Click for a larger (powerpoint size) image
The world has not warmed since 2001.
Team-AGW reply #1: In the last decade we’ve had six (or seven or eight) of the top ten hottest years ever recorded.
Skeptics Say: True, but it doesn’t mean much. Clusters and longer trends are all that’s left when you can’t say ‘2009, or 2008, or 2007 was the hottest…’
The kicker is that the world has been warming since the Little Ice Age of the 1700’s, long before SUV’s. And records only started around 100 years ago. That’s not long. (See the Akasofu graph.)
Plus, many records were set by ground based stations, and a lot of these can’t be trusted. The Urban Heat Island effect means thermometers in cities are really measuring parking-lot-warming, or the-air-conditioner-effect, not global warming. Satellites have circled the planet 24 hours a day for 30 years recording temperatures continuously. If temperatures were still rising, they would see it.
AGW reply #2: This flat patch is just natural variation.
Skeptics say: “Natural variation” is caused by something. And it’s more important than carbon dioxide, because it is overpowering any CO2 warming. Even if the temperatures start going up again, the flat trend for seven years tells us the models are missing something big.
Models can’t accurately predict the climate over eight years, why should they be right over 80?
Conclusion: This doesn’t prove global warming is over, but it proves carbon dioxide is not the main driver. Something else is causing temperatures to change, something the computer models don’t include.
Extra Notes:
Note: I’m quite careful not to draw too strong a conclusion from this graph. I don’t say, “the world has cooled in the last 8 years, therefore AGW is wrong.” Nor do I say “there’s a cooling trend since 1998” – there is, but it’s not that relevant because 1998 was a big El Nino year. What I do say is that all the major climate models failed to predict this change in trend. And that matters, because climate models are the substitute for evidence for some people in this debate.
Here’s the line of reasoning Team-AGW used:
“The world has warmed since 1700 or 1800, and carbon dioxide levels have gone up. We’ve ruled out all the other factors, therefore all the extra warming is due to CO2.”
This is technically argument from ignorance—or in common terms: “It must be carbon because we can’t think of anything else.” It’s flawed reasoning from the start. Worse, Team-AGW want us to believe they can “rule out all the other forces”, and at the same time accept the idea that it’s OK that they got the last eight years wrong because of… er …”unexplained forces”.
They can’t have it both ways: either they can explain what drives the climate, and predict what happens next, or they can’t explain what drives the climate, and so they can’t calculate carbon dioxides effect.
We can’t rule out all the other forces if we don’t know what they are.
Notes for Commenters
This is page 6 of The Skeptics Handbook. I did this post because I wanted to update the graph and expand on these ideas; I’ve had requests for a html version, and I wanted to have a place for people to find out answers to specific questions about this particular page. So below, we can comment specifically on what this page means, (and what it doesn’t). People reading this may have come from outside sceptics circles, and they will be looking here to see what kind of criticisms and answers apply to this graph and this page. Please stick to thread 🙂
I will be posting up most other pages of the Handbook so we can discuss those on other posts.
| Sources: Satellite Data is from UAH, lower trophosphere 1979 – July 2009. Surface Data is from GISS, global monthly averages, 1979- June 2009. CO2 is from Mauna Loa. The data is graphed as a variation from the 12 month (1979) average period for both temperature sources. The CO2 line is the linear trend line chosen by Excel. Abbreviations |
FWIW using the surface station data I calculated an actual warming trend of 0.15’c using linear regression, although I also calculated the correlation coefficent as not significant (too few data points). Calculating from 2001 is less significant.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
from 1995 onwards …
Intercept = 0.31
Slope = 0.0009
The equation is o = Intercept + (Slope * (MONTH NUMBER))
0.31 + (0.0009 * (0)) = 0.3053
0.31 + (0.0009 * (172)) = 0.4520
= +0.1467
Cor coef = 0.1001
So this whole topic seem pointless to me. You need a lot more datapoints to establish a meaningful trend. Perhaps you could get a professional statistician to comment.
10
JoNova – We can’t rule out all the other forces if we don’t know what they are.
Can we rule out Solar Variance?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/science/earth/09climate.html
But Dr. Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.
Speaking of the sun’s slight variability, he said, “Acting as though this is the alternative” to blaming greenhouse gases “is asking for trouble.”
10
I’m looking forward to the discussions here and on future posts from the handbook. This also reminds me that I need to go back and read the handbook, again.
“Proof of global warming is not proof that greenhouse gases caused that warming.”
Does failure to predict lack of warming falsify the climate models?
10
“Proof of global warming is not proof that greenhouse gases caused that warming.”
The lay person sometimes think that science provides proof of many things, but in fact science (outside of the mathematical sciences) doesn’t produce any proof of anything.
Science provides probabilities that something is true.
10
Mike – Does failure to predict lack of warming falsify the climate models?
I’m not aware of any lack of warming that is statistically significant. In fact, I am not aware of any warming/cooling or stagnation that is statisically significant in the last saveral years. It takes many many years to establish a meaningful climate trend.
But again, perhaps it would be good to invite a professional statistician to comment.
10
Mike – “Does failure to predict lack of warming falsify the climate models? ”
No. The climate models have built in expanding error bars. Virtually any outcome this century in global temperatures, except maybe an ice age*, won’t falsify them. (The hot spot does though.)
Damian –
1. I didn’t need a statistician to calculate a trend. I looked at the graph. Are you having trouble seeing the “unwarming” since 2001? How long would temperatures have to remain flat for you to suggest AGW might be exaggerated?
2. Thanks for calculating the rising trend on surface data. So 0.15 degrees per… 172 months means 0.105 degrees per decade? So, if we rope in all the effects from airports, and air-conditioners and asphalt, we’re on target for a big 1.0 degree rise this century – would that be 30% less than the utmost minimum IPCC projection? And if we ignore all the heat from hot black tar, buildings, badly sited sensors, and use satellites, we get… even less warming still. The fifteen year trend from the most warmist friendly data is not very supportive of the catastrophic crisis. Yes. Thanks.
3. solar irradiance doesn’t explain much of the temperature swings, and I’ve never said otherwise. The solar magnetic effect though is entirely different. Congratulations, you’ve ruled out one part of a universe of options…
4. As for the Revkin link: attacking a disparate unfunded group of independent thinkers for being…. independent thinkers – so what? No wonder you are confused if you look to him for your information. He’s not just missing the point, but going out of his way to avoid the real story of the International Climate Conference.
BTW In that same story: “There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said.” Said Richard Lindzen, Professor at MIT.
* Since ice-ages have occurred before despite CO2 being ten times higher than today, this experiment has already been run, and in that case, I’m wrong. Even an ice age doesn’t ‘falsify’ AGW for AGW-believers because it’s a religion. It can’t be falsified.
20
Damian @ 1: Perhaps you could get a professional statistician to comment.
I have been paid for doing statistical data analysis for decades. Does that make be a professional statistician or do I have to be a citified, license, and paid up member of The Intra Galactic Statisticians Society? …. I thought so.
However, there several fundamental facts that are behind ALL the methods of science including statistics.
The first fact is that the human eye-brain-mind system is among the best pattern recognition engines devised by either man or nature. So much so that it can perceive patterns where there are none. Hence the careful experimental design, data acquisition, and analysis done to separate noise from signal and fact from fantasy.
Eyeballing a trend in a graph is seeing a pattern. Doing a regression analysis and analysis of variance determines if you are just seeing things or if the trend is there for real or if its only a maybe or mostly a maybe not. However, the validity of such analysis is dependent upon the validity of the data itself, how it was collected, and the the design of the collection process. Randomly collected data that is “just collected” is no better than numbers from a random number generator.
The primary consequence of the first fact is the second fact: one tends to see what one expects to see. That is why there is the strict discipline of stating explicitly all of your assumptions. You do this because by assuming the truth of what you are trying to prove invalidates your entire line of reasoning. If you stumble onto the truth this way you don’t even know that its true. This must be avoided at all costs.
The believers in AWG embrace the above facts by assuming human caused CO2 emissions CAUSE global warming. After which they see it in the very noisy data they collect. ALL of their conclusions are thereby invalidated without further examination of the so called “evidence” they present. At this point, they must go back to the drawing board and start from scratch.
Finally we arrive at the third fundamental fact that knowledge is contextual. Meaning that all known relevant factors must be included in one’s analysis without contradiction. This is to be followed by an extensive search for countless previously unknown relevant factors to be included also without contradiction. If the processes, findings, cause and effect relationships and the like are as cherry picked as the AWGers seem to want to do, the conclusions are not only invalid they have insufficient connection to anything real even to be false.
Real science and real thought are not easy but is possible or we would not have modern technological civilization. We would still be living in a Stone Age Tribe, diseased, filled with parasites, and starving to death. That is if we are lucky. Most likely we would be dead. Such is the end of public policy founded on bad science and thought.
10
Time to think outside the box.
There has been a steady increase in primary plant production. Could it be that plants have an affinity for energy impregnated co2, and select it out from the backdrop of non energy enhanced co2?
10
Jo – Are you having trouble seeing the “unwarming” since 2001?
I am having trouble seeing the statistical significance regardless of whether it shows warming, cooling, stagnation, or anything else.
Jo – How long would temperatures have to remain flat for you to suggest AGW might be exaggerated?
Regardless of whether a dataset shows warming, cooling, or stagnation you ideally want about 30 years of datapoints. Preferably longer since fluctuations can be part of several factors operating at once. i.e. CO2 acting to warm the planet while say ocean oscillations and snow fall variance and volcanic eruptions periodically cause some cooling through various delayed positive and negative feedbacks. etc, etc …
10
That’s a little too far outside the box, Paper.
10
Thanks for India for saving us from the delusion of AGW believers who call a plant food called CO2 a pollutant and a knob of global temperature, instead of the knobs being solar radiation, ocean circulation, air circulation, the greenhouse effect of water vapour, the orbit and tilt of the earth and other variables. AGW believers, how is it that cooling by about 0.55 deg C from the average global temperature from 1878 to 1909 was okay, but warming by 0.33 deg C last year is dangerous? Don’t more people get sick during the cold season than the warm one?
http://www.geocities.com/girmao/GlobalWarming/MeanGlobalTemperatureAnomaly.htm
10
Papertiger,
Brian was being much too gentle by saying that you were “a little too far outside the box.” I will try to show you how far out you were.
Part of the scientific process is the development of hypotheses. This too comes under strict rules of evidence. For an hypothesis to BE an hypothesis it must have some substantiation in evidence and be admissible to being tested. Otherwise, it is not an hypothesis. It is a conjecture (aka wild ass guess) and is not admissible to cognitive processing. The reason being it is not connected to reality in any way. This connection must be made explicit.
Another part of the scientific process is that the words used in the hypothesis must mean something. That is they must have identifiable and identified referents that actually exist beyond some foggy ill defined intent or wish inside your head. A definition that points out this connection is hugely desirable and, in most contexts, is absolutely necessary. Especially this one.
Your “could it be” conjecture is deficient in both ways. Firstly, you appear to be “winging it” because here is no such thing as an “energy impregnated co2” vs “non energy enhanced co2”. What kind of energy, how this energy is impregnated, and how is the molecule deprived of this impregnation? Without being specific, you are simply using technical sounding words in a grammatical sequence that has no referent in reality. It is irrelevant that you intend the sentence to mean something. You must point out its referent or it is nothing but an arbitrary statement without connection to anything real. There is nothing to test and no reality to connect it to.
Now do you see why I said Brian was being much too gentle?
Now, would you care to be more specific?
10
genteel, please.
10
Another big straw man argument . . . wonderful.
10
While I have little time for economists in general, I think their solution to things that don’t behave the way their perception of reality predicts seems pretty elegant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
Maybe Climate Modellers need to adopt an “Invisible Hand”. Well, maybe they already have and the Invisible Hand explains everything that is not CO2.
10
Well here we go, it’s right off of My Thoughts Give A Pain’s website:
This is a response to The Skeptic’s Handbook by Joanne Nova, the epitome of denialist stupidity. Apparently Nova is unsatisfied with previous rebuttals of the Skeptic’s Handbook, so I will rebut it again. Since I am by no means an expert, I am referring to many resources and quoting people who know more about it than I do.
Now how about THAT? He leaves it to OTHERS to trash Joanne’s work, because he (correctly) observes that he (by no means is) an expert.
For that matter, how did he conclude that the Handbook was worthless in the first place? I guess it’s just a “feeling” he had, that he left others to “fill in the missing logic” for him.
Folks, if “pseudointellectual” is your game, take a gander at his website
10
A comment, posted about me me, on an alarmist’s website:
“I’ve never seen an angrier denier in my life.”
Yup. I’m one angry denier, all right. Don’t care for my tone, MTGAP?
You’re the guy who put it out there to get shot down
10
I think he needs to come up with a new name. Or maybe not as this is a goo discription. Of course it could be my eyes of my imagination but I read eMpTy CAP! and even if it is MTGAP that would fit when refering to the gap between the ears.
JoNova:
The data before 1979 needs to be discarded as the errors are greater than the so called trend. Just the sea surface data falsifies this record. That means that there is no evidence that the globe has warmed other than anecdotal evidence from regional reports which are not global. It would be alright to use the global data if you were to show bars accounting for the bad equiptment and methods which are suspected but unknown.
Damien:
You have been replied to so for now I will refrain!
Brian:
Please do not restrain from telling us how you rally feel. Use “NICE” words. We have a lady present!;-)
10
I appreciate the chivalry, but please don’t hold back on my account. I’m sure I’ve heard it all before – I am the only female in a household with four males (including Jack the golden labrador).
10
Actually, you probably heard it all on Apostrophe anyway
10
Don’t hold back?
OK.
Mister Empty Cup [not a term for a lady]:
Bring it here, so we can see it! Your synthesis of other’s diatribe against The Skeptic’s Handbook – let’s have a look! Come on!
You did it! Bring home your critique on the website of the individual who wrote the thing!
If you’re brave enough to do it – you’re brave enough to show us!!!
10
Lionell,
This is a AWESOME statement in post 7!
The primary consequence of the first fact is the second fact: one tends to see what one expects to see. That is why there is the strict discipline of stating explicitly all of your assumptions. You do this because by assuming the truth of what you are trying to prove invalidates your entire line of reasoning. If you stumble onto the truth this way you don’t even know that its true. This must be avoided at all costs.
This is what I would have liked to have stated hundreds of times over at GWH toward the Alarmists that visit! Joanne, you are definitely Blessed with People that understand the basics, yes including Brian. As with Anne-Kit and Mike Davis. I’m sure there are more and forgive me for not mentioning your names..This is why this Site is popular amoung many Realists sites! What’s also good to see are a FEW Alarmists that do know how to debate and not sling mud, so to say!
Good article Joanne and good posting Lionell Griffith!
Cheers
Denny
10
Well, perhaps not all my retorts are “mudslinging” – but I’ll put it this way: Not all my arrows are too sharp, either
10
why keep saying AGW (antropogenic global warming)?
It is better to say CACA (catastrophic anthropogenic climate alteration). It covers everything.
10
Oh, please
10
Some news from the “if it’s different, it’s bad, and it came from AGW” crowd
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/nightclouds/
10
Ane:
I was actually refering to Jo. I thought you were a big girl that was not to offended.
Brian:
Those were neat pictures and I can not understand why people feel that something unusual must be bad or be reason for concern. Ice clouds at the boundry layer seem to be more of an indication of the globe cooling than warming or a response to less energy comeing from the sun. I think I saw a face in the first cloud.
10
OK, I have two theories why these particular clouds are forming at mid lattitudes.
These theories are in my head. I am not going to say what these theories are are until I can propose ways to test these ideas.
Global Warmers, that would be a very good example for you to follow
10
FWIW For What It’s Worth
As in Number 1, from a well-known slander-mouth, it’s worth nothing, because a linear regression is not meaningful, to get the errors minimized in the Tchebychev criterion, a non linear regression is required
As in Number 2, once again from the same authoritative slander-mouth, it’s worth nothing, because it isn’t the solar variance over ten years that is meaningful, it is solar variance over a much longer period because, the effects of solar variance on the climate are not immediate
Is calling him “slander-mouth” a form of “name-calling” if that is what he does?
But “Slander-Mouth” seems as good a nickname for him as any
10
“A comment, posted about me me, on an alarmist’s website:
I’ve never seen an angrier denier in my life.
Yup. I’m one angry denier, all right. Don’t care for my tone, MTGAP?
You’re the guy who put it out there to get shot down”
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where did I say that?
10
No – that remark about me came from someone else’s website, not yours.
The quotes related to Joanne’s handbook came from your website. Since it did, I can only assume, you are the author of the quote about Skeptic’s Handbook.
Why don’t you write your name, for Christ’s sake? I hate that “anonymity” crap
10
Ah, I see what you were referring to. Yes, I did write that.
To respond to your post:
Now how about THAT? He leaves it to OTHERS to trash Joanne’s work, because he (correctly) observes that he (by no means is) an expert.
Well, only partially. I quoted several sources as a response to entire sections of the SKeptic’s Handbook. But I don’t really get what you’re saying here.
For that matter, how did he conclude that the Handbook was worthless in the first place? I guess it’s just a “feeling” he had, that he left others to “fill in the missing logic” for him.
I didn’t say it was worthless. I said it was “the epitome of denialist stupidity”, since it effectively summarizes the most prominent arguments made by climate denialists.
I put my name as MTGAP because I like that name. My real name is Michael.
10
Brian:
I think Joe Daleo beat me to stateing that this may or probably is related to solar activity. He ade the statement at Climaterealist.
I did find a site for climate activists / AGW faithful:
http://www.beyondthetalk.net/
There is a site called beyondtalk that this is an answer to.
I used to get in trouble for telling people they were aflicted with diarrhea of the mouth. Every time they opened their mouths #### came out. Then there is the current disease Chronic Cranialanalitis I think Jo is doing her part to find a cure for the last one.
10
I didn’t say MTGAP’s comments were worthless. I said they were “the epitome of stupidity”, since they effectively refused to address the original request made of him.
Bring your comments about the handbook here, MTGAP, post them here. I didn’t even look over your (I mean, somebody else’s, with more talent than you) comments about the handbook. So if they add knowledge about the world, or at least give a representation of the thought patterns in your head, then bring your comments and post them here.
10
It seems that Kelly in #24 wants to use a similar analogy to yours, Mike Davis
10
Joe D’Aleo and I think almost identically, and it’s almost uncanny to me.
By the Tchebycheff (there are a number of spellings of his name) criterion of data fit, two properties are satisifed:
1. Equal ripple property – the weighted “rippling” of data above and below the spline (fitting curve) is the same
2. The minimax property: The maximum error of the dats to be fit, is minimized by the spline.
Tchebycheff’s Theorem: Only the Tchbycheff polynomial has this property
10
Brian,
A curve fit to a data set, no matter what curve is fit or by what criterion, is at most a simulation of the data set. This is especially true if you have no idea as to the function that drives the data.
In a chaotic system such as climate, there is no single function driving the data. This is further complicated by the discontinuities of phase change. In such a case you pick your function by hunch and apply the fit criterion that you know how to apply. What is actually minimized by such a curve fit is not errors. It is some function of the deviation of the data from the curve that is fit.
One hopes but does not know that the fit curve adequately represents the underlying phenomenon. One expects the fit curve to be closer to the underlying phenomenon than the data itself. This may or may not be the case. You have no way of knowing unless you have a rather complete grasp of the detailed behavior of the system that produced the data. In which case, you would not need to simulate the data. You could simulate the system.
Words matter. Error implies deviation from the truth. Minimizing errors means you know that truth so you can in fact determine that you have minimized the errors. All you can truthfully say is that you have minimized the deviations from the fit curve according to some specific criterion. The result is simply a convenient representation of the data set that incidentally has a reduced apparent variation. Is it really closer to the truth than the data set itself? You don’t know. You simply hope.
The truth is in the data. So also are many types of noise both random and systematic in the data. Teasing apart the truth and the many types of noise from a data set is quite beyond the capability of a single curve fit on a single data set.
Hence, I suggest the use of the word “error” is misleading at best.
10
Hell No, Lionell!!!!!
Good God –
“error” IS science! With EVERY measurement there is an error – and there are two types: determinate and indeterminate, people can do something to “fix” determinate error, but without indterminate error, we can’t know if we have science! There is no science because we can’t know if the measurements mean anything!
Indeterminate errors propagate according to laws of statistics. If we see data with errors of measurements given, and if those errors do not conform to Gasussian statistics,
then we know those measurements are no damned good because they were fudged, forged, or from a non-existent data set!
Gauss IS the theory of errors, and until he came along, nobody really understood what “scientific measurement” was all about.
Newton didn’t know what true errors were, and Gauss demonstrated that Newton fudged a lot – BUT NEWTON COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN WHAT IT WAS HE WAS DOING!
Jesus – get rid of “error” – you get rid of telling whether science is science!
That’s how we know, for example, that Santer’s “demonstration” of AGW from humidity measurements is no damned good at all
10
Firstly, you appear to be “winging it” because here is no such thing as an “energy impregnated co2″ vs “non energy enhanced co2″.
Excuse me Lionel, but if there is no such thing as an energy impregnated co2 molecule then there is no such thing as co2 induced climate change.
Suits me fine, but I think the greater world (especially the politicians) will be a bit more hard nosed about it.
Maybe you can show me how co2 doesn’t absorb energy – with an experiment or some such.
10
Paper, molecules aren’t “impregnated” with energy, as if they were some teen-ager or something.
[sorry – perhaps a bad analogy]
but to get back to the point, the “energies” of molecules form a distribution, and if equilibrium is established that is a Boltzmann distribution, we can measure the T and P of a gas, and then from equipartition of energy statistics, we can know what the total contribtions of vibational, rotational, translational to the total energy of the gas are.
If it’s an ideal gas, then the internal energy (as well as the enthalpy) depends on the temperature, alone.
10
RE #34:
I missed that comment as well. I do not see why I should bring my comments here, since my own post is just as good a medium. But here you go. (For the sake of clarity, I am putting it in a separate comment, so see below.
10
This is a response to The Skeptic’s Handbook by Joanne Nova, the epitome of denialist stupidity. Apparently Nova is unsatisfied with previous rebuttals of the Skeptic’s Handbook, so I will rebut it again. Since I am by no means an expert, I am referring to many resources and quoting people who know more about it than I do.
[Nova was unsatisfied with illogical arguments and bully boy behaviour. I’ve debunked all these before. One Two Three (See #247 as well) Four Five. Why do you think mindless repetition of incorrect arguments will change my mind? Maybe it works for you. — JN]
Before we even get to the real substance, Nova incorrectly defines ‘skeptic’. She calls it as “person indisposed to accept popularity or authority as proving the truth of opinions.” While technically true, this is very narrow.
The best definition I can find is this one:
“The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.” -Miguel de Unamuno
[ Yes, you’ll convince a lot of people that AGW is right with this tack. — JN]
Check out Global Warming Denial by Skeptico. Recently, he and Nova got into a big argument. It appears that Nova won, but only because she ruthlessly censored Skeptico.
[ I already answered on another thread here and here. As for the “censorship” that was answered here for you personally already #247. — JN]
There is an important distinction between skepticism and denial. A skeptic questions, but accepts conclusions if answers are provided; a denialist questions, and refuses to accept any answer. Which one is Joanne Nova?
[ Not the same kind as Al Gore who won’t answer questions even if we offer to pay him $200,000 – his normal speaking fee. The “she censors” argument is another attempt to smear, since it is – like most alarmist positions – unbacked by facts. I don’t need to allow all the libelous insults, and repeated errors to be posted here just so I can prove I don’t censor. Find one scientific argument that I have censored, a point that I have not already answered, and I’ll post it. — JN]
Not just whether, but by how much. By the way, it would be really dishonest to pretend that there is no answer to this question. There are plenty of answers. CO2 traps heat; this is well-established basic physics. CO2 levels are far higher today than in the recent past, and this increase is attributable to human activity. Temperature has also dramatically increased, and the increase is correlated with the CO2 increase. Human emissions are responsible. The upper stratosphere is cooling, which only happens if the warming is due to greenhouse gases (as opposed to the sun). Now we see if you are a skeptic, or a denier. A skeptic would accept this evidence; a denier would ignore it.
[ Ha. Ha. This is a false test of ‘skeptic’, you are asking me to accept argument by authority (And a pretty low base authority at that) to prove I’m a skeptic. There’s only so much nonsense I can handle in one day. — JN]
This is a rather minor point, but it is still wrong. I doubt that the resources would be used to feed Somali babies, and we are already working on a cure for cancer. But in the end, this is just an appeal to emotion.
[ If $7 billion dollars (this years funding) was put into feeding somali babies instead of climate research do you have any evidence it would not satisfactorally feed one somali baby? — JN]
I don’t see what this has to do with skepticism. I do agree, though, that when debating climate change, we should stick to the subject. I wonder what the four points are?
Yes, proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory do have the burden of proof. I answered Nova’s one question already. It has been answered many, many times over the last thirty years or so, but Nova pretends that it has never been adequately resolved.
[And that’s why I just “pretended” to write the Skeptics Handbook. — JN]
97% of climatologists agree that it is resolved.
[Yes and 97% of scientists in the 1800’s probably thought quantum physics was rubbish too. Once again, people keep making argument from authority as if it is evidence. I’m starting to be convinced the “authority thing” is pathological. It’s getting so boring debunking it, I might have to make it a point that all commenters accept before they post. Kind of like, “Tick this box to show that your brain is functioning” before you can post here. — JN]
No one ever said it was. That’s a straw man if I ever saw one.
[OK. Yawn. Read AR4 – look for mentions of things that would be caused by any sort of warming, not just by greenhouse induced warming… Sea Ice. Glaciers. Sea Level. Drought. Flood. Cyclones. or look at this one page http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/qthinice.asp. Read point 1. Read point 5. — JN]
I suppose that’s reasonable enough.
This is going to be good.
Finally.
Remember earlier when I was talking about the difference between skeptics and deniers, right after I provided all that evidence? Joanne Nova just crossed the border from really dumb skeptic to denier.
Uh, wrong. Check out all the evidence that I posted above. But what is this newer data?
Are you serious? Is that the best you can do? We’ve known that for years. It’s called the feedback effect, and it’s crucial to the science of global warming. You want an explanation? Try this. Or this. Or this or this or this or this. Is that enough evidence for you?
[What evidence? You’ve just repeated what I said an alarmist would say in the Handbook. “Amplification” is a speculative unproven theory. — JN]
Um . . . yes they are. Remember how we were talking about evidence earlier?
[see graph at top of post — JN]
This is news to me. I’ve never heard this claim before, so I’m not sure how to respond to it.
However, I could start by pointing out the complete lack of references.
[ you could. And you’d prove yourself wrong again. Modtran. Archibald. — JN]
Interestingly, Nova claims that climate models are unreliable, but then uses one in her first point to “prove” that the greenhouse signature is missing.
[ Doh. The ‘claimed’ greenhouse signature is produce by a model. How can we talk about it without using a model? — JN]
For the bulk of the argument, I’m going to refer this one to the legendary Yahoo Answers user “Dana1981, Master of Science“:
Nice job, Joanne. Pretend that Al Gore makes real arguments.
This is a case of blatant cherry picking. Check out a 130-year graph or even a 2000 year graph and the warming trend is clear:
[ Answered below. You can’t win a cherry picking argument. We have a half billion years on our side. — JN]
For the same reason that if you flip a coin you have no idea what the outcome will be, but if you flip a coin a thousand times you know that you’ll get about 500 heads and 500 tails. But it’s actually false that models can’t accurately predict the climate over seven years. It’s based on the false premise that temperature cooled from 2001 to 2008.
Amusingly, Nova has included a few “AGW reply”s (by the way, AGW means “anthropogenic global warming”), all of which are straw men.
Nova claims that thermometers are unreliable because they are next to air conditioners and stuff. Which is funny, because her third point relies on the assumption that thermometers are reliable. Which is it?
[I’m picky about thermometers. The ones I rely on are in satellites or ocean buoys, or in remote locations, not next to nine lanes of traffic that wasn’t there 50 years ago. — JN]
Actually, the bias is accounted for by things such as Stevenson screens. Oh wait! She already refuted that point!
I have two responses. First, Stevenson screens account for nearly all nearby heat sources, so a site-by-site survey is unnecessary. Second, not every single thermometer has to be reliable; they only have to tend to be reliable to get an accurate picture of global temperature.
[ Quote a study of stevenson screens and how they can “account” for being next to two square kilometers of asphalt? — JN]
I’ll let Mitchell Anderson take this one:
[ And I’ll take you to this page where I already showed that he was wrong — JN]
In the last 150 years, we have increased atmospheric carbon from 280 ppm to 385 ppm, and the pace is picking up speed. We are on track to hit 530 ppm by 2050.
[On track thanks to the scientific journal called Sydney Morning Herald. Yup. Scary. — JN]
To see what all these numbers mean, have a look at this animation from the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway.
Aha, I can feel an appeal to authority coming on. The strange part, though, is that Nova admits that she is using an appeal to authority, and yet does it anyway.
[ It’s amazing how many ways someone can mis-comprehend a point. But it’s not interesting. Read that page Mr anonymous until you figure out that I use argument from authority to show that a consensus doesn’t exist. In contrast you use it to prove the climate obeys models. — JN]
Don’t try to pull that one. And definitely don’t try to start an appeal to authority debate. The proponents will win. And some types of appeals to authority, such as the “97% of climatologists” figure or the consensus among scientific papers, are appropriate.
That’s only a minor portion of the argument against the petition, so it’s really a straw man argument. Scientific American concluded that there were roughly 200 credible climatologists on the list. But okay, I’ll name 10 fakes.
From Seattle Times:
From Hawaii Reporter:
But I’ll bet Nova is just going to ignore the evidence again.
[No. Did you not notice? I’ve answered these see #247, old claims, (personally responding to you) and since you’ve ignored my answer, only an apology, or better info will let you keep posting here. — JN]
So if I provide this evidence, you’ll become a proponent of anthropogenic global warming and will advocate for it? Great!
Actually, they did. See any of my references on the feedback effect; in particular, this.
[ No. Pick your time scale: you lose. See a graph of 500 million years. See a graph of the last 1000. See the vostok graphs of the last 400,000. — JN]
It does. The upper stratosphere is cooling, CO2 and temperature are directly correlated. I could provide more evidence, but that’s all that is necessary. So Joanne, will you now give up trying to advocate for the wrong side? If you were a true skeptic, you would accept the evidence.
-If there was no correlation between CO2 and temperature.
-If the upper stratosphere was warming.
-If surface temperatures were cooling.
-If oceans were cooling.
-If the troposphere was cooling.
Those are the best I can come up with right now. There are probably many more.
[Yes. there are plenty more bit of irrelevant, wrong, dishonest data you can bring in. Please don’t. — JN]
*****
Well, The Skeptic’s Handbook is an utter failure. Joanne Nova, who claims to be a “skeptic”, is nothing but a global warming denialist.
10
I’ll save everybody some frustration, and I will just sort of summarise things that Empty doesn’t understand but criticises anyway, in Empty Head’s own words:
“Well, The Skeptic’s Handbook is an utter failure. Joanne Nova, who claims to be a “skeptic”, is nothing but a global warming denialist.”
Empty, more credible sources that yourself have already thrown most of what you have come up with at Joanne, and Joanne has already responded to it, so your cute little diatribe synthesis, is old hat.
Really, Empty. Go get a life. Yours must be pretty empty for you to do what you do (or don’t do so well)
10
The Empties of the world, come and go, on Joanne’s web site, they are boring to the utmost, because they re-invent the wheel every time they “prove” that Joanne is nothing more than a “denialist.”
These people demonstrate that they didn’t do very well in school, on their first foray into counter-denialism, because the first thing they demonstrate about themselves is their aversion to homework
10
Empty,
The question really isn’t “do you have proof of AGW?”. The real question is “Why would you believe in it?”
Let’s say, for arguments sake, that the claims of AGW are true – i.e. increased carbon causes increased temperature. Why would that be “bad”???? Increased CO2 IMPROVES plant growth. Increased temperature IMPROVES quality of life. Increased temp DECREASES overall death-rate due to weather. Increased temp INCREASES humidity and thereby available water vapor for rain.
The only thing that matters to AGW-ers is that increased CO2 also brings increased tax revenue and increased funding to third-world countries and the UN!!!
10
It frustrates me no end that AGW-ers NEVER admit to taking any of this into account when spouting there blather!!
10
OK Mr or Mrs no-name-mtgap, you’ve had your five minutes of fame, and I’ve done my community service for the day by bothering to connect you with all the rebuttals you didn’t bother to read.
Based on past form, I expect you will – undeterred by evidence – continue repeating delusional, illogical arguments, lies, and misinformation.
So I’ll do the community a service in future by only allowing your comments through that don’t waste our time. Apologies will be accepted, but no more insulting, irrational, baseless posts.
Congratulations. You’ve made it to my short moderated list faster than anyone.
10
Brian @ 38,
Yes, there are errors of all kinds in science but you are equivocating on the context of my comment. The context was curve fitting and not science in general. Curve fitting to a data set has nothing to do with errors especially with minimizing them. All you can do is propose a function who’s coefficients are to be computed using some method. The usual methods involve minimizing some function of the deviations from the curve. There are errors but you can’t know that you are minimizing them if you don’t know what the true values are. In which case, why are you curve fitting?
10
In this case, it’s minimizing the discrepancy between the data points,to see if there is any trend over time, if the errors in the data points are all on an equivalent basis in some way (and no data points are biased), then we know from Gaussian stsatistics that the trend of the curve will respresent a “true” trend, again within some margin of error, related to the errors of each and every of the individual data points.
I will agree that if we don’t have a good handle on the errors of the data points, then we don’t have a good handle on the error of the fitting curve, but I guess that doesn’t prevent anyone from seeing if there is a trend in the fitting curve.
This probably is not of general interest so write to me and we can discuss this on our own
bgvalentine@verizon.net
10
Overseas, from the way plant growth appears to be improving the world over in the past decades, I would say, we don’t have enough CO2 in the air now.
It is Chinese culture, in their belief that their CO2 from their energy is a gift to the rest of the world to grow their food, I agree with the Chinese.
Now get them to sign on to Copenhagen or something.
Not with that cultural perspective, you’re not
10
Empty,
If you’re feeling rather lonely and dejected at this point, you might petition Eli the Alarmist to help you get your ducks in a row so that you can make a reasoned response to Joanne.
Regrettably Eli can’t handle all the requests he gets, so you might not be given top prority by Eli.
Srongly suggest, Empty, that you don’t try going at it on your own again, because you simply lack the ability.
You confess as much in your notes, time for your ears to hear what your mouth says
10
To add just a small point to the above, which might be of some general use,
– data are not fit to a straight line, unless there is some empirical or rational reason behind it to do so.
In the absence of any such knowledge a priori to so so, the best we are left with, is Tchebycheff’s criterion
10
Brian @ 49 & 52,
I have no problem with curve fitting being use for such purposes. However, I do object to the use of the word “error” in that context. We deal with deviation and variation as well as various estimates of population statistics based upon samples. However, “error” implies usually much more and and sometimes much less than deviation or variation.
This brings us to another point of doing good science.
One must be careful to make true statements. When your statement implies more than the evidence supports, you have gone beyond what you know in to the realm of hypothesis, conjecture, and pure fabrication. Hence, the best practice is to make the strongest true statement you can based upon the evidence but no more. Then, when you go beyond that point, specify that the statement is a hypothesis, conjecture, or pure fabrication thereby returning it to the realm of known truth.
The words you use are important because they are labels for the concepts you use for thinking. When you use a word with less precision and accuracy, your thinking has less precision and accuracy. A misused word derails clear thought as well as clear communication.
I suggest this issue is very germane to the topic of AWG because the dissuasion is filled with statements presented as true statements that go way beyond the evidence available to support them. Add that to the all too common dropping of context and equivocation of critical terms and you have a total breakdown of clear thought and communication.
Linear Regression vs Tchebycheff is beyond the scope of this blog. However, I would suggest the principle of parsimony has given us good service. In the absence of any reason to do otherwise, linear extracts as much information from the data as do higher orders with much less room for misinterpretation.
10
Well, if we debate the last paragraph, we go beyond the scope of the intended discussion, I undersatnd your points, and I think they are all valid contentions to anything I have said
10
Brian, can you expand on your thoughts about Santer and humidity in #38?
10
In PNAS (an awful anacronym for a journal) in 2007, Santer claimed that world-wide humidity measurements showed (what he called) the “fingerprint” of AGW.
Absolute water vapour content in the atmosphere, of course the supposed “feedback” of CO2 in the atmosphere (at constant rh for increasing T), is supposedly indicative of AGW if the water vapour increase is anamolous to other known reasons for it.
Santer and his co-horts claim that worldwide humidity data show this effect present, BUT – the errors of these measurements (as reported) do not follow a Gaussian distribution acording to the known statistics of number of standard deviations of the means. So either
– the data are reported incorrectly
– the errors are not reported correctly [the most likely scenario]
– the data are fudged
Whatever the case, these errors show his hypothesis testing to be worthless
10
If the errors in Santer’s measurements are reported incorrectly, then we conclude that the effect that Santer attempts to demonstrate lies outside of the errors of his measurements, and therefore not observed in his measurements
10
For more on Santer 08 see here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4314
10
Brian:
It seems we all have a finger problem;-)
10
The worse problem, is that some unwelcome passers by must incorrectly see a sign posted on Joanne’s web site,
“PUBLIC RESTROOM”
10
Brian:
Maybe this will lighten your day. It is a site in response to a site named Beyondtalk:
http://www.beyondthetalk.net/
JoNova: If this offends you please remove!
I thought it funny!
10
Looks to me to be somebody who is as fed up with it as I am
10
This recent confrontation has made me realize that further investigation of climate change is necessary before I make an informed decision as to whether AGW is actually occurring.
10
Ah Mike!!! a wonderful, to the point page. Loved it!!!!!
10
Brian:
I think JoNova has put more time researching her handbook than most so called AGW promotters have researching thier positions. I can see the frustration in your words. Being retired aand liveing through some experiences I probably am not as affected as you but I still want to attempt to explain the need for some to “THINK”. Just repeating talking points from Public Relations sites that are paid to make things up is not Thinking. When a group needs a wordsmith to formulate their position on this issue it sets off alarm bells in my head. I am sure you have followed this enough to know who I am refering to.
10
yuh, pretty obvious
10
MT, A wonderful and unexpected idea!! If more people actually LOOKED it’s amazing what can be found!!!
10
MTGAP, I’m delighted to be proven wrong in #47. Thank you.
There is so much misinformation published on this topic it’s hard to find out the real side of the story. I too, thought that greenhouse gases were “bad” only a few years ago.
I don’t mind if people disagree, as long as they are polite and rational, they are welcome here.
All of us (me too) would be wise to remember that we fight against a machine funded by billions (which I am just about to expose in detail BTW). There are a lot of people who want to help society, but just haven’t been exposed to the news-the-mainstream-media-‘forgot’. Because we are grassroots and don’t have big PR programs we need to spread the message by word of mouth. Those links, the comments (on blogs everywhere), jokes with people at dinner tables, it all helps. Word of mouth is exponential.
Michael, you are btw the fastest to get off the short moderated list. (Why do Chris, Damien, bugs, Simon find it hard to say, “OK you were right on that point?”)
10
MTGAP (#63)…
Congratulations! You may enjoy to have a look at one of my favourite sites, as it is the story of someone who was alarmed about AGW… and then he looked more closely:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm
10
“Michael, you are btw the fastest to get off the short moderated list.”
Well thanks for that. This subject is rather important to me, and the prospect of being *gasp* wrong about it had me rather worried. Being the fastest to get off the moderated list makes up for being the fastest to get on the moderated list.
“(Why do Chris, Damien, bugs, Simon find it hard to say, “OK you were right on that point?”)”
I’m not saying you’re right, I’m just saying you might not be wrong. =P I can’t say I trust your correctness, but you have certainly gotten me to question my trust in some other sources.
The major problem I have with this site in general is a lack of citation. You did provide a couple of sources when I mentioned it in my “rebuttal” to your handbook, and you do have some good raw data, but I would like to see more.
10
Here it is morning in the USA, I feel pretty good this morning!
Someone made an unsolicited threat on Deltoid to “profile” me, over some unwelcome comments I made on his web site, evidently.
Well, good for him! His name is Green Fyre, and he is full of fire, all right, among other things.
It’s good to see Deltoid trash someone other than Joanne Nova for a change. Probably a welcome change for Deltoid’s readers as well, who might be getting bored with Deltoid’s habitual smearing and harangue of Joanne.
Good to see you have opened your mind, MTGAP, and I have always stated, that if anyone could read Sceptic’s Handbook, and come away convinced of AGW still, there is something wrong.
Joanne has been scrupulous in her reporting and her discussion, and verifying and accepting that, I hope you will walk what appears to be your talk about accepting the truth of the natural world, whatever impressions you may have had prior to that
10
It might be asked of me, “Why don’t you publish on Santer’s mistakes, if there are any?”
I wrote to the ProcNAS editor (I won’t use the other anacronym anymore), the letter went unanswered in the Proceedings.
From the mathematician P R Halmos, I learned two rules of publication:
1. Don’t publish on someone else’s mistakes
2. Don’t publish on conjectures you can’t prove [“see, here it is, I can’t prove it, but there it is anyway”]
10
Here is some humour, related to Government in Action,
The US DOE wanted to publish some program news, so it was published by a Government service, the name of this service is “Program News and Information Service,” and right on the front cover of the publication they abbreviate the name of the service,
“P-NIS”
and that is all the cover says.
Only the Government could come up with that one
10
MTGAP @ 63,
Wow! This is a first for me. I have just seen a believer in AWG beginning to question his beliefs. You are to be congratulated for your courage to check your premises. Keep up the good work.
10
You can read Deltoid’s trashing of Ian Plimer, then Richard Courtney and me, here
Deltoid is a swell group, aren’t they.
Can you imagine having someone like Tim Lambert as your next-door neighbour? yuk
10
Brian @75,
My eyes!…my eyes! My retinas are all but fused. I followed the link and read the lot. They make our Damien appear almost reasonable.
The Deltoid group would do well by studying:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Then br following my basic tech support rule:
If all else fails, read the manual. If that doesn’t work, try following it.
10
br = by (evidence of damage to my eyes?)
10
In the words of my wonderful friend, Rupert Wyndham, of Cornwall, “it’s so infantile I can’t really look at it”
10
It’s here. Finally. The Expose of just who is the underdog in this debate.
The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far – Trillions to come
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/23/massive-climate-funding-exposed/
I don’t know why someone hasn’t done this before?
Let the games begin 🙂
10
Give them hell, Joanne. They’re awful.
(yes another picture I’m sick of the old one)
10
[…] the morality category. If you really want to read my post, which you don’t, you can find it here in comment #42. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Common Fallacies in the Global […]
10
Well, again, the problem is not the statistics, it’s the physics. One ten thousandth of the atmosphere cannot warm the rest of the atmosphere to any measureable degree unless that one ten thousandth of the atmosphere is very, very hot.
Here is a simplified simulation: Imagine you have one litre of atmosphere in a can being heated from below, while the can is radiating enough heat to keep the atmosphere at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Now you are going to add the amount of CO2 to that atmosphere that represents the ‘manmade’ addition of one part in ten thousand. This would be one tenth of a cubic centimeter. What temperature would that 1/10th of a cc of CO2 have to be at to raise the tempertaure of that atmosphere one degree?
Roughly ten thosuand degrees, correct?
Does anyone think that that amount of CO2 can capture enough solar energy to add significant heat to the atmosphere? Even with voodoo ‘muliplier’ effects?
Now, the atmosphere is not exactly like this thought experiment, obviously. But the problem of the relative proportions is real, and this experiment illustrates the central issue.
All of these other arguments of what is causing what, and which measurements should be used, and whether the ‘trend’ is going this way or that way, and who should we believe about what, are very entertaining. But if the process can’t possibly work, the central idea of manmade global warming caused by additional amounts of CO2 is not a scientific hypothesis.
It cannot be true. It doesn’t matter how many government panels, failed candidates, or ‘Climate Scientists’ assert that it is so.
(Some real physicist will probably now step up and explain it would only have to tbe three or four thousands degrees, but I think my point is made.)
Manmade global warming caused by CO2 increases cannot be asserted as a scientific theory. Before it can be asserted as a scientific theory, it will have to be explained why the principles of chemistry and physics do not apply. I wouldn’t want to be the person trying to come up with that explanation.
10
Brad, it’s there if you want it to be there, for God’s sake, everybody knows that.
How did we get here, now?
Step 1: Al Gore took a course in general science from Roger Revelle, when Gore was at Harvard. Gore was so impressed with Revelle’s speculations that Gore called Revelle a “mentor.” Gore got a D in the course anyway.
Step 2: Al Gore, out of a job in the year 2000 after he (thankfully) lost the Presidency to Geo Bush, looked for ways to make himself “relevant.” He remembered his “mentor” Revelle, who had since recanted his earlier stupidity, and Gore decided to make a pseudo-career out of it.
Step 3: Pink European politicians, hating Geo Bush, decided to swipe at Bush and the Iraq war by fawning over Gore and his stupidity. The IPCC seemed like a good venue to “award” Gore for “something,” so the Nobel committee gave an award to the entire junk circus.
That’s how we got here.
10
Hi Joanne,
I’m confused. The argument from the skeptics always seems to be: “I can find a hundred reasons why global warming isn’t happening, so I’m going to continue burning coal and oil as much as I damn well please.” Least that’s the impression I get.
For arguments sake, lets say human caused global warming is a myth and doesn’t exist at all. Fine. OK. Have it your way. There is a barrel full of other reasons we should try and get off our oil and coal addiction. Surely all you guys are familiar with this stuff?
Its generally accepted that we have now burnt our way through more than half the oil our wonderful planet had to offer. The party’s kind of over. We in the west live within a society and an economy in which plentiful oil is utterly interwoven into every aspect of our world. What is ahead for our society as the rapidly industrialising east helps us drain the last of our oil reserves? You don’t think it might be a good idea to investigate some alternatives? And kind of quickly?
And surely you people are familiar with some of the known hazards associated with coal? Acid rain? Mercury and other toxins? Millions of acres of wilderness turned to moonscapes? Read ‘Big Coal’ by Jeff Goodell and come back and tell me that you still want to passionately push for business as usual. We need to find other ways.
Forget global warming. Whatever. Why don’t we try for a green future for the thousands of other reasons that it’s a good idea.
Ross.
10
Every scientific theory must compete with other scientific theories that also attempt to explain the same data. I can take a team of 100 people, pay each of them for an hour of their time, get each to drink two cans of beer and then ask them to stare at some global temperature readings on a graph. I merely get them to sketch a freehand extrapolation onto the graph showing what they think is going to happen in the next 50 years.
Now I have a prediction, and some estimated error bars, probably at a cost of a only few thousand dollars. Very simple for anyone else to repeat the experiment too.
If the supercomputing climate model costing billions of dollars can’t predict more accurately and with tighter error bars than my team of arbitrarily picked drunken freehand extrapolators — then Occam’s Razor falls in my favour, and mine is the better scientific theory! Ha ha. I win!
If anyone seriously wants to practice this experiment, I’m willing to chip in for some of the beer 🙂
10
grrrr green eschatology coming from Ross, because he likes green whether or not AGW is real
Ross your remarks are to Joanne but public so you get my anti-Green polemic whether you asked for it or not
(fair because you gave your theosophy to Joanne presumably uninvited)
OK. Have it your way It isn’t Joanne’s way it is the way the world actually is
Its generally accepted that we have now burnt our way through more than half the oil our wonderful planet had to offer. Not by DOE it isn’t
And surely you people are familiar with some of the known hazards associated with coal? Acid rain? Mercury and other toxins? Millions of acres of wilderness turned to moonscapes? Don’t call people ‘you people.’ That is the most condescending sh*t there is. Surely you-all are familiar with the sight you have painted for us as the result of bio-fuel.
Read ‘Big Coal’ by Jeff Goodell We don’t susbscribe to any particular theology, no matter where it came from
Why don’t we try for a green future for the thousands of other reasons that it’s a good idea. Because it’s a lousy idea for more ways than you could imagine.
10
Ross, go suuport some of Al Gore’s organisations, will you please?
He needs the money, and the patsies, because he can’t seem to get the Government moving in a direction that will make him King by fiat.
10
“green” is the reason I am virulently anti-GW in the first place.
If AGW was just some harmless nonsense like Scientology or something, it souldn’t inspire me to write diatribes
10
Hi Brian,
Sorry to upset you. Not that familiar with blogging. You’re right, ‘you people’ does sound condescending. I guess the phrase came to mind because of the wall of climate change denial sentiment on this site.
And I’m sure you’re right that going green is a lousy idea in more ways then I can imagine. Going green is certainly a hard sell. The denialists have the luxury of telling people they can continue on without sacrifice.
Hadn’t finished writing this when I got another post from you advising ‘”green” is the reason I am virulently anti-GW in the first place.’. Not sure I understand this. Why is it you are anti-GW?
Regards … Ross
10
Well, you’re contributing to the problem by using your computer, which uses a lot of nongreen electricity to operate, and so does the internet, so why don’t you (people) walk your talk and shut the damned thing off and go plant some trees
(so they can be cut down for bio fuel)
10
I’m guessing that you didn’t understand what you were saying either. I’ll ask again. What does ‘”green” is the reason I am virulently anti-GW in the first place.’ mean? You don’t like the colour? I really want to know why your anti-green.
10
I’m anti Global Warming because it is NOT a harmless fairy tale.
You (people) ought to have enough foresight (very little required) to understand why.
I’m a denier, not a “denialist.” I don’t pretend that people can survive living on slogans and extreme pricing guaranteed only by fiat and Government intervention.
I don’t care if you don’t care that poor people would be incommensurately burdened by your green wet dreams. I care.
sorry don’t mean to get sordid around here. I have been listening to too much Frank Zappa
10
Wow. That’s like WAY too much Zappa. Its nearly midnight here so I’m going to turn off my little coal-burner and go to bed. I’d still like to know why you’re anti-green, but I’m starting to get the impression you don’t know yourself.
Goodnight … Ross
10
Green, as in a putative means of survival with dilute energy, is not a sustainable means of supporting a population of some six billions on the Earth.
It ultimately means, some have to go, chosen by the green dreamers, of course.
10
Ross,
“Going green” is little more than a marketing slogan anymore. Too many companies are jumping on the green bandwagon for the term to be meaningful any more.
The problem with “green” and the anthropogenic global warming alarmists is that, if they aren’t stopped, a lot of money will be spent on things that won’t help at all instead of spending a fraction of the money to actually make REAL and SIGNIFICANT contributions to the welfare of the world.
If there was real proof that anthropogenic global warming was causing the earth to warm, I would support realistic measures to resolve the problem. I’m very confident that almost all of the people commenting here would.
The problem is
— there is NO physical proof that global warming is caused by man.
— CO2 is already doing almost all of the warming that it can.
So far as doing away with oil and coal, what do you propose to replace them with?
Or do you propose that we just go back to a more simpler life where the average life expectancy was 35 to 45 years of age.
Life is HARD without energy.
Even if wind and solar were able to come close to the best expectations, there is no way that they can match the current demand, let alone the demand of the future. The wind doesn’t blow all of the time and, in some places, it doesn’t blow at all. The sun, at best, shines less than half the time — no sun at night, cloudy days, rainy days, snow, etc.
And wind and solar, in current applications, don’t meet the expectations. The only way that they are viable is through government subsidies — even after all of these years.
Hydrogen fuel cells? We’re not there yet and you have to expend energy to produce hydrogen. Where does that energy come from?
Fusion? It’s still not practical.
Nuclear power? This is the one “green” option that is truly viable. However, I’m pessimistic about nuclear being able to replace coal. Having working in nuclear for over 30 years, I just don’t see the environmentalists ever allowing the expansion of nuclear without a fight — and most companies are unwilling to take the risk, except in countries where the citizens don’t have the right to oppose anything — or the desire to.
Hydro? Very limited potential — and the local greens will always oppose it.
Electric cars? Where does the electricity come from? (hint – power plants, cola, nuclear, gas, oil)
In much of the world people do without the energy that we take for granted. They live hard lives with a much shorter life expectancy.
Do you expect that the people in the developing nations NOT develop energy sources to help move their population away from grinding poverty?
What energy sources do you think that the people in the developing countries are going to use?
A green future without energy is a very bleak future.
10
Thank you Mike Goad, for your far more meaningful reponse than I could give.
Children and teens ought to have Mr Goad’s paragraphs as required reading.
10
Correction:
The phrase, “green eschatology” in #86 should instead read, “green scatology“
10
>I’m confused. The argument from the skeptics always seems to be:
>“I can find a hundred reasons why global warming isn’t happening, so
>I’m going to continue burning coal and oil as much as I damn well
>please.” Least that’s the impression I get.
Global warming is happening, and so is global cooling.
The question is whether man is contributing to global wamring through the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The answer is that it is impossible for the amount of CO2 that has been added to the atmosphere to wamr the atmosphere to any measureable amount.
I don’t agree that we should decrease the amount of oil or coal wwe are using. There is no reason to do so. The assertion that we have used up most of it is laughable.
In any case, we can synthesize all the hydrocarbons we need.
Chicken Littlism is no good excuse for public policy.
10
we can synthesize all the hydrocarbons we need
except that a small problem named “second law of thermodynamics” gets in the way to make the “synthesis” of hydrocarbon a process that requires (lots) more energy than available in the final hydrocarbon product, no matter what the starting materials are (except other hydrocarbon). That’s why we dig hydrocarbon as some fossil out of the ground.
Coal is a completly viable starting material for fuel and the US ought to convert to that.
The best method is to use coal to make methanol and convert the methanol to gasoline, or use coal to make F-T oil that can be used as diesel fuel.
Tough Luck, Enviros, if you don’t like that. Go live someplace else and paint each other with green paint
[how I wish they would]
10
Sorry to get off on a tanget here but I wish you people like Ross would stick to subjects that pertain to your own lives alone and DON’T get in the way of other people who DON’T WANT your green
material thrust in their faces to live their own lives
Do you people get it, Ross?
10
>except that a small problem named “second law of thermodynamics” gets in the way to
>make the “synthesis” of hydrocarbon a process that requires (lots) more energy than
>available in the final hydrocarbon product, no matter what the starting materials
>are (except other hydrocarbon).
If you use nuclear energy as the heat source to synthesize hydrocarbons from CO or CO2 and water, you can make oil a lot cheaper than you can pump it out of the ground.
Using nuclear heat, you are using the hydrocarbon as an energy storage and transport medium, not as an energy source.
Nuclear heat is far far cheaper than coal or hydrocarbon energy – and you can build the plants far awya from cities.
10
If you use nuclear energy as the heat source to synthesize hydrocarbons from CO or CO2 and water, you can make oil a lot cheaper than you can pump it out of the ground.
um, no. At an (optimal) off-peak base load pricing of nuclear electricity of 0.03 $USD/kWh, the energy cost is about 3x the energy cost of crude petroleum valued at 80 $USD and about 5x the cost of the final fuel product.
Do you believe me? Or do you want me to walk you through the arithmetic?
10
Water, and carbon dioxide, sit at the bottom of the free energy ladder, their DELTA(G) of formation from their elements is a number with a very big magnitude, that is why they persist and persist and persist!
There is no DELTA(G) of anything else hanging around that can compete with them!
10
The failure of the Al Gore’s of the world to get the Second Law of Thermodynamics through their heads is the reason we get hit with so much of their green gooo
darned stuff gets all over your hair, clothing, everything. It’s awful
10
Brian @ 97: The phrase, “green eschatology” in #86 should instead read, “green scatology“
Actually I think “green eschatology” more appropriate than “green scatology“.
Eschatology (from the Greek ἔσχατος, Eschatos meaning “last” and -logy meaning “the study of”) is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with what is believed to be the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
If the greens get their way it will be the “end of the world [of humans]”. They are attempting to bring about a real end by the use of fantasy and mythology. The typical religion is the other way around in that that they attempt to describe their fantasized end by the use of mythology.
10
It’s scatology all the same.
10
You people stepped into a lion’s den, didn’t you Ross
There’s no sign on the door saying you wouldn’t!
10
In response to Brian @ 104
The reason that we get hit with so much green crap is that they believe laws passed by them are immutable and the laws of nature are mere transitory piffles by comparison. As a consequence, they really do believe there is such a thing as a free lunch (assuming they can steal it from someone else and not call it stealing). However, back in the real world….
The Three Laws of Thermodynamics stated in rather plain language:
1. You can’t get ahead
2. You can’t even break even
3. As a matter of fact, you are behind before you start
A slightly more formal statement from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
1. The first law of thermodynamics, which mandates conservation of energy, and states in particular that heat is a form of energy.
2. The second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of the universe always increases, or (equivalently) that perpetual motion machines are impossible.
3. The third law of thermodynamics, which concerns the entropy of an object at absolute zero temperature, and implies that it is impossible to cool a system all the way to exactly absolute zero.
10
Albert Gore has been eating free lunches at other people’s expense for too [explitive] long now.
Albert, I’m not as well known as you are, but I will fight your green crud harder than you can
10
Correction: About all I can do Albert is help bring you down faster than you would go on your own.
g’night
10
Yes we can. All we need to do is discover how to stop feeding them. They sure can’t do it for themselves.
Everything they have is at stolen or copied without attribution. They haven’t an original self generated thought in a barge load. They are the mirror people who don’t dare let their real selves out in the open for public inspection. The interesting thing is they can’t help but expose themselves with every word and action. All we have to do is let ourselves see it.
10
>>If you use nuclear energy as the heat source to synthesize hydrocarbons
>>from CO or CO2 and water, you can make oil a lot cheaper than you can
>>pump it out of the ground.
> um, no. At an (optimal) off-peak base load pricing of nuclear
> electricity of 0.03 $USD/kWh, the energy cost is about 3x the energy cost
> of crude petroleum valued at 80 $USD and about 5x the cost of the final fuel product.
> Do you believe me? Or do you want me to walk you through the arithmetic?
I didn’t suggest using nuclear generated electricity to do this, and in any case the price of the electricity is not the cost of the heat.
There is nothing about nuclear energy that requires it to be turned into electricity. That’s just the first way they used it (other than the bomb) and it became a habit.
To use for creating synthetic oil, the nuclear reactor would not be designed to run a steam turbine, and we would not build it near population centers, so the capital cost of the plant would be much lower. Instead of massive custom-designed plants near population centers, I would see a federally-contracted standard plant design with a simplified permit process placed on federal land in the boonies. Build a bunch of them in a secure area, ship the coal or natural gas to them, then pipe the oil back to the cities.
The plant would be a high temperature design where the heated steam is used directly to make the hydrocarbons. The price of the carbon in a barrel of oil, derived from coal, is about $5 or $6, isn’t it? How much do you think the steam would cost? Maybe another $5?
Actually instead of using nuclear energy to generate electricity, we ought to be using nuclear energy to generate hydrocarbons, then pipe the hydrocarbons to conventional powerplants and burn it.
And of course we oculd make gasoline, diesel fuel, wax, etc.
But meanwhile back at the ranch, the amount of CO2 added to the air is too small to heat the atmosphere to any noticeable degree. Therefor all these other arguments about ‘manmade lgobal warming’ are like arguing about the color and length of a unicorn horn.
10
ummm, I don’t think I’m buying that one.
Take the reactor containment away, you’re down to 0.01 $USD/kWh maybe, at 40% conversion to electricity efficiency at the plant, you’re down to about 2.5 $USD/MM Btu of heat that you make from the reactor, with materials limitations, you MIGHT get the steam to 700 deg.C, in the reverse shift of CO2 and water to methane, gaseous oxygen, and hydrogen you’re at about 35% conversion at that temperature after gas separation, then oxidative coupling of methane to ethylene and water maybe 30% conversion, and once you have the ethylene you can do what you want.
We’re like down to 1.5x the energy cost to make iso-octane, hexane, etc comprising gasoline than the cost of deriving the hydrocarbon from the refining of crude oil.
sorry not investing this week
10
That is exactly the kind of thing DOE pays me to do
10
Thank you JoNova for overwhelming common sense.
Re post#82 and #42, a 1998 paper by Idso (link is on http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/What_Watt.html ) is well worth a look. Idso describes “Eight natural experiments” which debunk the likelihood of doubling CO2 having sufficient radiative forcing to warm the planet by more than 0.5 deg C. The planet provides the evidence and the modellers havent calibrated their efforts against the actuality.
Leaving for now the endlessly disputable graphs of historical temperature, consider the fundamental physics. How can anyone believe the fairy tale that 1.6W/m2 (a tiny torch bulb) will warm 10,000 kg of air (ie 1 atm pressure) by several degrees even over a century or more, when that air is circulating and re-radiating at night? And since 1 atm air pressure is equiv to only 10m ocean depth, and oceans cover 70% of the planets surface, a tiny tiny amount of ocean absorbtion to greater depths would see any increased atmospheric heat load (assuming exchange) disappear from measurement capability. We dont even need the cloud uncertainties to see that the temp increase estimates based on CO2 radiative forcing are hugely overestimated. Idso demonstrated the evidence is already right in our face
BTW does anyone knwo of a connection between Idso 1998 (op cit) and Idso NIPCC ? http://www.nipccreport.org/
10
Idso 1998 will also appeal to those who wish to consider “accepting the truth of the natural world” (post#71 Brian G V). Welcome back to reality MTGAP
10
Our wonderful friends and countrymen, the English, renowned for sanity in all matters,
excepting climate change. George Marshall makes an accurate observation:
Many people regard climate change as a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists
and then never stops to ponder whether there is truth behind the homely wisdom of the collective conscioouness
10
that from New Scientist.
The difference betwen New Scientists and old ones is that scepticism is no longer a part of scientific inquiry
10
I don’t have the stats in front of me but copper cables are hard to beat as an energy transport mechanism, and the nuclear fuel itself is perfectly fine as a storage system. I recognise your point about the efficiency limitations of the steam turbine but that’s a solidly reliable technology.
There are applications (such as motor vehicles) where liquid hydrocarbons make a nice package combining high density storage and portability. For almost all transport needs, electric trains are much cheaper to run (but more expensive to build in the first place). People enjoy private transport because sitting next to someone on a train seat is sucky, and you keep catching Swine Flu all the time 🙁 remains to be seen how much the market is willing to pay for that.
I’ll also point out that electronic communication is so many orders of magnitude lower power consumption than all forms of human transport that it will blow anything out of the water, regardless of what fuel you use. And electronic communication automatically protects against disease vectors, saves wasted time, prevents accident and injury caused by collision, and eliminates smog pollution. It even prevents arguments about who last bought the milk and how long it has sat in the fridge.
OK, sure, if you want to start from coal, that makes sense for situations where you do really need liquid fuel. As Brian said above, all you are doing is starting from hydrocarbons and getting to more hydrocarbons but I accept that liquid fuel is highly advantageous in certain situations. We won’t be seeing any battery powered strike aircraft in the near future.
Running nuclear fuel does look attractive from a cost perspective, but essentially you translate the cost from a material fuel cost into a future risk and cleanup cost. The future cost is more difficult to measure, and no one really knows the cost until after it happens. A pessimistic estimate of this future cost makes it pretty darn large, even with plants away from major cities (e.g. slack security allows theft of enriched fuel).
Properly accounting for large scale risk is one of the things our economic system does not handle well. Insurance companies are good with repeated instances of small scale risk, they can use standard statistical analysis. As a general rule, large scale risk gets dumped in the hands of government and government can’t be trusted with anything complicated. China is certainly popping up nuclear plants like mushrooms so I guess we can see how it goes over there. Then again, China’s approach to large scale risk is allowing a bit more population growth, I’m not entirely comfortable with that direction.
10
There’s this thing called a marketplace where shortage of supply causes prices to rise. As prices rise, so does the incentive to find an alternative, and so does the incentive to be more efficient.
Governments regularly believe that they know better than the market. They believe this on the basis that a marketplace contains millions of decision makers, with a great variety of skills, each with understanding of their own local situation, each trying to optimise their particular corner of the world, whereas a government consists of about four or five decision makers, with great skills in backstabbing but not much else, each trying to give kickbacks to their buddies and hoping to get some good publicity if possible.
If you believe that oil supply is heading for a crunch then may I suggest purchasing oil futures? This is a mechanism where anyone (individual, government or business) can put money into their belief of a future oil price. This in turn adjusts the present day price to allow for the predicted future behaviour (as best as anyone can predict the future). If your prediction of the future is consistently better than average, you stand to make a lot of money. If not, someone else will take your money.
Fair game, Squire?
You don’t think one or two people might have jumped ahead, and done a little bit of investigation already? And kind of many, many years ago?
The Hunter Valley is North of Sydney and a popular tourist destination. It has also been a major coal producing area since early Australians pushed handcarts through the mountains. Some decent sized power stations sit on top of the coal mines, providing power for the city. There has been some question about pollution in the area, I’ve tested with my own nose and I’ll argue that the Hunter is cleaner than any of the Sydney streets, probably because motor vehicle pollution is much worse than coal. If you don’t trust my nose, there are a bunch of clean air monitoring stations around the place — I’m not sure where the measurements of those monitoring stations are published, they are government run and our state government does everything in secret, be my guest and campaign for more open publication of taxpayer funded data.
Some of the racehorse breeders in the area claim that their champions would be a few hundredths of a second faster without the coal dust, but they still keep breeding horses despite this handicap.
Get on Google Earth, do a search for “Hunter Valley, New South Wales” and scan around for this moonscape. If you whack up the GPS coordinates of the place then I’ll drive up and take some photographs and post the links. I love the idea of being involved in real on the ground investigative research.
I’m quite happy to forget global warming, as soon as the Al Gore’s and Penny Wong’s of this world decide to also forget it, and the billions of dollars of research funding get moved into something else. I’m more than happy to discuss other issues of pollution and how we deal with those, providing we all work by an accepted methodology based on real world measurements, and independent verification. I’m not ever going to believe some complete hogwash, just because it seems expedient for unrelated reasons — that way madness lies.
By the way, what exactly is the definition of “a green future” ?
Who gets to decide on this ?
10
I think Brad Jensen makes an excellent point that Nuclear is not only the best heat source for electricity, nuclear heat could be made valuable for industrial processing as well – for what is most fossil fuel used for industrially?
Used to make steam, that’s what, and that steam could be direct to industrial processes, with the appropriate siting and integration.
I think we’re going to need containment, though, no matter where the reactor is located.
The only viable long-term energy solution for the US, UK, and Australia is coal to liquid fuel, take the money saved by NOT importing oil, invest this money in a viable hydrogen infrastructure based on nuclear with a breeder Thorium cycle.
Hydrogen, not hydrocarbon, is a lot better way to use and “store” nuclear energy, whether from electricity, or from direct heat.
Good advice is that which is inevitably taken, so there is no need to give advice to anyone. – Bertrand Russell
10
By the way fuel liquid production from coal is enhanced greatly, of course, with the use of hydrogen from an external source, so the liquid fuel from a coal operation would be dramatically improved siting this near a nuclear operation that made hydrogen and oxygen from water (electrolysis, or directly).
The oxygen is used to enhance the goal gasification process to give synthesis gas, which is further enhanced in hydrocarbon syhthesis potential by the addition of hydrogen.
Then the H2/CO misture (synthesis gas) is converted to methanol, or to F-T wax or oil.
The process produces a lot of CO2 by-product also, at least a kg of CO2 for every 50 litres of final gasoline or diesel fuel synthetic product produced.
Good.
TOUGH LUCK, global warmers, LIVE WITH IT. It’s GOOD for the PLANET
10
Brian, your 2:18 am. Good speech. Any thoughts on how to safely convey and store H?
On CO2 density discussed above, it is commonly touted ~0.038% average. Is that for total column or troposphere only?. Any idea what the density is in the first 10 M?
Isoprene seems to be gaining more attention, I did a arm wave about it and CO2Science looks to be on the case:
http://www.co2science.org//articles/V12/N28/EDIT.php
http://www.co2science.org/cSearch.php?action=SEARCH&lan=&keyword=isoprene&limit=25&case=all&extracts=1&perpage=10
Is isoprene important in the battle to achieve higher CO2 emissions by humans?
If you find it is important, can I quote you?
10
To find the ave density of CO2 over the first 10M, use the Barometric Formula and assume air is an ideal gas.
H2 can be stored and transported for that matter as the slush of its ice. This is the best way obviously because the molar volume is dramatically reduced over the gas. (That slush is only stable if it is first equilibrated to the 3:1 equilibrium ortho to para hydrogen ratio)
Existing natural gas pipeline might be used for transport, although with considerable reworking, because of the permeability of hydrogen in all metals, and the embrittlement it causes due to the formation of its metal hydrides.
All olefins, including isoprene, react with sunlight in the presence of CO (and NOx) to form tropospheric ozone. Of all pollution problems, tropospheric ozone is the known worst.
Forget the “global warming” potential or whatever about it.
To take a stand against naturally occuring isoprene, the first step would be to ban rubber trees, as well as dandelions (also a souce of rubber of the stems).
All natural rubber is poly cis-isoprene
(The cis-trans isomer of polymeric isoprene is called gutta percha, formerly used to pack golf balls)
10
Brian, thanks for your reply. I’m curious how the density varies with height, we have 2 reference points that are assumed reasonably safe, satellite and MLO. A third allows a reasonable estimate to be calculated for volume/height. I doubt the atmosphere conforms to ideal gas standards but in your judgement would a calculation using the Barometric Formula be be sufficiently accurate to project volume with height?
Unfortunately, climate sensitivity is claimed to be the issue so to “Forget the “global warming” potential or whatever about it.” is to sidestep imo.
CO2Science is a little misleading with their claim
“In the case of the latter experiment, the nine researchers found that “IS was approximately 30% and 18% lower, respectively, for eucalyptus and sweetgum trees grown at 520 ppm CO2, compared with trees grown at 240 ppm CO2.” They also found, in the other study, that the cottonwood and aspen trees “exhibited a 30-40% reduction in isoprene emission rate when grown at 800 ppm CO2, compared with 400 ppm CO2,”
because suppression depends on NOx levels.
“Ozone concentration is enhanced by the addition of isoprene, if the initial NOx level is high or medium, and depleted if the initial NOx is low.” (Nandita D.Ganguly and K.N.Iyer)
And CO2’s contribution to increasing biomass extent must offset the benefit somewhat. Assuming modellers somehow factored in an allowance,
“the large increases in future isoprene emissions typically predicted in models, which are due to a projected warmer climate, are entirely offset by including the CO2 effects.”
The other knock on benefit is said to be a reduction in the lifetime of methane.
“current tropospheric ozone content extends the atmospheric lifetime of methane by approximately 15%”.
(Unattributed comments are from CO2Science.)
Banning plantations of rubber would surely be seen as complimentary to banning CO2 aside from the trivial volume saving. Isoprene is said to be ~50% of organic compounds emitted. How about me taking a stand that says suppressing CO2 emissions is harmful to health, climate temperature and biomass, is there a case to be made?
10
Def: A gas is IDEAL if PV=RT for every T and P under consideration, where V is the molar volume.
A gas is non-ideal if PV>RT, or PV<RT.
At around 1 std atmosphere and temeratures of -40 – +40 Celsius, air is an ideal gas
(and incompressible of fluid flow for all wind speeds as well).
Ozone oxidises everything, methane as well, though not as rapidly as olefins.
Isoprene therefore is readily oxidised by ozone. As such, probable products of the oxidation include PAN, per-acetyl nitrile, formed in phochemical smog, and giving smog its lacrymator properties.
These very ill considered studies make me want to cry as well.
10
I’m an air pollution chemist, by the way, with daily exasperation over claims of calling CO2 a “pollutant.”
(It makes me cring to write the two words CO2 and pollution together in the same sentence.)
10
Fun Chemistry Facts
– Historically, the chemical structure of natural rubber was determined by analysis of the products of ozonolysis of rubber.
– In regions of high smog levels (such as the Los Angeles Basin of the USA) rubber degrades quickly because of ozone. Tyres wear out quickly. (Although tyres are not natural rubber, they are polybutylene, not polyisoprene, rubber.)
10
Brian, my CO2 query is dealt with. And incidentally probably explains why Hadley don’t include polar stats in their models (outside -40 – +40).
On hydrogen conveyance, ideal would be to convey it as water and separate the molecule at the destination. (If it was possible in vehicles at a sufficient production rate then networked outlets wouldn’t be needed. A partly closed circuit would seem to be most efficient in engine tech.) As it stands, the infrastructure cost necessary for a temporary solution that central storage of hydrogen would impose implies fos fuel will be with us for maybe a century or so. Natural gas is a superior choice in that existing networks suffice, it is abundant and vehicles are easily converted to use it. Pollution is minimal and readily managed using existing tech, cat converters get a lifetime boost. Even BS and that of chickens has its uses. While we are waiting for matchbox fusion reactors.
Air pollution, I could pick your brain till it was empty. Is. is of importance in the ozone arena but there is little clarity yet as to a value, WV and NOx densities being important. That avoids gaining a true value for CO2’s interference. It is expensive for plants to produce, no one has sussed how it benefits. Plants don’t like strong UV. Suppressed growth due to ozone is likely preferable to cell damage. Maybe that has something to do with it. Considering biomass conducts chemical warfare, humans should treat forests with much greater caution.
Low temperature release of Is. from tyres seems to be negligible so they aren’t self destructive so to speak. In populated areas where ozone levels are high seems to be due to the updraft from urban warmth drawing in biogenic Is. production. You might call us suckers.
In consideration of propaganda balance I may promote CO2 as humankind’s saviour due to its Is. production suppression, despite research providing insufficient competent support. Unfortunately, the value of additional CO2 warming effect being so low in reality, it may cause me to find increasing CO2 abundance has a net cooling action. I tread on the toes of the mighty with total abandon. A precedent has been set by GISS, Hadley, the IPCC and Gore, (all highly venerated comperes). I’ll apologise when reality resumes.
CO2 in reality is a pollutant reservoir. Cringe away. Oxygen is the source of all our woes and CO2 is a major collaborator. (From a George Carlin type of perspective) 🙂
A comment on your comments in general. Don’t stop.
10
If there is entertainment value then I won’t stop – but eventually, there comes a time when a fiddler must be paid to continue the dancing.
My new fee schedule is as follows:
1 $USD for an informative comment
5 $USD more a moderately humourous comment
10 $USD for a scathing comment
100 $USD for scathing comment that is actually funny
10
Looking around, I can’t ask for payment for humour because there are so many more talented than I am.
10
Brian, ozone papers are much funnier. It seems every one with ozone in the title departs into a rant by the 2nd or 3rd sentence – CFCs produced by humans… etc.
If the level of intelligence displayed by such as Brenda is sufficient to earn a PhD, there needs to be a reclassification. Did she stop learning at some point do you think?
Good luck with charging for comments.
10
Seriously – a warming activist, noting that I was associated with Joanne’s web site, asked me if Joanne had paid me to write sceptic propaganda on her global warming web site.
I told the woman who questioned me that Joanne would probably need to be paid first before Joanne could share some of the wealth with me.
I don’t know about Dr Brenda’s education, but I am quite sure that Union of Concerned Scientists isn’t paying her to be a sceptic.
I think it has more to do with Dr Brenda’s ability to fool herself, more than anything else.
Eventually the only thing she has to answer to is the nagging voice of her own conscience,
“This global warming thing is right. Right? It’s not a scam, right? Al Gore and my employer aren’t paying me to be a patsy, right? Eventually, it will get warm again, right? It has to. As Gore says, ‘this is SCIENCE.’
Tell me again – this isn’t junk science. Right?
How much could I be paid to be a sceptic … let’s see ..
oops bad thoughts again …
there must be a way to stop this doubting …”
10
For those who have inhaled too much stratospheric ozone, I have but one question:
Sue Solomon claims to have vindicated Rowland’s hypothetical cyclic mechanism for the destruction of stratosperic ozone via the halogen free radicals, Cl• and Br• – involving the intermediate ions ClO- and BrO-.
Solomon postulated that the intermediate ClO- was formed in the Arctic – and only the arctic – because of the presence of Polar Stratospheric Clouds PSC.
Fine. These clouds are ice at a temperature of -90 degC.
How is the formation of ClO- “catalysed” at -90 degC – and no where else at a higher temperature still?
10
… but it HAS to be right because, Sue Solomon is an AAAS Role Model for Women!
Anybody who claims that “humans” have been “polluting” the “atmosphere” for 250 years is no “role model” for ANYBODY.
Susan – how did you live, when you spent six months in the Antarctic at McMurdo?
Did you burn whale blubber to keep warm and catch your own fish to survive?
Or was your existence there dependent on plastic and fossil fuel oil?
If that stuff is good enough for you to use, how come it’s no good for anybody else?
And how did you get there?
Getting to the southern tip of South America from North America is six months by donkey cart at best.
Or did you save a little hassle and just take an aeroplane?
All that trouble just to come back and tell everybody how awful civilisation is?
YUCK
/rant
10
If I keep you commenting, will you continue to drop little gems of knowledge that likely save people like me weeks of frustrating reading? Thank you for the bit about Sue Solomon. Will she withdraw her paper? Is it her fault, the review system or has the whole science scene become so corrupted by money and manipulation that only a total reform of everything above laboratory level will have any impact?
Just using NAS as an example. They control to a large degree what gets pooh-poohed in the US. The example involving Monckton showed exactly where they were coming from. Is the whole board owned I wonder?
Sir J Houghton, I suspect, is convinced he is doing god’s work from some of his rants. He likely had a vision and took it from there or else he is a clever, devious man with a lack in moral fibre that enables him to lie with the ease of a professional, in his mind the end justifies the deception perhaps.
It is apparent everywhere, UK politics is in a similar state to science. The judgement of the few and a strong whip forcing unwanted and in most cases unnecessary impositions
on the public, perhaps the string pullers suffer from the same aberration as Sir J.
It is a big task and without clear objectives, trying to stop water flowing down hill. Quasi-scientific organizations like NAS have been compromised too deeply for them to be of further use to society or science perhaps. Several other organisations come to mind, Physorg is still playing the bias game but with much less enthusiasm than AAA.
Science is being sold as a drug, it satisfies many cravings, the quality is irrelevant. Cannabis, a recreational drug of monumental harmlessness is illegal. Farmers eke out an existence and produce mediocre herbs, the middlemen profit by manipulating the law to keep it illegal. Huge sums go into pockets of erstwhile respectable sponsors. I see no difference. Profit and power at the root, corruption at every level, the farmers get caned. Scientists are getting caned.
Lawrence Solomon complained that his exposé wasn’t getting the coverage it deserved. Even he must realise that media is now a pet of money and power and he is tolerated as a fop. I think people who know what the science is and are appalled are at a remarkable disadvantage. Praise be for Internet. Difficult to regulate as most contributors are unpaid.
Still, we have Joanne, not an equaliser by any means (yet?) but at least a force for truth. And you, Brian. Your knowledge is obvious and must lead scientists to respect your judgement. Science is by and large getting the message. It is the public that needs to be educated. A convert is worth a hundred already convinced. Common sense says be a little accommodating. Your value rests on the fact that your science is right and you speak with authority. Without studying for several years, how is Mr Joe supposed to distinguish?
H2O is the second order regulator of ozone.
10
Actually peroxyl HOO- is.
I was tainted in my views about CO2 in the atmosphere by a professor of physical chemistry I had when a sophomore at college. He was a polyglot and polymath and an historian of chemistry (himself a student of Paul Flory in the US and the great James Riddick Partington in the UK).
At that time, the name Arrhenius was significant to science students only associated with the relation of logarithm of chemical (or physical) rate constant proportional to the inverse of absolute temperature).
I learned that Arrhenius had also been associated with a periodically fashionable notion of warming the atmosphere from CO2 of combustion of fuel.
That notion of global warming, I was told, had made an appearance and then debunked decannaly since 1900.
Following the periodic trend, the idea should have been debunked once again in 2007, ten years after the formation of the IPCC.
This doesn’t factor in the fact that Albert Gore was fawned upon by pink European politicians after the Year 2000, for no other reason than Al Gore wasn’t George Bush.
These politicians knew nothing of science, and they felt they needed to reward Albert Gore for SOMETHING – and Gore being a patsy about CO2 in the atmosphere seemed as good a thing to reward him for as any.
Eli the Alarmist once confided to me that he only “believed in global warming” on the authority of others. Himself a molecular spectroscopist, he believed he lacked the knowledge to discuss the properties of CO2 in the atmosphere with authority.
Eli won’t engage in discussion with me, although he must hold me in some regard because he won’t criticise me in public (unlike everyone else who displeases him).
The same is true of Ray Pierrehumbert.
The same is not true of Andrew Dessler.
10
Brian, 1988, The IPCC started in 1988.
Twenty years ago.
But then with $79 billion dollars (and then some) in funding this time, who would be surprised it’s taken so much longer to debunk…
10
That is true, it was founded in 1988.
I guess I should have said, it didn’t become a manipulated entity until 1997.
Initially, the IPCC had not concluded that humans were doing anything. The notion was dispelled, pretty much.
Then “personalities” made people see the world, a little differently
10
Eugenicists elevated the crackpot Francis Galton to sainthood, and climate alarmists have done the same for Arrhenius, Callendar, Plass et al.
To the benefit of no one.
10
Ahem.
1997 Kyoto.
1998 First Carbon trading.
Hello vested interests! That’s when things c h a n g e d.
10
Any phrenologist worth their salt cold tell immediately that Al Gore has a tendency to be a manipulator, by the way.
10
Brian your no 139, one with a modicum of intelligence doesn’t willingly shoot one’s foot whilst standing on a golden goose. That is the problem.
I thought Al was the prophit elect of the club of rome, Enron via Greenpeace (Sierra Club), Paul the people hater, Strong, and possibly TBone Pickens via Conservation Voters. The man is manipulated and rich because of it. I guess we differ there. He is also a fall guy when the sh*t hits the fan. In my opinion.
“2nd order” was a poor choice of words. 2nd in importance after sunlight.
Methane has been fairly stable, it is also an H2O source.
Warmer water and air suggest WV volume has increased.
CH4 ~0.00017%
H2 ~0.000055%
H20 ~0.4%
Perhaps the source of H for the HOO is dominated by H2O volumes reaching the stratosphere?
Hi Joanne, thought we had this quiet little backwater to ourselves?
10
Ozone really couldn’t form at the T and P of the stratosphere, as far as I could see, unless peroxyl was somewhat stable.
Turns out that Joanne owns the deed to the land.
Bye for the day
10
Was a bit of conversation killer, came out wrong. Left hand working while right hand does its own thing. Try again,
Hi Joanne, nice of you to comment/ drop/ pop in. How are you?
🙂
10
She might own it, but she can’t prevent people from having a block party here if they want to and make a mess.
WOOOOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOOOOO
10
Beause “The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago2 (see graphic). If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says [Markus] Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.”
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/122712.html
Getting past the tropopause:
Correlation.
Observations imply a ~0.45% pa increase in strato WV volume in the last 50 years. Ozone is said to have declined from 1958. I’m guessing that’s enough for Dr. Hansen and Al maybe but you are a tougher cookie.
Stratosphere WV presence has increased, methods have been suggested for conveyance. More strato cloud, possible increased ionization of crystals by hydrochloric acid at below 213K. Regardless, come the Sun, polar clouds diminish, chlorine availability increases, ozone decreases. Ozone depletion gives cooling against the increase in H20 LWR absorption.
Tropo transport mechanisms, HCl ionization still theoretical FAIK.
Increased troposphere depth due to warming causes larger polar jet stream radii.
Jet stream ripples are extended causing prologed opposite direction transport of opposite temperature air from N to S and S to N, greater disturbance at the tropopause – increased breaking wave and vortex mixing, favouring the latter as although turbulence is increased, it is the same energy over a longer distance so smaller waves, less breakage.
Warmer sea surface gives less wind shear stronger, more vertical transport of LT air in hurricanes with deeper strato incursion. Not sure about daily tropical thunderstorms yet, whether they reach high enough (or are even necessary).
Latest correlation. SI falls a little, ozone recovers. Possible mechanism. Sea surface temp/evap reduces slightly, small drop in tropo depth reduces jet stream radii, turbulence reduces. The energy available for different postulated fountains reduces, their penetration ability falls. Lower strato temp causes higher latitude stratospheric cloud to form. Not sure but reduction in Cl availability seems likely as a product of the new cloud.
Volcanoes that penetrate the strato cause rapid warming/cooling producing an enduring step down in temperature. Theories postulate irradiated aerosols for the warming. What is the direct heat injection? I haven’t a clue. But the rapid rise and fall suggests something acting a bit faster than dirty air. Dr. Lindzen finds a small net warming trend overall. I think ignoring the peaks there has been an insignificant trend down. I postulate that is driven by WV increase and as H2O is well known for its almost magical transforming abilities, I suggest the stratosphere WV action is self limiting due to cloud formation depending on temp. It may be a thermostatic valve.
That is as far as I have got. There is an abundance of papers on stratospheric hydration, observational support, numerous possible mechanisms for transport, seemingly solid theory for cloud Cl reservoir. How peroxyl HOO fits, I haven’t worked out yet but as I try to find supporting research for my ideas (limited time available sadly) I’ll no doubt discover. HCl ionization, I don’t know a value nor if it is mportant. I’m open to persuasion on that (and all the other points).
It is rough and ready yet satisfyingly simple. If not 100% correct I’m happy to be redirected.
Still under consideration, ice crystals returning radiation amplifying depleted ozone warming, cancelled by volcanic heat vaporisation, replaced by larger droplets forming on aerosols. Possible increased proton incursion due to electromagnetic disruption from volcanic eruption intrusion.
Cross section of papers.
http://www.geo.uio.no/forskning/atmosfare/prosjekter/CHEMCLIM/fig/line_pres_helsing.pdf
Modelling Water Vapour in the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere
L. Gulstad and Prof. I.S.A.Isaksen
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/271/5255/1563
Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Hydrochloric Acid Ionization at the Surface of Stratospheric Ice
Bradley J. Gertner and James T. Hynes
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/2275/2009/acp-9-2275-2009.html
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/2275/2009/acp-9-2275-2009.pdf
Hydration of the lower stratosphere by ice crystal geysers over land convective systems
“Small ice particles not seen by the TRMM radar may remain aloft for a long time eventually evaporating and thus hydrating the lower stratosphere, as opposed to Danielsen (1982) assuming the water vapour to be trapped at the cold point.”
How about H2O and peroxyl HOO?
10
Here’s somethng on the energy neede for FT oil synthesis.
http://blog.energycrafts.com/rss/exploring-a-new-gasification-process/
10
Joanne, this particular post is very, very misleading. First, the time frame of your graph is conveniently chosen. By including 1998, the eye instinctively draws a trend line downward from that point. Also because it tails off in the last two years, that instinctive trend line drops to the last point on the graph. But if you look at it properly… if you remove the spike at 1998 because of the El Nino, then you notice that there was a definite and uninterrupted warming trend from 1996 to 2007. Only then, and only for two years do temperatures drop, and that is during a period that is preceded by an El Nino high in early 2007, and hit by both a La Nina and low TSI (as part of the normal 11 year cycle) driving temperatures down. Beyond this, if you show the graph for the past 100 years, it becomes clear to anyone that there are lots of dips that last that long. They aren’t trends. They say nothing about long term climate. They are blips related to weather, not climate.
You also appear to go on to misrepresent the AGW position, to make your position look good and theirs silly. I don’t know who your Team-AGW is, but your big red quoted statement is not the AGW position. The AGW position is based on a much deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved, and a consistent correlation between observations and expectations. It is not “we can’t think of anything else,” as you imply. And it is certainly too complex to be summed up in a single sentence… but it’s very convenient for you to do so.
10
ThinkingBeing @ 149,
That there has been a general warming trend with peaks and dips since the little ice age and an apparent recent rise in CO2 is not in contention. Its the CAUSE and CONSEQUENCE of the observations that are at issue.
The AGW position is that the CO2 produced by man is CAUSING global warming and, if not seriously reduced, will cause catastrophe.
You: “…the eye instinctively draws a trend line…”
Me: so what? This has nothing to do with science. In fact, the scientific method is based upon the presumption that the naive eye can be fooled so careful and objective data collection, analysis, and interpretation must be done IN ALL CASES. Then it must be checked, crosschecked, and checked again. Then finally, ANY conclusion drawn from the data CANNOT contradict any other similarly drawn conclusion from any other field of knowledge. The AGW data sets and conclusions fail on almost all counts. See the Hockey Stick Graph as a case in point.
You: “…if you remove the spike…”
Me: A translation: “We know the truth a priori so all we need to do is delete the data that does not conform to our truth and the remaining data will prove that it is true.” If we have, as our starting point, a period some hundreds of millions years ago, the resultant trend line will be cooling rather than warming. The slope of a trend line ALWAYS DEPENDS upon its starting point and ending point in a time series data set. So any cherry picked trend line is totally without meaning if taken by itself. What is interesting is that the AGW expectation was that the temperature was to continue to rise from ca 2000 on. It has not. At least, it has not to the extent they “expected”. Is it any surprise the chant changed from Catastrophe Global Warming to Catastrophic Climate Change? Reality didn’t follow their expectations so they had to do something….
You: “They are blips related to weather, not climate.”
Me: Climate is separate and different from weather? No. Climate is made up of weather INCLUDING all the dips and peaks of any weather parameter you wish to consider over any time period you wish to consider and then some.
You: “…a consistent correlation between observations and expectations.”
Me: Expectations are not data about reality. They are data about your fantasy.
That something does or does not correlate with them is irrelevant to the understanding of what actually is. Suppose the global temperature (if it could actually be measured) correlated with my expectation of the number of leprechauns per square inch in Ireland. Does that mean that there are that many leprechauns per square inch in Ireland? Its at best a correlation between some randomly selected time series measurement and a fantasy. Its without meaning or impact upon anything outside of my head. If I truly believed it to be so, it would mean that I am functionally insane.
You: “…it [AGW theory] is certainly too complex to be summed up in a single sentence…”
Me: Oh? I did so above. Its really quite simple. You see some parameter changing. You see another parameter changing. You see they somewhat correlate and assert one is causing the other. You also see man in the picture. Man does things to change the sacred environment (ie does what he must to continue to exist as man, each knowing that he cannot live as a cockroach). Hence, it is man that causes the change. Change means an uncertain future and you are frightened of the future so you insist on the divine right of stagnation. So it is easy for you to conclude that man is evil because he causes change. In particular he produced energy by burning otherwise mostly useless stuff which produces CO2. You conclude that man must be stopped. Hence, my one sentence is an exact summary.
I refer you to an ancient fable about Chicken Little and The Sky is Falling incident. AGW has as much connection to reality as the acorn hitting Chicken Little’s head had with the falling sky. Incidentally, it had a 100% correlation with her expectations which is much higher than the correlation between global temperature and the concentration of CO2.
Get over it. The weather changes, as a consequence, so does the climate. Man changes his environment to suit himself because he has no other way to continue to exist. You have the right to your opinions about and conclusions drawn from these facts. You don’t have a right to force us to act according to your opinions and conclusions no matter how extensively published and reviewed by like minded individuals.
AGW is a fraud and nothing more. The only person you are fooling here is mostly yourself and a few fellow travelers.
10
In more detail see: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/08/walter-starck
10
On the instinctive trend line:
In science the trend and looking at the right time frame is very important. But my point here is that this isn’t science, this graph was very carefully chosen and manufactured to put the author’s point in the best light. It is disingenuous.
On the spike:
Removing noise from data is part of any scientific investigation, and is common sense. Joanne even admitted it in her own writing. So now you’re arguing against her? Or only against anyone that disagrees with you?
On weather and climate:
Okay, this is where climate deniers really get fouled up, because they can’t understand the difference between climate and weather. Joanne knows the difference, even if you don’t. It would be nice if she’d educate her followers, instead of letting them spew nonsense. But go do some studying… there is a huge difference between climate and weather, and to argue the issue you must understand that difference.
On the complexity of climate science:
Yes, I’m afraid it is complicated, and if you think you can sum it up and call it “quite simple” then you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re like a child who thinks that because he can ride a tricycle it means he can also drive a tank. Until you educate yourself, you can’t really think for yourself, trust yourself or trust anyone else. You need to elevate your understanding of the issues considerably.
As far as you personal attacks and assumptions about what I believe… well, I’m not here to argue with you, or the likes of you. Joanne Nova should know better, though. If she wants to be taken seriously as someone who understands science, then she should properly address my points. If she addresses them the way you have… well, that will reflect appropriately on her.
11
ThinkingBeing @ 152
You: It is disingenuous.
Me: The AGW plots aren’t? How about the Hockey Stick plot? How about starting shortly after the little ice age and continuing to 1998 and then saying that 1998 was the hottest year? How about changing from cries of Global Warming to Climate Change ca 2005? I see the whole AGW camp and nothing but disingenuous.
You: Removing noise from data is part of any scientific investigation
Me: Only if you KNOW its noise. However it is not scientific to disregard data and data points that don’t match your preconceived ideas. Its called cherry picking your data to support your hypothesis.
You: they can’t understand the difference between climate and weather
Me: You are saying that climate has nothing to do with the weather and the weather has nothing to do with climate? Climate is nothing but weather smoothed over some arbitrary length of time. Climate is a different perspective on weather but it is still made up of weather.
You: On the complexity of climate science
Me: Yes, climate science is complex. AGW is not. THAT is the issue. You have changed context. AGW is connected to Climate Science as Astrology is connected to Astronomy – almost. The only real difference is AGW assumes, a priori, that change caused by man is evil and must be stopped. Astrology assumes, a priori, that the positions of the stars and planets at birth, determines the character and future of the man. Both have a lack of connection to reality at their base even though they pretend to be scientific because they use math, numbers, and scientific sounding words.
You: I’m not here to argue with you
Me: That’s good because so far you have not addressed the issues at point.
10
Joanne — I should never have been sucked into an argument with the willfully ignorant. Please address my original points.
(1) There was a clear warming trend until 2007, in which case two years of cooling can hardly be deemed a trend
(2) Your synopsis of the AGW position was unnecessarily over simplistic (it was a debating tactic, rather than an attempt to get at and highlight the truth).
Lastly, something I didn’t mention earlier, is that you are showing atmospheric temperatures. Ocean temperatures are more important, and they show no sign of cooling, even in recent years.
10
I glad we have another ThinkingBeing in our midst, becuase I’ve been seeing far too many DreamingBeings around here. My general comment about this topic is that the earth certainly has not cooled over the last few years. 2005 was the warmest year on record after all, and we have just experienced the second warmest June and July ever recorded in human history. Arctic ice extent is 100,000 square kilometers lower than last year at this time. Some conservative bloggers around the Internet over the last couple of years have been trying to claim that the UAH and Hadcrut dataset shows the globe to be cooling or in platue, but as anyone with any knowledge of the subject knows, those datasets exclude the polar regions. And of course as we all know the polar regions are warming particularly fast. Now I don’t know about you, but for me, omitting the most rapidly warming regions of the earth and then claiming that the data set that does so is “global” is not exactly being upfront and honest, is it?
10
Damien and un-thinking being, I hate to point out the obvious, but whether there is evidence for localized climatic changes – and there is – does NOT(!!!!!) prove that CO2 is the cause OR that we should spend TRILLIONS of dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist!! I can’t understand why people are SOOOOO happy for their governments to create another tax and help the rich to get richer WITHOUT putting up a fight against it!!
Spouting rehashed localised climatic changes without ANY evidence of their causes is ridiculous and disingenuous.
10
ThinkingBeing:
August 12th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Sorta like the atmospheric temperatures pushed by GISSTemp, HadCRU and NOAA? The ones the AGW side has been quoting for years? PULEEEZE!
Ocean temperatures are irrelevant. It’s ocean heat content that Hansen et al (2005) said was a better measure and ooops, that measure has gone down, or after torturing the raw data, remained flat. Willis et al (2008)
10
Damien McCormick (Daemon):
August 12th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Kindly cite the evidence. You are making an assertion.
Ok, now that I’ve gotten up off the floor from laughing.
HadCRU has a number of issues, honesty and being upfront are two of them. And I might add that HadCRU is on YOUR side. GISSTemp uses data infilling to get their Arctic temps. UAH and RSS (both satellite systems) cover more of the polar regions than any of the ground-based measuring agencies.
Fact is, there isn’t a lot of actual measurement going on over most of the globe, so coming up with any “global” number is fraught with potential error and the potential for misrepresentation.
By the way, I hear there’s some exciting beachfront property with palm trees available in that “particularly fast-warming” south polar region.
10
Okay, so the issue at hand is whether or not the past ten years have shown warming or cooling [this statement is made to explicitly avoid the denialist tendency to change the subject when things get uncomfortable, i.e. truthful). My contention is that 2007-2008, hit by a La Nina and an expected but unusually severe periodic low in TSI, represents a short term blip (of which there are many of the past thirty years) in the existing long term trend. When the outliers (1998 high and 2007 low) are removed, there is a definite upward trend in temperatures. You absolutely can NOT choose periods with high starting points and low ending points and then draw a line between the two and call it a trend. So, when more properly addressing the data, what do you get? Let’s look at JN’s graphs again.
In the first set, let’s just draw lines for the minimum, maximum, and median temperatures for each year (basically, the largest peak or valley for the year, and the point in between). Forgive me for merely eyeballing this instead of going back to the actual numbers, but I don’t think it’s noticeably inaccurate.
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/8575/agwsurfmmm.jpg
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/2229/agwsatmmm.jpg
Next, lets draw trend lines for each of those plots (min, max, median) from the relatively normal years of 1995 to the start of 2007.
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/8266/agwsurftrends.jpg
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9941/agwsattrends.jpg
Now lets clean it up, by looking at only the remaining trend lines.
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/4807/agwalltrends.jpg
Um, gee… the trend lines parallel CO2 levels. Wow. Look at that. So if you take out some of the natural variability in the system (El Nino and La Nina), you find warming that is exactly in line with CO2 levels. Shoot. How did that happen?
So, now we have to wait another decade to see if 2007 may be the beginning of a new, downward (or even level) trend, or just a blip.
10
To “ThinkingBeing (13th): More lines on paper given up as trends that are offered as proof! Great stuff – NOT. So you claim to have proven it simply due to a correlation? A triumph in cause-and-effect science that only a child might swallow. Next it will be: it rained on Tuesday for the last 2 months, its raining now..so it must be tuesday!. ha, simply laughable. If so, why is the slope the same as the previous two 1900’s warming trends (pre- industrial CO2?) As for comment(12th): Try doing some research on some 3300 Argo buoys – depths over 700m,some to 3000m ie. not just surface stuff. You might find here are observations ( not computer models) showing a lack of warming of the oceans since 2003, ore reading Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s research on alternative cause-effects.
10
ThinkingBeing:
Let me begin by agreeing with you.
You say:
“You absolutely can NOT choose periods with high starting points and low ending points and then draw a line between the two and call it a trend.”
Absolutely right, but the reason is that a straight line fit is not an appropriate way to assess cyclical data. For example, you will almost always get an apparent trend if you join any two points on a sine wave with a straight line.
And climate varies with a variety of fluctuations. Some of these fluctuations are known effects (i.e. PDO, NAO, etc.) but others are merely observed to be apparently cyclical fluctuations. One of these cyclical fluctuations is observed to have wavelength of ~900 years and another is observed to have a wavelength of ~60 years.
The ~900 year oscillation is apparent in that there was the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and then present warm period (PWP). It seems that the PWP has yet to reach the peak of temperature that existed in the RWP and the MWP.
The ~60 year oscillation is apparent in that it seems global temperature fell from ~1880 to ~1910, then rose to ~1940, then fell to ~1970, the rose to 1998, and has fallen since.
It seems that the ~60 year oscillation is linked to the PDO, but there is no clear relationship of the ~900 year oscillation to a known effect. Simply, we have the observation that these climate cycles exist but the science of their cause is not settled: the cause is certainly not atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (e.g. recovery from the LIA began long before the industrial revolution).
So, is there a trend?
Well, there is not a linear trend because the global temperature varies in cycles.
Is AGW observed in the data?
No, there is no indication of it.
Importantly, is the global temperature warming or cooling?
Neither, the warming from the LIA is being negated by the present cooling phase of the ~60 year cycle as it was from 1880 to 1910 and from 1940 to 1970.
And does the data indicate that warming will resume?
No, the history of climate change over recent millennia suggests that warming or cooling may occur when the ~60 year cycle reaches its warming phase (around 2030) because the peak of the PWP may or may not have been reached by then.
However, it can be said without any fear of reasonable dispute that the warming which occurred from 1970 to 1998 ceased in 1998.
Richard
10
Richard s Courtney wrote:
Whose temperature reconstruction are you using?
The ones that I am aware of have the current temperature half a degree at least above anything that could be called “medieval”, and probably about 0.2 or 0.3°C above anything in the last 120,000 years.
10
Richard s Courtney wrote:
How did you look for the AGW signal in the data?
10
Richard s Courtney wrote:
I dispute that.
What you are looking at is the 1998 El Nino, not a cessation of a warming trend.
The 00s are 0.19°C warmer so far than the 90s. The current warming is stronger than the 1970 to 2009 mean.
10
Hey im only 15 but i have been doing a geography assignment on this and i have come to
the conclusion of climate change is most likley not anthropacentric (excuse the spelling if its wrong)one of the reasons is that in truth we only contribute to 0.28% of all CO2 and according to my research i find that this year is not actually the “hottest ever recorded” and the earth hasnt warmed over the past 8 years.
10
AGWphiles don’t talk to you about the fact that there’s not only no giant, earth-parbroiling lens, but that every scientific organization on earth that can point/put a sensing device in the air,
and all of them working together,
haven’t been able to produce any: mark this: A.N.Y. evidence of the massive quantities of heat falsely alleged to have magically gotten from the inner curve, of the face of this GIANT, EARTH ENCIRCLING LENS to – ANY where.
Their pedantic refusal to face the fact, that the entire combined Meteorological, Aerospace, Military Research, Communications and Research, Astronomical,(legendary for the sensitivity of their extremely powerful optics, to atmospheric anomalies)
as well as, the combined efforts of all the UNIVERSITY and amateurs in every single science known to man kind:
can’t find A.N.Y. of the H.E.A.T.
What AGW pseudoscientists want you to believe is simple, and quite concise. There’s no mystery to it, and it’s summed up with ease:
the earth is surrounded by a layer of gases that due to their molecular arrangement, act as interceptors of heat, of a certain wavelength: the infra-red heat coming off a rock or a parking lot, a wood burning stove.
It’s a tuned lens. Sunglasses let visible light through, blocks ultra-violet; AGW myth-lens allows visible light out, blocks a little of the infra red.
The problem with this MAMMOTH lens, is that WITH THE ENTIRE SENSING CAPACITY of ALL MANKIND, for more than TEN YEARS,
N O B O D Y
but
N O B O D Y
can find ANY EVIDENCE there is a GIANT LENS. It’s just 26 miles away people: radiating downward, SO MUCH HEAT, that it is INTERMITTANTLY REFLECTING ENOUGH, TO WARM ENTIRE CONTINENTAL SIZED AREAS.
And N O B O D Y can find
IONIZED DUST along the FACE of the lens
HEAT created LAYERING around the FACE of the lens
AIR MOVEMENTS around the FACE of the lens
OPTICAL ANOMALIES around the FACE of the lens
CHEMICAL CHANGES around the FACE of the lens
ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGNAL TRANSMISSION CHARACTERISTICS ANOMALIES around the FACE of the lens.
They haven’t even BEGUN to EXPLAIN WHY FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, EVERY SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION ON EARTH, – MANY OF THEM WORKING TOGETHER COMBINING THEIR RESOURCES:
can find ANY – ANY of the HEAT they claim is enough to heat CONTINENTS –
THEY CLAIM they have a MAGIC LENS, that can not only hide ALL EVIDENCE IT EXISTS from us, but that it can hide ALL THE CONTINENTAL SIZED HEAT ANOMALIES IT HAS BEEN CREATING FOR YEARS.
THIS is I.M.P.O.S.S.I.B.E. UNLESS OF COURSE YOU WANT TO EXPLAIN HOW NOT IN ONE SCIENCE: BUT IN EVERY SINGLE SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE EVER DEVISED BY MANKIND ALL WORKING TOGETHER
WITH THE MOST SOPHISTICATED AGGREGATION OF DETECTION/SENSING HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, AND BRAIN POWER EVER COMBINED,
CAN’T FIND AN ENORMOUS, GLOBAL LENS, THAT IS HEATING UP CONTINENT-SIZED REGIONS OF THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE.
This is a SIMPLE QUESTION: IS THERE A GIANT, GLOBALLY ENCIRCLING LIGHTLY REFLECTIVE LAYER, STOPPING, AND TURNING BACK, ENOUGH HEAT TO CHANGE THE TEMPERATURES OF REGIONS THE SIZE OF CONTINENTS?
IF THERE IS, WHY CAN ALL OF THE SENSING EQUIPMENT MANKIND CAN DESPERATELY, FERVENTLY PUT TOGETHER, NOT FIND, ONE SINGLE INDICATOR of it A.N.Y.W.H.E.R.E.?
Especially in the tropics where the sun comes in MOST DIRECTLY and the atmosphere is by DEFAULT, THICKEST, INCLUDING THE AREA ABOVE IT, COMPRISING THE MAGIC MYTHICAL LENS.
Because according to the laws of THERMODYNAMICS pertaining to ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION it CAN NOT EXIST or WE WOULD BE ABLE TO FIND EVIDENCE OF IT BEING IN ACTION.
THAT’S what you need to show.
WHY YOU HAVE NO ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGNATURE DETECTABLE BY ANY MEANS KNOWN.
Why are the ASTRONOMY FIELD not saying ”Oh yes we’re familiar with atmospheric diffraction, our instruments are SO SUSCEPTIBLE TO HEAT CREATED TURBULENCE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WE BUILT HUBBLE and put it OUTSIDE THE ATMOSPHERE and WE CAN SEE CLEARLY, THE OPTICAL INTERFERENCE OF THE GIANT LENS’S DIFFERENT REFRACTIVE INDEX when IT’S ACTIVE in certain places” – or even ANYWHERE?
Why are the COMMUNICATIONS GIANTS of the world not saying ”Oh yes, we see different transmission and reception characteristics relative to certain signals, of certain strengths, at certain times/places due to the lens changing the atmosphere’s ELECTROMAGNETIC RESPONSE characteristics?
Why are the COMMUNICATIONS AMATEURS who for YEARS have made use of the atmosphere’s ability to reflect electromagnetic signaling and allow them to speak past, direct line-of-sight around the curvature of the globe – never NOT EVER noting that THEY are noticing that in certain places, at certain times, their communications ability using this method are being enhanced/degraded, EITHER?
Why are NONE of the organizations in CLIMATE/METEOROLOGY able to find ANY INDICATOR WHATEVER of CONTINENT SIZED HEAT DIFFERENTIALS when the MAGICAL MYTHICAL LENS is ACTIVE?
With ALL OF THESE PEOPLE FERVENTLY TRYING TO MEASURE ENOUGH HEAT TO CHANGE THE DYNAMIC OF CONTINENTS, EXPLAIN HERE, T.O.D.A.Y. WHY YOU CAN NOT SHOW ANY EVIDENCE OF YOUR MAGICAL LENS that CAN HIDE ALL EVIDENCE OF ITSELF, FUNCTIONING AS SUCH
AND, ALL OF THE HEAT YOU CLAIM IT IS REFLECTING BACK INTO THE ATMOSPHERE?
Go ahead and address one sensing science at a time:
gas chemistry
gas ionization
dust ionization
physical layering
optical anomalies
moisture uptake/release
THERMAL EVIDENCE
Go ahead and start now. We’ll wait.
10
I guess all the Church-of-the-Magical Myth-0-Matic, Melting Mannian Mechanism’s members, are all being pressed against walls by the sodden bodies of drowned polar bears, as melted ice caps’ waters have raised the sea levels till they’re all up to their waists in seawater, unable to reach their keyboards.
We’ll wait while you extricate yourselves and float on back over to the keyboard to put an end to all this questioning.
Fortunately I’ve got one of those floating cup holders for my coffee so while I wait for you to push back the bodies of the sodden drowned polar bears and get back to us, I’ll be o.k.
Just in case maybe I should go get a boat cushion to sit on in my easy chair here so I can keep up with the exciting revelations of how Micheal Mann’s Magical Melting Mechanism Morons explain to me in GREAT DETAIL how the laws of physics have been flipped and proven to not exist.
Just think of all the carbon used up printing those silly laws of thermodynamics and special relativity relating to electromagnetics. On the other hand, maybe since Einstein’s work is now worthless, we can use those now utterly debunked books on the laws of the universe to sop up some of the melted ice cap water.
pfffft. I wouldn’t wipe off my Pet Polar Bear’s behind with the degrees Gavin Schmidt, Micheal Mann, and Hansen claim they own. It is so GOOD living through the greatest scientific fraud attempt in recent history. It just makes me feel… well, ”cool.” Or maybe that’s just the ice cap water filling my sandals.
10
[…] ========== 8. ML writes: “Then we have to ask why the surface station and satellite data were near-mirrors of one another until just about mid-2006… http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/the-unwarming-world/.” […]
10
[…] This graph courtesy – http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/the-unwarming-world/ […]
10
Joanne Nova says:
Your graph needs updating.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/plot/uah/from:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:2001/to:2009.5/trend
The long term trend has once again overwhelmed the short term fluctuations.
20