic work side by side trying to prove wisdom and/or folly and often we plebs forgiveably don’t know which is which. Is folly now more commonplace than ever before given a growing population and are computers compounding that because they cannot do random properly?
And if there isn’t infinite randomness in everything then how come we have made such an awful mess of understanding a viral pandemic to the extent that our leaders thought it better to cripple our lives, manipulate our minds and paralyse us with fear with some scientists, who really should know better but clearly do not, egging them on? Who could have seen that coming without first registering that we have already been led up several garden paths by people who claim to understand climate matters (as long as they can both lie outrageously and deceitfully magnify problems on a daily basis) and make a lot of money out of it? The charlatans have loud voices and we encourage them with lots of public money … we should all feel sorry for the dedicated and honest scientists.
IMO a good analysis of the situation.
One small thing. You say “Two to three thousand years ago, —— catch up with what that motion would prove to science in general.” Well, three thousand years before that, planetary motion had been discerned, enough to use the science – and the maths involved – to create precise solar calendars. It had all been lost for millennia, for precisely the reasons you give.
In Germany 🇩🇪 , one gets the impression that the culture of global warming fear-mongering somehow led to paralysis and inaction after prior warnings of flooding, leaving reservoirs full to the brim when warnipgave ample time to lower their levels.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/529927-germany-floods-failure-climate-change/
Very interesting – thx
….
But the sad tragedy is that this latest catastrophe was calculated.
The first signs of a catastrophe were detected nine days before the event by a satellite in orbit 500 miles above the Rhine river. A team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of remarkably accurate forecasts about the impending extreme flooding along the Erft and Ahr rivers and of towns such as Hagen and Altena. Despite at least 24 hours’ warning that precisely predicted which would be the worst-affected districts, hundreds of people were caught unawares when the deluge came. Close to 200 people needlessly perished as a result, with many still missing.
Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University, who helped set up and designed the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) in the early 2000s to deal with disasters such as this, expressed alarm that a “monumental failure of the system” had led to one of post-war Germany’s deadliest natural disasters.
….
My last post generated quite a long discussion.
However, the accusations that I made against Judith Curry went unchallenged. Is there nobody willing to defend her?
Judith Curry does not do science. She provides her credentialed and respected opinion about developments in climate science.
She is very clear that she believes that strong government regulation to enforce carbon emission reductions are a bad idea — I have no objection to her having and clearly expressing this opinion.
However, every opinion about climate science that she expresses on this blog is 100% in line with that political/economic opinion. The fact that this pattern is expressed across a broad set of climate science opinions (Lukewarmism, natural variability, deep uncertainty, promoting Cliff Mass’ pseudo-scientific blog post over attribution science in this post, etc.) makes the bias even more obvious.
ACCUSATION #1: Judith Curry’s scientific opinion is worthless, because it demonstrates a consistent bias conforming to a specific political agenda.
Having made that accusation, I pointed out that this bias also disrupts free market innovation.
People read posts by Judith Curry and come away thinking that we don’t need to take urgent action to mitigate AGW. Readers of this blog are more likely to have lots of money to invest than to have lots of years left to live.
ACCUSATION #2: Judith Curry is an anesthetic for climate change innovation.
This blog misrepresents the threat that AGW represents (because it is obviously biased) and it is a drag on humanity’s ability to mitigate and adapt to AGW. This is true whether you are a fan of strong government regulation or free market solutions.
If I missed a genuine effort to dispute my accusations (as I was scrolling through the many long, irrelevant references to the Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamic by Robert I. Ellison), I apologize. Hopefully this comment states them more clearly and someone will come to Judith Curry’s defense.
Before I respond to your comments, I would like more information from you. Questions:
How long have you followed this blog?
What is your background?
How many actual climate science studies have you read and what was the subject matter of those studies?
Have you read any of the IPCC reports?
Hi CKid.
When I said that Judith Curry’s opinion is worthless, it was a bit harsh. What I meant is that her consistently demonstrated bias negates the weight of her credentials and past scientific contributions.
By that standard, my opinion is also worthless.
My observations and accusations are what a Judith Curry fan should want to debunk — nothing about who I am or my character is relevant.
Maybe you can provide a counterexample of a post that shows my observation about her bias to be incorrect. Maybe you can provide an argument of a way that Judith Curry has demonstrably encouraged free market solutions to mitigate climate change.
Have at it.
Over the years I’ve noticed clusters of comments with new names and fly by criticisms. It seemed they were showing up as part of a school term paper or project. You haven’t demonstrated this isn’t another one of those situations. That is why I asked those questions.
Beginning in the late 1970s I was budget director of a large natural resources and environmental protection agency. I worked with scientists for decades. Judith has always conducted herself with the utmost fidelity and integrity and commitment to the highest standards of science. No one I worked with possessed any better attributes.
Many denizens here have had long and illustrious careers and recognize what a true scientist Judith is.
They also recognize ankle biters.
It is nice to know that you have an informed opinion of Judith Curry relative to other scientists.
Judith Curry has undeniably had an illustrious career, probably more so even than the “many denizens here” that you refer to. She worked for NOAA. She has excellent credentials as a climate scientist.
That’s the problem. If she had “gone with the flow” and wasn’t a mainstream climate science skeptic, she could have had a good career, but nobody would know her name.
As a climate science maverick, she has become one of the most sought after, argued about, high profile scientists in the world.
Wealth and fame are strong motivators for someone to compromise their scientific integrity, but it is not proof that someone would and it is nice that she gets your endorsement.
However, her fame and influence is a perfectly adequate reason for me to seek reassurance that her “utmost fidelity and integrity” is not compromised.
I’ve read a lot of her posts and I have noticed the bias that I have accused her of.
As for me being an ankle-biter — I most certainly am an ankle-biter relative to Judith Curry. I have a MSc in Physics and a Bachelor in Applied Mathematics, I know how to design a process to numerically iterate a system of nonlinear differential equations. So maybe I’m not such an ankle-biter relative to a budget director, scientifically speaking.
The accusation stands and can be disproven with a single counterexample.
Unsupported allegations repeated interminably. Does he have any substantial scientific or policy point? That isn’t merely tribal allegiance?
These guys have always insisted that they are the defenders of science. That’s wearing a very this as cognitive dissonance kicks in. The big threat is now tipping points. Based on a 100 year old science they never understood and now deny. Something has to give. I think it is their sanity.
How has she misrepresented the science? What studies have you read that would indicate she is not following the science.
mdander,
I noticed that the only specific accusation you have made other than Judith Curry is a biased human, (which is the foundation for the establishment of the scientific method), is that she did not create a post to inform us of the republishing of a paper that was purportedly corrected from the flaws that were revealed in it from guest blogger here, Nic Lewis.
So I guess you are saying that Judith should have created a reminder to keep checking back on the status of a retracted paper in order to invite Nic back to comment on the republishing. This seems like a lot of expectation and a very unlikely example to be chosen at random and be mentioned in independent comments here. Do you have a connection to the Resplandy paper or Resplandy herself?
If Nic were to do this follow-up that you desire I imagine that he would approve of the correction if it had been done according to his suggestion. But if I recall correctly that would make the uncertainty so high that it would provide little value.
> How has she misrepresented the science?
By constantly lowering the limits of justified disingenuousness.
Hope this helps!
mdander,
I have watched several of Dr. Curry’s congressional testimonies. They seem very pragmatic. In this one from 2019 she gives several important points. Which one do you contest as biased? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3rw0aHUVH4
1) Solar and wind power are not likely sufficient by themselves to meet the need of reliability for advanced economies.
2) Emissions cuts by the US and Europe will do nothing to stop the emissions from China, India, Russia and others.
3) Emissions cuts even with global cooperation would have little impact on the climate until late in the century and mostly in the century after that.
4) Extreme climate events are costly but the climate was even more extreme in the US in 1930s and 1950s. Thus it makes sense to spend on policies that promote resilience regardless of the future climate.
5) It makes more sense to spend limited resources on 100% certain needs to adapt to climate rather than on polices with very uncertain outcomes: ones to change the climate.
Ron Graf wrote:
I have watched several of Dr. Curry’s congressional testimonies. 4) Extreme climate events are costly but the climate was even more extreme in the US in 1930s and 1950s.
Why do you believe this?
Ron Graf wrote:
2) Emissions cuts by the US and Europe will do nothing to stop the emissions from China, India, Russia and others.
Can climate change be solved if China, India, Russia and the others stop emitting but the US and Europe do not?
Ron Graf wrote:
3) Emissions cuts even with global cooperation would have little impact on the climate until late in the century and mostly in the century after that.
Says what?
My paraphrase of Dr. Curry: “4) Extreme climate events are costly but the climate was even more extreme in the US in 1930s and 1950s.”
David A. asks: “Why do you believe this?”
The records are public. Roger Pieke Jr. is a good search keyword with extreme weather. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=roger+Pielke+Jr.+extreme+weather&btnG=
The drought and Dust Bowl of the 1930s is a very documented era. Tropical cyclones have not statistically trended up or down in intensity or frequency over the last 150 years in the US. I do not understand the theoretical basis that GHG should cause an expected change. Wind is caused by the temperature gradient caused by solar radiation. GHG slightly diminishes solar radiation, not increase it. GHG is primarily blocking outgoing IR radiation, particularly during night and winter.
“Can climate change be solved if China, India, Russia and the others stop emitting but the US and Europe do not?”
Since the US and Europe are leading the way in reducing emissions, albeit partially by outsourcing smoke stacks to China and India, this is a very unlikely hypothetical. But the answer is obviously to form a global central government to control all aspects of human action and imprison or eliminate those who do not comply with healthy weather adjusting policies.
Ron Graf commented: Since the US and Europe are leading the way in reducing emissions….
The US can’t be said to be “leading the way” when its per capita emissions are still among the highest in the world….
Ron Graf wrote: The drought and Dust Bowl of the 1930s is a very documented era
“Western Drought Has Lasted Longer Than the Dust Bowl,” Scientific American, 7/21/21.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-drought-has-lasted-longer-than-the-dust-bowl/
Ron Graf wrote: Tropical cyclones have not statistically trended up or down in intensity or frequency over the last 150 years in the US
But other types of extreme events are on the rise:
“Global warming already driving increases in rainfall extremes: Precipitation extremes are affecting even arid parts of the world, study shows,” Nature 3/7/16
http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-already-driving-increases-in-rainfall-extremes-1.19508
“Increased record-breaking precipitation events under global warming,” J Lehmann et al, Clim. Change 132, 501–515 (2015).
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-015-1434-y
Evidence for more extreme downpours:
Papalexiou, S. M., & Montanari, A.(2019). Global and regional increase of precipitation extremes under global warming. Water Resources Research, 55,4901–4914. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR024067
Ron Graf commented: But the answer is obviously to form a global central government to control all aspects of human action and imprison or eliminate those who do not comply with healthy weather adjusting policies.
This is a ridiculous straw man argument — no one is arguing for anything like this. It shows you aren’t serious about the topic or the discussion.
David, you say the remedies that you envision by those who take power to fix climate are benign and reasonable. In the video of Dr. Curry’s 2019 testimony she was introduced by congressman Grijalva, who in 2015 used his power to cast a drag net over any scientist or academic that was not towing the line on climate alarmism. It was revealed that professor Willie Soon received a small grant from an oil company for his research and this fit in with the “merchants of doubt” meme that was running at the time, Grijalva attacked 7 individuals by name, including Dr. Curry. The manner of people like Grijalva and Mann make my skin crawl. If they are right about anything it is a complete accident. They are reckless, ruthless and understand what professional integrity even is.
https://theclimatefix.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/i-am-under-investigation/
But David Appell is certain that power that is given to people of this like would not be abused. You say dangerous climate change is already here. I say dangerous abuse is already here.
“When “witch hunts” are deemed legitimate in the context of popular causes, we will have fully turned science into just another arena for the exercise of power politics. The result is a big loss for both science and politics.” -Roger Pielke Jr.
Ron Graf wrote: “When “witch hunts” are deemed legitimate in the context of popular causes, we will have fully turned science into just another arena for the exercise of power politics. The result is a big loss for both science and politics.” -Roger Pielke Jr
Ron, that’s so ironic coming from RPJr, who misses no opportunity to criticize climate scientists on the flimsiest of excuses (like Marcott et al). And his reputation has suffered for it….
Ron Graf: The ethical violations by Willie Soon, pointed out by Congressman Grijalva, were serious and not “small.” By 2015 it was known that Soon received at least $1.2 M in funding from Southern Company, Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries. “At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?_r=1
These are serious ethical violations, not to be taken lightely, and serious violation of conflict of interest rules that cast real doubt on Soon and his work.
What’s more, Soon did not disclose these fundings when he testified before a House science committee, with other fossil fuel industry-related ties also unreported.
Soon’s work is not taken seriously, and repeated ethical violations like these are a big reason why. (His science is also wrong, as I wrote about for Scientific American in 2003 or 2004.)
David Appell says: “Ron, that’s so ironic coming from RPJr, who misses no opportunity to criticize climate scientists on the flimsiest of excuses (like Marcott et al). And his reputation has suffered for it….”
Yes, RP.Jr. has some nerve complaining about being targeted by powerful people in the government after he criticized the work of a fellow scientist who is favored by the Dems.
You are saying that Marcott has no ability to defend his own work or rely on other scientists to support his work? You are saying that anyone who criticizes his work should be on notice that they are supplying probable cause for committing a crime against humanity and need to be investigated and cancelled if possible? You are saying you want to live in that country that would condone this? What country are your from?
Willie Soon produced a paper that few payed attention to and was ruined because activists highlighted it was funded by a private grant from fossil fuel. (I think it was likely the last grant by fossil fuel before being neutered by the climate justice movement.)
Compare this to Michael Mann who produced a paper whose chart was on the jacket of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report and was featured in a Nobel Prize winning movie, (both as a temperature chart and as Lonnie Thompson’s ice core record.) The first was a scientific falsification, the second as Hollywood dramatic license. And Mann continues to be a leader of his field, enjoying showers of funds from the US Treasury.
Happily she needs no defense against your nonsensical claims. Have you read her numerous scientific publications? Or looked at her company’s innovative weather forecasting methods?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=Judith+curry&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C49
Says her scientific writings have been cited over 22,000 times!
One such scientific writing:
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv14n09page18.html
Prove it.
I couldn’t possibly. My accusations are pretty much impossible to prove, so I guess you win.
But being unproven isn’t the same as untrue.
Fortunately, if the first accusation falls, the second one is on pretty shaky ground. Meanwhile, a single counterexample is all that is needed to prove that my first accusation is untrue.
So, stevereincarnated, you could cement your victory by just finding one substantial counterexample of the bias that I described.
Describe in detail exactly what would disprove you because I consider this discussion a waste of time. You are obviously too biased to think objectively.
Accusation: mdander is a budding dictator racist pedophile who disposes of his gum under the seats in movie theaters.
I don’t believe the gum accusation for a minute.
steve –
> I’d really like to see your specific arguments on how you know Judith is biased.
I’m going to guess that you’ve read Judith’s blog quite a bit. You’ve read her advocacy on many different issues, on climate science and related sociological and/or political issues. Even on issues largely unrelated to climate science.
Have you never seen any indication of bias on her part in all that time? If you have what was it?
Groupthink is a cognitive disorder. Challenging the farcical left climate memes and how they are employed in political and social interactions is not bias.
Joshua, I’m not interested in trying to figure out what I disagree her on and trying to label it. That’s a lot of work if you want to maintain your objectivity.
> Joshua joins the debate on bias
To say that speculating about “motives for bias” is foolish, Chief.
But go ahead: we need moar hippie punching!
steve –
> Joshua, I’m not interested in trying to figure out what I disagree her on and trying to label it. That’s a lot of work if you want to maintain your objectivity.
That’s really interesting. You’re not interested in assessing yourself whether Judith shows any biases, but you’re very animated about challenging someone who suggests that she’s biased.
That fits almost perfectly with theories of motivated reasoning. You’re only interested in investigating ideas if they don’t match your preexisting views? And you think that way lies you maintaining your own objectivity?
I don’t think this started out as merely “I think Judith has biases.”
Prove it.
I’ll call you as my witness.
I saw you chew gum before going to see a movie.
Where’s your gum?
Now you know why I didn’t believe it. The evidence said otherwise.
mdander –
See there? Mere mention that Judith is biased, like anyone else I might add, sends these boys into an highly agitated state. A tither, one might say.
Judith’s sainthood is sacrosanct.
Well Joshua, since you are in agreement with mdander that anyone with bias doesn’t do good science and since we agree that everyone has bias, I guess you are arguing that there is no good science. Now I can see why you never argue the science. Where to start?
Steve –
> since you are in agreement with mdander that anyone with bias doesn’t do good science…
Stop fantasizing about me. I never said that, nor did I even imply it.
That’s exactly what you said when you said the argument was only over merely having bias.
Steve –
> That’s exactly what you said when you said the argument was only over merely having bias.
Lol
OK. Fantaize away to your heart’s content.
It’s clear there’s no way to get you to stick to what I’ve actually said.
You didn’t say the argument was only over having bias? Am I imagining your comments in my head? Anyone here a shrink? If you think that was all the argument was about then you must consider everything else that was alleged in the ‘goes without saying’ category.
That’s a weird meme. All ocean warming and cooling prior to the 20th century was natural.
Accusation: mdander is a budding dictator.
We should not let this blog degenerate into an Attorney General’s Weekly. Trading accusation would be inappropriate even there.
Inference: Curious George is suggesting that his accusation has the same weight and basis in reality as my accusations against Judith Curry.
Whereas Judith Curry has the ear of both policy makers and investors, I do not. Her opinions influence important people, so her motives and her integrity should be challenged.
You can challenge my motives and integrity all you want — I assure you that there’s a vanishingly small amount of people that care.
Will you respond to my accusation?
Do you expect other people to respond to your accusations?
mdander, are you aware that Dr. Curry was very much part of the climate establishment up until the late 2000s?
You make a good point that scientists are individuals and thus have personal opinions, and like everyone else, want to be proven correct. The scientific method was conceived to mitigate this natural bias. Agreed?
mdander:
In your mind are your accusations an application of the scientific method?
Do you believe that consensus = scientific method?
Do you think that big oil has ever funded Dr. Curry?
Can you provide one example of falsification for personal profit by Dr. Curry?
Do you know what Climategate was about?
Do you know what Mike’s Nature trick was?
Can you point to a paper that Dr. Curry has authored or co-authored that you dispute?
By the way, look at Webster 2005 and tell us how this was biased against the climate alarm industry?
What you are calling the climate establishment is a pervasive and invidious group think that demonizes any departure from the accepted narrative. They are militant and commonly daft defenders of memes that impose a stranglehold on open science. It justifies in the minds of the hyper irrational the tyranny of technocrat.
Real science progresses despite the gatekeeping but it hardly matters for realistic policy. The future is inevitably cyberpunk.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2015/10/19/cyberpunk-is-the-future/
Ron Graf:
Q: In your mind are your accusations an application of the scientific method?
A: What? No. They’re accusations of bias — an attempt to establish that this blog is not a BALANCED source of climate science review.
Q: Do you believe that consensus = scientific method?
A: What? No.
Q: Do you think that big oil has ever funded Dr. Curry?
A: That would be a motive for bias — I don’t claim to understand Dr. Curry’s motives.
Q: Can you provide one example of falsification for personal profit by Dr. Curry?
A: No. That wouldn’t be bias. That would be malfeasance.
Q: Do you know what Climategate was about? A: Yes.
Q: Do you know what Mike’s Nature trick was? A: Yes.
Q: Can you point to a paper that Dr. Curry has authored or co-authored that you dispute? A: No.
Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean by bias. I’ll point you to the same example that I gave atanb:
Search Resplandy on this site.
There is a five part saga detailing how Nic Lewis found a problem in the Resplandy et. al. Ocean Warming paper that concluded with the retraction of this paper (you can read the retraction in Nature — it credits Nic Lewis for his help identifying flaws in their method).
Honestly, I was impressed with Nic Lewis’ work and followed the saga with interest. I learned stuff.
Tell me why there was no follow up post when the paper was republished.
If this were a balanced blog, it absolutely would have highlighted that conclusion to the saga because Nic Lewis played a huge part in getting it there.
My answer is that the republished paper was no longer flawed, but the conclusion was not something that Dr. Curry would like to highlight.
It’s not falsification. There is no malfeasance or breach of ethics. It is just a simple, obvious bias against science that shows that AGW is a bigger threat than is portrayed here.
Does that mean that Dr. Curry is a liar? No.
I said that Dr. Curry’s scientific opinion is worthless. I said that to get a rise out of people and generate a discussion about bias (sadly it mostly generated random abuse). I actually believe that her opinion is not worthless if taken with a clear understanding of the bias.
I mean come on. She’s owner / president of CFAN:
“CFAN’s owners President Judith Curry and Peter Webster brings a wealth of experience and expertise for supporting litigation related to climate change. The following services can be provided for litigation:
Provide factual information and background relevant to the decision/policy and the litigation
– Consult with attorneys and examine documents
– Assist attorneys in deposition and cross-examination of experts
– Prepare expert and rebuttal reports
– Assist attorneys in preparation pre- and post-trial submissions
– Testify at trial”
Who would hire her if she suddenly started reviewing good scientific papers that indicated that fossil fuel emissions were contributing to climate change and were to some extent responsible for so some recent very costly extreme weather incidents?
I don’t claim to understand the motives for Dr. Curry’s persistent bias, but that’s not to say she doesn’t have any.
Show me a person that says they have no bias and I’ll show you a person that is too biased to have an objective opinion.
Stop repeating your nonsense. The real scientific question is not ocean warming but how much is natural variability and how much anthropogenic forcing. What should sensibly be done in the light of that uncertainty should not be the sole domain of the farcical left.
Accusation: George is playing squirrels.
stevenreincarnated! We just had a breakthrough. I admitted that Dr. Curry’s scientific opinion is not worthless, and you admitted that she is biased.
You met me half way on accusation #1.
mdander –
> I don’t claim to understand the motives for Dr. Curry’s persistent bias, but that’s not to say she doesn’t have any.
IMO, speculating about “motives for bias” is foolish. We all have motives for bias. It’s our very nature to have them. Unless you know someone well, personally, you can’t possibly know what motivates their biases.
In fact, one of the things I always find most amusing about this website is to watch “skeptics” so frequently floundering about, making accusations so entirely sure that then can determine what someone else’s motives for bias are. The great sign of bias is a total unawareness on display when someone’s very sure that they can divine someone else’s motives for bias.
That said, I do think there are many clear examples to be had of Judith’s bias. But I hope you know that she has a fan club here, who take it very seriously if anyone deems to even suggest that Judith is subject to bias just like anyone else.
Judith’s sainthood is sacrosanct.
mdander, I am biased. You are biased. We are all biased. The objective should be to understand your biases and try to adjust for them. Now do you know anything about climate science because I’d really like to see your specific arguments on how you know Judith is biased. Let’s see if you even know enough to find my biases. Perhaps if nothing else you can find some of your own.
oops. wrong place…
steve –
> I’d really like to see your specific arguments on how you know Judith is biased.
I’m going to guess that you’ve read Judith’s blog quite a bit. You’ve read her advocacy on many different issues, on climate science and related sociological and/or political issues. Even on issues largely unrelated to climate science.
Have you never seen any indication of bias on her part in all that time? If you have what was it?
Joshua joins the debate on bias. Now there’s an unintended irony.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/07/15/heat-waves-and-hot-air/#comment-956261
Chief –
You butt in to a conversation I’m trying to have with someone else, to do nothing other than level an insult.
Looks like your butthurt about being called out for unintentional irony hasn’t healed yet, eh?
The farcical left climate groupthink inevitably devolves into ridicule and insults. Magnified with Joshua, poor wee willie and others of that ilk because that’s all they have. It is a matter of ‘cancelling’ people – Judith for bias in this instance.
The CMIP-6 models assume by and large that greenhouse gases and feedbacks drive all climate change. They can’t all be right.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/cmip-6-1.png
The divergence can be explained in terms of nonlinear math.
‘Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable. They echo other famous limitations on scientist’s expectations, namely the undecidability of some propositions within axiomatic mathematical systems (Gödel’s theorem) and the uncomputability of some algorithms due to excessive size of the calculation.’ https://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709
Models can reproduce measured radiative flux at top of atmosphere – but this entails ditching treasured notions of the precision of models and their powers of prediction.
‘We compare top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes observed by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) and simulated by seven general circulation models forced with observed sea-surface temperature (SST) and sea-ice boundary conditions. In response to increased SSTs along the equator and over the eastern Pacific (EP) following the so-called global warming “hiatus” of the early 21st century, simulated TOA flux changes are remarkably similar to CERES. Both show outgoing shortwave and longwave TOA flux changes that largely cancel over the west and central tropical Pacific, and large reductions in shortwave flux for EP low-cloud regions. A model’s ability to represent changes in the relationship between global mean net TOA flux and surface temperature depends upon how well it represents shortwave flux changes in low-cloud regions, with most showing too little sensitivity to EP SST changes, suggesting a “pattern effect” that may be too weak compared to observations.’ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL086705
The inability to come to terms with new data that challenges memes is cognitive dissonance as part of a farcical left groupthink cognitive disorder.
Joshua suggests that speculating about “motives for bias” is foolish.
Chief hears that “it is a matter of ‘cancelling’ people.”
You can’t make this up.
Rest assured that poor wee willie has no problem making it up.
Joshie has a consistent pattern of reading people’s minds and diagnosing “bias” in other vastly more qualified people. He himself is totally unqualified to diagnose bias as his comments usually totally lack meaningful content or scientific quantification, but feature cherry picking, quote mining, and other behaviors that lead others to point out that he is troll. It’s a sad track record of wasted life energy. My suggestion to you Joshie is that you go back to school and learn some science, math, and logic so that you can avoid embarrassment.
Judith has a point of view like most scientists. She has a massive opus on the internet so people can judge for themselves. I believe her main contribution is pointing out how climate science is itself systematically biased by political activism. It also doesn’t adequately consider uncertainty. I would caution Joshie that Judith is highly qualified to make these observations.
https://gph.is/g/Zxen8vy
Oops.
mdander –
See there? Mere mention that Judith is biased, like anyone else I might add, sends these boys into an highly agitated state. A tither, one might say.
Judith’s sainthood is sacrosanct.
The assertion – repeated over and over again –
is that nothing Judith says has any value because she is biased. Then Joshua and poor wee willie dogpile on in a farcical left fervour. It is a pattern all too familiar. And being butthurt is supposed to silence me?
Chief –
> The assertion – repeated over and over again –
is that nothing Judith says has any value because she is biased.
I never said that once, let alone repeated it over and over. In fact, I’ve never even. Implied it. In fact, I’ve commented that I think she’s right to focus on the importance of uncertainty.
Stop fantasizing about me. .
Seeing as it mdander’s repeated assertions in dispute – Joshua may fantasize about my butthurt all he likes. I’m quite sure I don’t want to know.
Robert I. Ellison commented:It is a matter of ‘cancelling’ people – Judith for bias in this instance.
How stupid. Judith has a prominent blog and is often asked to testify before the US Congress. She has in no sense been “cancelled.”
Robert I. Ellison commented: The real scientific question is not ocean warming but how much is natural variability and how much anthropogenic forcing.
Except on short-term, decadal scales which aren’t of concern for the climate change problem, there are no known significant natural forcings — it’s all anthropogenic.
And no one here has ever shown any evidence to the contrary.
‘Hints that the climate system could change abruptly came unexpectedly from fields far from traditional climatology. In the late 1950s, a group in Chicago carried out tabletop “dishpan” experiments using a rotating fluid to simulate the circulation of the atmosphere. They found that a circulation pattern could flip between distinct modes. If the actual atmospheric circulation did that, weather patterns in many regions would change almost instantly.’ https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
Here’s a Tim Palmer video that goes into some detail on the vagaries of atmospheric circulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU
The atmospheric patterns that drove elevated temperature in the US Pacific north-west are the result of a stochastic process in which small initial instabilities can produce extreme events seemingly by chance.
“We have made trillions of small adaptations to optimize our society for the historical range of temperature, precipitation, etc., that we have experienced,” Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, told Axios via email.
“As the climate changes, that range is no longer the relevant one, and the mismatch between what we are adapted for and what we actually experience can generate huge negative impacts that seem to suddenly appear out of nowhere — even though we’ve been predicting them for literally decades,” he said.”
And that is utter nonsense. Climate has always changed not incrementally but as shifts in regimes. Seen in analysis pioneered by the giants Harold Hurst and – in a different field – Andrey Kolmogorov – almost 100 years ago.
There have been megadroughts and megafloods. Regionally as much as a 16 degree C change in temperature in as little as a decade. Whole continents transitioning from grassland to desert. With civilisations coming and going. Preparing global communities for inevitable surprises can’t just be a matter of carbon taxes and deploying wind and solar. Even less dismantling democracy and capitalism. There is a need to repair soils and ecosystems, build resilient infrastructure and deploy powerful energy technology. Economic growth provides the resources.
I have defended Judith Curry. Not that she needs it. She knows a lot more of science and pragmatic policy than any of the tendentious amateurs pontificating hereabouts.
Here – just for David – is the Wikipedia entry for the Hurst Exponent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurst_exponent
Robert I Ellison: Climate has always changed not incrementally but as shifts in regimes. Seen in analysis pioneered by the giants Harold Hurst and – in a different field – Andrey Kolmogorov
Not so. The calculated Hurst coefficients merely show that the autocorrelation function is more complex than would be predicted from iid or first-order autocorrelated data — they confirm what are called “long memory” models, nothing about shifts in regimes. No “Kolmogorov Modelling” of weather data time series has shown anything about regime shifts in climate.
The best (only?) statistical analysis of time series of weather data that supports a claim of “regime shift” is this, which I have cited before:
The Annals of Applied Statistics
2014, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1372–1394
DOI: 10.1214/14-AOAS753
© Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2014
CHANGE POINTS AND TEMPORAL DEPENDENCE IN
RECONSTRUCTIONS OF ANNUAL TEMPERATURE:
DID EUROPE EXPERIENCE A LITTLE ICE AGE?
BY MORGAN KELLY AND CORMAC Ó GRÁDA
University College Dublin
We analyze the timing and extent of Northern European temperature
falls during the Little Ice Age, using standard temperature reconstructions.
However, we can find little evidence of temporal dependence or structural
breaks in European weather before the twentieth century. Instead, European weather between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries resembles uncorrelated draws from a distribution with a constant mean (although there are occasional decades of markedly lower summer temperature) and variance, with the same behavior holding more tentatively back to the twelfth century. Our results suggest that observed conditions during the Little Ice Age in Northern Europe are consistent with random climate variability. The existing consensus about apparent cold conditions may stem in part from a Slutsky effect, where smoothing data gives the spurious appearance of irregular oscillations when the underlying time series is white noise.
Sorry to be so repetitive. If another analysis has demonstrated a “regime shift”, I hope someone will cite it or link to it.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233871224_Geomorphic_Effects_of_Alternating_Flood-_and_Drought-Dominated_Regimes_on_NSW_Coastal_Rivers
‘By ‘Noah Effect’ we designate the observation that extreme precipitation can be very extreme indeed, and by ‘Joseph Effect’ the finding that a long period of unusual (high or low) precipitation can be extremely long. Current models of statistical hydrology cannot account for either effect and must be superseded. As a replacement, ‘self-similar’ models appear very promising. They account particularly well for the remarkable empirical observations of Harold Edwin Hurst.’ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/WR004i005p00909
They called it the Joseph effect for a reason. And it must of course shift between self similar states well known to hydrologists. I can’t imagine what you think a ‘long memory’ is. But it is the fractionally dimensioned state space model of Lorenz that is more realistic. And we all know what happens there. But you have a single study that says the LIA was white noise and the breakpoints happened in the 20th century. And you are of course sticking to it because that suits you pettifogging purposes.
Kolmogorov studied turbulence and the phenomenon of shifts in spatiotemporal flow patterns is well known in hydrodynamics. This from the AIP history of abrupt climate change.
‘Hints that the climate system could change abruptly came unexpectedly from fields far from traditional climatology. In the late 1950s, a group in Chicago carried out tabletop “dishpan” experiments using a rotating fluid to simulate the circulation of the atmosphere. They found that a circulation pattern could flip between distinct modes. If the actual atmospheric circulation did that, weather patterns in many regions would change almost instantly.’ https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
The link between the scale of local turbulence and planetary hydrology is the remarkable Navier-Stokes equation that can mathematically be unpacked into millions of equations describing micro-eddies to planetary waves. The fractal nature of turbulent flow.
‘Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity’
Lewis Fry Richardson, 1922
Robert I Ellison: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233871224_Geomorphic_Effects_of_Alternating_Flood-_and_Drought-Dominated_Regimes_on_NSW_Coastal_Rivers
Is that “regime change” or a “regime” that includes alternations between extremes, a little more complicated than a harmonic oscillator or stochastic Brusselator? They don’t even demonstrate non-stationarity in the observation interval.
but, I thank you for the link.
No you are woefully mistaken and despite years of disputation make no progress..
I don’t get why you’d try to dunk on the only person who tries to engage with you on your favorite topic, Chief.
What’s in it for you, and do you realize why MattStat earned his nick?
You have to suspect ulterior motives from a card carrying member of the ‘farcical left’.
But I apologise to Matthew – I hadn’t read his comment. Just not in the mood for pettifogging disputation.
Robert Ellison: Here – just for David – is the Wikipedia entry for the Hurst Exponent.
Take the HadCRUT5 time series and calculate its Hurst exponent.
Then tell us what its value it lends towards solving the problem of climate change.
Changing patterns of atmospheric and ocean climate driving system feedbacks is climate change. Superimposed on that are anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Robert Ellison: And that is utter nonsense. Climate has always changed not incrementally but as shifts in regimes.
Specify what are the climate regime shifts over the Holocene.
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_climate_change_holocene.jpg
You can start here.
https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
Can’t go wrong with MotherJones. Science source of record.
Robert Ellison: There have been megadroughts and megafloods
Megafloods are usually outburst floods, such as the result of ice dams bursting, as with the Missoula Floods, not sudden climate regime shifts.
As for megadroughts…well, yes, I’m living in one right now. One that exacerbated the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave. One that’s been drying up the entire western US leading to smaller snowpacks, reservoirs at historic lows, larger wildfires, and — isn’t this ironic — one town giving up on economic growth for lack of water:
“A Drought So Dire That a Utah Town Pulled the Plug on Growth: Groundwater and streams vital to both farmers and cities are drying up in the West, challenging the future of development,” NY Times 7/20/21
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/us/utah-water-drought-climate-change.html
Lakes Mead and Powell, the big water supplies of the US southwest and, in part, southern California, are both at historic lows:
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2021/07/not-just-mead-powell-will-soon-drop-to-the-lowest-level-since-filling-in-the-1960s/
Climate change has toppled over the burgeoning problems of overpopulation and overbuilding, and “economic growth” isn’t going to magically provide more water. Conservation will help. More and better regulations will help. But something has to change — there can’t be more BAU, more of the same.
David has not the slightest clue. He has not seen the extremes nature is capable of in North Americas,
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaax0087
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/21/23/2008jcli2170.1.xml
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL042239
CKid: Can’t go wrong with MotherJones. Science source of record.
You’re easily triggered. It’s just a graph. Do you have any scientific problems with the graph? Any criticism of the graph itself?
“Climate change has toppled over the burgeoning problems of overpopulation and overbuilding, and “economic growth” isn’t going to magically provide more water.” – David Appell
Yes, this appears to be a major issue affecting humanity. I’ve been reading about lack of drinking water in Iran and Lebanon etc.
Just like magic – all it takes is dollars.
I think maybe the word “regime” is used in two senses, which I shall call “global” and “local”. Consider a system such as the Earth’s revolutions about the sun: the basis system has been well-studied (and well-modeled by Newton ‘s laws), and has not changed for millenia.: the regime, in the global sense, has not changed. but in its revolutions, the Earth goes through different areas of state space, and each region might be though of as a different regime. It may be a matter of perspective: for flora and fauna, the seasons are distinctly different regimes, even though for us the overall governing regime is constant.
For another example, the revolutions of the moon about the Earth has a constant regime, but the result at the surface of the Earth is the wave of tides that circles the Earth. The global regime is unchanging, but for life near the seashore, we may say that the regime changes.
Kelly and O'[Garda showed that for hundreds of years before about 1890, the statistical measurements in a region of Europe were stationary, a constant “regime” until the mean surface temperature began a consistent rise; but during the stationary time there were unusually warm epochs and unusuall cool epochs that might be different “regimes” in what I call the “local” sense.
Either way, Hurst coefficients are calculated from the sample autocorrelation function, the calculation of which assumes that the process has been stationary throughout the recording interval. They do not support an inference of “regime change” in any sense.
Something similar is true for any model, including a model exhibiting Kolmogorov dynamics: the estimation of model parameters assumes that the same model and parameters hold through out the recorded interval. “Local” regime change may be identifiable from eyeballing a graph of computed model output; but “global” regime change is assumed not to be present.
‘ENSO causes climate extremes across and beyond the Pacific basin; however, evidence of ENSO at high southern latitudes is generally restricted to the South Pacific and West Antarctica. Here, the authors report a statistically significant link between ENSO and sea salt deposition during summer from the Law Dome (LD) ice core in East Antarctica. ENSO-related atmospheric anomalies from the central-western equatorial Pacific (CWEP) propagate to the South Pacific and the circumpolar high latitudes. These anomalies modulate high-latitude zonal winds, with El Niño (La Niña) conditions causing reduced (enhanced) zonal wind speeds and subsequent reduced (enhanced) summer sea salt deposition at LD. Over the last 1010 yr, the LD summer sea salt (LDSSS) record has exhibited two below-average (El Niño–like) epochs, 1000–1260 ad and 1920–2009 ad, and a longer above-average (La Niña–like) epoch from 1260 to 1860 ad. Spectral analysis shows the below-average epochs are associated with enhanced ENSO-like variability around 2–5 yr, while the above-average epoch is associated more with variability around 6–7 yr. The LDSSS record is also significantly correlated with annual rainfall in eastern mainland Australia. While the correlation displays decadal-scale variability similar to changes in the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), the LDSSS record suggests rainfall in the modern instrumental era (1910–2009 ad) is below the long-term average. In addition, recent rainfall declines in some regions of eastern and southeastern Australia appear to be mirrored by a downward trend in the LDSSS record, suggesting current rainfall regimes are unusual though not unknown over the last millennium.’ https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/26/3/jcli-d-12-00003.1.xml
Regimes change over decades to millennia.
‘The Hurst exponent is referred to as the “index of dependence” or “index of long-range dependence”. It quantifies the relative tendency of a time series either to regress strongly to the mean or to cluster in a direction.[5] A value H in the range 0.5–1 indicates a time series with long-term positive autocorrelation, meaning both that a high value in the series will probably be followed by another high value and that the values a long time into the future will also tend to be high. A value in the range 0 – 0.5 indicates a time series with long-term switching between high and low values in adjacent pairs, meaning that a single high value will probably be followed by a low value and that the value after that will tend to be high, with this tendency to switch between high and low values lasting a long time into the future.’ Wikipedia
Geophysical series tend to have a H value larger than 0.5. Rainfall patterns change with seasons but these are not hydrological regimes.
Perhaps we could call it epochs for those more imaginatively challenged.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/tpi-sst.png
Robert I Ellison
https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
Thank you for this excellent article summarizing a great deal of historical thinking on climate up to recent times. My take away message:
“People can see only what they find believable.”
The message seems applicable to many issues today including vaccines etc.
What strikes me about climate science as it is espoused today, the paradigm of atmospheric CO2 is the driving force in the changes in climate we are seeing today is asserted without consideration that other forces/issues may be in play and a future paradigm is possible, really, seems likely.
David
Criticism? Of course, the obvious. That graph’s shelf life expired long ago. The science is moving at warp speed, and left the hockey stick in the dust. But if it’s a security blanket for you, the more power to you.
I’d be embarrassed linking stuff that is so irrelevant.
You’re posting teh Goddard’s crap, Kid.
Robert I Ellison: It quantifies the relative tendency of a time series either to regress strongly to the mean or to cluster in a direction.[5]
That’s one way to put it. I wrote that it distinguishes between “long memory” models and “short memory models” such as first order autoregressive. The coefficients are computed from the sample autocorrelation function on the assumption that the process is stationary over the observation interval. They say nothing about “regime changes” (at least within the observed interval) by any definition of regime.
I think you are ignoring the importance of the stationarity assumption in the calculation of the autocorrelation function and the Hurst coefficients. Maybe “stationarity” is one of those “pettifogging” details that you alluded to but did not list explicitly.
Long memory is the tendency for similar sized – autocorrelated – events to occur in a period. Then there is a different period with a different mean and variance. It is the only way that it is put. The definitions of stationary and nonstationary are a bit vague but nonetheless irrelevant. Whether nonstationary simply implies change – or there is some quality of change that distinguishes nonstationary series does not matter in the least to the procedure.
Climate series vary and are somewhat thoughtlessly classified as nonstationary. Stationary series include series in which random variations occur around a mean. In this case the best forecast is the unconditional mean. In a real world it is safer to assume determinism.
In this series we see breakpoints around 1250 AD and at the beginning of the 20th century. Analyse that.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.png
In the sense of a stochastic process – of which statistics is a unidimensional subset – stationarity implies that future uncertainty encompasses the range of past variance.
Matthews one unreplicated study – using econometric tests and fuzzy physical thinking – says that temperatures in Europe before 1900 were random variations but that changed to something or other after that. And he calls himself a sceptic.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate_3.gif
And that’s why I was in no mood for yet more pettifogging disputation.
W
What crap? You mean like this?
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2018-01-01044917_shadow.png
Nope. Didn’t do that.
Or this? Didn’t do that either.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-16-at-7.10.00-AM-down.gif
Re REI link https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.png
If the first ‘break point’ was ~1250CE, the next is still to come -the end of the shaded area- , sometime late in the 21st century. Both points coincide with the peak of the Eddy cycle. The previous peak was around 270CE, the Roman WP peak. Times of change. ( before that was 770BCE, and earlier 1750BCE – the 3k7 Kikkar event when Sodom disappeared. Coincidence?? . Seems God moves in predictable ways).
‘Spectral analysis shows the below-average epochs are associated with enhanced ENSO-like variability around 2–5 yr, while the above-average epoch is associated more with variability around 6–7 yr. ‘ https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/26/3/jcli-d-12-00003.1.xml
The shift to more El Nino like conditions may have something to do with solar activity – with the modern maximum last century. Cosmogenic isotopes increase in periods of low solar activity. I suggest that you have discovered a pattern that doesn’t exist.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/isotope-9400-e1531338833901.png
Robert I Ellison: The definitions of stationary and nonstationary are a bit vague but nonetheless irrelevant. Whether nonstationary simply implies change – or there is some quality of change that distinguishes nonstationary series does not matter in the least to the procedure.
The assumption of stationarity matters much to what inferences can be supported. “Stationarity” is well-defined; non-stationary is everything else, but drawing much of an inference requires accurately modeling the potential kinds of non-stationarity (this was the topic of my PhD dissertation, fwiw.)
Obviously it is true that you do not think the assumption of stationarity matters much, as I guessed. Obviously, we disagree on this.
In hydrology as in much of climatology events are still regarded as independent. Like a coin tossed many times. Harold Hurst discovered persistence, self similarity. long range memory… A structure in geophysical series that is not random.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/nilometer.png
Considering the Nile River series as stationary implies that any of the flow regimes can be revisited in future increasing future uncertainty.
CKid commented: The science is moving at warp speed, and left the hockey stick in the dust.
Really? Then cite that science?
The hockey stick has been verified a few dozen times by now, and it’s trivial to show it is required by the basic laws of physics.
http://www.davidappell.com/hockeysticks.html
Physical laws require a hockey stick:
1) temperature change = (climate_sensitivity)*(change in forcing)
2) CO2 forcing = constant*ln(CO2/initial_CO2)
3) Atmo CO2 has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of the industrial era.
So if CO2 isn’t changing, there is no temperature change — the flat handle of the hockey stick.
If CO2 is increasing exponentially, as it has been over the industrial era, its forcing is changing linearly and hence so is the temperature – which is the blade of the hockey stick.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/09/an-even-easier-way-to-get-hockey-stick.html
Robert I. Ellison:‘ENSO causes climate extremes across and beyond the Pacific basin…. suggesting current rainfall regimes are unusual though not unknown over the last millennium.’ https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/26/3/jcli-d-12-00003.1.xml
Regimes change over decades to millennia.
Very regional: “in some regions of eastern and southeastern Australia”
Not unique: “are unusual though not unknown over the last millennium.”
In short, nothing much. Yet another stretch.
The last dry spell in Australia (El Nino like conditions) was the medieval optimum.
Robert I. Ellison wrote;
David has not the slightest clue. He has not seen the extremes nature is capable of in North Americas,
Robert thinks he’s the only one who can read.
Though given how much he writes to show off, you have to wonder when he finds the time.
I have difficulty imaging how David has time for all his snark.
Robert I. Ellison:
You can start here.
https://history.aip.org/climate/rapid.htm
As I said, I procured the original report from the NAS. The report quoted at the top of the page you linked to.
The quote from the NAS at the beginning of Spencer Weart’s little summary draws the link between abrupt climate change and its chaotic origins.
No surprise — RIE wasn’t able to calculate the Hurst exponent of the HadCRUT5 time series, let alone tell us its value in solving the problem of climate change.
All talk, no action.
Surface temperature trajectories are one of the global impacts of the Pacific Ocean state.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/tpi-sst.png
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2525-1
There is a synthesis process in science. I am not sure what the problem is but David does not seem able to put the most basic Earth system ideas together to form a coherent picture. Each step must be based on evidence but the richness is in the journey.
‘Though arguably appropriate for applications of theory to engineering and applied science, the associated emphases on truth and degrees of certainty are not optimal for the productive and creative processes that facilitate the fundamental advancement of science as a process of discovery. The latter requires an investigative approach, where the goal is uberty, a kind of fruitfulness of inquiry, in which the abductive mode of inference adds to the much more commonly acknowledged modes of deduction and induction. The resulting world-directed approach to hydrology provides a valuable complement to the prevailing hypothesis- (theory-) directed paradigm.’ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016WR020078
Robert I. Ellison wrote: The quote from the NAS at the beginning of Spencer Weart’s little summary draws the link between abrupt climate change and its chaotic origins.
Obviously. It comes from the first NAS report, which I have mentioned several times already. Must I do it yet again for you?
Robert I. Ellison commented: I have difficulty imaging how David has time for all his snark.
I have difficulty imagining how you have time to eat or sleep, so often do you comment on every post on this blog, and then on every comment. And those include plenty of snark and insults.
I can’t decide whether this is yet more crap from David… oh wait. But what he calls insult is simply candour.
Robert Ellison wrote: Surface temperature trajectories are one of the global impacts of the Pacific Ocean state.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2525-1
Weird. This, which introduces a new index, and the included quote, are just standard, run of the mill, workaday science. Not any climate science paradigm shift that you seem to think. Let alone anything that is useful for addressing the practical problem of climate change.
The impacts are neither regional or insignificant.
Abrupt climate change was identified by the NAS in 2002 as a paradigm shift. It is the fundamental mode of climate at many scales. On which is superimposed some minor AGW. Perhaps some 0.3 degrees C over the past 40 years. But then David’s farcical left groupthink cognitive disorder kicks in and he repeats his silly memes. Endlessly it seems.
David
Analyses have torn the hockey stick to shreds. That is old news. I’m surprised you are still pushing that discredited stuff.
The more relevant issue is how many more months of no warming will you have to see before you cry uncle. The AMO is going to do what it was born to do. You might want to work on your excuses. It will take a lot over the next couple of decades.
Cue in the Jaws theme song.
CKid wrote:
Analyses have torn the hockey stick to shreds.
Which analyses are those? Cite them.
I doubt you can.
Meanwhile, a paper last year applied 5 different statistical methodologies and found hockey sticks:
“Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach,” Darrell Kaufman et al, Scientific Data 7, Article Number: 201 (2020).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7
This follows about two dozen earlier.
No surprise — the hockey stick is required by the laws of physics.
CKid wrote:
The more relevant issue is how many more months of no warming will you have to see before you cry uncle. The AMO is going to do what it was born to do.
See you’re talking about natural factors, not AGW. And we just finished a La Nina. Learn the difference.
The difference is that La Nina years keep getting warmer and warmer. Why is that?
Robert Ellison wrote:The impacts are neither regional or insignificant.
Using the contents of that paper, show that they’re not.
Robert Ellison wrote:Here – just for David – is the Wikipedia entry for the Hurst Exponent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurst_exponent
So where is that Hurst exponent for the HadCRUT5 time series? It’s your chance to calculate one and explain why it matters to the problem of climate change.
Robert I. Ellison wrote: Abrupt climate change was identified by the NAS in 2002 as a paradigm shift.
I pointed this reported out to you days ago, and now you keep repeating it like it was your discovery. Weak.
On which is superimposed some minor AGW. Perhaps some 0.3 degrees C over the past 40 years.
You told the same lie earlier. It’s not one you can back up with data.
I read that report long ago and have been citing it ever since.
Robert I. Ellison wrote: But what he calls insult is simply candour.
You’re just trying to make excuses for your rudeness. Others don’t.
Calling it the farcical left is a personal insult? I don’t think so. And what is most distasteful is the hypocrisy from David.
David
The hockey stick episode is a disgrace and anyone associated with it should be ashamed. One of the world’s leading statisticians took issue with the methodology used in its development.
“ The hockey stick episode is a disgrace and anyone associated with it should be ashamed.”
Would that include all the others “associated” with the many similar “hockey sticks” that followed?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWkJ5AFWsAAPvHO?format=jpg&name=medium
The hockey stick is a blunt instrument wielded by eco-fascists of the farcical left new world order.
https://www.use-due-diligence-on-climate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Historical-Temperatures-3.jpg
David
“ And we just finished a La Nina.”
I’ve long said that warmists are going to make internal variability their friend when they have to explain why decades of flattish temperatures occurred rather than a parabolic curve. After a couple of generations the Attention Deficit Disorder public will get tired of waiting for the catastrophe to end all catastrophes, and when they think hockey stick they will only associate it with Richard, Howe, Hull, Esposito, Yzerman, Orr, Lemieux and Gretzky.
As if sent from Heaven. The excuses begin.
“Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.
But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand WHAT WENT WRONG and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”
…….” Already scientific papers are appearing using CMIP’s unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100, adding fire to what are already well-justified fears. But that practice needs to change, Schmidt says. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming
kid:
“…when they have to explain why decades of flattish temperatures occurred rather than a parabolic curve.”
These are not people who “explain.” These are people who shift to new doomsday prophesies.
How did they “explain” the lack of millions of starvation deaths in the US in the 1980s and ’90s? How did they “explain” $2 gas in 2019 when they projected it would disappear entirely in the ’70s?
In a post above from REI there is this link
https://www.use-due-diligence-on-climate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Historical-Temperatures-3.jpg
The only note in the Holocene max is the 8k2 event. However that date can be viewed in a better and bigger context if compared with same date from other ice-cores from Antarctica (polar) and more importantly from Equatorial region. These can be found here at link below
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
But -important- Gisp2 on latter link needs to be shifted back by 1k1yr. At around 11k5BP temps everywhere increased rapidly, concurrently.
Then note that at the 8k2 event both Gisp2 and Vostok bottomed, but Kilimanjaro peaked.
Then go to 2345bce (~4k3BP) and there is an exact repeat. Same at ~6k3BP (patterns REI thinks are non-existent). And there are more.
Temperatures change fast, but those are just a response. What makes such fast changes is far more abrupt. Between those three dates are another two; at ~7k2 and ~5k2BP, and the evidence of those events lie everywhere, -geological, NA ice rafting,,but most telling are the two very distinct sapropel layers in Mediterranean sediment sandwiched between otherwise clay layers. The dates follow a 980yr cycle.
CKid wrote: ….when they have to explain why decades of flattish temperatures
That’s just wrong and stupid, “decades of flattish temperatures.”
There’s no point in even replying to such nonsense.
Robert I. Ellison wrote: The hockey stick is a blunt instrument wielded by eco-fascists of the farcical left new world order.
RIE puts up a cartoon graph that isn’t even sourced. Childlike science.
You know that climate has changed. The point is that a longer perspective is needed and data is approximate.
‘First of all, it is worth bearing in mind that any data on global temperatures before about 150 years ago is an estimate, a reconstruction based on second-hand evidence such as ice cores and isotopic ratios. The evidence becomes sparser the further back we look, and its interpretation often involves a set of assumptions. In other words, a fair amount of guesswork.’ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11647-climate-myths-its-been-far-warmer-in-the-past-whats-the-big-deal/
The bigger point is the clumsy political motivation for the ‘hocky stick’ terminology. Farcical left world domination.
CKid commented: The hockey stick episode is a disgrace and anyone associated with it should be ashamed. One of the world’s leading statisticians took issue with the methodology used in its development.
I didn’t think you could cite any papers that disproved the HS, and I was right.
The HS has been verified by many different methodologies by now. Because, as I said, it is required by very basic laws of physics. Which you have yet to refute.
For example, this paper used seven (7) different statistical methods, and all gave a hockey stick:
“Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geoscience, July 24, 2019.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0
Here are their graphs:
https://davidappell.blogspot.com/2019/07/yet-another-hockey-stick.html
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l6sme-MoRwU/XTmsBIEwvHI/AAAAAAAAMbs/D2Cnp2kkfY05kIzHojXPuOnAbO_1OAB8ACLcBGAs/s1600/PAGES%2B2k%2B2019.JPG
Hockey sticks in the scientific literature:
http://www.davidappell.com/hockeysticks.html
Robert I. Ellison commented: And what is most distasteful is the hypocrisy from David.
LOL – you can’t even describe it.
Nor calculate that Hurst exponent for HadCRUT5. Where is it?
melitamegalithic: REI’s graph isn’t sourced. It’s a cartoon. It sure doesn’t come from a scientific publication.
David
Triggered much? Your name is the only one showing on recent comments. I can tell the strain is getting to you. Imagine how you will cope when flattish temperatures are nearing the 10 year mark. Trying to use the El Nina excuse will get tiresome by then.
Your few papers supporting the HS will be swept away by the incalculable number of papers that reference the MWP. If there was no MWP, you owe it to the world to send those hundreds of authors a cease and desist letter telling them they are engaged in malpractice. Sorry Dave, history has passed you by. In the near future I will lay out what scientists have said about this sorry chapter in Climate Science. In the meantime, the Olympics await.
jeffnsails850 wrote: How did they “explain” the lack of millions of starvation deaths in the US in the 1980s and ’90s? How did they “explain” $2 gas in 2019 when they projected it would disappear entirely in the ’70s?
Who is “they?”
Seriously, who are “they?” Name them.
Can we also name all those who said the world was going to cool, and it didn’t?
CKid wrote: …….” Already scientific papers are appearing using CMIP’s unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100, adding fire to what are already well-justified fears. But that practice needs to change, Schmidt says. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming
Here are climate modelers reevaluating their modelers, just what deniers claim they don’t do.
Here are climate modelers saying their models can be wrong, just what deniers say climate modelers won’t admit.
Now let’s see what the corrections actually are. Not much!
“For 2100, in a worst-case scenario, that would reduce a raw 5°C of projected warming over preindustrial levels to 4.2°C.”
Ha ha, only 4.2 C on warming instead of 5 C. Ha ha ha, that will show those stupid scientists!
Medium emissions scenario goes from (graph) 3 C to 2.6 C, maybe 2.3 C and low scenario goes from 2 C to 1.7 C, maybe 1.4 C. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Deniers win! Warming a few tenths of a degree less than was earlier calculated.
Wow. All of these temp increases are all still dangerous.
Great play, Kid. You checkmated yourself.
CKid commented: Imagine how you will cope when flattish temperatures are nearing the 10 year mark.
Science is based on data, not imaginings.
CKid commented: Your few papers supporting the HS will be swept away by the incalculable number of papers that reference the MWP.
Which papers are those?
I bet you can’t list any. It’s just more b.s. from your mouth.
The hockey stick is a politically motivated illusion of too short and too disparate a record. But even so – the PAGES data is what it is.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/pages.png
I have answered David’s delusional points a dozen times in a dozen ways just to see him returning in an ever diminishing circle until he disappears up his own…
The real issue is what he wants to do with this cognitively disordered message?
Robert I. Ellison commented: You know that climate has changed.
Duh. Everyone knows this.
The point is that a longer perspective is needed
Why? How much longer?
and data is approximate.
How so?
The bigger point is the clumsy political motivation for the ‘hocky stick’ terminology.
What is the political motivation for the hockey stick? Finally answer this question or shut up about it.
Robert I. Ellison wrote:
The hockey stick is a politically motivated illusion of too short and too disparate a record
Politically motivated how?
An illusion how?
Too short how?
Too disparate how?
Start answering some questions.
As I’ve shown, the hockey stick is required by the laws of physics. No one here has yet proved me wrong.
Robert I. Ellison wrote: The hockey stick is a politically motivated illusion….
How come I never see your name commenting on any other blogs, the ones that present the consensus view of AGW? Afraid? You seem to stick to here, where you think you’re the Queen of the patch, and nobody knows enough to challenge you except me, mdander, Joshua, Tonyb, and a couple others, so you get away with insulting whoever you want.
Why aren’t you out spreading your deep scientific wisdom to RealClimate, Tamino, ATTF, and any number of other blogs that discuss the scientific POV of AGW? They want and need your insights. Why aren’t you setting them straight? Why do you stay here where it’s safe and easy going for you, with few to no challenges and you think you’ve learned you can slide by with insults and nonanswers?
That is of course a pejorative rant typical of the farcical left groupthink cognitive disorder.
It is all political in which certainty of immanent catastrophe translates into whatever mad social and economic objectives they have in mind.
Robert I. Ellison wrote: That is of course a pejorative rant typical of the farcical left groupthink cognitive disorder.
Viz., “I only comment where it’s safe and I know no one will dare challenge my status as the Queen. So I blather here all I want about Hurst exponents, which I can’t calculate to save my life, and spout off about H-G dynamics, even though I couldn’t tell you what good it does for helping the world deal with the problem of climate change.
“But at least I get to look smart among the unsmart. And that’s what really counts. So I’ll stay here where it’s warm until those bad men go away.”
I cite 100’s of leading edge climate scientists. David’s blog heroes are not among them.
David Appell : REI’s was good enough for what I wanted. Such graphs are available from various sources (but one has to be careful since there are some with big chronological mismatch).
A better one can be found here
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/
below the graph is a pdf link for a much larger and sharper image. It also provides comparison between Greenland and Vostok. The 8k2 event is visible – but beware: both places dip and rise concurrently (image is deceptive);
dip; greenland large vostok small
rise: greenland small vostok large
equatorial Kilimanjaro moves opposite both.
I have used that gragh and added material. See here: https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/113/
Compare also same events here from sea bottom sediments: https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/searching-evidence-2/
The two thick organic rich sapropel layers in what is generally clay sediment says something as regards its source – and why it is there at those dates. The 365CE Crete earthquake is indicated as a thin dark line.
There is not indicated that the events follow an apparently regular cycle. That info was posted much later on this site here, fig 122 ; https://judithcurry.com/2018/06/28/nature-unbound-ix-21st-century-climate-change/
REI harps about something very essential: the soil and the food chain. Covid has shown that general-we are not prepared for major disturbances in the social structure. And secondly the first to suffer is the most essential thing; the food chain.
David
What a sordid affair the entire hockey stick fiasco has become. How can anyone defending the indefensible sleep at night. The reviewers of the original work had sympathy for the M&M criticism of the statistics used. Van Storch Pooh poohing the stick. The Wegman report destroying the methodology. The NAS backing the Wegman report. Soon and Baliunus showing what real science is by destroying Mann’s fiasco. Great disparity in the calibration and verification data. Almost criminal R2 numbers. NAS rejection of the single validation statistics.
But even with all the problems with the original amateur hour, the greatest indictment is simply all the studies that have come out in the last 20 years showing climate data all across the globe that conform to MWP conditions. The science moves on. Appell emotionally hangs on to discredited crap from the last century.
David
The hockey stick fiasco is a stain on climate science. Look at how many problems there are. Two reviewers were sympathetic to the issues raised by M&M. Von Storch didn’t buy into the stick. The Wegman report excoriated the methodology. The NAS backed the Wegman report and rejected the use of single validation statistics. Short centring has been identified as problematic by key scientists. There was unacceptable disparity in the verification and calibration data. R2 was almost criminally deficient. How can anyone sleep after defending the indefensible.
Soon and Baliunus with their study displayed what real science was unlike the third stringers from your Team. But more importantly the hundreds of papers published since covering locations around the globe with conditions consistent with the MWP have become the strongest evidence for that warm period.
“She is very clear that she believes that strong government regulation to enforce carbon emission reductions are a bad idea.”
Really? I have been following this blog for years now, and do not have that impression. If I were to characterize her political leanings I would characterize them as liberal and as more likely to have voted for Biden than Trump, although, and admittedly she has not implicitly stated her political position. I would also think that she believes in strong government regulation, and have not seen any indication that she is either libertarian or conservative. I guess we could debate this, but I would insist on looking at a broad range of positions, not just on this one issue. For example, her position on vaccinations, masks, government restrictions during COVID, GMO’s, the debt, immigration, etc. most of which she has not taken a public position on.
“ACCUSATION #1: Judith Curry’s scientific opinion is worthless, because it demonstrates a consistent bias conforming to a specific political agenda.”
I think you are grasping at straws. Dr. Curry was one of the IPCC authors and as I recall wrote a paper on the increased incidence of hurricanes that Dr. Pielke took issue with. It appears that she has a different take on the incidence now, but to say that a specific political agenda has anything to do with it is a stretch. I suggest you educate yourself on the heresy portions of this blog and ask yourself if she had a different political view previously (as she would need to in order to be consistent with your argument) , what made her change her mind? For my part I assume that she has not changed her political leanings (most people do not), but simply broadened her view on the science.
“ACCUSATION #2: Judith Curry is an anesthetic for climate change innovation.”
This statement must be from ignorance. I suggest that you read up on what she actually says. Innovation can take a number of different forms. That currently she is leaning toward adaptation and low hanging fruit innovation rather than your preferred “innovation” does not give any credence to your accusation.
This is especially stupid: “However, every opinion about climate science that she expresses on this blog is 100% in line with that political/economic opinion.”
If someone’s scientific opinions contradicted their politics/economic opinions and they held both that would make them irrational. Every rational person has scientific opinions that are in line with their politics/economic opinions.
mdander writes “Judith Curry’s scientific opinion is worthless, because it demonstrates a consistent bias”
That is a meaningless phrase because ‘bias” is not defined.
However, if you have special qualifications with original research of your own about bias, then you should state it and so be more likely to be heard. Geoff S
Thank you Dr Curry
40% less rainfall in Iran this year has lead to violent street protests and possibility of power shortages adding to the misery of water running dry:
https://youtu.be/j1x7rFTTI5Q
CO2 concentration has increased in by some 130 ppm. Overwhelmingly in the past 40 years. It is increasing by a few parts per million every year. Distinguishing natural variability from AGW has always been problematic – but it is some 50% of late 20th century warming and almost all the early century warming. It is hardly an existential threat at this time – especially considering that natural warming of the past century is more likely than not to be lost this century.
Drawdown is encouraged – by Judith as much as anyone – just in case there are inevitable climate surprises.
e.g. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373/abrupt-impacts-of-climate-change-anticipating-surprises
But the criteria must be pragmatic and not ideological,
https://drawdown.org/drawdown-framework
But
Meanwhile Kimberley in South Africa receives some highly unusual snow ❄️
https://youtu.be/l1ShxXkcIVo
Nice to see African children enjoying the snow without having to negotiate white saviour climate activist-journalists – no risk of them showing up to this kind of climate anomaly!
I don’t climate blogs too often. For good reason apparently. I have just been cancelled on Tamino’s ‘open mind’ – for the sake of the children – for posting this video from a doyen of climate modelling Tim Palmer. What stunning hypocrisy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU
Apparently the proof that models and climate are are not chaotic is the predictive skill of models.
The range of models mean outputs in the latest IPCC opportunistic ensemble is shown in blue and yellow. Above and below the mean of means. Some models are run in centres with large computing facilities. Models can be run many times with slightly different initial conditions and wildly divergent solution trajectories. Some have more modest origins. The range is from benign to potentially catastrophic.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/cmip-6-1.png
Each of these models in the CMIP 6 opportunistic ensemble have an ‘irreducible imprecision’ or ‘evolving uncertainty’ – however one wants to put it. Below is an example of a single model run 1000’s of times. The rest is a work in progress. Yet they somehow continue to insist on the verisimilitude of models.
It’s a sort of madness comparable to the more extreme contrarian crap.
I don’t do climate blogs…
ut here’s the missing graph….
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/rowlands-fig-1-e1612040479369.png
And now for something completely … well somewhat different as there’s much hot air on this. I thought this was funny.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-stephen-breyer-retirement-politicization-blumenthal-cnn-11626989813?st=oshubjgexqgw7af&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
‘Much is said and written about hydroclimatic hazards: storms, floods, droughts. Such hazards have existed and will always exist, while the usual scaremongering on them is of little help to avoid them. Instead, what is needed is a cool look at risk, based on measurement data, using scientific methodology, and ultimately employing technology in the service of reducing hazards and their consequences.’ Dimitris Koutsoyiannis, 2021, Stochastics of Hydroclimatic Extremes: A Cool Look at Risk – http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/2000/
I have no more patience for trying to discuss science with alarmists. They are frauds, liars and willing dupes. Uncertainty is the last thing that they want. They need certainty of imminent disaster to sell by proxy the great reset. Unfortunately for them – uncertainty is what we have.
This is not to say that we haven’t added 130 odd ppm of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or that won’t trigger a transition to a new climate state sometime in indefinite future. The fabled tipping point in a canonically chaotic climate. It’s just that David Appell says it’s not worth worrying about – so I won’t.
Instead – we should focus on way to profitably feed the world. Rattan Lal – Distinguished Professor of Soil Science – too many honours to mention – estimates that the carbon content of 157 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be returned to soils and ecosystems this century.
https://cmasc.osu.edu/
That’s a substantial proportion of the 130 ppm added – with minimal warming – to the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion, land use conversion, soil cultivation, continuous grazing and cement and steel manufacturing. We may have to burn more fossil fuels.
This soil carbon store can be renewed by restoring land. Holding back water in sand dams, terraces and swales, replanting, changing grazing management, encouraging perennial vegetation cover, precise applications of chemicals and adoption of other management practices that create positive carbon and nutrient budgets and optimal soil temperature and moisture. Atmospheric carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to soil carbon stores through plant photosynthesis and subsequent formation of secondary carbonates.
That sort of innovation is driven by farm economics. Reducing input costs and increasing output. This soil carbon store can be renewed by restoring land. Holding back water in sand dams, terraces and swales, cover drops, replanting, changing grazing management, encouraging perennial vegetation cover, precise applications of chemicals and adoption of other management practices that create positive carbon and nutrient budgets and optimal soil temperature and moisture. Atmospheric carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to soil carbon stores through plant photosynthesis and subsequent formation of secondary carbonates.
Carbon sequestration in soils has major benefits in addition to offsetting anthropogenic emissions. Restoring soil carbon stores increases agronomic productivity and enhances global food security. Increasing the soil organic content enhances water holding capacity and creates a more drought tolerant agriculture – with less downstream flooding. There is a critical level of soil carbon that is essential to maximising the effectiveness of water and nutrient inputs. Global food security, especially for countries with fragile soils and harsh climate such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cannot be achieved without improving soil quality through an increase in soil organic content. Wildlife flourishes on restored grazing land helping to halt biodiversity loss. Reversing soil carbon loss is a new green revolution where conventional agriculture is hitting a productivity barrier with exhausted soils and increasingly expensive inputs.
The 4 per 1000 soil carbon initiative was announced in Paris at COP21 and is now a global movement.
https://www.4p1000.org/
Robert I. Ellison commented:
I have no more patience for trying to discuss science with alarmists. They are frauds, liars and willing dupes. Uncertainty is the last thing that they want. They need certainty of imminent disaster to sell by proxy the great reset. Unfortunately for them – uncertainty is what we have.
You just can never get off your high horse and your insistence that you are the smartest person in the world. Yet your continued need to insult everyone who disagrees with you betrays your confidence and security at every turn.
Everyone — everyone — knows about uncertainty. Uncertainties CUT BOTH WAYS – resolving them might worsen future climate projections and strengthen attributions as much as diminish them, so they know it’s not a reason to not to act. Scientists have been talking about uncertainty for decades — at least since Stephen Schneider.
Then you write this lie:
This is not to say that we haven’t added 130 odd ppm of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or that won’t trigger a transition to a new climate state sometime in indefinite future. The fabled tipping point in a canonically chaotic climate. It’s just that David Appell says it’s not worth worrying about – so I won’t.
A lie. What I’ve written is that you can’t define your H-K dynamics in your own words, can’t show how to test a process X(t) for it, post hand-wavy graphs that are drawn by eye, after the fact and with no methodology, can’t prove it appears in any climatological time series, or show what use it has in practically dealings with the climate change problem.
I still haven’t see you do any of these things.
Everyone knows tipping points might be problems, going back at least to a NAS report 20 years ago (which I ordered — they ended up sending me the book for free — and read):
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136/abrupt-climate-change-inevitable-surprises
A second report came out about 10 years later:
https://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=18373
Not two years ago an article in Nature discussed tipping points:
“Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against: The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must compel political and economic action on emissions,” Timothy M. Lenton et al, Nature 11/27/19
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
The existence of possible tipping points isn’t not in any way a reason to sit around and kvetch until they happen. Because meanwhile the world is warming at 0.2 C/decade and, as we’re seeing, that’s already causing problems and is going to cause more problems. BAU — energy and economic — is what got us into this problem, and it won’t get us out — see the quote by Einstein about the definition of insanity. Yes, there are many solutions we can and must try, and to your credit you have, more than once, listed and discussed them, as in your last reply. But for you they are too often secondary, because your first priority is always to tell us that “H-K dynamics” mean, essentially, no one knows what’s going to happen. When until now scientists have largely been quite accurate about what was going to happen, and it’s happening. That’s the main story.
This study was the start for me of a 40 year journey. The authors discovered alternating multi decadal regimes of flood and drought.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233871224_Geomorphic_Effects_of_Alternating_Flood-_and_Drought-Dominated_Regimes_on_NSW_Coastal_Rivers
Persistence in hydrology is a phenomenon whereby similar sized events occur consecutively. In the Nile River as much as in NSW coastal streams. It emerges from global patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation that drive changes in ice, cloud, water vapor, precipitation, sea surface temperature and biology. It beggars belief that they imagine immense natural variability can be distinguished from minor anthropogenic warming over mostly the past 40 years.
Can these spatiotemporal chaotic patterns be predicted? Not as more than probabilities a week or so in advance. Then they wax delusional about how predictable it all is.
I don’t have any more patience for David repeating ad nauseum his simple climate memes mixed with a sort of neo socialist fervour.
A similar story to the inaction in Germany after flood warnings were given, Chinese subway authorities similarly failed to take responsibility to halt the trains & start evacuating when the floodwaters started to rise.
This is the shocking reality that will be played out again and again around the world. Drastic action is needed to prepare for the decisions required in the face of extreme natural disasters:
https://youtu.be/qjTMfgGlUcE
6:12 Graphic images warning dead bodies of children on the subway platform show evidence of having their eyes cut out due to the lucrative cornea industry.
This is what communism leads to. This is the direction the west is heading too.
I strongly ask German friends not to underestimate the coming storms. Although there is little rain from the Atlantic, the jet stream will bring moisture from the Mediterranean. Already yesterday night storms occurred in the area of Munich.
Bjorn Lomborg says:
We need to hear the full story on heat and cold deaths
“100,000 more heat deaths, but 200,000 fewer cold deaths from climate change”
“Headlines from around the world tell us of hundreds of deaths caused by recent heat waves. The stories invariably blame climate change and admonish us to tackle it urgently. But they mostly reveal how one-sided climate-alarmist reporting leaves us badly informed.
https://mailchi.mp/lomborg/jbpl570n9d-623860
Where does the 200,000 number come from?
If climate change causes more extreme events, there might be more cold deaths as well as more heat deaths.
Bjorn Lomborg says:
We need to hear the full story on heat and cold deaths
“100,000 more heat deaths, but 200,000 fewer cold deaths from climate change”
Bjorn Lomborg is another idiot who thinks his living room should be kept warm by heating up his entire city.
I wonder if he prefers furnaces placed everywhere across the ground in a 5×5 meter grid or space heaters hung from all the telephone poles.
Bjorn Lomborg says:
We need to hear the full story on heat and cold deaths
“100,000 more heat deaths, but 200,000 fewer cold deaths from climate change”
Bjorn Lomborg is another genius who thinks he should heat up his living room by warming up his entire city.
I wonder if he prefers furnaces placed everywhere across the region in a 5×5 meter grid or space heaters hung from all the telephone poles. Had he formed a commission to study that?
Heat wave attribution to AGW
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/07/20/the-agw-heat-wave-hypothesis/
Thunderstorms are predicted for July 24th in the area of recent flooding in Germany.
https://i.ibb.co/qJQb8P0/gfs-cape-eur33.png
How aweful for them. It’s a reminder that we are all vulnerable.
G20 environment ministers meet in Italy following floods in Germany, Turkey and China with wildfires in western America.
The rhetoric to reduce CO2 emissions is becoming ever for feverish:
https://youtu.be/wtIHTsTiHdI
It’s unimaginable to comprehend how the Webb space telescope is destined to unravel a new gravity theory, allowing a new driver of climate change to enter the public consciousness.
In an earlier post, I accused Judith Curry of bias and I substantiated this with my observations of the consistency and frequency that her posts are aligned with a preference for weak governmental regulation.
There were lots of replies, but only atanb actually stepped up to disagree with me and refer to his observations of what Judith Curry writes — it was refreshingly unstupid.
Judith Curry, Robert Pielke Jr., Michael Mann, Katherine Hayhoe — they write books, they appear on expert panels. Why do you suppose that politicians want them on their panels? It is because they can be relied upon to be consistent with the message that their fame/notoriety is built upon 100% of the time. It’s their brand and it makes their reactions to new developments in climate science unreliable.
If you read this blog for a balanced understanding of the latest developments in climate science, you are kidding yourself. If you read this blog because you are comforted that a credentialed scientist of Judith Curry’s stature agrees with you, then at least understand that this blog is promoting Judith Curry’s brand.
Get your climate science from as many disparate sources as you can manage. Being well informed is better than being brand loyal.
No, the reason most read this blog is that it covers the science and the uncertainties inherent in climate science. I noticed you didn’t respond to my questions above.
Your problem is you don’t understand enough about the science to question Judith’s views nor are you qualified to judge any of the motivations of the skeptics.
Spend some time actually researching why there are so many uncertainties and learning about the nuances in developing appropriate public policy options.
Do more homework.
I have found that the “weekly” postings of web links to be pretty balanced. There is something for everyone in them. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I have found stuff that I just wanted to scream at because it is so ignorant and based on faulty logic and unverified premises that it was just awful. I have also found articles that were well written and challenging to my assumptions about the world. Further I have found well written articles that confirmed my assumptions. There is a whole lot of in-between articles as well.
Sure, I agree that this site is consistent with her branding. However, I disagree with you over what that brand is. I have found it to be more in line with reviewing everything, allowing everything (within limits) and deciding which we agree with and which we don’t. I like this site because I find that the moderation is light enough to allow for discussions without fear of being moderated for an unenlightened viewpoint. She allows very unscientific discussions to take place as long as they are not demeaning and just mudslinging, although I find that she does allow some of that to take place. The fine line of moderation is a difficult one at best, and though I don’t know where she draws that line every time, I have grown accustomed to her moderation and am okay with it enough to not worry about it. Other sites that I have visited are either a free for all hostile environment where only trolls hang out or too censored to have a reasonable conversation. She allows you do freely demean her as host apparently without repercussion as can be seen by your preceding posts.
If you are really so concerned with the residents of this blog being informed then you are free to inform us! I would bet that if you sent her a well written blog page she would even post it for you. She has done so in the past for articles on both sides of an issue. It would be an improvement from your accusations that can neither be proven true or false and simply attack the messenger rather than the message. This you can freely choose on this site, or you can choose to become a troll (she allows some of those as well). Your choice.
Thanks again atanb for another well argued defense of Judith Curry with some good points and useful perspective.
You referred to my “accusations that can neither be proven true or false”. This is the only thing that I would like to correct. To disprove my accusation #1, you simply need to provide a counter example of the bias I have accused her of. She admits that climate change is at least partially caused by human CO2 emissions. Show me a post where she says that the threat from that climate change is sufficient that something is warranted — government regulations or individuals should invest their money / change their lifestyles / take any little bit of responsibility to move the emissions needle in the other direction. Really, anything that would make a U.S. senator think twice about including her on a panel of experts.
It is actually much more difficult for me to provide proof. I’d have to show bias in every one of Judith Curry’s posts. The best that I can do is provide an example that demonstrates bias.
Consider Resplandy et. al. (search Resplandy on this blog).
This was a peer reviewed paper (Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition) that claimed to provide ocean heat uptake estimates using a new, independent method. Their result suggested “that ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates, with implications for policy-relevant measurements of the Earth response to climate change, such as climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the thermal component of sea-level rise.”
Judith Curry’s statistician pal Nic Lewis found errors in the paper. I applaud him for this.
This one paper was hoisted high as an example of how flawed the peer review process is. It exemplified what is wrong with mainstream climate science.
The paper was retracted. The authors mentioned Nic Lewis in the retraction and admitted that the results were weaker than they had originally estimated.
The last post that I see on this blog that mentions this paper is the announcement of the retraction: https://judithcurry.com/2019/09/25/resplandy-et-al-part-5-final-outcome/
However, the paper was later re-published WITH the corrections recommended by Nic Lewis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56490-z). You’d think that this would be highlighted in Judith Curry’s blog.
Oh, but “The correction did not substantially change the central estimate of ocean warming but led to a roughly fourfold increase in uncertainties.” So the paper still represents a completely independent method of estimating ocean warming that suggests ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates — it is just less certain.
Suddenly it’s not so interesting, despite Nic Lewis’ contribution.
It is not on brand.
I call that an obvious example of exactly the kind of bias I have been talking about.
mdander, you are a lost puppy. Judith has never claimed anything else other than man was at least partly responsible for climate change and she has always advocated for expenditures towards improving infrastructure which would be useful regardless of what happens. Now say your apologies and move along.
BTW, in case there is any confusion, I have absolutely no authority here :)
The assumption about the nature and source of warming is unwarranted.
https://www.mdpi.com/climate/climate-06-00062/article_deploy/html/images/climate-06-00062-g002-550.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62/htm
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/19/16/jcli3838.1.xml
mdander,
I think the main point of your discussion is a bit misleading;
“However, the paper was later re-published WITH the corrections recommended by Nic Lewis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56490-z). You’d think that this would be highlighted in Judith Curry’s blog.”
If the blog did not highlight the re-published report, why am I aware of it?
As I recall (this is your fight, not mine so I have not double checked), Nic Lewis, told us that the paper had been republished and that the results had not been affected, just the uncertainty.
In fact my understanding is the same as your statement;
“Oh, but “The correction did not substantially change the central estimate of ocean warming but led to a roughly fourfold increase in uncertainties.” So the paper still represents a completely independent method of estimating ocean warming that suggests ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates — it is just less certain.”
If this blog (the only one that I regularly visit) has kept me informed as to the paper in question and I agree with your assessment of the paper, what is your point exactly?
Further, if you really want to test this “brand” thing of yours why don’t you do like I suggested and ask for her to publish a rebuttal to Nic Lewis that you compose on this paper. I look forward to reading it.
atanb: “I think the main point of your discussion is a bit misleading;”
me: Nope. I accused Judith Curry of frequent, consistent bias. I did not forward proof. I gave the example of the Resplandy paper as an obvious example of that bias (that human caused climate change is a substantial threat) — but one example does not prove frequency or consistency. You can choose to agree or disagree.
atanb: “If the blog did not highlight the re-published report, why am I aware of it?”
me: Don’t know. You are certainly not aware of it from reading any of the searchable content of this blog.
The results when you search “Resplandy” are very clear. There are posts “Resplandy et. al.” Parts 1 through 5 (lots of coverage) the last one detailing the retraction. There is no part 6 detailing the republishing. Entries dated after “Resplandy et. al. part 5: Final outcome” do not mention the republishing.
atanb: What is your point exactly?
me: Dr. Curry’s failure to highlight the republishing of the Resplandy paper (despite having published 5 posts detailing how Nic Lewis had got it retracted and had contributed significantly to the revised version) is an obvious example of bias against published science that indicates a greater threat from human caused climate change.
I don’t think that I can make it more clear. Your argument against it has been the most articulate so far and it amounted to you saying “As I recall…”, not being bothered enough to do a one word search on this site.
Having established the bias, how Dr. Curry and Nic Lewis responded to the Resplandy paper is especially interesting when considered in the context of THIS post.
This post includes a section “III. Scientists conducting climate model-based attribution analysis.” which Dr. Curry sums up saying:
“This entire climate model-based approach to extreme event attribution is fundamentally flawed. Until climate models are able actually resolve circulation features (requiring a horizontal of resolution of ~20 km), they simply are not useful for attribution of extreme weather events.”
The uncertainty of the attribution analysis is clearly quantified. Judith Curry has at her disposal the analytical means to discredit this paper if it has stated its uncertainty inappropriately — that is what Nic Lewis did with the Resplandy paper. The methods used by the paper are not new. There is no excuse for her to simply do some hand waving as she (and Cliff Mass) did here.
Conclusion: The climate model-based approach to to extreme event attribution is not as “fundamentally flawed” as she says. I’ve already established that she is biased against science that suggests that human caused climate change is a substantial threat, and her qualitative exaggeration of the flaws in the attribution analysis are completely in line with that.
As stevereincarnated says “Show me a person that says they have no bias and I’ll show you a person that is too biased to have an objective opinion.” The best way we can each mitigate our own bias is to get our climate science from multiple sources.
The facts as I see them;
If she had made some of your comments disappear I would concede that you might have a point. She has not. It is my opinion that your comments have not been in keeping with the published rules on this site, and likely would have been removed if they were about anyone but her. It is my opinion, after following this site for as long as it has been in existence, that this host allows things to be said about her that she does not allow to be said about anyone else, including you. Further, any bias that she may have (I still don’t think you have made a valid point) is negated by the fact that she has allowed you to freely post and attempt to offset any perceived bias you may think she has.
As far as the particular study goes their result is +1.11 ± 0.68 per meg per year. Doing the math that is somewhere in the range of 0.43 to 1.79. I have no idea why climate science does this convoluted and non-standard (no other science allows this that I am aware of) reporting of results, but there it is. Normally in scientific notation, you show all the digits you know for sure then add one guess digit. In this particular case the result should be +1.1 ± 0.7 per meg per year, but I digress. In any case, the error is very large and anything from benign to much larger than the models that are currently out there. Not sure that result is any better than the direct measurement with all of its various problems. Sure if they can find a way to eliminate some of the error, then this would be an important method. However, as it is, is like saying the answer is somewhere between 4 and 18. Or the result may be 11 but it could be as low as 4 (less than half the value) or 18 (which is a bit less than double the value).
The fact that my understanding was that the paper was republished, reassures me that this web site is a useful tool in keeping me up with the latest. If you do not find that to be the case then you are welcome to visit other websites were I can guarantee you that if you said something like you have at this site about their host it would have been obliterated into the digital wasteland, and that would have happened very quickly, if they allowed the post to show up at all. I have been to other blogs, and the moderation is very non-accommodating to other views.
Further, the point that you never comment on in the slightest is that this host is very accommodating in guest columns. You could put a post together to acclaim the study that you think has not been emphasized enough. You could do a whole series of them for every bias that you perceive to be. However, your silence in doing this shows to me that you are really not serious, but just want to make unsubstantiated claims. How do I know that she is accommodating? Because I have seen it happen. The guest posts are varied in views and varied in their quality, just like the weekly lists are.
I am not going to go through the exercise of going through every page to find some bias that you perceive to be here. I do not find that bias, and nothing that you have stated has changed my perspective in the slightest. I do find that she has a bias when it comes to studies that have incorrect precision in them. She likes to point out such results. I think you may be confusing that bias of improperly done studies to another bias. Pointing out such a bias in the first place and then not mentioning the republishing of a the same non-important study (if that is what was done) is not the bias you point to in my opinion.
In any case she has allowed your comments on the study to appear, and since you think it is such an important study you are free to comment on its importance, as you have done in the past.
Hi atanb.
I think that it is charming that you think that this site might be moderated by anything other than a bot.
My interest in posting here is not to get the attention of Dr. Curry, or of anyone that might be making policy decisions. None of them has time to read any of the comments posted here.
I have university degrees in math and physics and I have been following climate science for 30 years. As such, I feel that it is important to be able to have informed discussions with people that might not have as informed a scientific perspective as I do on the science. In my experience these run from completely unrealistic expectations of how quickly we can decarbonize to fundamentalist opinions that human caused climate change is not much of a problem.
People in the latter group will often point to posts like this one and make qualitative-masquerading-as-quantitative arguments like Dr. Curry did (and you did in your last comment). I’m not actually interested in trying to change the mind of fundamentalists like yourself, but, insofar as you had the most articulate counter-arguments, it has been instructive to have a conversation with you — it prepares me to be better at having productive discussions with people that care about being fully informed (i.e. they get their climate science information from disparate sources).
So thank you.
> It is my opinion, after following this site for as long as it has been in existence, that this host allows things to be said about her that she does not allow to be said about anyone else, including you.
Judith has told me that she removed comments of mine specifically because I mentioned her name and criticized her thinking (with no personal criticisms or anything that violated her posted moderation rules). She regularly leaves up all manner of insults directed at any variety of other people.
I’m curious if you could point to a comment about her that you think she would delete were it said about someone else.
I agree with mdander that Judith certainly should have highlighted the republishing of the Resplandy et al paper, or at least made note of it in her “Week in Review” column, especially after her earlier discussions about it. It’s odd she would leave that out.
‘In an earlier post, I accused Judith Curry of bias and I substantiated this with my observations of the consistency and frequency that her posts are aligned with a preference for weak governmental regulation.’
I have to admit that this particular interpretation has never occurred to me. Posting endless crap contrarian science to be sure. Hosting weird science comments yes. Perhaps this particular opinionated troll could let me know what strong government regulation is so I know the difference.
> what strong government regulation is
See, Chief?
That is trolling.
Tell me again what your AI economic overlord does poor wee willie?
Temperatures in the lower stratosphere over the southern polar circle are dropping to a minimum this winter.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/70mb6590.png
What we need is more cows and fewer self appointed saviours of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x67Q58dJw4E
Mmmmmm…
China is a nation of economic contrast. Pockets of wealth and privilege in a setting of stubborn poverty.
‘China remains a mostly unfree economy. The modest improvements in its economic freedom score in recent years have resulted mostly from gains in the property rights, judicial effectiveness, and business freedom indicators. Overall, the economic freedom that does exist in China continues to lack depth and breadth, and the government needs to ensure that business-friendly policy changes are understood and implemented nationwide, not just in Beijing or the major commercial centers.’ https://www.heritage.org/index/country/china
I am an occasional visitor to this site, a Ph.D trained time series statistician and an avid consumer and analyst of climate data. Kudos to Judith Curry for maintaining this site. Having said that, I am done with David Appell’s incessant jibberish, naysaying, and half-baked climate alarmist propaganda! He knows just enough statistics and climate science to impress CNN and MSNBC viewers. He does not belong in a serious discussion and should be given a time-out so serious and productive discussion and debate can proceed.
Your contribution was much appreciated.
Dan Coggin wrote: I am done with David Appell’s incessant jibberish, naysaying, and half-baked climate alarmist propaganda!… He does not belong in a serious discussion….
Hey Dan, they why don’t you take the risk of criticizing my ideas and claims and putting your own out there instead of just attacking me personally, which is cheap and easy?
Personal attacks are your specialty, but you don’t have a patent.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/10/14/week-in-review-politics-edition-13/#comment-817514
CGeorge wrote: Personal attacks are your specialty, but you don’t have a patent.
Odd. Protesting injustice is not a personal attack, George.
We have differing concepts of injustice. And of protesting.
I ran the Column Radiation Model on the June 29 0Z Medford sounding, for CO2=304 and CO2=419 ( about the increase of the last century ).
RF at the tropopause increased 3.5 W/m2, implying about 1C.
The heating rate was negative ( cooling ) up to about 400mb.
Interestingly, the heating rate for this depth decreased further with increased CO2, from -2.23 K/day to -2.26 K/day!
I then rand the same scenario for the 2021-1-1 12Z Fairbanks AK sounding.
The radiance at the tropopause increased.
The heating rate, which was positive,
increased with increased CO2 for the cold inversion,
from +3.86 K/day to +4.11 K/day.
So, increased CO2 -cooled- the heatwave and -warmed- the Arctic inversion,
apparently acting to moderate extreme temperatures, somewhat in contrast to the radiative forcing.
In WordPress, you can go back to the classic editor. It is a maintained plugin.
The recurrent call to climatologists instead of meteorologists is not good for the credibility of Science and scientists. I point out two drawbacks:
– there are many valid theories in meteorology that climatologists can ignore or poorly understand. These theories do ignore the climate change because a daily-to-monthly anomaly is, by far, a smaller scale than climate. What a lack of education if we link meteorological theories to climate change
– among the climatologists, the most excited ones promote the idea of an alarming environmental science which in turn fits the needs of the media rentability. Hence the mainstream media simply do not accept anymore the “keep calm” (and educated) discourse of many scientists and the mainstream audience is educated only to “panic”. The “heat dome” concept has been turned in my country as “a new – worrying – process”… whereas it is just a new name.
The physics of climate is not the hockey stick. The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002. A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory. The new theory says that climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain. This article reviews abrupt change in simple systems, in a 1-D climate model and in the climate system at multi-decadal timescales.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2014/06/23/the-unstable-math-of-michael-ghils-climate-sensitivity/
It is seen in hydrodynamic series as Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and its source is the spatiotemporal chaos of the oceans and atmosphere. Superimposed on this large millennial scale variability is a few decades of AGW. This is the dominant climate science paradigm.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ghil-sensitivity.png
The farcical left groupthink is that AGW is an immanent existential threat that requires unspecified government coercion to counter. Computers in charge of production and consumption in the thought bubble of poor wee willie. It’s all a bit odd.
Robert Ellison wrote: The physics of climate is not the hockey stick.
The hockey stick is a reconstruction of past temperatures, not a climate model. A lot of other people get this wrong too.
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002.
Quote them.
A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory.
Prove this — with data.
David incessantly repeats that physics demands a hockey stick. Now it is just a temperature reconstruction. Seems much more like a meme.
https://www.dandebat.dk/images/1570p.jpg
Robert I. Ellison commented: David incessantly repeats that physics demands a hockey stick.
Prove my reasoning wrong. Go ahead, let’s see it.
Robert Ellison wrote: The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002.z
More hollow words of yours, that you can’t support. You just blather.
Robert Ellison wrote: A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory.
More blather he has failed to support with data.
David Appell, thread bombing as usual. 105 of 123 comments, i.e. over 20%!!!!
Correction, 105 of 523 comments
Peter Lang, I’m glad to see you’re paying attention to what I’m writing — that’s just what every writing wants to know!
I don’t read your loony left ideological nonsense. You haven’t a clue about what is relevant for justifying policies.
Hey Peter, how much bombing by Robert I. Ellison? Too much to count, huh?
Ellison has posted 107 of 532 total comments.
The difference is that I reply to perhaps 1 in 5 of David’s tedious cognitively disordered trollery. And there was a discussion with the usual suspects om how public masks might add marginally to more effective public health measures. They need at great length and with much repetition to insist on their own perspicacity. Much more perspicacious than those who must be biased because they disagree. It’s a sort of cultural agnotology.
I’m in favour of pragmatic climate policy – but I’m still waiting for them spell out their new world order. What are these grand ideas – other than sad willies brave new AI economic overlord – that need such furtive subterfuge. Substituting – as is the topic of this post – scare tactics for rational policy analysis.
I have investigated the “heat dome” case since the word is not a standard of the academic community.
The “heat dome” word massively broke out during the PNW heatwave because
– there was first a heatwave in the southern US that was already entitled “heat dome” (the Washington Post had issued an article on the topic at mid-June)
– some (maritime) mid-latitude meteorologists – who cares on the PNW and western Canada – can describe any anticyclonic wave of the jet stream as a “heat dome”.
Different “processes” described by the same word and by coincidence, both “processes” occurred in less than one month, pushing the word “heat dome” to the summits!
In my country, several scientists used a more academic word for the PNW wave: “blocking high”. A slow anticyclonic wave can be in some sense approximated to a “block”.
Note that the main idea of a “heat dome” for the US scientists is the first heatwave. Indeed, most of the US have no interest for the maritime mid-latitude processes. But eventually, the “heat dome” word has broken out worldwide because of the PNW heatwave. A typical nonsense of no brain media.
Note also that the NOAA’s webpage called “heat dome” is in fact a summary of the Deng et al study about seasonal processes explaining how we can reach extreme temperature levels in July-August in the southern US starting from spring anomalies. In other words, this webpage is not designed to explain any heatwave at the beginning of June and is not designed to explain any heatwave over the PNW.
The Washington Post article has good ideas but it is confusing because it gives the false impression that a “heat dome” is a single process. They used a single schematic.
My final conclusion: if we have extreme heat levels starting from New Mexico and heading to Canada, we must at least separate the process into two theories. One for New Mexico, another one for Canada. Of course, it is possible than the result of the first process is a forcing for the second one but we would write this as two theories that have interacted.
In terms of ‘thinking outside the box’, one gedankenexperiment might ask the question: ‘were there specific other odd climate events happening xxx days/weeks before this extreme heat event?’
The reason I pose this thought is that I noticed a link (not a causation, just a correlation) between extremely odd summer snowfall patterns to low altitudes in Europe (basically below 1000m in the Eastern Alps or below 1500m in the Western Alps) and subsequent very heavy snowfall events around 15 weeks later (usually signifying a very early start to winter snow cover or an unusually heavy snowfall in the pre-Christmas period).
The reason I picked up on this is that when i was 16 years old I went on an exchange trip to practice my spoken German to an Alpine valley in Austria in the summer of 1981 and it snowed down to the valley (under 1000m) on 15th July. I hadn’t brought clothes suitable for such an event!! This was not 1cm, it was 20cm+. It was an extremely odd and rare event. In 1981, 1 metre of snow fell in those same Austrian valleys in the first week of November, again an event which is most unusual. It presaged a long, hard and snowy winter, with valley level snow only disappearing in late April 1982.
A similarly odd event occurred a few years ago with snowfall in late August down to low levels. It too presaged an unusually heavy snowfall just before Christmas (up to 2 metres over a 14 day period).
It allows you to ask questions like: ‘was the abnormally heavy snowfall in the second half of February 1999 in the Alps preceded by unusual snowfalls to low altitudes in late October 1998??
I’m not saying there is a linkage, I’m just saying that if you notice odd events, you can ask the question as to whether there is any causal linkage going on.
We could ask questions this year in Europe about whether the unusual summer heat in Southern Europe in 2021 has any links to the unusually cold April and May experienced across much of Northern Europe.
In the UK, we had a miserable May in 2013 and an unusually hot July that year. This year the summer heat has ended up elsewhere….
Over-reactions to over-reactions are common features in complex systems, most notably in the realm of Western politics…..
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