A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.
In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).
Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels.
On “tree-rings”
Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.
Some will also, rightly, point out this is just Tibet, not a global average. True. But the results agree reasonably well with hundreds of other studies from all around the world (from Medieval times, Roman times, the Greenland cores). Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
Jo
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau [Chinese Sci Bull,]
Figure 5 Prediction of temperature trends on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau for the next 120 years. Blue line, initial series; orange line, calibration series, 464 BC–834 AD; purple line, verification series, 835–1980 AD; red line, forecasting series, 1980–2134 AD. (Click to enlarge)
There are beautiful graphs. Have a look at the power spectrum analysis and the cycles below…
ABSTRACT:
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities, causes and future trends of temperature variations based on tree rings for the past 2485 years on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau were analyzed. The results showed that extreme climatic events on the Plateau, such as the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th Century Warming appeared synchronously with those in other places worldwide. The largest amplitude and rate of temperature change occurred during the Eastern Jin Event (343–425 AD), and not in the late 20th century. There were significant cycles of 1324 a, 800 a, 199 a, 110 a and 2–3 a in the 2485-year temperature series. The 1324 a, 800 a, 199 a and 110 a cycles are associated with solar activity, which greatly affects the Earth surface temperature. The long-term trends (>1000 a) of temperature were controlled by the millennium-scale cycle, and amplitudes were dominated by multi-century cycles. Moreover, cold intervals corresponded to sunspot minimums. The prediction indicated that the temperature will decrease in the future until to 2068 AD and then increase again.
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Figure 1 Tree-ring-based temperature reconstruction for the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau during the past 2485 years (gray line), the 40-year moving average (thick black line) and the 40-year running standard deviation (thin black line); the horizontal line is the mean temperature for the 2485 years. (Click to enlarge)
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Figure 2 Power spectrum analysis of the 2485-year temperature series. (Click to enlarge)
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Figure 3 Millennium-scale cycle in the temperature variation during the last 2485 years. (Click to enlarge)
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Figure 4 Decomposition of the main cycles of the 2485-year temperature series on the Tibetan Plateau and periodic function simulation. Top: Gray line,original series; red line, 1324 a cycle; green line, 199 a cycle; blue line, 110 a cycle. Bottom: Three sine functions for different timescales. 1324 a, red dashed line (y = 0.848 sin(0.005 t + 0.23)); 199 a, green line (y = 1.40 sin(0.032 t – 0.369)); 110 a, blue line (y = 1.875 sin(0.057 t + 2.846)); time t is the year from 484 BC to 2000 AD. (Click to enlarge)
…
…
Conclusions
Climate events worldwide, such as the MWP and LIA, were seen in a 2,485-year temperature series. The largest Figure 6 Temperature comparison between the forecast and observation data taken from seven stations on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau (seven stations: Delingha, Dulan, Golmud, Lhasa, Nagqu, Dachaidan and Bange). amplitude and rate of temperature both occurred during the EJE, but not in the late 20th century. The millennium-scale cycle of solar activity determined the long-term temperature variation trends, while century-scale cycles controlled the amplitudes of temperature. Sunspot minimum events were associated with cold periods. The prediction results obtained using caterpillar-SSA showed that the temperature would increase until 2006 AD on the central-eastern Plateau, and then decrease until 2068 AD, and then increase again. The regularity of 600-year temperature increases and 600-year decreases (Figure 3) suggest that the temperature will continue to increase for another 200 years, since it has only been about 400 years since the LIA. However, a decrease in temperature for a short period controlled by century- scale cycles cannot be excluded. Obviously, solar activity has greatly affected temperature on the central-eastern Plateau. However, there are still uncertainties in our understanding of climate change, and the concentration of CO2 affects the climate. Further investigations are thus needed. –
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REFERENCES
Liu Y, Cai Q F, Song H M, et al. Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau. Chinese Sci Bull, 2011, 56: 29862994, doi: 10.1007/s11434-011-4713-7 [ Climate Change over the Past Millennium in China.] … Hat Tip: Geoffrey Gold.
The article title says “study shows shows sun”.
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REPLY: Fair point. I was in a hurry when I wrote that title. I’ve changed it to “natural cycles” which is much more accurate. Thanks Jo
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Jo, I believe “warcroft” was more commenting in the duplication of the word “shows”.
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Gad. I must sack that proof reader ;-)! Thanks.
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Jo,
The study shows that current temperature is as high as it has been in the last 2000 years and predicts that it will get cooler in the next 100. Based on what evidence??? Absolutely none.
According to this study the MWP occurred between 800 and 1000 AdD which is totally inconsistent with claims that the MWP occurred in Europe between 1000 and 1400 ad.
How about you define when the MWP occurred before attributing ever study that shows a variation in temperature between 500 and 1500 AD as evidence for global warming.
PS I notice you are still censoring posts that demonstrate the unscientific nature of your blog. That in itself demonstrates your lack of credibility.
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REPLY: 1/ Try to read the post above before you rush to blind conclusions: “what evidence” would be 2485 years of tree rings and a fourier analysis of the cycles in the data. That doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s reasonable to discuss it.
2/ I don’t define the MWP – I’m quoting the experts. Read the post: “The results showed that extreme climatic events on the Plateau, such as the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th Century Warming appeared synchronously with those in other places worldwide. ”
3/ I’m not censoring anything: you paid nothing for the right to issue baseless insults, and we (the mods and I) are all volunteers and not at your beck and call. All first time posters are moderated until they show they are here for a polite, informed conversation. If you apologize, post more carefully, and agree to be polite, we will welcome your future comments. If not, you can ask for a refund. We’ll give you 200%. — Jo
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Roger, if you bothered to check the link for “medieval” that I posted in the article you’d see the graph (Loehle et al). Using 18 non-tree ring proxies the MWP globally appears to be centred circa 800 – 1200 AD roughly. I expect Liu et al concluded it was “consistent” for similar reasons.
Jo
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Wonderful. I wonder if I will still be around to see the “Co2 causes global cooling scare” I was around in the 60’s and 70’s, “world is going into another ice age scare”.
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Me too. My mother was always talking about “the ice age” as a result of the media coverage of that scare in the 70’s. When it changed to “global warming” she shifted gears without a thought. No questioning what happened to all the “ice age is coming” claims at all, it went from the one scare to the other being “discussed” in our house. My dad and I stopped listening to her on that topic about that time.
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the 60s were quite warm, and yes there really was a sudden temperature drop at the beginning of the 1970s. I actually do remember that it was very decided. It is a little bit like the changes that we are currently experiencing. Mind you, I lived in Melbourne at the time.
Also, I can clearly remember the talk and scaremongering about the “cooling” and that we were heading for an ice age.
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I assume you live in Canberra as I do otherwise your blog name is pretty cheeky. I grew up in the NSW Southern Highlands left for Sydney about 1960 and then moved here about 1975. I was blissfully unaware of any cooling where I grew up always was stinking hot this time of year as was Sydney and humid. In Canberra around 1980 I remember days over 40. Then for me it was gee it is hot/cold with no worry about who is guilty, oh those were the days! BTW our gummint (up jumped council) has banned thin plastic shopping bags and I keep buying more an more of the thick ones because forget to take them. Do you know of an empty creek where I might chuck my excess it is becoming quite a problem.
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You may remember warm 60s, while I living at 6,000 + feet in Wyoming learned to dress for three seasons when going for a picnic, fishing or hunting.
I saw nothing unusual in experiencing snow 11 months out of the year.
Old friends who still live there think it wonderful that they now have Autumn along with mostly winter and summer. They say yeah to Global Warming.
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That was the first attack by the fascist eco nutters but then they rediscovered fake CO2 so called warming science that was from 1900 and so it went warm!!!!
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Yes, time will tell as in all things but on the surface this appears far more objective than some of the other “science” we are supposed to accept.
If indeed there is a cooling cycle that will last until 2068 I would be interested in knowing just how cool we can expect things to get. Warming is nice, plants thrive when it is warm which means food for animals, food for people. The cold is not so kind to us.
The potential problems that can result from a lengthy cooling cycle are worrying when (unless the “powers that be” have been preparing for it in secret) the focus has been on warming which means no planning or even consideration of the opposite will have taken place.
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Looking at the graph suggests a cooling of about 2C by 2068, whereas the LIA looks about 4.5C cooler than today.
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Robert,
In answer to your question about preparations for cooling I can refer to a statement in the Land newspaper about twelve months ago. A CSIRO researcher stated that since the world was going to warm he needed to only consider the effects of rising temps on plant growth. He also refered to the need to grow drought tolerant crops since global warming would see stronger and longer droughts in the major crop growing areas. This sort of fuzzy thinking is the result of adhering to an unproven but accepted hypothesis; that of AGW. I believe that type of thinking is widespread and as a result we could see food shortages in the future.
The adherents of the new religion have a great deal to answer for and I firmly believe those who spread the false faith knowing that the science was faulty should be prosecuted. I would include many in the CSIRO, the BoM and the Chief Scientists in that group. At the very least they should be barred from senior scientific positions including those in universities. Their poor advice has cost us dearly and through such things as bans on clearing have cost lives as well. They are criminals.
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Ahh, no hockey sticks but obviously plenty chopsticks judging by the spiky graph.
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Doing climate science by looking at real data rather than running simulations? Why it is almost as if the scientists think that nature is in control rather than their wild fantasies or government research grant agencies. This is more like the science I learned over a half century ago. We worked to understand nature rather than dictate our terms of acceptance.
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Lionel, you’re so old-fashioned! (Like me) You’ll have to go back to uni to study post-normal science, where they run scientific models that can produce any socio-political outcome you want. It’s a warm favourite among the data doctors at the IPCC, who have worked so hard to get grants. Err, results.
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Go back to school? Ever heard of an immovable object meeting an irresistible force? The result would not be pretty. I suspect only one of us would survive the experience.
I got into enough trouble the first time with a few professors who believed their beliefs defined the limits of truth without respect to objective evidence. Fortunately, there were professors of a different persuasion. I am not sure there are any of the second kind still around.
Sad to say, post normal science was around even then. It lived mostly in social science and psychology. However, there was one neurophysiology professor who…never mind. It was just not as ubiquitous nor as perverse as it is today.
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It’s rough, I went back last fall to return to work on an engineering degree I began many years ago. It’s kind of like what I found in the corporate world when I was working as a software engineer. The work itself isn’t that difficult (if you know what you are doing), it is surviving the politics that’s hard.
As I’m generally 20 or so years older than most of those in my classes I tend to spend more time listening to what everyone around me is saying. It is very frightening to see just how stupid so many of our university level students appear to be.
I’ve had to review papers that wouldn’t have passed a freshman composition class in high school. But then I’ve had “assistant professors” and “teacher’s aides” leading classes that were more interested in “making it fun” resulting in a university level course that felt more like being on Romper Room or Sesame Street…
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Several years ago I had the (dis)pleasure of helping my 40y old mature-age student with her assignments by editing her prose to make sense of what she was trying to write. She didn’t know that in paraphrasing so-called academic papers one ought to ensure what was written wasn’t nonsense.
So, I introduced her to the purpose of [square] brackets and why you need to use (sic). In my rough edits her essays would show either; every tenth word as (sic) or almost no original text because those references were almost unintelligible, illiterate nonsense.
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My guess is the same “scientists” would never accept a medical finding based on the exact processes they themselves are using, not if it meant their own might be at risk with whatever”remedy”was proposed by such methods of “research”
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Lionel, everyone knows the ENTER key is the main driver for Climate Change. Sign up for that refresher at uni now /sarc
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The Indians have Prof Rao, the Chinese have Liu et al and the Russians have Siberia. So no wonder they all are paying lip service to Durban. I’ve always thought Mr Putin considers global warming a good thing because of Siberia.
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The Chinese Gov doesnt believe in AGW its all play and games with the West. Also noteworthy that theyre now playing war games.
http://www.4thmedia.org/2011/12/07/chinese-president-hu-urges-navy-to-prepare-for-combat/
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Don’t think so…
From the Abstract：
To compare differences among the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), Little Ice Age (LIA), and 20th century global warming (20CW), six sets of transient and equilibrium simulations were generated using the climate system model FGOALS_gl. This model was developed by the State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The results indicate that MWP warming is evident on a global scale, except for at mid-latitudes of the North Pacific. However, the magnitude of the warming is weaker than that in the 20th century. The warming in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is stronger than that in the Southern Hemisphere.
From Abstract：
A tree-ring-width chronology of Pinus tabulaeformis from Kalaqin, Inner Mongolia was developed using modern dendrochronological techniques. Based on the results of correlation function analysis, the total precipitation from the previous August to current July was reconstructed for 1771-2008 AD with an explained variance of 49.3%.
The tree ring data only extends back 200 years, not 2500. Also it used to measure precipitation not temperature.
The eight articles published in this special topic of Chinese Science Bulletin present partly preliminary results obtained by the project over the past two years. The tree-ring climate analyses and the diagnostic analyses, numerical modeling experiments, and nonlinear dynamic predictions of the millennium climate change are presented here. *They reveal some characteristics and regularities of changes in temperature and precipitation in China and in East Asian monsoons over the past 1000 years.*
Amazing how the actual documents only cover the last 1000 years yet somehow JoNova seems to stretch it out to 2500 years. Also they only study a localized climate, not worldwide conditions.
ZHOU XiuJi concludes with “A method of predicting how the nonlinear dynamic system will change under the influence of external forces varying over time is preliminarily put forward.”
“Preliminary” means “Denoting an action or event preceding or done in preparation for something fuller”. So in essence ZHOU XiuJi is saying he [and the State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences] are making just a snap judgement as to the future [not really done] yet JoNova calls it “Blockbuster”.
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Guy, you are reading from different papers.
This abstract says: Amplitudes, rates, periodicities, causes and future trends of temperature variations based on tree rings for the past 2485 years on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau were analyzed. The results showed that extreme climatic events on the Plateau, such as the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th Century Warming appeared synchronously with those in other places worldwide.
I have merely reported what they said. Perhaps other papers show something different. Feel free to quote them and link to them, but not free to throw baseless insults.
Please post more carefully. Try to make a coherent point.
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This is also consistent with Jovian orbital patterns and corresponding magnetic field interaction vis-a-vis the sun and the galactic core, which pointed to a solar max in 2005 followed by 60-65 years of cooling before ticking back upwards for 30-40 years. I’ll try to repost the exact citation for the study.
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Guy says:
Yet the title of the document is in fact: Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau
http://csb.scichina.com:8080/kxtbe/EN/abstract/abstract504775.shtml
an excerpt from the abstract:
(Bold is by me) Guy, does this make you uncomfortable?
And Jo says 2485 not “2500” as you say……….
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First law of Journalism (nee Propaganda):
“Never let the facts interfere with a good story”.
NIce piece of journalism there, Guy.
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Fellow readers:
You can check out who the authors:
(LIU Yu, CAI QiuFang, SONG HuiMing, AN ZhiSheng, Hans W. LINDERHOLM )for:
are and their status in the academic/science world, together with some of the
citations they have in hand at:
http://csb.scichina.com:8080/kxtbe/EN/abstract/abstract504775.shtml
Not only was the study was peer reviewed, but they did some of the
field work too !
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For your information Jo, I can’t remember who undertook the research, Uni of Wollongong maybe?, or where it was published, since it was at least 10 years ago but there was a study of pollen contained in peat cores from Barren Grounds, NSW (Illawarra Escarpment).
The study found that there had been no significant change in vegetation type for the last 5000 years, which I believe was as far back as they could (supposedly) accurately date.
This still however doesn’t mean I think the carbon tax has anything to do with science.
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The vertical axes on the graphs are in temperature. The paper does not give primary measurement details, such as which isotope methods were used (if any), equations linking measurement methods to temperature, or a calibration graph against local temperatures in the instrumented period. Therefore, one has to retain existing doubts about dendrothermometry.
The situation might be especially complicated here because the average temperature of just above freezing indicates proximity to ice fields, whose own isotopic composition is probably unusual because of their elevation at these latitudes. Isotopic fractionation in rain and snow (for example with oxygen 18, if used) is classically explained more in the context of precipitation exceeding evaporation at the poles and the reverse at the tropics, though this is a gross simplification of Daansgard 1964, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1964.tb00181.x/pdf. Speculatively, isotopes might be a little messed up on the Tibetan plateau compared with well-studied areas like Greenland, which has problems enough in ice.
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I was also slightly puzzled by the 600 year trends, particularly the one from 350ad to 950ad. The line of best fit seems much steeper than is justified by the curve. Is the data available for download anywhere?
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Here’s the 2009 paper which appears to me to be the basis of the Oct 2011 paper referred to in the OP. Its fascinating to me that with this study they have actually been able to incorporate historical records in the area to aid interpretation.
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Catamon, in the 2009 paper (thank you for linking) I’d like to hear your comments regarding figure 5 and the graph showing D’Arrigo et al and Mann et al at roughly 1850 forward.
All the others correlate well but these two….
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No idea. Haven read those papers.
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sure you haven.
Just look at the graphs for now. That is why the good Lord gave us eyes.
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Ah…Catamon, I was so hoping that John Brookes would be offered the same facilities for data/code as Phil Jones and Michael Mann offered to other reviewers (MacIntyre springs to mind). The fact that there is no hesitation in offering the data is testament to the way the debate is so biased. Just sayin’, like.
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Be intersting to compare to the Landscheidt cycles.
http://www.landscheidt.info/
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Yes they are pretty similar at a glance from yrs 1000 to 2000.
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Oh well, at least we will be spared an ice age for now, as temperatures will only peak at the end of the current 600 year warming trend in a couple of hundred years. The good news for you guys is that the next 60 odd years are supposed to cool, so you’ll all be able to gloat until you die.
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“…gloat until you die.” That’s a bit extreme, John. (No, it’s freakin’ obscene!) I mean, I always figured that cooling would be a lot, shall we say, less beneficial to us than warming. What I have never seen from your side is, what exactly is a 1 Deg rise in ‘Global averages’ (whatever THAT means) compared to a 1 Deg fall. I prefer warm to cool. My gas (heating) bill tells me so.
So, what is the ideal climate, afayk?
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Snotrocket,
Never mind JB he just gets the shits up now and again whenever another pillar holding up his beliefs gets knocked over. Give him a couple of days to forget this study ever existed and he will be back to his spritely best.
Regards
Crakar
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I’ll reserve judgement until I see that there are no funny statistical methods being used.
Sure looks cold in the 1600s and the late 300s. Does a cold snap in the 300s line up with other studies?
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A cold snap in the late 300s aligns with historical records. It coincides with crop failures in Scandinavia. The Scandinavians then migrated south and invaded Rome.
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yes it does. The Rhine froze solid in 410, allowing hordes of germanic tribesmen to surge across and eventually sack Rome.
History. It is all there. Eye witness accounts from men and women who never ever gazed at tree rings in their lives.
I myself rejected AGW entirely on the basis of my reading of history.
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ok I did some checking. The Rhine froze in 406, not 410, but it did allow the “barbarians” across what was once an impenetrable barrier, and they sacked Rome in 410, and that year the Romans withdrew their legions from the provinces.
Climate change hastened the fall of an empire. But it was cooling, not warming.
And warming around 800 AD led to the Carolinian renaissance and then later to the cathedral building and expansion of thought and population in the High Middle Ages.
Cooling once more led to the darkening of things in the later Middle Ages after about 1350. which was, incidentally, about the time of the Black Death
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Same here Steve!
I have also rejected the socio-economic agenda for exactly the same reason.
Study human history and the answers are there….what a pity we don’t learn by our mistakes.
🙂
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@John Brookes.
You say…
‘Oh well, at least we will be spared an ice age for now, as temperatures will only peak at the end of the current 600 year warming trend in a couple of hundred years. The good news for you guys is that the next 60 odd years are supposed to cool, so you’ll all be able to gloat until you die.’
Do I understand from that remark that you agree with this post’s projections/conclusions? Must be a tough one for you. I further interpret your last sentence as you ‘gloating’ while ‘we’ die… Nice.
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No Duncan, by “until you die”, I meant that the end of the 60 years cooling, you, me and all of us will be dead. Nothing snarky about it.
I very much doubt the conclusions of this study, but the actual data could be interesting.
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JB, thanks for yet another death-sentence from the cooling sceptics.
Based on the evidence of my own fifty plus years of life, and projecting that graph forward, I can assure you that I, with a very small margin of error, am most likely going to live forever!
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It seems the Chinese are using the Hockey Stick data in their graphs for the years going into the 21 century. No?
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[…] Nova nos trae [–>]un estudio reciente (octubre 2011) sobre los cambios en el clima en el Tíbet. Basado en proxis […]
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Human beings with their relatively short lives are naturally most concerned about things likely to happen within their own lifespan. However natural things seem to work on a much longer timescale, so research which covers 2500 years is starting to have some signifigance, after all 2500 years is to the earths life of 4.5 billion years, as about one minute is to a man’s lifetime of say 80 years. We really are rather insignificant against the great canvas of nature!
Having said that I think that chart three indicating a cycle of about 600 years with alternate warming and cooling may well be a reasonable predictor of what is in store for the next few hundred years. Perhaps this indicates that the current 400 year trend will see a further slight warming of half a degree or so over 200 years or so, before the next downtrend starts, with shorter term cooling and warming trends along the way. Nothing about the future is certain but it seems as good a guess as any.
The thing I find worrying (not for me personally at the age of 74, but perhaps for my grandchildren or their progeny) is the huge uncertainty about the even longer cycles, 10000 and 100000 years, which appear to have caused the heavy glaciations followed by rather short interglacial periods which have characterised the last 600000 years or so of the earth’s geological history.
Is and if so when, is the next heavy glaciation likely, if at all? I think the world would likely be a much more pleasant place if the temperature rose even 7 or 8 degrees (however unlikely that may be), than if it dropped by say 10 degrees and covered most of the northern hemisphere with a kilometre or so of ice.
May not happen of course, but if the current ice age (which we have been in for about 35 million years) produces another heavy glaciation then the human race had better be prepared for major adaptation.
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David,
You will notice current science is only interested in temperatures to the exclusion of all other data.
In doing so, many good research is lost.
Have you noticed in science we do not loose a single drop of water and yet the time line suggests their was vastly more water that suppressed volcanic activity and protected the planet from meteor strikes?
How about the ocean salt changes in the last 4 decades?
Oh ya, that is not temperature data, silly me…
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If there were time to do these graphs for every major region of the Earth, I’m fairly certain we’d see lots of variation. In China’s case, I would suggest the Himalaya Mountains also play a huge role in how the climate runs, and therefore, how the tree rings go… someone (other than non-entities like johnny b or matt b) correct me if I am wrong.
It does pose a question though: if one feeds this data into mann’s models, would it generate a hockey stick?
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Otter, everything fed into Mann’s models produces hockey sticks: white noise, red noise, watermelon noise–the list goes on and on. If you fed the Chinese phone book into Mann’s models, you’d probably get a hockey stick.
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But there’d be a 50% chance that it would be an upside down hockey stick! And the amplitude would be much smaller.
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According Team Members (ref the e-mails), a randomly generated series provided a hockey schtik … the model was clearly
pre-programmedpredisposed to generate a hockey schtik shape; is there any doubt then as to why the requested data has been “lost”?10
You know the nicest thing about this research?
It demonstrates fairly conclusively, that the climate is not an entirely random function, that just appeared to have cyclic characteristics! If you try to run a Fourier analysis on random noise, it runs forever.
So, if nothing else comes out of this, at least we now know that there are defined periodic effects. We may not be able to establish the cause in every case, but at least we now know where to start looking.
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It should also be remembered that China has detailed historical records dating back over 5000 years. These can be compared with observations such as tree rings to gain a more compete picture.
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well said. I comment below saying the same thing in more detail
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My guess would be that these cycles are astronomical in origin. Self-oscillation of a chaotic system rarely produces cycles that are regular enough to show up crisply on a Fourier decomposition — you usually have to use a much shorter time scale tracking sort of algorithm like Prony’s, or lagged phase-space plots in order to find periodicities.
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Well, thank you for that Bob!
I am now going to have to spend the weekend brushing up on my math …
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Look here http://www.landscheidt.info/ you’ll get a surprise.
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In figure 1, the bottom half of the standard deviation doesn’t look right to me. Statistics isn’t my strong point so can someone confirm or refute it?
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You are right. While the top of the standard deviation seems to track the moving average pretty well, the bottom standard deviation curve is a bit weird. Whenever the average temperature goes up, the lower standard deviation doesn’t follow. It is particularly evident from 1650 onwards. Still, it might be a real and interesting effect.
But I’ve got my doubts about the analysis.
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Catamon kindly linked @ 10.1.1 to a 2009 reference paper. If you look at figure 4 (seems to be the same graph) of that paper it seems to have better representation of the standard deviation. Perhaps the authors of the paper Jo links to took some liberties with the art. (or got lazy)
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Upon closer inspection of the 2009 paper (fig. 4), it appears that sample depth is the cause.
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Dont have that paper at the moment as i’m at work, but there did seem to be some periods of the reconstruction where the authors are uncertain of the results due to small sample size. They pretty clearly define those periods though.
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Yes quite clearly in the text and a graph on top of figure 4 showing sample depth.
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Hmmm, I guess Cisco didn’t build that Great Firewall of China strong enough on both sides; it’s keeping dangerous Western civil libertarian ideas out of China, but it’s letting the dangerous history of real world climate out into the West!
Slightly off topic but this Spanish play (a ripoff of 1984) is an almost perfect description of the global warming scam.
◈ Fahrenheit 56K⬈.
Thank Buddha for the Internet.
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There is no date on that entry!
I just hate it when people do that … 🙁
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It’s ISBN: 978-84-9916-155-6
This was a random discovery which showed up while I was looking for something different.
I’ve never seen the play, which is probably just as well because according to a review of the performance it was rather poor in vivo. Less entertainment and more a poignant text.
So if you’re putting this link in your research catalogue you can chalk up the date as Oct 2009.
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Or it could be a take of of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
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Jo,
Do not temperature fall under pseudo-science?
It is not created on it’s own but needs many drivers on our planet to be stable enough for our definition of life?
Every point on this planet is unique and in constant change and yet our scientists are looking for a constant pattern.
So much focus on temperatures that are a cause and effect factor…
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[…] een mooie hockeystick! Nu alleen nog een bal…Lees jezelf snel bij met het hele verhaal over de Chinese studie inclusief de temperatuurprognose tot 2068./*//>*/Aanverwante berichten:Nieuw voor […]
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It appears that China is at least escaping its “Lysenko” period.
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I’d suggest a great place to start in Gondwanaland would be the Huon Pine in Tasmania.
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The official answer is that the tree locations have to be (a) old enough and (b) located in such a way that a change in temperature is going to materially affect growth.
Normally they are chosen at altitute (close to the tree line) or at high latitude (again, close to the northern tree line). These are chosen because these trees are marginal and are affected by small movements in the temperature.
Of course, that doesn’t cover the myriad of problems with tree ring studies, but you’ve at least got to have a reason.
So it’s unlikely that huon pines would match any of those characteristics.
To be fair, the study of tree rings was fairly uncontroversial in the past – it’s just the application of dodgy statistics which promoted tree ring studies above other proxies because certain tree ring sets have a hockey-stick shape – that’s where they get into controversy.
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Hi observa. Ed Cook and others did one such study in 1991.
Cook et al, ‘Science’ v.258p.1266-1268
John L Daly dealt with it in his article ‘Talking To The Trees in Tasmania’.
He summarised Cook’s study this way:
“The Cook et al study was interesting in its treatments of climates over the last 1,000 or so years, but by pandering to the global warming scare in such an unscientific manner, the rest of their work was largely overshadowed. It is not only the Cook team who lacked scientific rigour in their tree study (insofar as it related to the late 20th century), but part of the blame for such bad science should also attach to the reviewers of the paper and to the editors of `Science’ journal itself for accepting such fashionable, but also unsupported, claims so uncritically.”
http://www.john-daly.com/huonpine.htm
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[…] Problem: temperatures are not rising. […]
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For crying out loud… the entire world is connected to China with one DSL line or what?! >:(
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Yes of course. This is right. But it is simpler than this. The scientists could have saved themselves much trouble and effort and consulted their own historians who would have told them the same things. And Chinese historical records are more complete than in the west as civilization was more continuous here than in the west
Or are even Chinese scientists saying that consistent human eye witness accounts over centuries of chronicled observation are unreliable; that the only persons who are capable of getting things right are scientists gazing at tree rings?
The arrogance and myopia of scientists make difficulties where there are none.
I know that the Rhine froze over in 410, that they grew wine in Scotland 1000 years ago etc because men at the time said so.
It is called history. And too many scientists are simply too arrogant or myopic to even notice it
Yes, these Chinese scientists got it right. But have even they never heard of interdisciplinary studies?
But then I am a mere musician and amateur historian who though earmarked for science as a primary school boy got sidetracked into the humanities and arts in my high school years.
So what do I know??
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Interdisciplinary studies?
Good grief no!!!!
That would mean they would have to share the grants with historians and geologists and etc!!!
That would also mean they would have to graph the historical primary evidence and model them according to their modelling parametres.
They can’t look at 5000 years of continuous civilization in asia….that primary evidence will simply not co operate…..a little bit like the climate is not co operating at the moment 🙂
The history has way more to teach us than most people realise.
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From the Abstract:
(Bold is mine)
Kinda shoots down the “unprecedented” comments by warmists of the past doesn’t it?
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I am in the process of reading through the paper right now.
A word of caution: it is possible to use a wide variety of methods to estimate parameters of a system, PROVIDED there is some calibration. Trees, for example, by themselves can be a measure of several different variables, such as precipitation, soil nutrients, predation, and yes, even temperature.
Also, it has been pointed out that this is a somewhat localized area, and may not be applicable to the entire hemisphere. It can be taken as an indication of variation over a section of a continent.
Instead of calamitous caterwalling over some mythical human-caused non-event, more research could be undertaken to find variations in mulitple locations on every continent except Antarctica; this would allow us to begin to form some kind of global “picture” of the climate and climate varations, and thus expand the universe of scientific knowledge.
Maybe we could convince these authors to head up and coordinate international teams, who could standardize their methodology.
I know: its a pipe dream, but the longing for actual science has been seeking an outlet for quite some time. We can always hope.
Best regards to all,
Mark H.
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Noble thought, Mark, but for that to happen, the IPCC, its philosophy and its funding gravy train would have to be derailed.
Objectivity does not underpin climate “science” as we know it.
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Interesting the Fig4 from the 2011 paper. While the “cycles” they have identified and plotted aren’t near the peaks of where they have been before, the 40 year moving average of temperature (Fig 1)is.
Hmm, makes more sense when you look at Fig 6 from the paper the data is sourced from here.
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Excellent link; I shall add this paper to my reading list, and see if I cannot get into it this weekend.
Appreciate it,
MH
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Jo,
I am new visitor to your website, congratulations on your good work and dedication. This most satisfactory article has already started to be linked on many other sites (I found it on http://www.wattsupwiththat.com).
One small comment on the article above, understandably written in a flurry of excitement: I have never come across a “dog-standard” anything, I trust you meant “bog-standard”.
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Wouldn’t yo love to see the catty emails between the Hockey team in response to this.
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I’m sure that one day we will.
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Popular piece in my 99% bankrupt country (with the highest percentage of AGW believers in the globe — I wonder if there is a correlation…)
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[…] the BBC, admits that Man-made global warming is a crock. Who knows, he might even start reporting real science, as opposed to Team “science”, one day […]
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The same sort of analysis was done on the CET temperature record from the UK (actual temperature record, not tree rings) and the basically resulted in the same as this tree ring study. The prognosis is the same, too.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm
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And Michael Mann says …
Nothing, except you can’t trust the Chinese, we all know they don’t want to apply climate change stuff, and Shell just announced a shale gas project there, so Big Oil is paying those guys to misinform and deny the Mann-truth.
(Only 10 years to retirement: can I keep the game going that long, Mann whispers into the still night.)
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The Chinese have always been great innovators and scientists — arrogant idiots like Mann should read some history like others above have suggested.
I recently read a great book
” Bomb , Book , Compass –Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China” by Simon Winchester. There is a 10 page appendix listing all the scientific/engineering discoveries made by the Chinese , in some cases centuries before the West “latched” onto them.
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Does this study underestimate the future cooling because it underestimates the effects of positive feedback? If the positive feedbacks are as strong as we were told then should the cooling not be amplified to become extremely fast? Perhaps with a negative temperature divergence of slightly larger scale than the recently claimed positive temperature divergence.
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Very relieved I had 25 (logging truck and trailer) tonne of Eucalypt logs delivered to my place yesterday. This will be my firewood for the next 3 years.
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The evidence in this paper is entirely consistent with the following post that I placed on another forum because it shows exactly the sort of pattern one would expect to see in a single region as the climate zones overhead shift latitudinally to and fro in the process of maintaining overall thermal equilibrium despite variations in forcing factors.
“Note that the ONLY effect of ALL factors capable of changing climate is to influence the rate of energy flow through the system. At any given moment all those factors are netted out to cause either slight warming or slight cooling.
The system can only respond to changes in the rate of energy flow through the troposphere in one way, namely the surface air pressure distribution which is intimately connected to the size and/or speed of the water cycle.
When the surface air pressure distribution changes significantly it does so by altering the relative sizes, intensities and average latitudinal positions of ALL the permanent climate zones.
If the net forcing effect of ALL variables is towards warming then the surface pressure redistribution acts to speed up the rate of energy flow through the system to maintain equilibrium by shifting everything towards the poles.
If the net forcing effect of ALL variables is towards cooling then the surface pressure redistribution acts to slow down the rate of energy flow through the system to maintain equilibrium by shifting everything towards the equator.
Once that is understood the only question to be determined is as to how far human CO2 emissions change the surface air pressure distribution as compared to sun and oceans.
Given the scale of the surface air pressure redistribution between MWP and LIA it cannot be much.
One can still debate the relative contribution of all the available variables so that is the next step.”
The global thermostat is actually a planetwide extension of Willis Eschenbach’s idea. It isn’t ‘just’ more convection in the tropics. It is actually the ability of the permanent climate zones covering the entire planet to shift latitudinally so as to provide the necessary negative response to ANY forcing so as to keep global temperatures within a relatively narrow range.
This paper is a picture of the process in action above one specific region.
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Wind turbine going up in smoke:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8943507/Parts-of-Britain-are-battered-by-gale-force-winds-and-storms.html
Made oi larf.
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I can see a time when a turbine like that, in the Australian bush, will catastrophically fail in high wind conditions, and the resulting fire will start a bushfire that will cost many lives and property. After all, the worst bushfires are in high wind situations, and that’s when the turbines fail.
That should give pause to anyone who still thinks they are a good idea.
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I agree with part of that. It’s certainly an issue. Don’t get the idea that there are not fire risks connected with coal fired plants or the transmission networks.
I will say though that I have fought in two major fires in coal cuts, which if they are allowed to intensify are a major ignition source for farms and bush, and I have fought a number of fires resulting from failures at various points in the network, including a number of fires in 2009 directly resulting from record temperatures pushing power lines past design tolerance.
On balance I think turbines are fine, just not a base load solution. Incidents like that highlight issues of design detail, not fundamental flaws in a technology.
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I wonder how much carbon tax should be assessed against the owner of that turbine? Looks to me like a pretty hot hydrocarbon pyre there!
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Hence the old country saying: “Red sky at night, turbine’s alight.”.
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“Red sky at morning, turbine’s a-warming”
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Hey Joanne,
Great write up but the authors name is misspelled in the first sentence.
Thought you might want to fix that.
[many thanks! As Jo would say “we’re going to sack the proofreader”] ED
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Climate change is caused by many variables but some of the most compelling is the correlation between sunspot activity and climate.
Low sunspot activity and changes in magnetic field seem to trigger earth movement and volcanos.
Large volcanos, Krakatau 535AD, Greek islands/BC Canada/Hawaii 700-800AD, Kuwae 1452AD, Tambora 1815AD All contributed to cooling the planet and associated with lower solar output.
Possible? Low solar output = more volcanos and increase in cosmic dust (normally blown away by solar wind)= increased cloud cover and volcanic dust in atmosphere = Cold climate.
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Forgot the association with the China tree ring study. More and more new evidence of our climate history,(ice core, sea bed sedement core, tree ring data) allow comparing this history to many other variables to better understand what causes climate to change.
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It is certainly an interesting time series. The last 400 years show a steady warming following the Little Ice Age precisely as described by Akasofu.
The power spectral analysis shows 3 significant peaks below .01 a^-1. The peaks are broad, particularly the lowest frequeny one and the authors are not justified in attributing 2 discrete frequencies at 1324 and 800 a as they have done. These “peaks” are just random noise and are not significantly different from one another.
Furthermore the broadness of the significant peaks implies that they are due to band-limited noise rather than discrete lines. Consequently it is not possible to predict future behavior past 2068 as has been done in the first figure – the time-series is not sufficiently deterministic; it is too noisy.
I remember a similar paper being given at CSIRO, Hobart in the 1990s using data from Huon pines at Lake Johnson, Tasmania. It showed similar periodicities as I recall.
The most interesting feature is the sudden cooling and warming which occurred between 350 AD and 400 AD. Does that turn up in other time series?
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Look at the graph Figure 5 and see how the major cold periods are also associated with historical periods of large volcanic activity (not in the study) and line up well with low sunspot activity (also not in the study). I mention this info not because the study left it out,(it was not part of their study)but to point out what should be obvious to anyone wishing to find clues to how our climate works. If the sun continues to have low (sunspot) activity then I wonder if we are in for more disaster/earthquake/volcano and cold climate. You can also associate cold climate with crop failure/famine/disease/death/fall of empires and they all line up nicely with the figure 5 graph of cold periods. 300AD-400AD fall of Rome, 600AD-700AD Smallpox and Bubonic Plague, 1300-1400 Great famine and Black Death. Each of these cold periods are associated with a global population decline of (+-)20-30% and in England as much as 50% decline in population. History shows that nothing good come to Mankind in periods of cold. Empires built and vast knowledge growth can occur in periods of warming. Lets hope we don’t go into a period of increasing cold!
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Lovely – thanks (again) for sharing (-;…. slightly off-topic: if Combet et al. supported the “Carbon Tax” despite no-one else in the world having a bar of it (say ~1% global involvement), why then abandon Kyoto because there is only 15% global involvement? Is this a definitive demonstration of federal fickleness?
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Any sane person, and there seems to be a lot of insanity in some of these posts, must come to the only sensible conclusion possible; and, that is: the precise understanding of the physics for natural phenomena known as ‘the weather’ is beyond man’s capability to properly and concisely determine. Would it not be better to garner our wealth to prepare and defend climatic changes by adaptation as and when the REAL scenarios unfold? The climate science seems to be a game of statistics, rather than physics.
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As I suspected, the sanity of many seems dependent on the insanity of the vanity of so few.
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Bollocks. Ohhh its to hard, give up and stop trying to understand things and just believe as i do?? While our current understanding is imperfect its getting better all the time. Take away the conspiracy theory crap that is so much a part of the climate change discussions at the moment and there is a lot of interesting work going on out there that worth taking note of.
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Never a truer word spoken Cat, however the more we understand and the more we know the more you are proven to be hopelessly and catastrophically wrong.
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Disputed Crak, so sit and spin baby.
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Catamon –
“….and stop trying to understand things and just believe as I do??”
Do you belong to any particular religious denomination?
The Church of Climatology perhaps?
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“Bollocks. Ohhh its to hard, give up and stop trying to understand things and just believe as i do?? While our current understanding is imperfect its getting better all the time. Take away the conspiracy theory crap that is so much a part of the climate change discussions at the moment and there is a lot of interesting work going on out there that worth taking note of.”
Get out a bit sonny. Because the ALP state government thought like you do and imagined the BOM and CSIRO had a handle on future weather lumbered every Victorian with a white elephant desal plant that will be costing them billions for years to come.
In this and other contexts of erroneous predictions a more reasonable proposition is that main stream climatology, constrained by its obsession about human CO2 emissions, has set back any advances in a better understanding of how our chaotic climate system works… perhaps for a generation.
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Umm Lew, being from W.A. i love the idea of desal plants as infrastructure. Bet that when the next cycle of drought comes around the critcism of desal plants in the east will become quite muted.
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catamon,
time to have a shave buddy, and while you’re doing that, you might actually see what a hypocrite looks like.
Let’s actually take you to task on your Desalination Plant, shall we?
Let’s do a workup for one example, er, let’s say Wonthaggi, but be aware that this is indicative for all desal plants.
An average desal plant consumes on average 5KWH of electricity to produce each cubic metre of water.
Wonthaggi, at its predicted maximum delivery will be producing 200 Gigalitres of water a year, which is 200 Million cubic metres of water.
At that average 5KWH per cubic metre, that amounts to 1,000 GWH of electricity required each year to produce that water.
Now, the desal plant has to operate 24/7/365, so that power actually has to be there all the time, so Wind towers and solar power won’t cut it here, because they are barely in operation for 4 to 8 hours a day at the best.
That absolute requirement for power amounts to, er, and wait for this, 10% of the total output from Hazelwood. Now Hazelwood actually supplies 25% of Victoria’s total power already, so to run the desal plant (24/7/365) you’ll need to either construct a new (large scale) power plant, or take power away from other areas of Victoria’s consumption.
Either way, having the desal plant in operation virtually ensures Hazelwood will HAVE to stay in operation for a long time yet.
Either way, if you wish desal, then you have to have in place something that can actually produce the power it needs to operate.
Gee catamon, I wonder if you even bothered to find out something like this prior to saying you’re happy to see desal plants as infrastructure.
Hmm! Let’s see now, water or CO2 emissions, which one do we really want.
Say, imagine if they spent (only part of) the money that the desal plant will cost, and used it to construct a large dam on the Mitchell, and let’s even have some forethought and attach a hydro electric plant to that dam.
So catamon, what’s it to be mate?
Desal or CO2 emissions.
Gee! The choices are so tough these days.
Green supporters, it would seem, only tend to think in one direction. They NEVER look at any of the (unintended) consequences of what they support.
(The figures are the same for desal plants everywhere.)
Tony.
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Forget about the Wonthaggi desal plant :), because I have a better example for you. SYDNEY
When they decided to go ahead with the Sydney desal plant, they also decided to commission wind turbines, at Bungendore but on the outskirts of Lake George. They built a swag of these monstrosities and they have made the landscape look like an eyesore. They have not been used since they were built.
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Catamon
I was doing some consultancy work for Western Power at the time Perth’s desal plant came online, and ended up doing some of the commissioning and operating procedures for it. So I got to see the facts and figures.
The bottom line is that unless a new base-load power station comes online in SE WA by mid-2016, there just ain’t gonna be no water from the plant.
Either that, or the suburbs of Perth will have to learn to live with permanent rolling blackouts and brownouts, cos there simply aren’t going to be enough electrons to go around.
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How would we like a national water grid instead? Pump water away from floods and uphill with off peak power. Generate heaps during the peak demand as it races down hill toward the drought affected areas.
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Even many of your Pinko friends think Desal Plants are horrible simply because they are! The total blowout of costs for the Desal Plant by hopless Vic Labor Government is typical of an awful party. Now people are getting annoyed at Baillieu having to raise costs of things because of a past government’s failings.
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“Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.’
Anyone that does NOT scoff at tree rings as a proxy for temperature simply does not understand tree rings and trees. The whole concept is junk science!
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I should probably elaborate. UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS OF MOISTURE, SUNLIGHT, NUTRIENTS, ETC., you can plot growth rate (like tree ring width) against temperature for the plant kingdom, and you will obtain a quadratic curve function which is shaped like an upside down U. I.e., as temperature increases, growth increases UP TO A CERTAIN POINT (about 25 C for many trees), whereupon the growth rate (ring width) then DECREASES rapidly.
Now, if you are following this, you will see that this means that temperatures above 25 C (or whatever the peak temperature for the tree in question) cause smaller growth rings which some idiot dendrochronoligists who really know nothing about trees would somehow probably “equate” with COOLING. But it just might be WARMING.
This is simply what makes the whole idea of tree ring/temperature correlation/proxy so damn stupid! IF you could SOMEHOW prove that the trees whose rings are being studied were never exposed to temperatures above the optimum for growth, then the silly tree ring/temperature studies MIGHT make sense (i.e., if there was also plenty of moisture, nutrients, AND CO2!). BUT, there is no way to demonstrate this. So it has to be relegated to the junk science bin. Sorry, Mike, et. LOL.
I am still amazed that any rational people who know anything about plant physiology would not laugh at these stupid tree-ring studies.
BTW, tree rings ARE very useful when it comes to studying drought.
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Having established from earlier papers that methodology did not involve isotopes, but tree ring properties, can I but agree with you? One can still obtain a high correlation coefficient if the response curve is an inverted U (by making some subjective assumptions), but I have not yet been able to find the primary shape of the tree response versus temperature curve for the instrumented period. Also, correlation coefficients of 0.6 are not particularly good as a calibration basis. I have a little essay on correlation coefficients of temperature v. temperature at ONE site. One conclusion is that Tmax can behave very differently to Tmin and that the mean of them can behave rather more understandably. But then, we have the problem that in this cold Tibetan area, one would expect growth to happen in the month or months when T max was greatest – but instead the authors correlate with the previous whole year Tmean.
BTW, I have been to a hundred km or so of the SE edge study area and it is a recommended travel destination.
Tree rings are an interesting study source for an open log fireplace.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Extended%20paper%20on%20chasing%20R.pdf
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Geoff,
While I agree with your Tmax and Tmin, tree rings afford great data in regard to local climate with far more variables than Temperature and CO2 (as you state) and reports or results may be wrong.
Yet specimens under current studies with variables measured (wind, evaporation, CO2 concentration, temperature, nutrients, Ph, light, carbon pathway (specific to individual plants eg CAM, C4 etc) ground water etc) and the list is endless, show correlations that back this article even if it were for only over 40 years. Xylem & phloem properties vary greatly within 100 meters of indentical species – yet also reflect similar trends. Example is on a hill side where you witness east, west and south within a small radius – yet vastly different growth. But with the environmental conditions recorded for individual plants, a lot of data can yield many answers.
Growth of species (especially in Tibet) are regulated by numerous combinations of favourable seasons and can influence the rings significantly. CO2, water and temperature are however big factors – but the botanical studies in this area have been conducted prior to 1700.
Maybe nature is recording data for us – but we just need to identify the yardstick more accurately?
I agree fire places are great for tree ring burning – but a quick investigation can ask and answer equally as many questions!
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jae
Your conclusion is very dry!
Where did you obtain this gem regarding plants NEVER EXPOSED above optimum temperatures vs ring growth – papers please? Elephant in the room!
Tree ring studies = Three ring circus jae? Stop all studies on tree rings NOW under your advice – close CSIRO, JCUNQ, ANU & UQ departments currently undergoing research in this very subject.
You may find you are not correct jae!
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off topic http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3720568.html
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Although Ms Nova has pointed out the caveats, they bear repeating and extending.
A single location, or region, has more variance than the global average. Single locations, or small regions such as above, do not display fidelity to the global mean, even during the instrumental record when there is much more confidence in the anomalies.
One of the difficulties in reconstructing millennial temperature records is aligning the data temporally. Virtually all single-location reconstructions show a strong warming peak prior to the 20th century and Little Ice Age, but the period of warmth varies greatly from location to location, by up to 700 years. This is most easily seen, oddly enough, in an interactive graph promoted by skeptics of AGW.
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
Rolling the mouse over each graph expands it. As you go through the chart, you can see that the peak of the warm period in one location might be 850 AD, whereas the peak in a different location may occur at 1400 AD. And in the years it is warm in one location, it is cool in another.
This is antithetical to Jo Nova’s posit that local reconstructions of the MWP are temporally coherent. While many places do exhibit temporally coherent warming/cooling, many others do not.
Meanwhile, the majority of Northern Hemispheric reconstructions (there are few global reconstructions) centre on the notion that the temperatures of the last two decades are likely warmer than during the MWP. Personally, I don’t think that this matters much in terms of the AGW debate. The world has been hotter and cooler in the past. No one is denying that. We are interested in the radiative effect of significant increases of atmospheric CO2 (40% over 150 years so far), how the biosphere responds, and whether or not something should be done about it. The relative warmth of the MWP doesn’t speak much to that.
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But if it was warmer in the past with no co2 ‘forcing’, then there is nothing unprecedented about the current warming period. If it’s not unprecedented, then it’s likely not from co2, and we can all go back to doing what we were doing before.
Personally I think the world could do without inefficient, expensive energy sources and misallocation of human and resources capital towards building solutions for problems that don’t exist, when there is no shortage of real problems that can do with solving.
Whenever you see a windmill or a grid-connected solar panel, or a desalination plant instaed of a dam, or even millions in grant money going to climate studies instead of medical research, you’re looking at the effects of people chasing up the wrong tree.
The fact is none of the current misallocation of capital could have happened without the ‘smoking gun’ of a hockey stick to work with. No hockey stick, no unprecedented warming. No unprecedented warming, no basis for saying current warming is anything but natural in cause, effect and scope.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and every investment choice means something else that didn’t get invested. WHen you throw good money, time and resources down the drain then you make everyone poorer.
If you have trouble visualising this concept, think of a giant space death ray that had been built to counter the threat of unwanted alien beings. Imagine this was funded by taxing every working person on earth. The people who built and ran the death ray would be very happy. Everyone else would be thinking they could spend the money better on their own choices.
THe Kyoto protocol was supposed to be redistributing $100 billion a year to help developing countries ‘deal’ with climate change. The international space station has cost $100 billion to build and deploy, and has/will greatly advance the state of knowledge of humans. If you diverted the wasted climate change money into space research, you could be building 1 space station per year. Instaed the money was supposed to be handed over to countries to do whatever they wanted, when not one single person or country can definitively point to something and say ‘this happened because of climate change’.
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Barry,
If it were all only left to academia as fascinating research we’d not need blogs like this. But if you haven’t noticed this is well beyond “whether or not something should be done about it”. We are smack dab in the middle of global economic “forcings” that are truly unprecedented. All of this based upon a theory that a very small amount of Co2 (40% increase of a very small number is still very small) is responsible for dangerous warming. The people responsible for the scare regularly point to today’s temperature as “the warmest ever” and offer that as iron clad proof of the theory.
The relative warmth of the MWP isn’t what this is about, it’s about finding a signal of a natural temperature curve perhaps solar, perhaps as yet unknown. something that could help us determine with some confidence that today’s temperatures are not rising abnormally and that the climate system is perfectly able to operate no matter what the co2 dial is “set to”.
A significant number of very capable scientists have offered alternative theories that make co2 nearly insignificant. We need to understand much more than we do before we implement stupid taxes or manipulations of energy sources.
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Y’all should stop jumping for glee and consider the fact that about a 100 years ago there were no cars in the world, and today there are more than 650 million cars. Consider the emissions from these that did not even exist in the past.
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Dear Mr God,
How quickly You forget Your own creations.
Before cars there were millions of bison roaming the plains in North America, all belching forth copious amounts of methane.
Before cars there were tens of millions of horses all around the world, similarly belching forth methane.
Consider the emissions from these which to a very large degree do not exist now.
Things change.
I would have hoped after an eternity (or two) You of all people would be able to grasp that simple fact.
I suggest You check out Ecclesiastes 3, versus 1 to 7 in YOUR book.
Sheesh – people having been singing this stuff to You for nearly 2,000 years, one would have hoped You’d heard by now. –
No wonder prayer doesn’t work.
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Be carefull memoryvault, maybe, just maybe, this might be…you know who?
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So? I used a capital “Y” for “You” and “Your”.
That’s surely worth Brownie points?
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To follow on from Mark:
Just 200 years ago, 1 in 5 children would die in Europe, before their first birthday. That figure increased in cities to 1 in 3. Those that survived had an average life expectancy of around thirty five years (twenty years in the cities).
The daily calorie intake for the average Frenchman was just 1,660 – just about what it takes to sustain life, and probably less than half your daily intake today. Having a low calorie intake affects growth, and the average Frenchman stood at 1.64 metres.
Most people died of typhus, dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, leprosy, starvation, accident, or in battle. Dying of old age was almost unknown, even for the rich.
My choice of 200 years for a snapshot was quite arbitrary. The above situation had existed for centuries, and would continue until the start of the Industrial Revolution, which provided the technology to develop medicines, and produced energy to pump clean water, remove sewage, transport food, warm living areas, provide stable employment, et cetera.
You bleat about cars, but did you know that gasoline was originally a byproduct of oil production for industrial purposes? People didn’t invent horseless carriages and then start pumping oil to power them.
Of course, we could theoretically wind the clock back a couple of hundred years, and live as our ancestors lived just ten generations ago. But our remaining life expectancy would be measured in months rather than years.
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I remember once reading a book that gave us our basic rules to live by, subsequently emended a few thousand years later, that has served us rather well. The part that was not emended was a direct order from god.
Go forth and subdue the Earth, This I have always taken as make the Earth user friendly and a more hospitable place for our existence. So my god, we are only following orders from a higher authority.
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I like to consider how just one of those cars (heavy duty Dodge Ram 1500 with 4 wheel drive and 15MPG) makes travel so much easier……..That makes me jump for glee too.
Of course we could challenge y’all by asking you how much longer y’all will live compared to those born 100 years ago.
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if anyone has any money here’s Barnaby’s Canberra Times column
and I might add if the Govt weren’t so interested in bashing Aust banks to pass on the RBA interest rate cuts our money might be safer; if the Aust Govt weren’t borrowing so much money the borrowing costs might be less for Aust banks. A reduction in the cost of money is no use if no one can get access to it
and this applies also to persons who have savings in the banks
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4 billion years ago the planet’s surface was 1000 degrees C. The current warmth is definitely not unprecedented! CO2 levels have also been much higher in the past, in the order of thousands of parts per million (currently about 390 ppm).
The concern is not that the climate is changing or that CO2 concentrations are changing – that happens naturally anyway. The concern is regarding the rate of CO2 injection into the air, the rate of warming, and that rapid climate change may have severe deleterious effects on the modern world. Tens of thousands of years ago we could just pick up and leave if the climate changed. Now we are land-locked, and our water and food infrastructures for billions of people are built on the implicit notion that the climate will be stable.
Simplifying the argument does not make it go away, unfortunately. It is a risk management issue, like military expenditure. We don’t now what the future holds, but we should be prepared for it. The range of possibilities run from a little discomfort to a serious threat to our way of life. Pollyannas want us to spend less money on the military because they argue that it is not in Australia’s interest to get involved in international efforts, and they implicitly believe that no threat to Australia could possibly materialize.
A well-known skeptic and qualified climate scientist, who often rails against the IPCC, puts it best I think. Roger Pielke Snr says it’s not because we know what will happen in the future, it’s because we don’t know what will happen, that we should make efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions. Those who downplay the risks of climate change are simply embracing a small portion of the risk assessment and preaching isolationism on an international issue – a bit like the pinkos who want us to downsize out military.
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Well Barry, your post reads like a fair and reasonable argument, but I see a fundemental flaw in it.
You say…
The trouble with analogising military expenditure with AGW is that WE KNOW FROM HISTORY both recent and distant that military precaution principle is justified.
Even Australia, for all it’s isolation was attacked less than a lifetime ago.
Now if you can show me historical proof (like we can show with military threats) that a rise in global temperatures will be a danger to us, your analogy will have merit.
Until then, not so much.
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Bah,
History is replete with (regional) climate-induced food and water shortages and the severe impacts that had on societies. But there is no historical analogy, obviously, for a global population of 7 billion people with societies in the tens of million strongly dependent on stable food and water supply. For that we must defer to the science. But we do have evidence of science making successful predictions based on observations. Perhaps the best example is the hole, or rather ‘dent’, in the ozone layer – in that they got the cause right and the international community successfully worked together to mitigate the problem.
If scientists predicted a 25% chance that an asteroid the size of a small town would hit the Earth in 40 years, potentially causing devastation to one quarter of the globe, you’d think an international effort would be made to avert the potential disaster. The scientists couldn’t tell you where it would hit or what exactly the impacts would be, or who would be worst affected, but there would be sufficient cause for the international community to hedge its bets and figure out a way to remove the threat. The argument that asteroids hitting the Earth have never hurt anyone before wouldn’t really cut it.
I note from comments below that people seem to have a problem with the whole notion of risk management – as if you have to know exactly what will happen before you can act. Most government decisions are made against best estimates, not sure knowledge. Most policy can readily be seen as risk management. So why do people think the climate change issue should be predicated on certainty?
As far as I can tell, a lot of people just like to whinge and rant. There is a highly vocal, well-documented campaign against the idea and implications of global warming – a campaign which relegates science to a grab-bag of highly selected views to give the campaign a semblance of authority, and this is eagerly lapped up by people who hate Labor or have libertarian tendencies, or who are more straightforwardly concerned with their bank balance. What is generally missing from this milieu is a dispassionate appraisal of the full spectrum of scientific understanding, and an uncritical enthusiasm only for any opinion, scientific or otherwise, that confirms the preferred POV. It is a successful campaign in that it has gathered people to it and, like a planet accreting matter, the spin has accelerated. The miasma of distortions and misrepresentations of the science is now self-reinforcing.
These misnamed ‘skeptics’ will endorse one study against scores of others and laud the insight and integrity of the author, while denigrating the probity and perceptiveness of the rest, despite having not the first clue about how to scientifically investigate the issue themselves.
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STILL don’t see a “Plan B” Barry.
So I ask again, in accordance with your interpretation of “risk management” and the “precautionary principle”, now that you have created the current situation, what is your intended course of action if you’re wrong?
Just for the record, my view of “climate change” is pretty much based on what I learned in high school 45 years ago. NOT because I don’t read the new material (from both sides) – which I do, but because NOTHING has changed, NOTHING has happened, NOTHING is happening, or is even likely to happen based on current observations, to suggest anything different is taking place.
Climate is cyclical – get used to it.
Also for the record, I make a large part of my living devising risk management solutions and procedures for multi-billion dollar refineries and multi-million dollar power stations.
I can assure you my definition of “risk management” – and that of my clients – is decidedly different from yours.
If I started literally “putting all my (clients) eggs in one basket”, based entirely on the output of questionable and unverified – and increasingly wrong – computer models, prepared by people with a vested interest in producing a predetermined outcome, and in direct contradiction of all observed empirical data, then I would very quickly find myself very much unemployed.
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Exactly. Funnily enough, we’re told AGW will induce……regional food and water shortages an severe weather impacting on societies.
We’ve gone from a mere a few hundred millions to 7 billion despite those severe climactic events. With modern wealth and technology we should be scared? Not a chance.
Yes there is. See my above reply. Mankind has ALWAYS been dependent on stable food and water supply. We coped when we were less able. We’ll cope better now and better still in the future. History of mankind prooves that ever since fire was first harvested, we set off on the road to escaping the extremes of climate. We are well experienced with weather as a species. (check out your air-con or your heater) I have no fear whatsoever.
Google historical extreme weather for China when millions at a time would die. Compare that to the floods and droughts they’ve coped with recently due to their rising capacity with newly acquired wealth ON THE BACK OF CHEAP ENERGY.
Big difference between Astronomy and climate science. Astronomers will know to a high degree any trajectory of an asteroid. PREDICTION IS POSSIBLE/PROBABLE.
Now I’d ask you to link to A SINGLE INSTANCE where the IPCC says they “predict” as oppose to “project”. In fact they’re at pains to insist they DON’T PREDICT. Go ahead, do a search.
Moot point. Who ever said past extreme weather events “never hurt anyone”?
But look at your own statement about an asteroid strike. We are now capable of possibly averting such an event. ALL DUE TO OUR ADVANCES. 50-60 years ago we couldn’t.
The same applies to weather extremes. If you think it doesn’t, I’d be interested in hearing why.
Well….now you’ve totally lost me as a debating partner. If you think the pro-AGW side hasn’t been “highly vocal, well documented campaign” FOR the idea of AGW, then you’re exhibiting the very complexes you’re complaining about. Mirror, meet Barry. Barry, meet mirror.
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Bah,
so you agree that there are historical precedents for severe impacts on societies due to climate change (“Exactly”). Good. Then the military analogy wasn’t such a long bow.
BTW, are you aware that various militaries around the world (Australia, US, UK) are planning and funding contingencies for global warming? They’re taking it very seriously. You reckon they are staffed by greenies? They are doing exactly what they should do in response to a potential threat.
Your argument seems to be that we can adapt to any future climate change, because humanity is capable – but only if it has access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy.
This sounds little bit convenient, don’t you think? The implication is that decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels will make us vulnerable. Is there historical precedence, then, for the deliberate weaning off energy sources causing societal calamities? The closest I can come to is the unleading of petrol or the banning of CFCs. No civilizational disruption with those efforts. Should I be alarmed about the prospect of reducing dependence on fossil fuels? Is economic Armageddon upon us or something slightly more subtle?
I probably have more faith in human ingenuity than you do. On the other hand I have about the same faith in human politics as most people commenting here.
There are plenty of formal economic studies on the cost/benefit of adaption vs mitigation, and they almost universally agree that mitigation will be less expensive. I can’t work out the truth of the matter for myself – I’m not an economist – so I tend to defer to the experts. Who do you defer to?
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Barry your tune has changed a bit from the days of:
Apparently you were a bit disingenuous about the “whether or not” part of your earlier post. WTF do you think we are stupid not to notice?
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What we have here barry is…
How could you miss the point so badly? I’ll present it another way.
Gillard and Brown didn’t lobby for a new defence tax.
Nor did we climate tax ourselves at any time in the past, but we are here 7 billion strong.
Now you are displaying naivette.
The military top brass aren’t stupid. The top brass in fact are more politicians than soldiers, that’s why they’re top brass.
Their job is to ensure the military is well funded. They see billions being thrown around, they get in on the action.
Whilst there is no (perceived) threat, military budgets get cut.
I’ve had the good fortune to get to know many “real” soldiers, corporals, captains etc from the Enoggera Barracks and I can tell you catagorically that none of them believe climate is a military threat.
Say what? Nothing to do with convenience. It’s an historical fact. I gave you China as a recent example. If you think this was just “convenience”, direct me to a fact where mankind coped better with extreme weather in the past compared to modern times.
Now you’re wasting my time. Unleading of petrol didn’t lead to one less litre burned. Banning CFCs didn’t lead to one less person with a fridge.
If you tell me how you’d cope without motorised transport or a fridge, that would be relevant.
That’s not what your comments reveal.
Now you’re talking chapters 2 and 3 of the IPCC report and the Stern report.
I happen to have both and I happen to have been one of the people involved in the Citizens Audit of the IPCC report and my experience tells me that WWF and Greenpeace activists are not experts, but advocates to be wary of.
I too am not an expert, but I spent the time and effort to research the matter, so I defer to my own judgement.
As for you, you have 2 choices.
Either you can accept environmental activists as experts and take their word for it, or you won’t accept them as experts, raise an eyebrow (like a true sceptic) and find out more before you “defer” to anybody. Reasonable?
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Baa may I agree: climate change is not a military threat.
May I also suggest that “climate mitigation” is a very serious military threat? Also a sovereignty threat, a Constitutional threat, and a personal freedom threat.
Caveat Emptor……
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Bah,
And the Garnaut report, the German Institute for Economic Research report, Watkiss et al (2005) and a brace of US studies.
(I think you mean WG2 and WG3, not chapter 2 and 3 of the IPCC?)
I haven’t actually read IPCC WG1 and 2 (I have read and re-read WG1 – the science basis). The weight of opinion that I’m aware of is from economic experts, not IPCC or WWF. Would you like some links?
So you defer to your own, inexpert judgement of the IPCC (but presumably not the Stern Review?). I am not persuaded, but I sincerely applaud your honesty. It’s refreshing in these climate debates. Too many people exceed their intellectual reach by orders of magnitude.
We can’t trust the military to be a good barometer of potential threats, and their decision-making is strongly influenced by pecuniary interests. I stand corrected. Now I feel like a pinko. That’s exactly what they say. Would you say that our military is over-funded then? (I wouldn’t know)
Re coping with climate in the past:
I note that our indigenous communities seemed to cope very well with harsh conditions and extremes. Our modern society suffers more when flooding and drought occurs exactly because we have locked-in infrastructure. Did you notice what happened to bananas lately? A 400% increase in price due to flooding out almost the entire crop. If mid-range projections for the Oz climate come true, then we are looking at agro-economic disruption on a much wider scale in the next 30 years or so, and getting worse over the century.
Modernity brings many great things with it, but it also brings vulnerabilities that more ancient peoples didn’t have to deal with. They could move when the climate changed. If the coast of Bangladesh becomes submerged and millions of people displaced, that will place a lot of pressure on communities further inland, and probably in neighbouring countries. We’ve already had wars over water and have problems with refugees. A rapidly changing climate could well exacerbate these issues. China certainly has greatly benefited from cheap energy, but that has occurred during a period of climatic stability. It is difficult to assess the impacts of modernization on disaster prevention and relief in that country, but I would assume a positive corollary. Both the greatest and the fewest mortalities associated with extreme events occurred before the boom. The comparison doesn’t work – and it would take a considerably detailed study to resolve the question.
Global mortality from floods and droughts has decreased markedly over the last century, indicating, in light of larger population concentrations, that we have adapted extremely well through technological advances to these extremes. But the rate of climate change over the last century is not as strong as projected, and we are barely beginning to see the effects of climate change, according to the experts. Mortality from extreme temperature events, on the other hand, has markedly increased over the century. Other natural extreme events, mudslides/avalanches, wind storms and wave surges have seen a moderate increase in total deaths, but a decrease in death rates.
http://www.csccc.info/reports/report_23.pdf (Not IPCC)
I doubt I’m telling you anything new. The main point is that of the clear majority of (not IPCC) formal cost/benefit analyses of climate change, mitigation is far less costly than adapting. I’m not convinced that Australia’s coming tax on carbon is going to be ruinous. We survived the GST with a 2.5% increase on the cost of living, didn’t we? I will watch with interest, as will the rest of the world, the impacts of this carbon tax.
I’ve done a bit of research on this myself. Much more on the science than the economics, which make my eyes glaze. If you actually got through the entire Stern report, kudos to you.
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“I haven’t actually read IPCC WG1 and 2”
Should be WG2 and 3
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need to edit a sentence…
What is generally missing from this milieu is a dispassionate appraisal of the full spectrum of scientific understanding. They have an uncritical enthusiasm only for any opinion, scientific or otherwise, that confirms the preferred POV
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Dispassionate as in Hansen?
How about uncritical as in Mann?
Give me something to work with Barry! Otherwise I’ll have no choice but to slot you as a warmist (and maybe troll).
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Of all the unmitigated crap that I have wasted precious moments of my life ploughing through, this must surely take the cake. Where oh where to start?
The only actual measurable, observed effect of the increased CO2 (regardless of cause), has been the measured and observed increase in plant growth. So unless you’re expecting an invasion of Trifids there’s not much to worry about.
As for the “current rate of warming”, the current rate is zero, nada, zilch. Even if there had been any for the last decade, it couldn’t be attributed to CO2. The “warming effect” of back-radiated energy from CO2 (even if one actually believes in such “Alice in Wonderland science”), is logarithmic, and has already all been pretty-much used up.
Perhaps it “may”. But anything approaching cognitive reasoning ability would tend to suggest that any warming will have the same effect on life – including humans – as it has EVERY OTHER TIME IT HAS HAPPENED IN RECORDED HISTORY. That is, it will be beneficial.
Exactly when and where has the world’s climate been “stable”? The very history of humankind is the history of the forced migrations, wars and invasions, and mass starvations of “cool” periods, and the expansions, trade, and general well-being of the masses during “warm” periods, and the fairly regular, cyclical fluctuation between the two states.
And if it were really possible for humans to pull a King Canute and “stabilise” the climate, what should be our reference point?
I happen to like the weather just as it is here on Bribie island at this time of the year, at around 11.00am in the morning. But my friends in Hobart Tasmania would probably prefer it a bit warmer, and I know my associates in Darwin NT would like it a bit cooler.
Since no matter what temperature we “stabilise” the world’s climate at, where is our reference point where THAT climate remains what it is? Because unfortunately it is still going to be hotter, AND colder elsewhere, depending on location and altitude.
And we haven’t even started to consider rainfall yet.
Yes, and there’s far more OBSERVED data suggesting we are entering a cooling period, than there is supporting the cultist belief that we are entering a period of “runaway warming” which has little going for it other than increasingly apparent faulty computer models designed by people who apparently can’t even put together an Excel spreadsheet.
Barry, if the world really was getting warmer, dangerously warmer, the truly prudent thing to do would be to build more base-load power stations. That would give us the power for air-conditioning, refrigeration, water desalination, and all other things we would need to survive.
Conversely, if the world was getting cooler – as observation suggests – the prudent thing to do would be build more base-load power stations. That would give us the power for domestic and greenhouse heating and all the other things we would need to survive.
So tell me Barry, now that you and your ilk have created a world totally bereft of surplus power-generation capacity by tilting at windmills for twenty years, plus a world with no surplus food-generation capacity, having diverted to biofuels, what exactly do you intend to do if, shock, horror, it turns out that the world is, in fact, now entering a cooling phase?
Barry, now that you have committed hundreds of millions to a slow, agonising death by exposure and/or starvation if it is in fact getting cooler, just what exactly do you intend doing about it?
I’ll put it to you simply Barry. If it turns out you and the other cultists have been wrong, what’s your “Plan B” to undo the damage you have done and avoid being recorded by history as the greatest genocidal mass-murderers of all time?
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memoryvault, your Post #59.2 was utterly beautiful, I dearly loved it.
And to comment on this statement by you, to wit:
Right you are. I do not believe it is possible for anyone to measure the heating/warming effect of the lesser quantity of gas (CO2 @ 389 ppm) in a mixture of two different gases when the quantity of the greater volume of gas (H2O vapor @ 20,000 to 30,000 ppm) is constantly changing from hour to hour, day to day. Especially when said greater volume of gas (H2O vapor) has a potentially 239.2 greater “warming” potential for said mixture than does the lesser volume of said gas (CO2) in said mixture.
Anyway, ……. all claims made by proponents of CO2 caused AGW are “rooted” in the “fuzzy math” calculations being employed to derive monthly/yearly changes in Average Temperatures via use of a highly questionable 130 year data base of extrapolated, interpolated and/or Recorded Temperatures.
If the Average Summer Temperatures had been increasing at the same rate as the Average Winter Temperatures during the past 130 years, which they should have been if atmospheric CO2 is the culprit, then 100+ degree F days would now be commonplace throughout the United States during the Summer months. But they are not commonplace and still only rarely happen except in the desert Southwest where they have always been commonplace.
Now, instead of saying that “the Earth is warming” it is more technically correct to say “the earth has not been cooling off as much during its cold/cool periods or seasons”.
Given the above, anytime the earth’s yearly average calculated temperature fails to decrease to the temperature recorded for the previous year(s), it will cause an INCREASE or spike in the Average Temperature Calculation results for that period ….. which is cause for many people to falsely believe “the earth is getting hotter” …… and thus to make false claims such as “hottest month on record” or ”hottest year on record”.
Cheers
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Barry,
Military risk is quantifiable, as is business risk (when it is done properly). It comes down to a series of questions:
“What situations could impact production at Factory X?” “What is the probability of each of those situations occurring?” “What would be the per-day cost for loss of production for each situation, should it occur?” “What would be the overall cost of remediation for each situation, should it occur?” “How much time would remediation take for each situation?” “What combinations of situations could occur, and what is the probability of those combinations happening?” “What investment is required to avoid each situation occurring?”
The same applies to military risk, you just replace “situations” with “tactical initiatives”, and “production at Factory X” with “the planned strategy”. From there it is just number crunching – computer models – yum.
Now, do the same thing with Climate Change … hmm, not quantifiable in the same way that business and military risk is.
Enter the “Precautionary Principle” which basically says, “We have no show of understanding how any of this climate stuff really works, or what could go wrong, or how bad it could get, or how much damage would be caused if some of it went a bit haywire, or how much it would cost to fix, or any of that stuff.” “So all we can do is to spend a heap of money trying to avoid every possible combinations of events that could cause some, as yet undefined, unwanted changes to something we are not quite sure about.”
Put in those terms, is the demand for action around “Climate Change” (or whatever the term du jour is currently) the correct approach for a rational person to adopt. I personally think not.
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I really do want the following quote from ‘Barry’ to be put on a T-Shirt. It is the most fatuous, idiotic, meaningless, absurd, bird-brained, ludicrous, peurile load of BS I have ever heard come from the catastrophists:
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!!!!
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Now that is a moniker…
It’s been in the teens (Fahrenheit) here the past few days and everyone is sniffling, guess we got hit by one of those rockets. 🙂
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The precautionary principle, taken too far, is just another name for paranoia.
We don’t know what will happen tomorrow so let’s be terrified, and plot strategies from the fantasies of the paranoid?
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Steve, I find this interesting. I do use the precautionary principle to the best of my abilities (this includes financial). For example I do pay for a whole variety of insurance. I find that governments have no right to decide for me what thing are important enough to apply MY MONEY towards.
I hope the difference is clear, paranoid or not.
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Great intelligent comments here! Anyway, I see two main debunking points on AGW: 1. current temps are not unusual (no h. stick), and 2. CO2 shown only to be a result, not a cause, of warming. These 2 served (and serves) as the central foundation of AGW. This study should add more support for point 1.
Someone graphically inclined could do a 30 sec. spot where the h. stick morphs to the actual “now is not unusual” record. Continue with trace gas CO2 being shown to be only a result of warming (do faster, but idea is in this ~3 minute GW Swindle excerpt [which shows Gore to be full of it!]), and CO2 is dwarfed by the variable sun oceans etc. A website that gives full support for the claims would be noted.
I know there is other impt stuff to mention, but here in maybe 1/2 minute you can send a pretty decent torpedo into the bloated AGW hull.
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The killer blow is actually a low 2XCO2 as per Spencer and Lindzen’s respective direct measurements around 0.6–0.7 C/doubling. Which is middle ground to your #’s 1 and 2. (Those who read this blog’ll also know I’d cross checked S&B 2010 by an independent method & found 0.7 C using the CET).
The point with these empirically measured values is they kill CAGW stone dead. You have to increase pCO2 by ten times to exceed the IPCC’s arbitrary danger number of +2 C. Not possible unless we import whole methane seas from Titan.
The point about this is the question ‘if not CO2 then what?’ That is where Svensmark et al comes in (although I’m not completely convinced he’s exactly correct…but I think he’s close). Most of the temperature rise in the 20th C, which is the main training period for the models, is due to these indirect solar magnetic effects, plus a bit from ocean cycles – neither of which are included in the models. And like all good models missing a significant variable they smooge the other covarying parameter to fit the data…so, CO2 becomes the bad guy. Anyone with multivariate stats experience knows this.
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Great to have your reply Bruce! The thing is — and I know that you’re 100% right and what you say is the killer blow — but I wonder, what about complexity? We need to hit the public with something simple. Maybe greater complexity, or secondary or bolstering points could be on the support web site.
Anyway, moving away from the short video idea, for web comments and the like, I think I’ve got it down to a compact easily repeatable pattern, which others could spread. It is this:
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yes, the logic of AGW is killed stone dead.
But i once tried reading Kuhn’s book on the nature of scientific revolutions. It was appallingly badly written, even worse than one of my student efforts.
What I got from his idea is that once a scientist makes up his mind he never changes it, even if the evidence comes in in superabundance. He will become a die-hard.
A new generation of younger minds will face the evidence but the die-hard will not. He will have to die off of old age before his dissent is stilled (and no i am not advocating persecution of AGW fantasists 🙂 ).
This I understand is how the believers in phlogiston left the field of scientific endeavour: not by repudiating their error in the face of all the evidence, but by the natural attrition which will claim us all in time.
I expect this to be the case with all those who have invested their egos in AGW, the Mann’s the Hansen’s etc.
So while we may reach people in the street the ivory tower egos wedded to this fad will not be reached.
Or so it seems to me
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Steve, it’s more than what you say about the old guard. The “climatologists” I think have understood that they are PR people, that push for what the leftists want: de-industrialization to whatever degree they can achieve. “Science” here does in fact require quotes.
I think the Ivory Towers are nearly 85% leftists, and not our friend now, unfortunately. It’s not science for them; it’s ideology, PR, and admitted and often obvious deception. We have to reach the man on the street… to effect policy, and also to cut the funding$ to the climate quacks.
Part of the Ivory Tower strategy is to try to make it seem complex. The basics don’t have to be complex. We can win over the public.
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You scored an own goal here (and Joanne did offer that argument a few times too).
If the CO2 concentration tracks temperature, then it should be dropping now, since it is argued that “it has been cooling since 1998”. And yet the CO2 concentration keeps climbing at about 2 ppm a year. How do you reconcile the two?
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An own goal?
From where i was sitting in the grandstand it looked like Eric danced around 6 defenders with all the wizardry of Harry Kewell and deftly slammed the ball into the back of the net.
As far as i am aware the “denier” position on this is that CO2 lags temperatures by 800 odd years so it would come as no surprise to them to see CO2 and temperatures heading off in two different directions. However the warmbots are the ones that would have us believe that a molecule of CO2 released today will increase temps tomorrow.
An own goal? Maybe you were the keeper and you got a finger nail on it?
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So, are you arguing the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 100 years or so is caused by warming that took place 800 years ago? And that somehow, all the CO2 we produced by burning fossil fuels magically finds its own sink?
We’re doing an uncontrolled experiment on our own atmosphere and you guys (I don’t call you ‘deniers’, I prefer the term ‘cornucopian’) say it will have no effect. Maybe you’re right, then maybe not.
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This actually points out a problem with the science being too specialized. If you gave the graph of the temperatures to an electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer, the first thing they would do with it is run a spectrum analysis, see if there are any periodic components to the data, and then try to identify what those might be.
We need more cross-discipline eyeballs on these things. Something that might completely escape a “climatologist” might be immediately obvious to a physicist.
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I agree and the “specialisation” is being pushed lower down the educational tree every year. At a base level there are only three fields of study for natural science, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. Climate science is really only the application of these fields of study to the climate system, eg Atmospheric Pysics. likewise for “environmental science”. 40 years ago only the basic fields of study were taught at school and at undergraduate level at most university. Scientists would then specialise with post graduate studies. We now have the situation with things like “climate science” and “environmental science” being taught even in primary schools. All they can be being taught about these complex areas at such an educational level is the dogma of the day. Surely this can, therefore, only be an exercise in propaganda.
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Now that I think about it, since Hansen is not a climatologist, he is an astrophysicist, this might have been obvious to him all along.
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I suspect it was, and I suspect it still is. There is money to be made in the political arena, but in the laboratory, not so much. And Hansen is, above all else, a showman.
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Technically Hansen isn’t even a scientist. He has a BA, MSc and PhD in mathematics. His background is in computer modelling not physics.
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Technically speaking, his lordship isn’t a member of the house of lords.
There. Now we’re equal.
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I’ve just posted a belated reply at 25.1.2 to this post about Huon Pine by observa at 25 which some may miss, but I think would be interested in seeing so the link is below.
“observa
December 8, 2011 at 11:31 pm · Reply
Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
I’d suggest a great place to start in Gondwanaland would be the Huon Pine in Tasmania.”
Johm L Daly: Talking to the Trees in Tasmania
http://www.john-daly.com/huonpine.htm
——————————————————————————–
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Barry @ 59.
“The concern is not that the climate is changing or that CO2 concentrations are changing – that happens naturally anyway.”
“We don’t now what the future holds, but we should be prepared for it.”
Barry, IMHO, you have inadvertently condensed some of the main arguments of most sceptics of CAGW and put them very succinctly!
We do know however, that natural disasters will continue to occur in the future no matter what the cause.
Billions of dollars have already been wasted on trying to sheet responsiblity home to one factor, rises in human-induced CO2 under the pretense that by limiting emissions we can somehow control climate or temperatures and in the process setting us on the road to dismantling trusted power and energy sources and destroying industries and economies.
Further trillions of dollars are available and earmarked in part to finance heavily taxpayer-subsidised inefficient uneconomical ‘renewables’ .
Let us instead spend money on increasing living standards for the poverty-stricken people of the world and trying to prepare for whatever calamities we know are sure to come.
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Strange is it not that some science in the western world is being strangled by a tyranny, and the countries with a tyranny of old have freed their scientists.
The Chinese scientists have no axe to grind and can call a spade a spade and not a manual earth moving device that is approved as carbon neutral in its operation.
I have no problem accepting this finding by the chinese as it rings a little truth bell, and my BS meter is placid.
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That would be strange, if it were happening. The Chinese (and others) in Durban have said that they will not be part of any agreement with legally binding targets. At the same time a chinese journal publishes a rehash of a 2009 paper suggesting that recent temperature increases are not unprecedented, and that temperatures will fall until well into this century.
So a Chinese journal publishes work by Chinese scientists supporting the position of the Chinese government, and your BS meter doesn’t register?
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Why would you ask that John, yours obviously doesn’t register when your government does the same type of thing.
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Take a look a my graph at:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2010/10/1470-year-do-events-transition-from.html
Using a much longer ice-core record – The last two (-6 and -7) and next (-8) 1470 year Dansgaard–Oeschger (D.O.) warming events STARTED at:
800 B.C. – with temperatures reaching maximums around 600 B.C. (200 year rise)
680 A.D. – with temperatures reaching maximums around 1100 A.D. (400 year rise)
and 2150 A.D.
In addition, there are secondary warm peaks at 200 A.D. and the present.
In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period [typically a few hundred years].
Wikpedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
Figure 4 of Liu Yu et al.’s paper shows that the 1324 years long term warming events peak at:
680 B.C. – with long-term temperatures reaching maximums 350 B.C. (~ 350 year rise)
620 A.D. – with long-term temperature reaching maximums around 920 A.D (~ 300 year rise).
and 1900 A.D. – with long term temperature reaching maximums around 2200 A.D. [obtained by extrapolation of their period)
Other than the roughly 100 year shift, I suspect that the 1324 year cycle that Liu Yu et al. (2011) are finding in their truncated tree ring record is really just the is the 147-0 year DO phenomenon.
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Ninderthana, this is interesting!
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I’m an idiot and do not understand the Power Spectrum Analysis graph – it must be important, but it means nothing to me yet. What is power density in the range 0 to 7 and what is frequency in the range 0 to 0.5? Can someone here enlighten me about this Tibetan mystery.
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Richard Pearson, it is possible that both of us are idiots and I’m pretty sure a few people here are certain about me. I’ll take a crack at answering you and I’m sure others will do a better job.
The graph you ask about is the various frequencies that have been teased out of the data by using a Fourier Transform. You might benefit by reading here about the process.
Essentially, for this tree ring study they found significant amplitude (power) at the frequencies indicated on the “Power Spectrum Analysis” graph, buried in the noisy raw data. These frequencies are then used in the “decomposition” graph #4 as the gray, red green and blue plots.
Anyone else care to slap me silly for that layman’s explanation please feel free.
[edit done]ED
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Thanks for this.
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Carl #47
Can you refer me to an article or papers on the sunspot and volcanoes stuff you mention (jsr at ecofluidics dot com).
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Yeah, I’d like to see this too.
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How can one possibly find a statistically significant 1300 year cycle in 2500 years of data? That right there makes me think I won’t even bother reading the whole thing. Aren’t there *any* standards involved in getting this stuff published?
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Kevin
Methinks you may find it helpful to enrol in Statistics 101.
The data (to which Mark D. describes in #68, above) is analysed computationally against specific formulae. The results are not contestable.
Cheers
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That is kind of meaningless Bruce. It is easy to analyse something computationally against specific formulae and come up with rubbish. I think I’m with Kevin on this, if you have 2500 years of data, then claiming to see a 1300 year frequency pattern is a bit rich – because you don’t even have two full cycles, so there really isn’t a good reason to believe it will repeat in the next 1300 years.
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Also have to agree.
A good rule of thumb is to discount signal components in time series when those time series are not known to be stationary (certainly the case, because the author talks about a number of non-episodic events) when they are less than four or (some prefer eight) times sampled. In other words, in say a 2400 year series, most folk would not attempt to assign significance to cycles of greater than 600 years and conservatives would be wary of anything greater than 300.
Some other points to note.
They used a Hanning window on the data. They had to, to minimise artifacts due to the fact that the method effectively wraps the end points together. Thus the 20th century and BC components of the signal are largely non-contributory.
They detrended the data to remove the upward trend (which they say agrees with the IPCC estimate). They had to for the same reason as above.
Stage 4 of figure three is of different duration (shorter) and yet is already high, so does not reflect a strictly periodic oscillation. And the last 400 years, to my eye shows much less of the 100-150 year quasi-oscillatory behaviour, variability like stage 1 (no obvious trend despite the line on the graph) but with a sharp upward trend. On top of that, the red line (the 1324 year line is matched to the phase 2 and 3 years and underestimates to phase 4.
Mostly what I see is not inconsistent with late 20th century warming; some evidence of quasi-cyclic temperature fluctuations.
I guess it will be incorporated and cross checked over time.
Although it rather suggests that late 20th century warming is having an effect, the method was conceived to concentrate on earlier times where cycles (if they existed) would be complete.
Second Lastly. One really needs to be careful when using a method that requires data to have a specific property, as a means of proving that it has that property. Fourier transforms assume that (a) the data segment is complete, (b) that is is composed of only fixed frequency oscillations (c) with no presence of frequencies lass than twice the sample rate. To take this paper as proof that this is the case with our current climate is pure question begging, and not the intent of the authors.
Lastly. I did enjoy the irony that Fourier of the Fourier analysis, is the same Fourier as first observed CO2’s potential as a greenhouse gas.
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Pretty sure I intended to refer to Figure 4, panel 1 here.
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IPCC’s Feb. 2007 statements and forecasts –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/feb/02/greenpolitics.climatechange
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I have looked through the rest of the posts (and links) for information on efforts to validate there results to no avail, maybe I missed it. I have just read “The Hockeystick Delusion” by Montford. I guess most here would know the sorry story. Mann et al in 98 published the peer reviewed MBH98 paper. Sometime later Steve McIntyre tried to replicate it and encountered every trick in the book to stop him doing so. Could someone more on top of it than I clear up the following about the this new report.
It was produced in 2009 why the delay?
Is the base data freely available and is it adequate?
Are the methods used to derive the results freely available?
Mann used Principal Component de centring is there any similar gotcha?
Has it been replicated or about to be?
Why has it not been better publicized?
I not trying to discredit this and have no agenda it is just my skepticism kicking in. Oh for the day when we can write about the weather and not have to worry whose fault it is.
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OT but might be of interest:
Recent article by statistician Grant Foster Tamino
Global temperature evolution 1979–2010
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044022.pdf
it’s absolute nonsense!
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Please explain.
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on page 6 Tamino shows in Figure 6. “Trend rates from various starting years to December 2010, for all five adjusted data sets”. Yet the chart only goes to 2005…….does he call that science?
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And on page 4 the explanation.
I too think the cation text could be better. 2005 is start years, Last day in analysis is 30 Dec 2010.
This assumes some intelligence on the part of the reader. That in no way whatever invalidates the paper itself.
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Ridiculous claim. One very small country does not make a “climate” standard for the rest of the world. Nor does any of the data gathered negate any of of the other science that has well-proven the recent era of climate change effects.
Nor is temperature decreasing (anywhere). The deceptions in this article are actually rather staggering. Talk about cherry-picking the data. The egregious violation is pretty normal for climate skeptics.
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[snip] really?
ED
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[…] Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels. READ MORE […]
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[…] Chinese 2,485 year tree ring study shows natural cycles control climate, temps may cool til 2068 […]
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Did anyone notice that 198 onwards is the prediction?
But 2008 was not the highest temperature.
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Pick a year. 2005? 2009?
They’re all up there.
2010 warmest La Nina on record?
Every one knows that warming stopped in
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Nice Chinese paper, though not the first to do a periodic analysis based on tree-rings. Charles Egeson was laughed out of the Sydney Observatory in the 1890s for suggesting that climate could be linked to solar activity cycles. Facts are scarce, but Egeson probably died in an insane asylum. Beware riding the climate-cycle. You could well run into a brick wall. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086776/?tool=pubmed
More recently, West and Scafetta have also suggested solar variability as a big driver of climate. http://goo.gl/6csfm
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Thanx for that Egeson link Dave, fascinating.
You may be aware of the legend of Inigo Owen Jones, another Australian long range weather forecaster.
If not, try this link to a talk at the National Archive by Tim Sherrat,
And this link to a pdf by Ian Holton of Holton Weather Forecasting about Inigo O Jones.
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When this was first posted, I did not notice the left-hand units on the graphs.
Those are not +0.3C down to -0.2C. Those are FULL degrees centigrade. The high-to-low range shown in Figure 5 is FIVE FULL DEGREES CENTIGRADE. That is 6 times higher than the range of MBH98 (1,000 years) and about 3 times higher than BEST (100 years).
Now, since China in other reconstructions shows no anomalous regional variations, what are we to make of the DEGREE of warming and cooling shown in this study?
Does it mean that this study is wrong? That the other reconstructions are wrong? That someone somewhere misplaced a decimal?
For me, the thing is that I have had trouble reconciling an approximate 0.8C range with the MWP and the LIA, not to mention the RWP and the Bronze age WP. Knowing how much the daily temps vary, a 0.8C or 1.0C variation over 100 or 1,000 or 2,485 years seems like “So what? You can’t even SENSE that little bit of change from one hour to the next, and you people expect us to believe it created the WMP and LIA?” I mean, “Huh????” I mean, you don’t even have to put on or take off an undershirt for 0.8C or 1.0C. Who is stroking whom, ladies and gentlemen?
Add in the Vikings grazing cows on Greenland, which sure ain’t a-happenin’ now, Baby, and you’ve got an AGW crowd run amok over nuttin’. It is an absurd mountain made out of a molehill.
But THIS study has numbers I can actually accept. A FIVE C increase? Yeah, that sounds like it could create a LIA or MWP. Perhaps both.
And I DO love the steep(er) slopes in that Figure 5 for earlier warm-ups.
AGW itself is one of those “Move on, folks, nothing to see here” things. Essentially, we have been having to defend modern civilization against a sky falling when the sky hardly even dipped down a bit. All because these activist wackos have made the world scared of 0.8C. Ooooh, I am SO SCARED!
All I can say is, “WTF???”
But this study shows a magnitude of warming I think is close to real. Thank you, Liu et al.
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#74 –
(So-called) IntelligentObserver, you show your lack of intelligence when you say,
Oh, really? Not “anywhere”? Anywhere, as in no exceptions?
CO2science.org used to have a feature every day with a city or town somewhere in the world, with its temperature history graphed. They had enough of those to change it every day – for places where the temperature was cooling.
And it is never warming, at any time, anywhere?
Not, like, in the last 11+ years over the whole globe (15 years by some reckoning)?
Where have you been for the last decade? And not from 1940-1970? Or from 1880-1910? Being alarmed? Cowering in your storm cellar? Putting your seaside house up on stilts? Cutting your carbon footprint to zero?
Please, pull your head out of the sand and stop making ludicrous, untrue, un-intelligent statements.
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[…] From Joanne Nova: “A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that […]
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I think we need to coin a new term; “Global Cooling deniers”.
This would apply to all those who deny that;
1/The climate is now cooling (very obvious from the data)
2/Projections from many scientists in many fields now show a cooling trend is likely until at least 2040.
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[…] Jo Nova has details of another Chinese study, this time in Tibet. This seems to come to similar conclusions, as this graph shows. […]
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This appears to give similar results to a 2006 study of climatic fluctuations in China.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/chinese-study-confirms-mwp-and-lia/
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I am not a fan of treating data mechanically; since computers have replaced paper, pencil, logs, and slide rules, an element of judgement seems to have withered (historically, one finds “elegant” solutions to math an physical problems- because number crunching was really tedious. )
Just LOOK at the data: temperature spikes historically come from, one can infer, catastrophic events having massive effects over very short periods- sometimes a few generations. Core samples from everywhere confirm this, as does our knowledge of the past. Allowing for the tree rings to be representative of something, somewhere- there is NO PRIOR PERIOD exhibiting a more or less gradual temperature ramping for 400 YEARS !
I don’t wish to debate the validity of the analysis; I am INSISTING that the pattern of the last 400 years has no precedent; and any math treatment must be viewed with skepticism.
I’ve heard that statisticians claim there is no such thing as a “streak shooter”: anything viewed as such could be demonstrated to live within the realm of “normal”, therefore treatable. I would like to hear such a statement from a scientist who may have also been a phenomenal shooting guard.
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[…] Chinese 2,485 year tree ring study shows natural cycles control climate, temps may cool til 2068 (JoNova, Dec. 8, 2011): A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, […]
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I do wish sunspots were the only factor. One that is actually a concern for today, is changes in the ocean currents, past changes led to very ugly temp changes, and precipitation changes, and it looks like we are just now entering the realm of those changes as the ocean currents have indeed already changed.
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Jo, a most interesting find.
I agree with your assessment of what makes at least this skeptic reluctant to consider more tree-ring analyses. Advocates of AGW have, time and again, admonished the skeptical community about how our “evidence” against AGW isn’t “global” in nature, that it does not (to their satisfaction) reflect worldwide coverage. Yet the most vocal advocates (odd that the names Mann, Jones and Gore are among those that always seem to come up) and many of their followers are clearly not so willing to apply that same standard to their own research (the solitary tree in Yamal, for example). What has become evident is the highly selective nature of “Climate Science” today, with its particular brand of repetitive cycles of data analysis not so much for assessing any possible trend in “dirty” data, but removing data to force a trend to be evident, as well as data “adjustments” that are not documented.
My background, training and most extensive professional experience in in engineering. Having a “follow the facts” basis as it does, and using all the data (and getting more when there clearly isn’t enough). Tossing data because it does not conform to a pre-conceived notion is not only a very bad plan, it can cost a few or a few few thousand lives. That’s why engineers are generally licensed, subject to stringent ethical codes, and extensively check not only their own work, but have others independently check it as well. The safety of the public is in the hands of engineers when they design and oversee construction of buildings, roads, bridges, dams, etc. With the proper checks and balances, true engineering failures are rare. Many have been due to a failure to acknowledge that we — society as a whole, and engineers in particular — do not know enough about the world we inhabit, the materials that we make, and so on. “Climate Scientists” appear to hold themselves above such mundane things as uncertainty. Perhaps above ethics as well?
The only problem that remains is that there is no independent repository of baseline global temperature data available to skeptics and AGW advocates — and everyone else. With only selective, incomplete garbage available (e.g., Jones’ so-called “value-added version,” for which there is crappy documentation) in the hands of advocates to dole out as they please, and that they may continue to “adjust,” again apparently on a whim, no one will ever really know how the Liu, et al., projections compare.
Of course, there may also be issues with the current gridded calculation of global mean temperatures, with so much emphasis on interpolating the temperatures in grids hundreds or thousands of miles of actual temperature records, but that’s a debate for another day.
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See New Zealand tree ring data for the last 1,100 years.(Palmer et al 2002)
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO. 14, 1667, 10.1029/2001GL014580, 2002
MWP clearly shown, along with little ice age in 1600.
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Yawn. I have more faith in the scientists than in the fossil fuel industry that is determined to protect their future profit (and executive compensations), businesses that depend on uses of fossil fuel, and people, especially non-scientists, who are determined not to give up their energy intensive and polluting lifestyles. If anyone is a liar, it is you who refuses to acknowledge your selfishness and irresponsibility and tries to deflect attention from your behavior by insisting that there is a well-financed conspiracy to take away your right to continue doing what you damn please! If you are honest, you’d admit it, but you are afraid that if you are honest, then you’d have to either accept that the scientists are on to something serious and make uncomfortable and even painful adjustments or be labeled an hypocrite! The heat, drought, storms, changes in the ecosystem in the last 10-15 years have convinced me that AGW is real, and the dishonesty or stupidity of the deniers has disgusted me greatly. I have made adjustments to reduce my carbon footprint and managed to live fairly comfortably. If I can do it, so can you if you will stop thinking only of yourself!
(This is a hostile baseless name calling and factually unsupported screed that did not try to address the blog’s post content at all which is mostly based on a peer reviewed science paper.Therefore your ugly comment stays in the moderation bin) CTS
[No more from you “Gary” until you name and explain the paper that deniers– deny, or apologize. Jo]
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From GaryR:
I used to drive some people nuts at work by saving all paper which had a blank side, to use at home. That was 20 years ago and I have just used up the last of it recently. In a broader sense I can probably list 50 ways in which I am “green” (yuk – I hate that term)!
My sister won environmental awards in the 1990s with her reusable cloth shopping bag campaigns. Recently she told me that the AGW theory was nonsense.
See Gary, people can be “green” yet “denier”.
The use of “carbon footprint” (another dreadful term) is stupid because carbon dioxide cannot be pollution because you, I and animals exhale it.
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All the Anthropological Global Warming hypothesis ever had was some circumstantial evidence; i.e. the globe was warming, and CO2 is rising. This has now disappeared because the globe has entered a cooling trend. There never was, and is not now any evidence at all for dangerous, human caused climate change.
What is happening in the world today?
Are sea levels rising? No; falling rapidly at 2.5mm/per year.
Globe warming? No; its been cooling for the last 15 years.
Any reason to suppose AGW may have caused the rise in global temperatures, 1979-1998? No; This rise was exactly like the last two.
Are any IPCC models/projections correct? No. All projections made so far have been completely wrong.
Reduction of rain forests due to AGW? Not happening.
Polar bears disappearing? No, Populations are increasing rapidly.
Greenland and Antarctica ice is melting? Nope, net ice mass is increasing; so are ice flows.
Any evidence for positive feedback of CO2 in the climate system? No.
See any evidence for the model-predicted CO2 greenhouse fingerprint in the troposphere? No. Troposphere is cooling.
Hurricanes increasing? No, they are at an all-time low.
And so on and on it goes.
If you list every dire prediction, or any prediction at all made by the IPCC or any alarmists (or scientists who are AGW proponents), you will find that they have been right ZERO times.
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[…] rapporterar om en kinesisk studie av tibetanska trädringar som sträcker sig 2500 år bakåt i tiden. Forskarnas rekonstruktion […]
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found an interesting paper that shows a good predictive formula for ~30 year cycles in the past ~100 years:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/predictions-of-global-mean-temperatures-ipcc-projections/
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[…] south during the Maunder Minimum and further north during the MWP. These are known to have been global termperature events, not just regional, providing at least anecdotal evidence for a solar effect on […]
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[…] past 2485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau, 09/2011, LIU Yu; read more here. “The long-term trends (>1000 a) of temperature were controlled by the millennium-scale […]
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