Joint Post: Jo Nova and Tony Cox
Even most skeptics agree that the world has been warming during the last 50 years, but there is apparently no significant underlying warming trend in 46 out of 47 years of data. Something decidedly unusual happened to the world in 1977 and we don’t know for sure what it was. The world got warmer, and the change “stuck”. But there were no extra emissions of CO2 in that year, so there is no reason to pin this to CO2.
It’s difficult to believe we are not sure – but the last 50 years of warming trend depends on that single stepwise leap in 1977. Look at the graph below. Does it show one strong underlying warming trend, or is it really a trend so insignificant that it wouldn’t exist if there was not a step change that artificially bolstered it?
A series of two flat lines can appear to be a continuous warming trend if a linear trend line is fitted because it ignores the step change. McKitrick and Voselgang
This step effect was first noted by David Stockwell in 2009
The continuous warming appears to be obvious in the records of the lower atmosphere when we draw a linear trend line.
McKitrick and Voselgang (click to enlarge)
But look again at the data, allowing for the step-change in 1977.
McKitrick and Voselgang (click to enlarge)
The problem with step changes is that two flat lines with a rising step change will artificially produce a rising linear trend that is meaningless. McKitrick and Voselgang[i] account for the step change and show that significant warming trends in the low to mid troposphere only occur from 1958-2005 if we include the step-change. If the step change is removed, the underlying trend is not significant. In other words, 46 out of the 47 years of atmospheric data do not produce a meaningful rising trend.
If CO2 is having an impact on our atmosphere it is impossible to say with any certainty what that effect has been.
[i] McKitrick, R. and Vogelsang, T. J. (2011), Multivariate trend comparisons between autocorrelated climate series with general trend regressors, Department of Economics, University of Guelph. [Discussion paper PDF]
I am getting bored. The globe can be getting warmer or colder, but the idea that the human contribution from burning carbon fuels has anything to do with it is not only IMHO the biggest political and intellectual fraud ever – but so says the IPCC itself: http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.com/2011/10/west-is-facing-new-severe-recession.html. The ongoing discussion pro and con is becoming akin to the scholastic argument as to how many angels can dance on the head of a needle. Which is, of course, exactly what is intended to achieve worldwide disorientation away from the actual IPCC aims of monetary and energy policies – and bringing a whole, if not all, of science into disrepute. Even the UK Royal Society has become Lysenkoist.
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I’m bored too Michael.
It doesn’t seem like anyone is really thinking creatively about what the nature of the Earth’s climate is about anymore. We’ve lost our native curiosity and our sense of wonder.
It’s not about the urge to know how nature works anymore. It’s all kultursmog now. And that’s really sad. I’m hoping that blogs like Jo’s can somehow return us to a sense of awe and excitement about the vastness of what we have still yet to discover about the world.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a scientist, but I worried that everything would be discovered before I could grow up. Now as a cranky old bastard I know the wonders will never be exhausted, the surface hardly scratched. I wish I could impart how mysterious the world really is to any young person reading this. Because, I know children today are taught what to think rather than how to think.
The science is not settled. Nor can it ever be.
We’re so obsessed with the single parameter of global temperature in what is a multi-dimensional non-linear system that we’ve come to assume that’s what the climate is all about–regulating the Earth’s temperature. This is a melodramatic over-simplification of nature and it now obscures any path towards a deeper understanding of how our climate works.
I remember listening to a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose (the English physicist) asking what the bloody hell is human consciousness. He said did NOT know and was pretty sure that all the so-called experts on the topic couldn’t possibly know either. Why? Because we don’t even know what an electron is all about, much less something as complex as human consciousness. Sir Penrose reckons we’ll never be able to understand really complex phenomena in nature until we unify Classic Physics, that which describes our macro world with the ultra-micro world of Quantum Physics. The chaotic gap in between the two domains of rocket trajectories and electron valence is where most things occur and that’s precisely where our science is still almost medieval.
Something like this is true about climatology as well. We ask: Is the Earth warming or cooling? The answer: That’s the wrong question, dude.
The fact is you can get whatever answer you like depending on where you choose your starting point for your graph…So the question is political rather than honest curiosity.
We simply do not grok the first principles well enough to describe what is going on today’s climate, much less predict the future.
Armed with the awareness of our utter ignorance, we must return to “the great moral challenge of our age” again, which is….
What should we, as a nation, do about future weather?
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You just admitted that you have no clue what the aggregate causes of climate change are, and yet you expect government to spend tax money and penalize industry on the off chance that it will have a positive effect?
Get back to us once you have actually done some good science and can make actual falsifiable predictions. So far all of the AGW supporter models have predicted nothing, and do not work when used to predict past weather and are then compared to real past data.
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I am not sure if the “You” refers to Wes, in which case you misinterpreted what he wrote, or the generic “You”. Just sayin …
But in answer to your last point. It would appear that the climate models do “predict the past” reasonably well – it is called “back-casting”. It is done using algorithms that have been “tuned”, and “adjusted” by various constants and non-linear variables to make them “predict past weather”.
There is nothing wrong with this approach because it actually helps the researcher to understand just how much they still need to learn. Each constant needs to be explained, the cause of each non-linear variable needs to be identified – areas of research, yet to be explored.
Where they move over to the dark side is in trying to extrapolate from the modelled past (which by definition is imperfect), into a modelled future, that is then treated as a prediction, by those who wish to change society for their own purposes.
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Exactly, Rereke.
In fact, they can’t make a good past prediction without fudging their model, which says a lot about the invalidity of the underlying theory.
You can make any theory fit reality briefly by adding fudge constants. This does not mean you have a clue about what is really happening.
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Your post Wes is really deep philosophical thinking.
I couldn’t agree more.
The whole issue of climate is just so wide ranging it can never be modelled accurately, never fully measured with any great accuracy,with infinitely variable parameters never predicted so far in advance.
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A New Hope: Star Wars caused global warming.
The warmists’ sad devotion to their ancient religion has not given them power enough to conjure up the missing heat and the positive feedback.
(And yes I wish you’d posted this yesterday so I could make the old cliché date pun.)
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“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.”
―Obi-Wan Kenobi senses Alderaan’s destruction.[
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This is just one of endless variations of “its not warming”. Or, “It is warming, but because it doesn’t track CO2 there must be some other reason”.
As for the analysis, did you choose the step at 1977, or did the algorithm choose it? Was the option of more than one step change considered? Since there is nothing special about 1977 (except that Elvis died), why would there be a step change there? Actually, I’m not sure that there is nothing special about that time. Isn’t that around the “great climate shift”?
When you are fitting a curve, the more parameters you use the better the fit you’ll get. A line of best fit uses 2 parameters, intercept and slope. The step fit uses 4 parameters, the value before 1977, the size of the jump at 1977, and the value after 1977, and the choice of 1977 for the step change. With 4 parameters you’ll get a better fit than with 2 parameters. There is a statistical test that allows you to compare fits taking into account the number of parameters. Was this test applied to see if the step function is actually better than the linear fit?
Anyway, I reckon that the step change won’t be much better than the linear fit, if at all. Anyone with spare time and a bit of statistical nous want to have a go?
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“I reckon that the step change won’t be much better than the linear fit” – agreed. Plus the linear fit has the decided advantage of a solid explanation based upon well understood physics, namely the response to increasing greenhouse gases. What’s the explanation for the step-change? So far we have Elvis and Obi Wan Kenobi.
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…namely the response to increasing greenhouse gases.
And of those greenhouse gasses Mick, what is the % of CO2 ?
And of that minimal % figure, how much is man made ?
And of that minimal % figure how much does Australia produce ?
Do you see how hopeless you guys are sounding !!!
Give it up ! We are going to win, the scam is up boys, go home to the Polar Bears ! 🙂
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If you go to this link you will see that this climate shift has been discussed quite a bit. This was when the PDO changed from it’s negative to it’s positive phase. The PDO has changed back to the negative phase in the early 2000s. This may be the reason that the temperature rise has satlled and may be reversing. Time will tell if this is part of climate puzzle.
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No no, you can’t cite the PDO because that is predominantly a Southern Hemispheric phenomenon.
We are discussing the global climate here. /sarc
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When the PDO is positive temperatures go up, when it is negative they go down period.
The big picture is a 1/2 degree per century rise with a sine wave caused by the PDO.
In 1998 we are a little above the 1/2 degree warming in 1978 we were a little below it.
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John: observation comes first, explanations are always secondary. If a step change is observed, it’s no good discounting it because we can’t yet explain it. Was it Elvis’s fat corpse decomposing that produced the necessary heat? Very probably not, but that doesn’t mean the explanation isn’t out there somewhere. I guess you’re of the mind that there is no need to even consider an alternative explanation to CO2. The science is settled, eh? Heh!
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You mean the maximum 1% extra greenhouse gases due to the increased CO2 has a measurable effect?
Water vapour the *the* greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. What has happened to that?
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It was all Kerry Packer’s fault. He launched World Series Cricket in 1977 and the planet was never the same again.
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Why 1977? Too easy Johnny….just more shenanigans from Tony Abbott. What an evil little gremlin he is..
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Brookes:
Really JB this MUST be bugging you bad…….All that hand waiving.
Careful, you don’t want to injure a wrist.
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The data chooses the step fit!
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Lazy bastards. All I ask is that someone do the maths to back up the “step change’ claim, and no one does. No one even adresses the idea. If I have time, I’ll try and do it myself…
Whats worse, is no one even picked me up when I said that a step change had 4 parameters. Its obviously only 3. Still, if you use 3 parameters, you can fit a parabola, so I might try that one as well.
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Lazy bastards JB?
I`ve got 3 kids to bring up, a house to run and a garden that needs maintaining because it keeps raining this stuff that Flannery said would never happen again!!!
I certainly aint gonna worry about some silly steps that you think change the whole ball game!
You warmistas are incredible, clutching at straws is all you have left!
It`s almost time to feel sorry for JB, Mick Buckley and Co.
But I dont! Let `em squirm… keep it coming guys…
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I think The Black Adder has given you your answer John. He ain’t gonna worry about your silly steps, so why waste your time on it.
I came here thinking I might learn something about the skeptic position, but I’ve become very cynical very quickly.
Comments like The Black Adder’s above are all too common and betray a closed-mindedness which is astonishing.
I thought about doing David Evans’s work for him and plotting an up-to-date temperature series on top of the IPCC temperature curves
from the FAR. But given that Jo won’t even engage with the straightforward point made by Matthew England it didn’t seem worth the effort.
But hey, I dare say there could be lurkers whose minds are less closed than many of the regulars. Go ahead and fit your curve, although I believe
a continuous non-differentiable function, two straight lines with different slopes that meet at 1977, might turn out to fit even better.
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Brooksie & Mick Buckley
JB comments:
Mick comments:
Why are you always negative and angry all the time – the repetition of your attitude above in only 2 comments is consistent throughout this forum! You aren’t interested in the science, the debate, the environment! No – you only want to justify the CO2 Tax – more money – it always comes back to the money for jam for you both!
Environmental issues you do not debate or get involved with – only false data, graphs, accusations etc – but not true environmentalism – explain how the molecule CO2 is classified as a pollutant! You encourage Wind Farms – biggest destruction of local species of all energy sources, Solar Farms – massive uptake of arable land to produce a trickle of electricity! Fence off all these areas and they become sterile species (plant & animal kingdom) experiments that should be banned. Even MattyB agrees that nuclear & coal is a better alternative to the garbage sprouted by you both in previous threads.
After 20 years plus of your anger telling us of hotters heats, wetter floods, drier drys – the world gets on with producing food (of which you couldn’t care less) and as a result this:
And also please stop with your continual assessment of those who come here as inferior to your own knowledge – SNOBBERY – I think they call it. You should try to continually learn every day – not get stuck in the rut that you both find yourself in!
There is info on all sites and this is one that I enjoy greatly – but I still read the SMH and visit The Drum!
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Dave asks, “why are you always negative and angry all the time”? I guess you see me as negative because I hold views which are different from yours. I’m not angry and I apologise if my comments appear that way to you.
You say John Brookes and I are not interested in the science and that we should try to continually learn every day. Yet in his comment John is asking for someone to do the maths, and in mine I say I came here thinking I might learn.
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Mick,
No problems – thanks! Works both ways!
Yup!
No! He called everyone Lazy Bastards and demands a response – Not very civil of JB!
Then you follow it with “but I’ve become very cynical very quickly” – so vitually your mind is made up because of your percerption of the coments here – and I remind you of the very same reasons that you stated above! But don’t demand please!
That’s all fine – I accept your right to a difference of opinion – but don’t ever tell me to accept it because you know better! 🙁
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Mick’s whinging that no one can be bothered to answer his question and Johnny’s “lazy bastard” remarks are a farcical version of inverting the burden of evidence.
Fact is…. Warmists are suppose to be answering the questions, not the skeptics.
Apparently, some Warmists are so daft they think it’s the skeptics job to falsify the AGW hypothesis. Nothing could be further from the truth. All skeptics are required to do is ask pertinent questions that serve as tests for the hypothesis. Then the supporters of the AGW hypothesis must provide strong evidence their hypothesis provides useful insights into the nature of climate.
If the Warmists can not answer skeptical questions usefully by referring to their hypothesis. It’s game over. That’s the way the scientific method works. It designed to keep researchers honest by culling early hypotheses that aren’t useful.
*
If you reverse the burden of evidence, anyone could hypothesise anything.
Someone could even hypothesise that…. “Aliens cause global warming.”
When a skeptic observes….”Hey, that seems pretty bloody unlikely!”
Johnny and Mick’s would demand… “Oh, Yeah? demonstrate that Aliens don’t cause global warming, or are you a lazy baaasturd???”
Mick can run around in circles yapping… “Answer my question!, Answer my Question!, Answer my Question!!!!”
When we inevitably fail to show Aliens didn’t cause global warming, but remain skeptical nonetheless, Mick with a sense of self-righteous superiority claims:
What’s astonishing is Mick and Johnny’s ignorance of how science progresses.
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wes, skeptics asking pertinent questions – sure I have no problem with that. But skeptics basing their criticisms on errors and misprepresentations, not so much.
I’ve raised the issue that the graph by David Evans in the ‘ABC biased …’ thread is a misrepresentation of the IPCC’s Figure 8. There has been little coherent response. So in my comment above my reasoning went thus: if I can’t get anyone to discuss David’s errors (plotting straight trend lines instead of curves, shifting trend lines up and down the graph, plotting the wrong temperature series) then why should I invest more of my time.
I’m still interested in skeptic responses to David’s errors. I’m going to show willing here and get things started. I’ve done a bit of science but I’m pretty new to climate change, and by no means a climate scientist. Nevertheless I think this is a better graph of the IPCC FAR prediction against observed temperatures. It bears comparison with this misleading graph constructed by David Evans.
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To help people along I have annotated the David Evans graph to show the mistakes as I see them.
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Mike,
Your annotations of David Evan’s graph is very revealing about why skeptics view climatology as pseudo science.
1. Surface Temperatures v lower tropospheric temperatures.
As a beancounter (accountant) I like to reconcile figures. That is to account for the discrepancies. Skeptics like Jo Nova. The surface temperature records have consistent “adjustments” that brings reality into line with the models. Whatever excuses you can conjure up, as an accountant I would say that they fail to offer a “true and fair view”.
2. Trend lines should not start at the origin.
So you disagree with standard forecasting? That is you start with the current position.
3. Trend lines should be curved.
Agreed. This is for simplicity. See next point.
4. Trend lines should be further apart.
Are you saying that the climate models have a wider predictive band of 0.75 celsius over 25 years? If they were straight lines, over a century they cannot get within 3 degrees. Put in curves and the range would have been much greater.
There is a way to narrow things down. Get the original climate models from 1990, plug in actual CO2 data, and see how it stacks up. This is what proper scientists do. Pseudo-science just gets evermore insular, dogmatic and intolerant.
Compare Mike’s annotations with my comments here.
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Oh dear, I just had another look at that step change, and its actually got sloping lines before and after the step change. That makes 5 adjustable parameters. What a joke.
Anyway, just for fun I compared linear and quadratic fits (2 and 3 parameters respectively) and linear is much better than quadratic by the Akaike information criterion. If Jo or Tony give me the source of their data and the equations of the lines and the location of the step, I’ll apply the Akaike information criterion to the step model.
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Hi JB, I think that Wes George has made a vdery pertinent comment at http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/has-co2-warmed-the-planet-at-all-in-the-last-50-years-its-harder-to-tell-than-you-think/#comment-1059312
If you are looking for a pertinent sceptical question – how about one of these.
Could you please provide a valid link to a current independent (i.e. Non UN, Non Environmental Activist) audit report on the work practices of the UN IPCC, which holds that organisation to account to ensure that it is producing it’s reports in accordance with it’s own stated practices? (i.e. not using grey literature, etc).
Could you please provide a link to the Conflict of Interest Policy of the UN IPCC, which would have been adopted to ensure that, as much as possible, the staff at the UN IPCC would act in an objective manner that is not influenced by external parties such as the WWF, Greenpeace, Goldman Sachs, etc.
Could you please provide a link to the statements of funding (including the years in which that funding was made) that the UN has made to directly investigate global warming caused by natural variation, as distinct from “Man Made Global Warming”, as I would like to know how much of an effort the UN has made to ensure that as an organisation it was not being subject to confirmation bias.
The UN IPCC claims that it captures the results of all the best climate scientists in the world, can you please provide a link to the criteria by which the UN IPCC judges/selects scientists to be the “best climate scientists”. Are you able to provide a link that demonstrates that the criteria (if they exist) are in fact a valid method for selecting the best climate scientists.
Could you please provide a link to the policy/memo of the UN IPCC that defines a way of working to avoid organisational group think. I would like to know that the UN IPCC is operating in a manner that represents the best practices of mature organisations.
I look forward to your answers.
Thanks – ExWarmist
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i have to say i agree…
I should add..that the global mean temperature is not a good variable…we don’t even know if higher global mean temperature of lower troposphere really means more heat there…
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You’re not being one of those “Lazy Bastards” now are you? 🙂
This would be true, John, if you were adding parameters to a function that could take on different shapes, like a polynomial. Here, however, what they are doing is decomposing the temperature series into two functions that are not equilivant: a Straight tilted line, and a horizontal line with a step (as shown in the first graph).
However, if the underlying (noiseless) data is a linear increase then the tilted line will fit it perfectly (with the right intercept and slope), but the horizontal stepped line will always have a finite fit error regardless of the two levels or the position of the step. When you add measurement noise, the tilted line will have a fit error entirely due to the noise variance, but the stepped model will always have a higher fit error.
Conversely, if the underlying data is a horizontal line with a step, then the tilted line will always have the larger fit error.
This is analgous to a Fourier decomposition, where you determine how much of each of a set of sine waves with different frequencies is the data.
True, they should have taken the analysis a step further and shown how much of the data variance was explained by each function, but the point is: If the data didn’t have a step in it, then adding the step function wouldn’t have improved the fit.
This is a perfectly valid method of looking for the presence of a step in a data file, and is done here with a lot more honesty and transparency than Michael Mann did in (mis)using a related method (Principle Component Analysis) to fake a temperature record from bristlecone pines.
But when the “analysis” goes: “We can’t think of any other reason, so it must be CO2” you’re OK with that?
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BobC astutely points out…
That would be an example of the logical fallacy of “arguing from ignorance”, and since graduating from the Warmist domain – I like to pay attention to avoid using logical fallacies.
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I’m late to this conversation but inadvertently or otherwise Brooksie has hit on a key point; that is statistical significance without correlation to phenomena which may explain that statistical significance.
The McKitrick analysis should be read in the context of this paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1650v3.pdf
Here the break which McKitrick isolates is explained by reference to well documented natural events; these natural events, massive alterations in oceanic upwelling, provide a cogent and consistent explanation for the also well documented temperature step in 1976-7; and also the temperature pause in 1998.
This break in 1976-7 has also been recognised by the AGW establishment:
http://cbe.anu.edu.au/research/papers/pdf/wp495.pdf
But, as usual the significance of this break has been twisted by the demands of the AGW theory as is noted here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/garnaut%e2%80%99s-second-update-sceptics-are-the-white-swans/
Do try and think about these things John instead of just parroting the rubbish at SkS and Deltoid.
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Very interesting. If there is indeed a step change about 1977 that accounts for the assumed significant linear trend since 1960, then I suggest a simple test to verify its effect. What happens if you split the data into two sets of data, from 1960-1975 and 1980-present, and graph them separately? If the two graphs – both excluding a 4-year period around the apparent step change – do not show any significant increasing trend, that would be a pretty clear indication that the period 1976-1979 represents an anomaly.
I know this is similar to what McKittrick and Vogelgang’s graph shows, but it might be more obvious if we isolate the period immediately surrounding the step.
It would be interesting to extend this analysis further back, allowing for the varying availability of accurate data. It may be that claimed long-term trends in temperature actually follow the same pattern of long stable periods with short step changes that mimic long term variations.
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Patrick, we could do what Skeptical Science does and split the data into several regions of decreasing temperature with steps between each one….
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ERR… Jo. I thought that the science informed us that increases in CO2 followed planetary warming by a matter of several centuries.Thus the increase in temperature over the last 150 years concurrent with an increase in CO2 is correlation without causation, as the CO2 increase could be a result of the MWP combined with industrial emissions and therefore nothing to do with the recent, now ceased and probably reversing planetary warming.
What am missing
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What am I missing?
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Jo, I’m glad we’ve got back to blog posts with graphs in them. I’d like to remind your readers that commenters have found errors and misrepresentations in recent graphs and statements by you and David Evans, but you have failed to address the issues raised.
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@Mick Buckley
May 5, 2012 at 8:20 pm
You fail to address questions asked of you in previous blogs about lies you make up like this one:
You make whacky, mis guided, unfounded claims that there is evidence of ‘negative impacts’ of cO2, but can not show ONE example.
Stupid resident troll Gee Aye adds nothing but unicorn spotting in a failed attempt at a ‘drive-by’ in your defence.
Where is the evidence of negative impact of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and, what evidence do you have that cO2 has ‘negatively impacted’ the climate change ‘so far’?
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Handjive, there are many. One example is drought. These aren’t my words, they come from NASA. “An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area.”
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LoL… He gives Drought as an example. Flannery would be proud…. So proof for the AGW hypothesis is: Drought, Flooding, Warming, Cooling, Cyclones, No cyclones, Malaria, Hemorrhoids, Baldness……
Give it a rest Mick… There is no evidence that CO2 is anything more than a good plant fertilizer.
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Jokes aside…. Are those Nasa statements using data from satellites or from surface stations?….. Because if it’s surface station data then they are probably just measuring air conditioner heat and aerodrome tarmac temperatures….(adjusted of course)
Anthony Watts has plenty to say about the surface stations sitings that collect that temp data…. and it’s not good.
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Most of Anthony Watts concerns about station siting etc. were addressed in the BEST study. At the time of the study Watts himself was so impressed with their approach that he said he would stand by their results whatever they were.
It was only after the results were announced (BEST data is in very close agreement with the data Watts criticised) that Watts turned and started to attack the BEST project.
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Mick, you are recycling tired arguments about BEST that have already been dispatched into the deepest carbon sequestration repository we can find. Need a refresher course?
See also responses by cohenite and Jaymez in that thread.
But top marks for recycling. It’s the green thing to do.
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Do you mean NASA where Hansen works?
How about NOAA:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/the-ipcc-1990-far-predictions-were-wrong/#comment-1057932
Look at the graph, follow the link
Buckley, your mind is full of crap.
P.S. to ED, thanks for posting the graph!
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Dorothea MacKellar has a poem for you Mick. Written sometime in the 1890’s I believe. Google it like I did eh.
Perhaps the highly educated Mr Garnaut and Mr Flannery could read it also.
Kneel.
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“I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains,/Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of droughts and flooding rains.”
Nice poem. I take it you welcome more frequent extreme weather. I don’t.
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In time the Alarmists will change this poem to:
“I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and Climate Change.”
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Huh!
Why not!
Labor started the move to change the wording of Advance Australia Fair.
Tony.
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Not only read the poem but also check weather event records such the BOM data that plainly show there has been no change in the severity or frequency of floods and droughts in the “sunburnt country” since European settlement when atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were at pre-IR levels of about 280 to 290ppm.
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Can be read at http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/
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Hi Mike,
Here in Britain, on the BBC there have been a couple of interesting programmes about climate change in the Sahara. It seems that for a few thousand years the Sahara was savanna, supporting a cave-dwelling human population, ostriches, elephants and lions. In the wet seasons they were even temporary, vast lakes. About 7000 years ago the climate changed, and the the population moved to where the water was. Most significantly people moved to the narrow fertile strip by the Nile. This lead to the creation of the Egyptian civilization. But the most surprising thing was the statement that this was dramatic climate change was accompanied by a drop in temperatures.
On the other hand, in Al Gore’s book of the film “An incon truth”, there was a page showing changes to rainfall patterns in the last century. Generally rainfall had increased with rising temperatures, though a minority of areas show increased drought. So if we are seeing more extreme climate, and if Gore represents the mainstream, then were should be seeing more rainfall records than drought records. The net impact on populations should be positive.
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The archaeological records of occupation of Australia’s interior and marginal lands clearly shows that people moved in and out rapidly. Many parts of Australia were much drier for longer during these cooler periods than now.
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Dear Mick, not even the UN IPCC believes that there is any sort of substantial link between MMGW and growth in extreme weather events.
REF: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
From the ref.
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handjive said…
I re read the exchange to make sure I didn’t create the wrong impression. I simply pointed out that your line of logic was flawed and was a poorly constructed argument. Please point out where I supported the thing that you were doing a bad job at arguing against. Also please do it in the thread in question. I’m sure others would appreciate that.
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@Gee Aye
May 7, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Quote: ~ “I simply pointed out that your line of logic was flawed and was a poorly constructed argument.”
Reply: Suggest you take that up with Mick Buckley and his subsequent illogical answer; drought.
He is the one with flawed claim & poorly constructed argument: “Given what we already know about the negative impacts of the relatively modest climate change which has occurred so far…”
Your reply is a unicorn. You obviously understood the questions’ substance, despite my ‘bad’ comprehension & use of the english language, but failed twice to provide any evidence to support what you defend.
Quote: ~ “Also please do it in the thread in question.”
Reply: *Mick Buckley May 5, 2012 at 8:20 pm, Quote “…but you have failed to address the issues raised.”
Simply held MB to task for what he demanded of others.
Checking his response on original thread, all I see is you complaining about comprehension, and you can not provide one example either.
And still can not.
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thanks… Mick Buckley’s reply might be fanciful but I didn’t take him up on it because many already had and I took you up because you specifically mentioned me.
Your holding to task, as you put it, did no such thing as your argument was flawed. I think you can’t grasp that I can state this and yet not agree with Mick. You can’t rebut a stupid argument with a stupider one.
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just one extra bit I left off the previous post…
regarding this
Why are you telling me to do this? Can you point me to the place where I said anything that I need to substantiate with an example like this?
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What a useless post! Mick, you really think you’re on to something? How about you stay on topic and discuss THESE graphs?
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Fair enough. I didn’t really intend to start up a sizeable off-topic discussion. All I wanted to do was to remind readers about Jo and David’s serious errors and misrepresentations in earlier posts. Commenters have picked up mistakes which would be embarrassing to a high school science student, yet in replies Jo has repeatedly failed to engage with the points raised. One of the commenters pointing out errors was Prof Matthew England, a climate scientists with an impressive publication record.
When people like this come onto your blog I think you have a duty to respond to what they say. I think this is relevant because it speaks to Jo and David’s reputation.
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I think Jo has responded to all the “issues” you and others have raised. If you don’t agree that’s fine but don’t continue this garbage that Jo and David should feel ablidged to keep repeating the facts as they see it.
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Ross, I beg to differ.
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Hey, Mick
You didn’t provide the link to the part of the thread where Jo Nova mops the floor with your delusional bum.
It’s instructive. 🙂
You’re a case study in denial.
That would be clinical psychological denial as opposed to the Warmist smear: “Denialist” which is an ad hominem attempt to link skepticism with neo-Nazi historical revisionism.
Proper clinical denial is a well-documented cognitive malaise in which a sensitive person, usually suffering from a great disappointment or some major life trauma is unable to appropriately process the facts of a situation.
You might want to brush up on the Kubler-Ross model of coming to terms with personal grief. Denial is merely the first of five stages a recovering Climate True Believer will have to pass through before they can return to normative cognitive perception.
Climate Change Delusion is already a documented psychiatric condition….You should seek some help, mate.
There aren’t any clinics for recovering Climate Alarmists yet, but this addiction denial link will work. Just substitute “Alarmist” and “Alarmism” whenever you read “Addict” and “Addiction.”
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Wes, thanks for your advice. Meanwhile the unanswered questions remain unanswered.
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The “process” took me about 6 months – I was in denial that (1) I had been duped, and (2) that the authorities could be so mendacious or at the very least indifferent to the truth.
Much less naive now.
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I don’t think proper Team-adjusted data is being used here.
When you use the properly adjusted data – if it is not available now, it soon will be (remember data is always being ‘improved’ by dedicated ‘climate scientists’) – then you will find the year 1977 is irrelevant and the angle of temperature increase moves sharply upwards.
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You ask what of significance happened to the climate in 1977, here is a clue! In that year, Henry Lamb the first director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia switched from predicting global cooling to a prediction of global warming. The following year the CRU set out to establish the CRU temperature series and the rest is history:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
“The area of CRU’s work that has probably had the largest international impact was started in 1978 and continues through to the present-day: the production of the world’s land-based, gridded (currently using 5° by 5° latitude/longitude boxes) temperature data set.”
Lamb started his career at the UK Met Office from where Sir John Houghton “managed” the first IPCC report. He was also active in the WMO from whence came the temperature records that they perhaps could “adjust” from cooling to warming to make them consistent with Lamb’s change of mind!
The WMO was also active in this year on climate matters:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/gaw/ozone_reports.html
There were also papers on climate change, hunger and human health etc:
World Meteorological Organization Bull. … 1977: Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World’s … of meteorological information. Preprints, Fifth International Meeting …
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/biblio/quantitative.html
Or perhaps it was the 80th meeting in 1977 when they decided El Nino was catastrophic:
• Tracking down El Nino’s stormy siblings.
Thwaites, Tim // New Scientist; 5/13/95, Vol. 146 Issue 1977, p18
Describes a climatic catastrophe named El Nino. Details; Occurrence of an international climate conference in Melbourne during April, 1995 to mark the end of the World Meteorological Organization’s 10-year Tropical Ocean-Global Association (TOGA) experiments.
http://connection.ebscohost.com/tag/WORLD%2BMeteorological%2BOrganization
So what changed that year was perhaps not so much the actual climate but the political climate into which “The Cause” was bor or am I being too cynical!
No doubt there are other links showing that it was the year that the “consensus” on global warming was born since it was alive and well in 1985 before the “consensus scientists” actually reported in the FAR!
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Nearest the pin so far. well done Peter.
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Firstly it was Hubert Lamb.
He was Director until 1978, when he was succeeded by Tom Wigley.
Secondly, I doubt he was the source of the global warming ramp, as even in 1995 he issued warning to his ex-colleagues about being too enthusiastic about CO2 causing warming in last century.
It is interesting that all the “old timers” Lamb, Ladurie, Bryson, Fairbridge and even Revelle were less than enthusiastic about CO2 controlling the climate.
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Good point.
Perhaps the step change is another adjustment by our old “friend” Tom Wigley. As I remember it didn’t he play defence for the Hockey Team, at one time?
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I think there was a PDO shift in ’76/’77 from hot to cold. It started to flip the other way a couple of years back.
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Climate Change is natural and CO2 is life everything else is B.S.
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Nicely put. I really hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
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4.5 billion years of climate change and CO2 up to 7,000 ppm seems to prove it.Also Natural CO2 emissions aprox 190 billion tons make mankinds 6 billion tons look pretty insignificant. have a great day in our beautiful ever changing world
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You don’t need to worry. You know that you are wrong but you have an agenda to pretend to be right.
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And while it is pretty obvious that the impact of CO2 is negligible politicians, business leaders with vested interested et al continue to pursue a mitigation strategy – ETS, renewables, carbon sequestration etc etc. All flushing money down the toilet, impoverishing those who work and pay taxes. And they appeal to the “precautionary principle”.
Given the very high uncertainty of man’s impact on the climate the truly precautionary approach is to search for ways to adapt to the natural changes.
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Re that ’76/’77 PDO shift: in the heavily populated NOTW I live in — SEQld, NNSW, there has not been a cyclone cross the coast south of the Tropic of Capricorn since then whereas prior to that it used to happen several times a year.
When those times return the people here won’t know what hit them and you know what they’ll scream?
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Check the graph, drongo.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/cyclones.cgi?region=ause&syear=1976&eyear=2006&loc=0
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Yep, Spangled Drogo is right.
If you compare the graph 1978 to present, against the graph from 1950 to 1977 it would appear that the majority of cyclones are tracking much further north, since 1977.
Isn’t that curious?
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If you take the time to compare pre 76/77 years to post 76/77, as both you and myself have, then Bungalow Bill wouldn’t have made a goose of himself.
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The Drongo stated :
I draw your attention to the statement “there has not been a cyclone cross the coast south of the Tropic of Capricorn”.
Clearly, several have crossed the coast since 76/77.
It comes as no surprise no one takes you guys seriously.
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Bob,
“… wouldn’t have made a goose of himself.” Nor would he have needed to resort the the semantic splitting of hairs as his last line of defence.
I note with interest, that a Bungalow is a single story house.
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Hey Bungalow Bill (Hmm! That sounds familiar)
The key words here are crossed the Coast and SOUTH of the Tropic of Capricorn
Had you taken the time to actually check, you may not have pressed that Submit Comment button.
Since 1976/77, only 2 Cyclones have crossed the Coast south of the Tropic, Cyclone Cliff in 1981, and Cyclone Fran in 1992. There were a couple of others that tracked the Coast, and Gertie while staying defined as a rotating low, was only that as it crossed the Country after forming off WA. It stayed as a Low until crossing into the Pacific where it later reformed as a TC and moved further into the Pacific.
To, er, paraphrase your own words, ‘It comes as no surprise that no one takes you seriously.’
Tony.
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Rereke:
BB states “Clearly, several have crossed the coast since 76/77.”
I count three that crossed south of the tropics, Gertie in 95, Cliff in 81 and Fran that kissed the coast in 92. Two more crossed right on the southern edge but not south of the tropics , Paul in 80 and Pierre in 85.
For Bill (three equals several) and ignores the point of spangled drongo’s post that cyclones have moved north in the warming years and none south of the tropics in the last seventeen years. You know those decades Julia keeps telling us have been the hottest on record.
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Anyone who lived in that area during that pre ’76 period would know that the very few “cyclones” that did cross the coast after ’76 were pussycats and prior to ’76 many people [including me] spent a great deal of time and effort during the many bad cyclones trying to save houses from falling into the sea. We were not always successful. Those houses now sell for multiple millions and if those conditions returned the screams [particularly from the media] would echo loudly around the world with strong AGW connotations.
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Tony:
You put it so much better than me, and as you point out Gerti came from the west and made it’s exit on the east coast.
Thanks.
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Just for comparison with post-1977, and because appearances can sometimes be deceiving, I counted the TC crossings south of Rockhampton (approximately) shown on the BOM chart for the 30 year period 1946/57 to 1976/77.
(A cyclone in Feb 1976 appears on only the earlier of the two charts so there is no overlap or double-counting with these parameters.)
North to south they were:
§ EMILY 1972, § BETH 1976, § WANDA 1974, § ANNIE 1962, § DAISY 1972, § DORA 1971, § UNNAMED #34 May 1963, § BEATRICE 1959, § BARBARA 1967, § AUDREY 1964, § ZOE 1974, § UNNAMED #14 Feb 1957,
§ UNNAMED Mar 1949, § UNNAMED May 1948, § UNNAMED Mar 1953, § UNNAMED Feb 1950, § UNNAMED Jan 1951, § UNNAMED Mar 1951, § UNNAMED Jan 1947, § UNNAMED Feb 1954, § UNNAMED Feb 1956.
For those keeping score at home, it’s Elvis Era: 21, Kenobi Era: 3.
The government (BOM) explanation is so wishy washy as to be complete BS:
They say “may” because they either don’t actually know or don’t want to actually lie about it.
It would seem the headlines of MANN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING CREATING EXTREME WEATHER are wrong. As the climate cycle repeats we are going to see a RETURN TO TEMPERATE ZONE INCURSIONS OF TROPICAL CYCLONES.
You can see why I don’t get paid to write scary headlines.
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Tony, thanks for your reply.
If you had read the original post from the drongo, you would have noticed that he was referring to cyclones crossing the coast south of the Tropic of Capricorn after 76/77. My response referred specifically to that point. To any normal person that was obvious.
You appear to acknowledge that but forgot it immediately. Had you absorbed that little piece of information you probably wouldn’t have continued on and pressed the submit button, as in actual fact you agree with me.
So let me resubmit my post with a little more clarity.
“”I draw your attention to the statement by drongo “there has not been a cyclone cross the coast south of the Tropic of Capricorn since then (76/77 PDO shift)”.
Clearly, several have crossed the coast south of the Tropic of Capricorn since 76/77. Three, in fact, notwithstanding the direction of travel.””
In future I will endeavour to post with a little more clarity and detail so the less intellectually endowed are less prone to confusion.
Cheers
Bill
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Hey Bungalow Bill (that still sound familiar)
Thanks for that clarification.
You’ll just have to take into account that all of us here are stupid morons that you so obviously look down upon from the lofty heights of ‘knowing it all’.
I guess it makes you wonder why you even bother to come here in the first place, eh!
Tony.
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Hmm!
Is that a self ad hominem?
That’d be a first.
Tony
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Tony, my original post was to indicate that drongo’s statement was not 100% correct. The first reply from Rereke and Bob ignored the point, moved the goalposts and tossed in a bit of ridicule for good measure. My second post attempted to clarify the matter but again met with ridicule from Rereke, Bob and yourself.
All you had to do in response to my original post was to say, yes that’s correct some cyclones did pass south of the TOC after 76/77 and that would have been the end of it. But it was too much to point out that one, or three if you want to include Rereke and Bob, of your own had made an error. Even your own post acknowledged I was correct then proceeded to imply I was wrong. In simple terms it was a pointless, stupid post.
I don’t come here all that often, but it became apparent early on that ridicule plays a large part in the dialogue on this site. After establishing that fact, visits were primarily for entertainment purposes.
Climate science would have to be one of the most difficult disciplines to understand and I do not claim to have any expertise in it, so that puts you, me and most others here in the same boat.
I don’t really care what side of the debate you sit on, but the ability to acknowledge one’s errors does wonders for one’s credibility. If however, you continue to respond to posts the way you responded to mine, as I said, no one will take you seriously.
Cheers
Bill.
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Bill
Off to work so no time for full reply, safe to say the only reason for your original post was a point scoring exercise based on semantics. Totally ignoring S.P’s point that since 76/77 the number of cyclones crossing the coast from the east to west has drastically reduced, in fact none in the last 20 years.
Yes S.D. was in error when stating “none” but his argument is still valid, cyclones have moved north since 76/77.
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” The time has come the walrus said to speak of many things” Investigating the past shenanigans and stupidities is a good starting point. Peter pointed out that the quantum shift may have been necessary for the new paradigm from cooling to warming.
If this is indeed the case we have had no warming only data adjustments. The increasing biomass of the world and better crop yields can then be blamed squarely on the increasing CO2.
This of course is bad in some way, but I fail to see why. Maybe John Brooks or Mick Buckley can enlighten me.
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As it’s bank holiday here in the UK this weekend I’d like to make an O/T comment that I hope everyone here can agree with because life’s to short.
Smith-e, he can bat, he can bowl, he can fly through the air to stop sixes like superman.
OK thanks guys back to discussing the impact of a life giving gas.
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To come close to solving this riddle, you merely need to look back to 1977 and find out who was on the “team” then.
Jo Nova and a fellow named Mohib Ebrahim have conveniently placed for your perusal this fine reference: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/climategate/history/climategate_timeline_banner.pdf
I leave you to draw your own conclusions…..
P.S. I encourage our new warmist agitators (Mick and Matt) to carefully study the above PDF.
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Surely 1977 was just one of those tipping points we have heard so much about.
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[…] Jo Nova Share this:PrintEmailMoreStumbleUponTwitterFacebookDiggRedditLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Climate Change and tagged climate models, climate research, climate science. Bookmark the permalink. ← Luboš Motl: Kaczynski Heartland billboard wasn’t a blunder […]
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Don’t worry about a rising trend. The best that may be deduced from a rising trend ( if there really is one) is that the longer it’s been rising, the likelier it is to begin falling soon.
But will we ever learn.
Once we’re into the ‘is it really rising or is it actually falling’, stage then it’s already more likely on the turn.
Straight lines are not nature’s way. The ‘best fit’ is sinusoidal, even if it comprises many of them.
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As a metrologiist, when I see a step change in trend data my first instinct is to look for a change in the measurement system. The industry in which I worked was measurement based and paid a lot of attention to the effects of instrumental changes on the data obtained.
If you look at the satellite measurements of temperature since 1979, you see a step change in the 1990’s coinciding with a new satellite. Try as I must I have been unable to identify any data that confirms that the instruments on the 5 satellites launched since 1979 were actually equivalent! The metrology is seriously lacking. Engineers launch satellites with instruments that on each iteration are different, but never confirm that they are equivalent. It is a basic element of metrology but seems to have been substantially neglected. I have considerable experience of supposedly identical instruments that have been demonstrated to yield slightly different results – the metrology is importantin Eli imaging this.
When you are looking for very small changes, the equivalence of the measurement systems involved is paramount to the integrity of the data!
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Rigorously correct meteorology is required only if your goal is to determine the true value of the parameters to be measured. The lack of proper meteorology in the climate science game is proof that the goal is NOT to measure the climate. Words to the contrary are simply smoke screens to hide their true motivation.
What is their true motivation? Consider the first law of systems: The Purpose of a System is what it Does. Don’t listen to the words. Don’t even try to untangle the mountains of published papers. Simply look at their results. You will have their purpose and you will know their purpose has absolutely nothing to do with discovery of knowledge, the truth, or saving the planet.
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-Peter Azlac’s comment above
Apparently, one sequela of the CAGW fraud – and the deep psychological denial that our elite institutions of research, learning, governance and media find themselves mired into today – is a complete lack of public trust in the science.
It’s so deep that Peter Azlac imagines the corruption began way back in 1977 long before political bias for global warming existed. Maybe, he’s thinking that the step change was the result of innocent confirmation bias? It’s possible.
1977 ? That was the year The Eagle’s Hotel California topped the charts.
But then Lionell reinforces the theme of lack of trust by universalising it with a formula for identifying the “true motivations” of scientists, not realising that his formula cuts both ways.
This is a profoundly cynical position. It’s anti-science. It’s an understandable reaction given the horrid political climate of Australia. But it’s devastating because it undermines the human project to understand nature, by assigning ulterior political motive to scientific research. How can we know anything if we have no faith in the methods of science to honestly sort things out?
Sure, I know Lionell only means to impute egregious motives to the scientists whose results we disapprove. But can we really establish a system for imputing motives to one group scientists we don’t like without denigrate the entire human project of rational inquiry?
In fact, what Lionell has done is to channel the deconstructionist, post-modern critique of rational inquiry by coming up with a formula straight out of a Neo-Marxist revision of history. Obviously, this was not his intention. But it’s the kind of thing that happens when you let your bile get the best of you. Bile is the animating force of the enemies of reason, so when you let bile do your thinking for you, you’re likely to arrive at the same hotel the Marxists, Greens and deconstructionists, etc. inhabit. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!
Since time immemorial epistemological warfare has been fought by those who wish to destroy reason as our primary method for measuring reality. One recent tactic employed is to assume rational inquiry is simply a bourgeois tool to manipulate power rather than an objective representation of empirical reality.
The Green political forces that have appropriated the language of science to cloak their agenda don’t care that their millenarian zeal has damaged the credibility of science. On the contrary, the Greens are profoundly anti-science, anti-reason. What the MInistry of Climate Change represents is the yearning for a new age of Endarkenment. The destruction of rational transparent scientific inquiry is a prerequisite for Green and Leftist political dominance.
Not that implosion of the CAGW fraud was planned to provoke us into losing faith in human curiosity and rational inquiry. Bob Brown must be wryly smiling in some swamp somewhere.
I wish we could find a passage back to the place we were before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUevY8GHLiw&feature=related
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“Peter Azlac imagines the corruption began way back in 1977 long before political bias for global warming existed”
What baloney is this???
Maurice Strong was the head of the UNEP in 1972. King and that wop established the Club of Rome long before that.
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Rod,
As Kevin Moore rightly notes, back in the 1970’s even as environmental apocalypsism was consolidating with the Marxist critique of capitalism, the consensus was that the Earth was cooling as it slipped towards the next glacial period. No one ever imagined cooling could be reversed by governments passing laws to manage the Earth’s climate in the way our society today seems to do without question today.
The idea of globally altering the climate by parliamentary legislation is a radically new idea that would have gobsmacked people back in the 1980’s as bizarre science fiction. The idea of manipulating temperature data in support of a political agenda is likewise a relatively recent development.
The original critique assumed that a global Green socialism would only emerge AFTER the catastrophic collapse of industrialism caused by an environmental apocalypse due in part to global warming! The environmental apocalypse was a necessary stage the Earth would have to pass through to be rid of capitalist industrial oppression. So there was little political advantage to manipulate data to boost warming trends. All the better to let the apocalypse creep up on the greedy bourgeois.
It is only since the 1990’s that the meme decisively changed to Green global socialism could SAVE the planet from an eco-apocalypse. The catastrophic collapse of capitalism due to environmental stress isn’t necessary in this scenario…this seems to be when a motive for data manipulation first begins in earnest…
So, yeah, it’s highly unlikely that back in 1977 the climate record was being manipulated with a political agenda in mind a la Climategate, hide the decline, etc.
That said, an innocent confirmation bias shifting from a belief in a rapidly approaching glacial period to the CO2 warming meme is a conceivable explanation for the step change of 1977-79.
It would be interesting if anyone had any evidence for this.
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I have no problem imputing the same principle to myself. It applies to all systems.
The moral implication of that law of systems is the following. If you advocate and implement a policy repeatedly and repeatedly get the same result your purpose IS that result without regard to any words you use to the contrary. If you hold otherwise, you are trying to fool either yourself, others, or both. This applies to me as well. It is an inescapable moral principle.
As for my channeling of post modernism, I suggest you check your premises and develop an actual understanding of what post modernism actually is.
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Yeah, but that’s a switch. The “law” of system you state earlier is inferring the designer’s intent from what the system does. Your next statement above is inferring the purpose of the users from how often they use the system unaltered. The second statement is less grandiose and accords with people’s behaviour.
Also, Newton was wrong about motion, but his purpose was not to explain relativistic effects. Einstein was probably wrong about non-determinism in the atom and the wave/particle duality of light, but his purpose was not really quantum mechanics (at least not when he first began).
You can’t say Newton set out with the purpose of misleading the world about time dilation at high velocity simply because his theory of motion doesn’t do it. You CAN say people continue to use this flawed system unchanged because it suits their purpose under everyday macroscopic conditions.
We can say the IPCC crowd continue to use flawed models for public pronouncements because it keeps the grants coming. To say they were developed with the intent to mislead is borderline in the specific but doesn’t generalise to a law. In a system supposedly under continuous development (eg science) it is just cynicism to suggest that bugs were intended features.
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Lionell,
You’re right that institutional corruption at BoM and CSIRO has so distorted the research process we should be suspicious of their results.
What I object to is systemising cynicism as a universal principle in discerning good science from bad.
It’s wrong to claim that one can look at scientists’ research result and discover their motives.
It’s even more destructive to assume that any scientist you disagree with is motived by sinister political agendas.
This is the very persecution that skeptical scientists have suffered at the hands of Warmists for the last decade. How many times have we heard alarmists dismiss spot-on criticism without addressing the points by smearing the source as “in the pocket of Big Oil” or whatever.
As skeptics we have to rise above this kind of bilious ad hom logical fallacy and stick with a transparent analysis of the evidence judged on its own merits regardless of its source.
If inappropriate manipulation of research results for whatever reason is detected, it’s important to call a spade a spade. But to say, as you did, we can judge a scientist’s motives simply by scanning the concluding results is not on.
Because what you are really saying is that research work that confirms your theory is good science, work that does not “has absolutely nothing to do with discovery of knowledge, the truth, or saving the planet.” This is exactly how Warmist group think operates.
I’m sure you know this Lionell, because I’ve been reading all your comments for years and know you’re really a brilliant writer and thinker. Your problem is that you’re a cranky old bastard with an itchy post comment finger which you sometimes use to vent. Fine. But this is a family blog about SCIENCE and the youngsters here might be too credulous to sort your many insightful wise comments from the occasional starkers.
That’s where I can help lift your game. No need to thank me. 😉
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I suggest you both look at exactly what I said and not add your own twisted vision of what you think I said or should have said.
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I think you’ve misread Peter’s post. He speaks of metrology, which is the science of measurement, not meteorology.
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Good spot!
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Now there’s a principle dating from biblical times, Lonell. Judge by the results not the words. Jesus said to judge the man and the tree the same way; good fruit, good tree; good fruit, good man. We’ve had that principle to apply for a long time. Shame on us for not doing it.
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Roy,
Damn it! We ain’t talking about bothering God here.
We’re talking about assigning grossly invidious political motives to scientists simply by reading the abstract of their research papers.
Granted, Lionell’s a pissed-off hothead. And he’s got a right to be. I can understand why after so much suspected bad behaviour has been discovered at the CRU, BoM, CSIRO, etc, we’re tempted to consider their whole body of climate research biased at least and possibly even so tainted it’s almost useless.
I’m fine with that. But Lionel tried to make a general “systems” principle out of it.
Lionell says I’ve twisted his words, here they are… (keep in mind we talking about research scientists here.)
That’s one of the most gawd awe-full things I’ve ever read on this blog. It reminds me of the time Crakar honestly made the case that Australia should adopt Sharia Law! It’s a mad right-wing interpretation of post-modern relativism because it decouples properly conducted scientific research from objectivity and applies a political motive to everything. In such a world all knowledge is equal. One man’s poison is another’s cure. Instead of measuring scientific result against empirical data, we would accept only that which conforms to our political orthodoxy and reject that which goes against it.
Maybe I misunderstood Lionell when he invokes “the first law of systems”. Sounds kinda universal…
Maybe he only wants to apply well-earned prejudice to Alarmist research results?
Sigh…Lionell’s got no problem applying the same principle to himself, eh? Only it’s NOT the same principle!.., Lionell subtly shifted the topic from judging scientific research by…
To judging a political system:
It’s a truism that policy motives should be judged by policies that one “advocates and implements.” Duh.
Nor is it what you said.
Oh, well, never-mind then. 😉
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Peter, I too have serious doubts about the satellite temperatures. The instruments are never retrieved and checked for calibration. So even the same satellite and instrument may drift. I’m happy to believe it does as cycling the temperature and radiation environment of sensitive electronics is quite likely to do this.
The basic sensor is claimed to be good to +/- one degree C and somehow they claim accuracies for global temps of better than 0.01 degrees.
Garbage.
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The change in 77 was a PDO change from cold to hot, the Atlantic changed in the mid 80s from cold to hot. No co2 corellation, hence one less attribution, just the natural world at work!!
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O/T but reply to chestdocmd
Briffa, K.R. got his PhD at the CRU in 1984.
Thesis Tree-climate relationships and dendroclimatological reconstruction in the British Isles
Supervisor was Prof. T.M.L. Wigley, the Director at that time.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/thesis/
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Interesting Graphs. Has anyone tried a cusum on the data?
Basically, you normalize the data so that it has a zero mean then cumulatively sum all the data points plotting out the sums against time (in this case.) It is a method of integration so points under the curve will count negative and points above will count positive.
If there is a step in the data, then the direction of the cusum will change from going down to going up (or vice versa).
It is a moment’s work in Excel so only Phil Jones would struggle with this!
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Just for interest –
Scientists almost unanimous the Earth is cooling – 1975.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2235115/posts
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
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I’ve posted this before but it is from a respected institute known for reporting facts from observations without bias.
Alaska Climate Research Center
Decadal Climate Change in Fairbanks
The best linear fit of the data points of the last decade displays a fairly strong cooling of 1.8°F. Recent cooling has also been observed in other parts of the world, and some climatologists have attributed this trend to the low solar activity we have experienced over the last few years. Another symptom of this can be seen in the aurora activity, which has decreased over the few last years here in Fairbanks. It is worthwhile to point out that during the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), a time period of very low solar activity, Greenland froze over and the Vikings had to leave, as agricultural activities became more difficult.
The temperature has varied widely over the last century, 1926 being the warmest year. In 1976/77 a sudden and substantial temperature increase was observed in Alaska, which we attributed to a change in circulation, which is expressed in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The PDO shifted from dominantly negative to dominantly positive values. Since that change, the temperature trend has been fairly flat for Fairbanks.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/
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It is generally accepted by historians that the viking population in Greenland disappeared sometime between 1424 and the 1480’s. The date is obscure. The last definite date is 1410, but ships were supposedly making contact until roughly 1480. In 1492 the Pope complained that there had been no contact for 30 years, but he was talking about church matters.
There was no sign of life when a ship captained by Gaspar Corte Real (1450?-1501?) sailed to Greenland in 1500.
But you are correct in saying that a colder climate was devastating for the settlements. The Little Ice Age started around 1280, and was felt first and more strongly in the north. One of the settlements was abandoned around 1350.
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O/T,
Ahhh. Great news for a Sunday Morning. The ALP are still in such complete Chaos, senior figures are now being quoted as recognising the Carbon Tax is killing them:
Link Here
Who would’ve thought that we peasants might get a little antagonistic with a governement promising one thing in an election and then doing the exact opposite when in Government for no other reason than the career aspirations of it’s incompetant leadership.
Maybe JuLiar might suffer from a messiah complex? After all, she can’t be doing anything wrong, it must be dem evil wrongdoers….
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She seems to think she knows what’s gone wrong. It’s the abbottabbottabbot.
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P’raps she’s just fallen into bad “Abbotts” Rod!
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The modern electorate has become so cynical about a government that says trust us even though they lied about a tax and implemented it, that the Labor movement itself not just the political wing is facing destruction as Industry becoming noncompetitive because of this tax will shed workers, has too.
For this time only I will call you sane Jack(jk), to point out they are in a leadership tangle again and saner minds (true labor movement people) recognise what the common man is not only saying but demanding, they keep pinning the blame on the leader and its the tax that’s doing it. Australians don’t vote for change by and large, they vote to fix something as in a leadership foisting stuff they don’t want, the carbon tax is not a fix it’s a backward step for a resource and agribusiness tourist economy, all industries that are effected by this energy transition tomfoolery and onanistic messiah complex the left are always infected with.
The time for change leadership stuff has ever been a media myth. Pissing down someones neck and telling them its raining deserves only two responses a left hook behind the ear and upper cut to the groin.
Anyway the step function was an ideological shift and the sattelites stuffed their little excursion into fantasy right up.
They keep pointing at pink unicorns and no ones buying it.
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Well said Cap’n
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O.T but hot off the presses. Yesterday Tasmania had elections for two seats on our Legislative Council (Upper House). The LC was always traditionally independent but Labor and The Greens have stood candidates in recent years. In Hobart, long serving Labor MLC lawyer Doug Parkinson retired having been re-elected with 43% of the Primary vote in 2006.
Ex-Hobart Lord Mayor Independent Rob Valentine looks to have won with 37% Primary: Greens candidate 22%: Labor candidate 19%.
The other seat was strongly held by the incumbent Independent.
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This morning is just getting better. Roll on the week ahead!
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Jo. This is for the many new posters I see here and for those who visit your site seeking information but don’t necessarily post.
The redoubtable Chiefio (E.M.Smith), one of the most interesting and amazing persons it’s been my privilege to encounter on the Internet, has collated his many posts and links on GIStemp into one fantastic eminently readable resource. He has done the same for his posts and links on AGW and they will delight anyone with an enquiring mind and thirst to learn.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/agw-basics-of-whats-wrong/
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Does any one know of any unusual solar activity in 1977?
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I think it best we look at a proper and correct STATISTICAL methods expert rather rely on a lawyers.
“They are playing Enron with the data and Pravda with your mind”.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/43020.html
Of course there has been significant warming during every decade since the 1970s. But that doesn’t mean that some years aren’t cooler than others, and one can always find a particularly hot year (such as 1998) that sticks so far above the trend line that a few subsequent years appear cooler until the trend catches up. These few years present a (short) dream come true for those who deny climate change for their own agendas or emotional needs.
In fact, if one chooses a brief-enough period, there will never be any “significant warming”— in the same way that you never gained measurable height from one day to the next during childhood. Miraculously, this lack of “significant growth” has never prevented a baby from growing into an adult.
Statistics is subtle and confusing, no doubt about it. That’s why it takes a decade of study to become a true statistical expert.
So what should an alert and alarmed, but understandably confused, member of the public do in light of conflicting messages and statistical nonsense in the media? Fortunately, there is an easy answer, and it is one I report in a peer-reviewed paper that is about to appear in Psychological Science. All you have to do to avoid confusion about climate change is to look not at a picture but at a graph.
A graph of all the data, for the entire globe, and across all available years.
In my study, I showed people a graph with climate data and asked them to predict the future trend — in one condition the climate data were labelled as such and in the other condition they were presented as fictitious share prices. Regardless of condition, and regardless of people’s attitudes towards climate science, the results of the study were crystal clear: Everyone — including the few individuals who deny climate science — recognized the trend for what it is, and everyone knew where it is heading; people’s responses (averaged across 100 observations in each case) are shown by the red triangles in the figures below.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/linkableblob/43018/data/lewandowsky_tables-data.jpg
___
I think this notion of step is valid but there have been many more “steps” in the analysis since 1850 or 1970 or 1979. The “signature” of global warming is unmistakable.
But WATCH YOUR STEP! (analysis methodology)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/SkepticsvRealists.gif
Ross J.
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Put all the fudged and tortured data from the hockey team in your graph and you will have a large upward trend. Put all the raw data from only rural stations and your trend is constant since the L.I.A.
Ross you now have a problem, the temperatures have ceased rising even in the fudged data, they are falling in the raw rural data. This is totally the result of normal outside influences and never had any bearing on CO2.
A little reality in your research will show the reason why our climate cycles, every couple of centuries we cycle through warm and cold periods. Welcome to the start of the new cold period.
If you want it to keep warming you will need to stop Gaia worship, and start praying to Ra such that he may be awakened from his slumber.
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Wayne,
Overall wrong conclusions. Variability is correct. Measurements are compared and homogenised but are independent of each other as to outcome.
Multiple lines of evidence “prove” the trend is real. Satellites/Land measurements/Sea measurements/ Atmospheric Layer measurements.
Nothing of sufficient evidence invalidates the greenhouse effect that it does not warm our climate.
Yes there are alternatives that are as old as mid century science but these have have falsified over time.
Ross J.
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Ross, in an earlier post I performed a 5 year running average of the BoM global temp anomaly data over the past 10 years and found 0.0 degrees of global warming.
Your argument of an upwards “trend” is fallacious rubbish. But it sounds like you are on te gravy train aren’t you mate? Go figure.
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No response again from Ross the propagandist.
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This is what Warmism has been reduced too? How embarrassing!
How many logical fallacies can you fit into a sentence?
First Ross disingenuously creates a strawman to beat up.
No one claims the Greenhouse Effect doesn’t warm the planet. We all accept without so-called Greenhouse Gases the Earth would be -30c. The fact that a Greenhouse Effect exists is NOT evidence for the hypothesis that Earth is warming catastrophically rapid due to human-produced CO2 emissions.
Secondly, Ross proves he doesn’t understand how science works by suggesting its up to skeptics to falsify the CAGW with “sufficient evidence.” That’s totally assbackwards.
It’s up to the supporters of the AWG hypothesis to provide sufficient evidence to show their hypothesis is the most useful explanation of how climate works.
That AGW supporters have utterly failed to do so is evidenced by lonely Ross lamely beating up strawmen and reversing the burden of evidence.
It’s all they got left.
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If you want proper statistical analysis and a look at “climate change” with long term graphs, you and Mick Buckley should go to the chiefio site on “gistemp” I linked to at @ 26 and follow the links there. Start with the guest post by TonyB and all the comments following. As Chiefio (who is not funded by vested interests nor bound to any organisation like the UNIPCC but reports what he finds whichever way the dice fall,)writes:
“I find the definition of “Climate” as the 30 year average of weather increasingly galling. We have known cycles of 60 years (PDO), 176-210 years (solar), and 1470 years (bond events). To try to claim that 30 years is anything other than “a short weather average” is just bogus. Frankly, I think it rises to the level of “flat out lie”. No smiley. No moderation. No hesitation. No reduction or diminution of any sort. Bald Faced Lie. If you wish to speak of “climate change” then you must use at a minimum a 3000 year baseline. (NO “IMHO”. This is a mathematical fact based on the Bond Event cycle being somewhere in the 1500 +/- 250 range, you simply MUST have a base line longer than the longest end of that cycle. So 1750 plus some range and 2 cycles is better. Call it 2000 year minimum, 3000 years better.)
On that time scale, climate change is clearly and unequivocally happening. And it is a steady undeniable drift toward colder and the eventual plummet into an ice age.
The only good news is that we have such short lives that the plummet is not perceptible to just about everyone living on the planet. Unfortunately, that is the bad news too …”
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/
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Forgive me if I point out that it won’t matter if anyone recognizes it or not. It will happen anyway if it’s going to. And the only possible human response is to take it as it comes — Ross James notwithstanding.
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Effect, I would like to introduce you to Cause, who is … Oh, Cause appears to have left the room.
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O/T,
Wow, on meet the press right now, an economist in the know is making it very clear that the budget will be dependant on the RBA to slash interest rates to compensate for Swans budget.
So that buffer for insulating the economy is about to be significantly reduced because Swans cronies can’t manage their expenditure!
I’m still not seeing the media talk of the compensation package and how it’s only a temporary sugar sweetener.
The Next Government is going to have a brutal time sorting out this economic vandalism.
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Of course, the RBA is independent regarding fiscal management … cough, cough.
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Rereke,
And I’m sure the Banks will pass on all of the RBA cuts. cough, scoff
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On ABC’s Inside Business this morning one commenter was suggesting the possibility of Swan raiding Superannuation Funds.
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RE:
I wouldn’t put it past him or the current career ambitions of this current lot. Doing this probably wouldn’t make any difference to the next election. It’s only the blatantly ignorant rusted on supporters supporting the ALP now.
Of course, cranking up more debt than necessary might as well be a raid on super. Probably no difference really.
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Humour – “Master Chef Wayne Cooks up his Budget Special” [Not available in Australia]
http://barnabyisright.com/2012/05/04/p-s-i-just-had-to-do-this/#comments
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Kevin,
That link is fantastic. It’s a therapeutic remedy for a weary member of the public
Thanks muchly
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Madjak,
I don’t know how legit’ this is but it sounds good.
“Vladimir Putin – Russia Issues International Arrest Warrant for Rothschild & Soros”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpO3PArAoUQ&feature=player_embedded
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“Light Green, Dark Green,it’s all good”. New Senator replacing Bob Brown.
The very first “Earth Day” [April 22,1970] just happened to be Vladimir Lenins 100th birthday.
“Under the guise of Greens……..hang all the rich peasants,priests,landowners” Vladimir Lenin.
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Folks, we all agree here except for a couple of jokers. Why not go over and leave a few words of wisdom at . Somebody needs to be educated.
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What a sad little article.
At the end of it all, Wisdom and Experience always trumps Zeal and Idealism, and does so without fail. That is the one lesson that Wisdom and Experience actually teaches you.
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that was http://blog.wwf.org.au/2012/04/a-journey-to-change-the-mind-of-a-climate-sceptic/
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Well here we are, twenty four hours older and wiser, and poor Anna Rose has only had two comments on her article at WWF (discounting her own). Both are from sceptics, and one of those was mine. Perhaps WWF folk don’t work the weekend. Perhaps nobody cares any more …
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My own meagre contribution has been made.
Don’t worry Anna, I care.
Enough to set the record straight. 😉
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This study evokes two chains of thought, that may bypass those that are not familiar with philosophy of science and econometrics. Please bear with me for you maybe enlightened.
The first, and simplest (in a relative, but certainly not an absolute sense) is a central problem of science – you can look at the data in a number if different way and come up with different conclusions. If so your theory is underdetermined. From “Kuhn vs Popper – Steve Fuller 2003″ Page 46
With respect to global surface temperature trends, you can look at them and detect a correlation with CO2, a 60 year cycle (with an underlying constant trend), within natural variability of chaotic systems or like this paper, a step change in 1977.
The second is something more personal to me – and more difficult to understand. As part of my undergraduate studies in economics I did a course in econometrics. The lecturer, following the standard textbook of the time (Econometrics – Anna Koutsoyannis) said that that two of the issues that could undermine multiple regression results (the standard technique for verifying economic hypotheses) were heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. If a data series is heteroskedastic then the error bars vary the length of the data series. In global surface temperature data (or temperature proxies), the error bars usually are larger the further one goes back in time, so heteroskedasticity is a serious problem. Autocorrelation is a problem of time series data. With global temperature, whether the temperature is flat, rising or falling, last years temperature will be highly correlated with this years average temperature. This means that we can get an accurate prediction of next years temperature from this year.
I remember getting pretty disillusioned with economic theory, as most verfications in journals ignored the issues posed by these two areas. As a result there was a pretense that theories were verified by the evidence, when tests for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation were not carried out. In general, climate science is at a much lower level. In economics, it was standard practice to publics the R-squared values. When investigating Mann’s hockey stick, it took a great deal of time for Steve McIntyre to even discover the R-squared value.
The McKitrick and Vogelsang paper is novel in trying to tackle the heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation issues, utilsing at the latest techniques. Whether ultimately right or wrong, a paper that tackles the uncertainties head on should ranked higher those papers that take a more minimalist or tangential consideration of scientific technique.
This brings me back to the underdetermination issue. If one does not use rigorous verification techniques, and cannot shown that alternative theories have an inferior level
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I believe a critical word insertion is required here:
Without this correction, I was wondering how Lorentzian time dilation was occurring in the temperature charts. I was reminded of the words of Einstein:
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour.”
It’s a bit like the aerosols excuse for the lack of warming. Has the cosmetics industry been creating cute girls who cause time contraction at exactly the right rate to counteract the time dilation caused by hotter temperatures? 😉
C’RUTEM: Because you’re worth it!
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🙂
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Email sent to alol MPs today:
H/t to Tony Price for posting it on this interesting thread on Jennifer Marohasy’s website:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/05/legal-challenge-to-mandated-renewable-energy-in-the-eu/?cp=1
By the way, if others haven’t seen that thread, you may be interested to see what engineer Pat Swords has achieved: “Legal Challenge to Mandated Renewable Energy in the EU”. Perhaps get involved in suggesting how we could apply it to Australia.
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If CO2 is having an impact … it’s impossible to say what it is.
Exactly. There is a lot of evidence that the leftist environmentalists contrived a problem to which the solution was ‘coincidentally’ precisely what they have been pining for for decades: de-industrialization! But, it turns out (surprise), there is NO empirical evidence that CO2 effects temps on a climate level. None. At best we have an ambiguous controversial arguable theoretical model.
Fact is, the only solid evidence there is shows that CO2 rises and falls as a result of temperature change, not that it causes temp change. See algor repeat the key ipcc deception (well, other than the hockey stick!) in this 3.5 minute, share-worthy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg
Plus, from my previous comment:
Lindzen says: “Claims… that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”
Piers Corbyn, in a comment, takes it further: “Observational evidence gives the possibility that the net effect of CO2 increases on World temperatures may not be ‘only trivial’ but in fact miniscule, zero, or even negative due to errors in some of the science some claim or – I would suggest – hitherto not understood feed-back and competing processes…”
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Looking at the data its seems that sunspot activity increased from 1977-97 and has lowered since. The global temperature reflects this trend.
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Very interesting. Frankly, fitting linear trendlines to non-linear datasets is always going to be dodgy. While this might seem to work well for relatively short periods, linear statistics completely fail to pick turning points. The step-change may well be such a point or it could be a statistical aberration. Who knows?
What is certainly the case is that the Earth’s climate is a complex, coupled non-linear system. Attempts by the CAGW cult to fool people into thinking that climate is driven by CO2 is scientifically INSANE. It is Post-Normal Science (PNS) at its most malignant – devoid of logic, data, facts, knowledge, honesty, integrity… but it satisfies key political objectives and that’s why it has been foisted upon us.
These criminals had better change course soon because a rapidly cooling world – which looks increasingly likely now – is going to show them up for the pathological liars, fraudsters, thieves, cheats – that real scientists and anyone with any common sense already know them to be.
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I don’t know Andrew. Complex, non-linear, etc etc. No doubt these things apply, particularly when working out regional changes to climate. But when the atmosphere simply traps more heat so that the surface has to be at a higher temperature to get rid of the heat – that seems pretty simple and straightforward, rather than INSANE.
Now if you’d just like to tell me when the rapid cooling is going to start (and why), that would be nice…
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Actually yes; HADCRUT itself.
About a month ago it announced that global temperatures have been in decline since 1997 due to solar cycles, and that we can expect the next two 22 year solar cycles to have less solar activity and therefore cooler temperatures. This was a UK Met Office news release about a month ago but I can’t find it now.
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What, it will cool for 22 years? I really do want to see that prediction!
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We’ve been cooling (slightly) since 2006.
Therefore 30% of the “prediction” is already correct.
Certainly more plausible than the 3 to 5 degrees quote by the government science fiction department CSIRO.
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Complex and non linear means chaotic, that is the system of an unplumbed heat pump called Earth. What we get from this is weather. Climate of the Earth is another matter and is totally reliant on external influences. What you expect is climate, what you really get is weather as the Earth tries to reach equilibrium with ever changing imputs.
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And one more time John, where is the evidence?
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“But when the atmosphere simply traps more heat”
roflmao !!
That is one of the stupidist things I have seen even you write !!!
Heat transfer in the atmposphere is dominated by convection. Only a change of state can alter that rate of transfer (ie condensation of H2O, which only slows down the energy transfer temporarily)
If the air is warmer than the atmospheric pressure allows, you get convection.
The whole thing is governed ONLY by atmospheric pressure and incidence of incoming radiation.
This moronic idea that the atmosphere is some sort of blanket, is just plane stupid.
It keeps the Earth’s temperature REGULATED, by cooling the surface when required… all controlled by pressure gradients and the combine gas laws.
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Oh and, CO2, if anything, lowers the specific heat of the air, thus increasing the rate of convection.. but as CO2 is such a minor trace gas, the effect is probably very hard to measure, being swamped by the effect of any water vapor.
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I must agree entirely with this in your case:
“roflmao !!
That is one of the stupidist things I have seen even you write !!!”
Try this:
The evolution of the Earth’s climate has been extensively studied1, 2, and a strong link between increases in surface temperatures and greenhouse gases has been established3, 4. But this relationship is complicated by several feedback processes—most importantly the hydrological cycle—that are not well understood5, 6, 7. Changes in the Earth’s greenhouse effect can be detected from variations in the spectrum of outgoing longwave radiation8, 9, 10, which is a measure of how the Earth cools to space and carries the imprint of the gases that are responsible for the greenhouse effect11, 12, 13. Here we analyse the difference between the spectra of the outgoing longwave radiation of the Earth as measured by orbiting spacecraft in 1970 and 1997. We find differences in the spectra that point to long-term changes in atmospheric CH4, CO2 and O3 as well as CFC-11 and CFC-12. Our results provide direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect that is consistent with concerns over radiative forcing of climate.
Then try this for aother slice of scientific reality:
Abstract
Previously published work using satellite observations of the clear sky infrared emitted radiation by the Earth in 1970, 1997 and in 2003 showed the appearance of changes in the outgoing spectrum, which agreed with those expected from known changes in the concentrations of well-mixed greenhouse gases over this period. Thus, the greenhouse forcing of the Earth has been observed to change in response to these concentration changes. In the present work, this analysis is being extended to 2006 using the TES instrument on the AURA spacecraft. Additionally, simulated spectra have been calculated using LBLRTM with inputs from the HadGEM1 coupled model and compared to the observed satellite spectra.
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And yes, there are radiative barriers, but the very temperature gradients that Roy talks about with the gas laws means that ANY warming on a low layer MUST immediately be compensated for by changes in the pressure gradient.
ps.. it is unwise to cut and paste when you have no idea of the import of what is being said. But I expect no better from you.
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Just a little more, this time from Roy Spencer:
Why Atmospheric Pressure Cannot Explain the Elevated Surface Temperature of the Earth
December 30th, 2011
“Epilogue
Finally, I want to address 3 stumbling blocks which people encounter in all of this.
FIRST, if you are still confused about whether greenhouse gases warm or cool the climate system, let me make the following 2 points:
1) For the atmosphere as a whole, greenhouse gases COOL the atmosphere, through IR radiation to outer space, in the face of heating of the atmosphere by the solar-heated surface.
2) In the process, however, greenhouse gases drastically change the vertical temperature structure of the atmosphere, warming the lower layers, and cooling the upper layers. Think of greenhouse gases as a “radiative blanket”…when you add a blanket over a heat source, it warms the air between the blanket and the heat source, but it cools the air away from the heat source.
Greenhouse gases change the energy budget of all layers of the atmosphere, and it is the energy budget (balance between energy gain and energy loss) which determines what the average temperatures of those layers will be.
SECONDLY, some people claim that IR emission and absorption cannot affect the atmospheric temperature profile because the rate of IR emission and absorption by each layer must be the same.
Wrong.
The rate of absorption of IR by a layer is mostly independent of temperature; the rate of emission, though, increases rapidly with temperature. In general, the rates of IR absorption and emission by atmospheric layers are quite different. The difference is made up by convective heat transport and (especially in the stratosphere) solar absorption.
THIRDLY, if you are wondering, “If temperature change is an energy budget issue, then why does the temperature of an air parcel change when you change its altitude? Doesn’t the temperature change necessarily imply an energy budget change?”
The answer is no.
When an air parcel is raised adiabatically, it’s loss of thermal energy is balanced by an equal gain in potential energy due to its altitude. The ‘dry static energy’ of the parcel thus remains the same, which equals cpT + gZ, where cp is the specific heat capacity, T is temperature in Kelvin, g is the gravitational acceleration, and Z is height in meters.
Of course, averaged over the whole Earth, there can be no net change in altitude; all air parcels rising (and cooling) at any given pressure altitude must be matched by an equivalent mass of air parcels sinking (and warming) at that same pressure altitude.”
Please contact the source if you still beg to disagree and you can convey to him your specious and fallacious message:
“This moronic idea that the atmosphere is some sort of blanket, is just plane stupid..
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“Of course, averaged over the whole Earth, there can be no net change in altitude; all air parcels rising (and cooling) at any given pressure altitude must be matched by an equivalent mass of air parcels sinking (and warming) at that same pressure altitude.””
Therefore no net energy gain.
Its all driven by pressure gradients. As I said.
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Except , there is radiative energy loss from the upper atmosphere.
The Atmosphere COOLS the surface of the Earth if it get’s warmer than the pressure gradient allows.
Funny sort of blanket. !!
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If you cannot see that the WHOLE DYNAMIC of the Earth’s atmosphere is to remove excess heat from the surface,
which is the OPPOSITE of what a blanket does.
then I am obvious talking to the wrong end of the Dopey Donkey.
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Thank you AndyG for showing everyone how stupid the “blanket” analogy is. There are many fools on this site that start explaining the GHE by saying “imagine a blanket……”
Thanks Andy
Crakar
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A related questions would be, “Do humans have any measurable effect on atmospheric CO2 levels”.
I came across this post by Roy Spencer while doing a google search when I was trying to understand the C13/C12 ration argument:
“Spencer Part2: More CO2 Peculiarities – The C13/C12 Isotope Ratio
Posted on January 28, 2008 by Anthony Watts
NOTE: This post is the second in the series from Dr. Roy Spencer of the National Space Science and Technology Center at University of Alabama, Huntsville. The first, made last Friday, was called Atmospheric CO2 Increases: Could the Ocean, Rather Than Mankind, Be the Reason?”
I went to the “CRAN” website recently and downloaded the “R” program, and figured Spencer’s question regarding temperature versus mankind could be answered statistically, and would give me practice learning how to do the comps.
I found a paper by Fred Goldberg that contained simple data I could use in an “ANOVA” comp:
http://www.klimatbalans.info/Climate_data_show.pdf
Here’s the data. The first column is the year vector, the second is the change in parts per million CO2 vector, the third column is the change in world temp over prior year vector, the fourth column is the gigatons of carbon produced by humans vector.
I ran a multiple linear regression, figuring that both temperatures and human output would have a measurable effect on the yearly change in atmospheric CO2.
vyr vppmv vTemp vGtonC
[1,] 1979 1.64 -0.074 5.403
[2,] 1980 1.67 0.088 5.348
[3,] 1981 1.08 0.052 5.186
[4,] 1982 0.99 -0.154 5.144
[5,] 1983 1.83 0.036 5.126
[6,] 1984 1.32 -0.257 5.308
[7,] 1985 1.60 -0.213 5.464
[8,] 1986 1.02 0.148 5.629
[9,] 1987 2.71 0.109 5.762
[10,] 1988 2.24 0.109 5.992
[11,] 1989 1.36 -0.110 6.106
[12,] 1990 1.27 0.074 6.196
[13,] 1991 0.82 0.116 6.312
[14,] 1992 0.64 -0.192 6.187
[15,] 1993 1.13 0.149 6.203
[16,] 1994 1.62 -0.012 6.344
[17,] 1995 2.03 0.142 6.487
[18,] 1996 1.10 0.020 6.649
[19,] 1997 1.96 0.047 6.840
[20,] 1998 2.91 0.512 6.788
[21,] 1999 1.37 0.039 6.804
[22,] 2000 1.24 0.034 6.981
[23,] 2001 1.86 0.200 7.116
[24,] 2002 2.36 0.313 7.167
[25,] 2003 2.23 0.272 7.504
[26,] 2004 1.65 0.192 7.910
[27,] 2005 2.42 0.328 8.098
[28,] 2006 1.72 0.275 8.329
Here are the results:
Call:
lm(formula = vppmv ~ vTemp + vGtonC + vyr)
Coefficients:
(Intercept) vTemp vGtonC vyr
4.368262 2.251407 -0.051813 -0.001296
> anova(m)
Analysis of Variance Table
Response: vppmv
Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)
vTemp 1 3.4558 3.4558 15.5710 0.0006039 ***
vGtonC 1 0.0531 0.0531 0.2392 0.6292371
vyr 1 0.0002 0.0002 0.0008 0.9773810
Residuals 24 5.3266 0.2219
—
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
confint(m)
2.5 % 97.5 %
(Intercept) -176.50887107 185.24539474
vTemp 0.86680594 3.63600813
vGtonC -0.91350219 0.80987625
vyr -0.09469161 0.09209872
>
the gigatons per year CO2 produced by humans had a negligible effect on yearly changes in atmospheric CO2 despite a roughly 50% increase in output between 1979 and 2006. At the 95% level, the slope of Gigatons CO2 could have a slope anywhere between
minus 0.913 and plus 0.810. The p statistic of 0.629 was insignificant.
for Temperature, the slope was between plus 0.866 and plus 3.63 degrees/ppmCO2 change with a p statistic of 0.0006039 which means such a close relationship would happen only about 6 in 10,000 times by chance alone.
I next hypothesized that Fred Goldberg’s data might be wrong. I used GISS temperatures from 1959 to 2011 to compute changes in yearly temps starting in 1960 and running through 2011, and Mauna Loa CO2 changes form 1960 to 2011. I found plenty of pretty
graphs on human CO2 output, but no actual figures for 1960 to 1978, so I didn’t use the vGtonCO2 figures in the second comp.
the results were:
Call:
lm(formula = vCO2 ~ vT)
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 1.44308 0.07278 19.827 < 2e-16 ***
vT 1.82906 0.45968 3.979 0.000224 ***
—
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
again, temperature change is a significant predictor of CO2 added to atmosphere in a year.
confint(m)
2.5 % 97.5 %
(Intercept) 1.2968911 1.589276
vT 0.9057754 2.752353
To be fair to the CAGWers, "confint(m)" shows there is a significant increase in CO2 per year of between 1.30 and 1.59 ppmv even with a zero temperature change. My guess is that the imbalance is due to the warming from the little ice age over the last couple of centuries.
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I found lining the graphs up by eye looked so close I didn’t bother to look for the original data.
No, it’s not “despite”, but because of human output. Human output is so consistent every year that the yearly change in [CO2] is mainly from natural temperature variation. We hardly vary our output at all (year to year).
I have previously ventured a hypothesis of what the carbon flows were around the 2003 to 2005 period. Does the data you found imply a correction is needed to the size of these flows?
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Hi Andrew
I think that human output is increasing due to population growth.
I also believe that for two or three years after each new annual population group there will be “extra” CO2 in the atmosphere until natural bio-sequestration expands to meet the new CO2 levels.
This temporary “extra” CO2 will be so small in comparison with effects from Natural Origin CO2 and water that no effect will be felt either now or in the long run because of man.
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We are NOT GUILTY OF NOCTURNAL CO2 EMISSIONS.
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KK, Yes we are, in a lagged sense.
Here’s a self explanatory copy of part of my last home water use in thousands of litres.
Clean water comes in at a cost of $1.7756 a thousand litres.
It goes out via the sewer, and we pay again, exit price $1.9546 per thousand litres.
Maybe the difference of 18 cents a litre is a government estimate of the value of crap, which we all know can produce some methane.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Water%20bill.jpg
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In 1975 the USA implemented regulations on new car emissions, reducing them by 90%. This was further strengthened in 1997. Because of the global nature of car manufacturing. These effectively became a global standard.
Fewer aerosols from cars -> less solar irradiance scatter and less low level cloud seeding -> increased solar insolation, especially early morning solar insolation, which explains the disproportionate warming in minimum temperatures.
While this is primarily an urban effect, the global surface station network is heavily urban biased.
That’s what happened in 1977 and a few years either side.
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really love the lengths some go to — to distort the data.. ooh look their pretty chart … the consolation for REAL science is it is not long now until accountability will be here with the new media watchdog .. the fake distorted stuff and their websites will disappear overnight …
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Ah, the “Progressive” fantasy: If you can’t convince them, use force.
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Methane escaping into atmosphere from cracks in pack ice out at sea—warming is going to accelerate
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/warming-arctic-methane-greenhouse-gas-oozing-through-cracks-sea-ice
Enjoy. Sensible people would want to do something about it, not cherry picking suss data to pretend warming isn’t happening.
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So Maxine,
What exactly are you, personally doing? What exactly have you done to reduce your own personal impact on the environment?
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Geez MadJak, I’d be careful asking Maxine that. She might just just tell us all again….ad infinitum….ad nauseam!
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I am genuinely interested.
The reason I am interested is because I have yet to meet anyone who takes AGW seriously and pushes for systemic changees to address it who isn’t actually a complete hyppocrite.
I am on a quest to find someone who actually practices what they want everyone else to be forced to do.
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do you consider the BOM “Suss data”. Again Maxine I have demonstrated from the BOM global temp anomaly data that we have had 0.00 degrees of warming over the past decade, using a 5 year running average. That’s how science works Maxine. If you want to claim it’s still warming please feel free to download the actual data, process it and then report back to us.
Otherwise please stop telling lies, or we will have no choice but to accuse you of being a liar.
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… It’s not the only crack that methane is oozing out of.
Tell me Maxine, do you fart into a methane sequestration device?
You could also simply light your farts although that will add a small amount of localized warming that could put adjacent body parts at risk. Still it’s an awesome party trick you could try at your next trendy party to show just how committed you are to the environment.
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Sonny, you “cracked” me up and lost me half a mug of spluttered tea!! Reminded me of on an incident 66 years ago at High School when an earnest young woman was giving us a lecture on health and nutrition. My mate Colin whispered in my ear “ask her what’s the nutritional value of a fried fart in a pickle bottle”? My explosive guffaw got me sent from the room and a trip to the Principal for not explaining to the nutritionist and the Class what was so funny!
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I can tell you the answer to that.
A fried fart in a pickle bottle is worth about $23 per tonne.
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It would be good to capture that escaping methane and use it for fuel.
No sense letting useful fuels go to waste.
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Well Maxine,
Maybe Heinz should be added to the worst Carbon polluters list. They make baked beans.
Oh, that’s right, you guys are just interested in Taxing.
I note you haven’t answered my question about what you personally have been doing to reduce your environmental footprint.
Should I assume that your bleating to others that the guvmint should force everyone to do what you think is right is your contribution? Would this assertion be wrong?
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This is why I love to fart loudly and proudly in the company of trendy progressives..
Normal people may take offense to the noise and odour, but the Maxines of the world think of the polar bears and the island people.
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Andrew McRae
May 6, 2012 at 4:44 pm ·
“No, it’s not “despite”, but because of human output. Human output is so consistent every year that the yearly change in [CO2] is mainly from natural temperature variation. We hardly vary our output at all (year to year).”
Note that there was a steady increase in gigation output frm 5.403 to 8.329 gigatons. That’s a (8.329/5.403) = 1.54 or 54% incresse over 28 years. I realize that this might be a case of “restricted means” limiting the significance of the data. If so,
talk of reducing human CO2 output by 20% over X years won’t cut the mustard. To make a dent we’d have to cut CO2 output by closer to 100%. If CAGWers believe that, and that CO2 output by humans is a major problem, they shouldn’t be sitting around posting to blogs, or flying to conferences in Kyoto, or Stockholm, or Brazil- they should be cutting the use of all fuel power, throwing away their computers, and working diligently to put us back in the dark ages.
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Are you completely sure that they are not?
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I note that 5% is ten times smaller than 50%. To argue, as you have, that the maximum (in 2004) +5% year to year (or averaged over 28 years a compounding growth of 1.55% p.a. ) variation in human emissions is somehow significant year to year compared to the +/- 50% year to year variation in final atmospheric increase is just being stupid. As I said, human output hardly changes year to year.
You declined to answer my question and then attempted to hide the decline.
A simple Yes or No would have been a good starting point.
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Well bowl me over. After all this time you can’t hardly tell. I guess it’s nice to have it official now (thanks, Jo :-)). But I gave up worrying about it several years ago. When no one can see it, it just ain’t there.
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While the time-temperature plot contains many data points, there are only between 1 and 2 30 year statistical events. That’s far too few for the statistical significance of a conclusion.
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Fenbeagle has a great post here.
Julia the Gizzard of Oz gets a gig at the end. Brilliant.
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Oh, cut alors, the millennialists are in force here, hoping for the new media watchdog to arrive soon and despatch us naughty bloggers into perdition, and then Methane Maxine mutters more perdition. Next thing le France will have a socialist president!
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A few weeks ago it was reported in the UK press ( unfortunately I cannot find the link) that there was a “poles apart” forecast on the weather for May in the UK between Piers Corban ( predicting the coldest May for many decades) and the UK Met Office ( predicting an average mild May). Early days but it looks like despite all their super computers/models, Piers will win the “little” difference of opinion with the Met Office
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/318254/Winter-to-last-until-June
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I don’t think this is the one you want Ross, but it is an article on Piers and his May predictions and he also comments and makes a couple of corrections to the article.
http://climaterealists.com/?id=9461
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Try this one, “The Weatherman caught in a media Storm”.
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Like this bit from Piers Corbyn:
“Reminded that all the world’s national weather services use numerical weather prediction, he says: “Well, what they’re doing there is delusional nonsense, because the weather is not controlled by the weather. It’s controlled by other things, ie external factors.
“Their calling for more money to be spent on computers is just theft. All it will enable them to do is get the wrong answer quicker.”
It occurred to me a few ago that the idea of defining climate as the average weather over a selected time period is “delusional nonsense”.
Once one begins to think of climate, essentially regional and even local, in terms of a large number of variables, mostly external, it allows one to shed delusional thinking of the sort that inhabits the brains of alarmist climate scientists and their lay fellow travellers.
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…a few(years)ago…
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This is interesting and relevant …
An internal study by the U.S. EPA completed by Dr. Alan Carlin and John Davidson concluded the IPCC was wrong about global warming. One statement in the executive summary stated that a 2009 paper found that the crucial assumption in the Greenhouse Climate Models (GCM) used by the IPCC concerning a strong positive feedback from water vapor is not supported by empirical evidence and that the feedback is actually negative. Water vapor in the atmosphere causes a cooling effect, not a warming one. Carbon dioxide also causes a slight cooling effect but it so small it could never be measured by man’s instrumentation.
EPA tried to bury the report. An email from Al McGartland, Office Director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), to Dr. Alan Carlin, Senior Operations Research Analyst at NCEE, forbade him from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues. In a March 17 email from McGartland to Carlin, stated that he will not forward Carlin’s study. “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator (Lisa Jackson) and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. …. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” A second email from McGartland stated “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.”
McGartland’s emails demonstrate that he was rejecting Dr. Carlin’s study because its conclusions ran counter to the EPA’s current position. Yet this study had its basis in three prior reports by Carlin (two in 2007 and one in 2008) that were accepted. Another government cover-up, just what the United States does not need.
Eliminate this regulation immediately. This is a scientific tragedy.
[Links would be useful. Otherwise all of this is heresay and a waste of time. Mod oggi.]
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Graham
You got that right. Almost everytime Science has jumped onto a political or theological bandwagon, science and human progress has suffered.
I am genuinely concerned for the perception of science when all this is done and dusted. I want the populist science to take a backseat to the diligent, specific and unbiased science, but I do fear that all will be tarnished. And that will be a tragedy.
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This is interesting re water vapour…….
Quadrant Online – Climate Modelling Nonsense – CARBON DIOXIDE VAPOUR TRICK:-
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/10/climate-modelling-nonsense
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Here are three:
Wikipedia Article on Carlin
Links and discussion on WUWT
Editorial on EPAabuse.com
[Well done. Thnx. Mod oggi]
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Madjak
I think you are right and it is showing already in another area. Our local paper ( Wellington NZ ) has column each Monday written about science matters –a wide range of topics have been covered over the past few years.
In today’s column it covers the the fact that radiation levels around Japan following Fukushima barely register — no alarming issues with people exposed and tested ,similarly with tests on water and fish around Fukushima.
The writer comments ” the Japanese Govt. and scientists say many displaced Japanese can return home but few have done so.The residents no longer trust the government or scientists,thanks to media and enviroomental alarmists”
Sorry I cannot link the article as it is not online.yet.
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Yes, well, New Zealand and Nukes is an interesting case in point.
I really doubt that if Darwin was being bombed that the everage Kiwi would give a Rats arse if an Allys ships were nuclear powered or not.
Great for the Hippie Tourism maket I guess, but naive would be the best word for it, IMO.
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Ross,
I found an Australian government site that verified your claim which said, “One year on,the levels of radioactive iodine have declined to insignificant levels”.I didn’t copy the link properly and when I went back Google had blocked the site.
However Fukushima pales into insignificance compared to events over the last 60 or so years.
http://rezn8d.net/2012/01/20/haarp-timeline-an-animated-history-of-ionospheric-destruction/
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I took a different tack to find the media release –
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/News/MediaReleases/Japan1YearOn.cfm
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suddenly it’s fashionable to notice what’s been obvious all along, even if i don’t like all the Fin Review’s recommendations:
7 May: AFR: Time to rethink carbon policy
The government is in a bind because it locked itself into a carbon tax that is simply too high. Trading will start at $23 a tonne from July 1 this year and rise to $25.40 by 2014. By mid 2015, when the scheme shifts to emissions trading, the price is likely to fall to the legislated floor price of $15. In contrast, prices in the most directly comparable scheme, in Europe, are currently trading way below that; last week the price set by that scheme was just under €7 a tonne or about $9…
As the Productivity Commission report, Barriers to Effective Climate Change Adaptation, released last month noted, the bulk of scientific evidence is that human made warming is real. But there is considerable scientific uncertainty about how this could unfold…
With a carbon price well above international levels and few other countries apparently prepared to follow the lead of either Europe or Australia, there is good reason to take another look at the proposals put forward by the Productivity Commission…
http://afr.com/p/opinion/time_to_rethink_carbon_policy_hjVzeVsd5sC4JQjLmiLEyM
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An interesting article re carbon (DIOXIDE – PLANT FOOD) price…….
The carbon tax just got more useless:-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_carbon_tax_just_got_more_useless/
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Have arrived late to this debate and after reading many comments above there is not much left to say, so as always and only a little OT Milne on “meet thepress” yesterday was priceless.
Sorry if this has already been mentioned
http://www.wakeup2thelies.com/2012/05/07/the-carbon-tax-regime-is-so-stupid-it-will-tax-a-bio-fuel-company/
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So it’s about efficiency – and helping people – who would have thought that???
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Christine Milne has never said this, but she may as well have.
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These apparent step changes appear to be a load of statistical nonsense, so let’s look at the data record for HADCRUT3 in line with Jo’s quote:
Hadcrut trends plus PDO for those who incorrectly think it has any long-term influence, after all it is an oscillation.
One waits in wonderment for the next exciting installment?
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,
ONLY if they are not correlated with real, observed and well documented natural events. The step change in 1976-7 was correlated with such events: see:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1650v3.pdf
Unlike CO2, the ‘break’ has a natural and measured explanation.
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Gee whiz a visit from the past by the ol’ mineral!
PDO data or the graphics. Pity about that eh! But relying on Stockwell and Cox – pitiful! You’ve gotta’ do better than their simplistic visual correlations!
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What is your point sf?
Other break papers:
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2002/2002GL015191.shtml
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/Douglass_Knox_pla373aug31.pdf
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
http://cbe.anu.edu.au/research/papers/pdf/wp495.pdf
There are plenty more; is sf denying that a 1976-7 ‘climate shift’ involving s tep change in temperature did not occur?
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OMG where to start, first principles perhaps and with a profound sense of scepticism.
In typical surface climate anomaly patterns for warm (positive) phases of PDO, SSTs tend to be anomalously cool in the central North Pacific coincident with unusually warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the west coast of the Americas. A cool (negative) phase PDO is associated with cool sea surface temperatures along the Pacific coast of North America.
And on your references:
From Douglas Knox:
From a quote and reference in his paper:
Thus global warming and cooling during Earth’s internal mode of interannual climate variability arise from fluctuations in the global hydrological balance, not the global radiation balance. Since it occurs in the absence of extraterrestrial and anthropogenic forcing, global warming on decadal, interdecadal, and centennial period scales may also occur in association with Earth’s internal modes of climate variability on those scales.
And the others:
From 1
The results suggest that much of the decade to decade variations in global air temperature may be attributed to tropical Pacific decadal variability.
From 3
Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained. The apparent lack of a proximate cause behind the halt in warming post 2001/02 challenges our understanding of the climate system, specifically the physical reasoning and causal links between longer time-scale modes of internal climate variability and the impact of such modes upon global temperature.
From 4
Our analysis shows that the upward movement over the last 130-160 years is persistent and not explained by the high correlation, so it is best described as a trend. The warming trend becomes steeper after the mid-1970s, but there is no signifcant evidence for a break in trend in the late 1990s. Viewed from the perspective of 30 or 50 years ago, the temperatures recorded in most of the last decade lie above the confidence band of forecasts produced by a model that does not allow for a warming trend.
I concur that there has been regime shifts in the PDO (as there would be with any long term oscillation) but a climate shift in temperatures as a result is absolutely ridiculous!
And here’s a graphical view: thanking memoryvault below (unless of course he’s a clone of one Luboš Motl Pilsen of the Czech Republic) for his valuable input. Obviously one finds that the PDO has some influence on temps’, both cooling and warming, but as you can see is not the answer to the measured increase.
Indeed, it’s as insufficient a reason for global warming as that of Robert Carter et al and their failed ENSO hypothesis.
And that’s all we need to say about that!
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Way to go sf! Your entertaning graph showing the PDO index for the 20thC and comparing it with the temperature trend for the 20thC misses a couple of crucial points.
Firstly, over the 20thC there were TWO +ve PDO’s; +ve PDOs feature global warmer temperatures than -ve PDOs; so by simple aggregation that simple fact would explain the increase in 20thC temperature. Simple, eh?
Secondly, the PDO oscillation has not been equal over the 20thC; as I note asymmetry occurs in natural cycles and this has been well documented in ENSO, the determining constituent of the PDO cycle; this asymmetry is a proxy for solar variation as Meehl has found. The asymmetry produces an accumulation effect on temperature as Monahan and Sun and Yu have found. We know TSI has increased over the 20thC so PDO, as a proxy for this can indeed, in its “regime shifts” explain “a climate shift in temperatures”.
The physical mechanisms for this “climate shift” are well documented and a closer read of Stockwell is required by you and other alarmists. Stockwell references many papers dealing with the partial cessation of ocean upwelling which occurred in 1976. This cessation left solar heated water on the surface and provides an excellent explanation for the atmospheric warming which lasted from 1976 until 1998 when the uprising RESUMED.
Read the references in Stockwell sf; start with the Guilderson and Schrag paper and then look at the McPhaden paper. The trouble with smart-bums like you sf, is that you can’t see the woods for the trees.
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Cohenite,
None of what you posted in any way explains the temperatures are rising?
How about getting back to the point, how does the PDO warm the atmosphere? If PDO was responsible for warming the surface, the oceans would be cooling: which they aren’t. The PDO is an internal process and does not increase or decrease the total energy in the climate system. Thus you offer no substantive argument, merely a paltry excuse that there was a unattributed step change in temps.
As well: from the Max Plank Institute TSI v global temps: showing no correlation in the last 40 odd years.
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Silly; TSI from the IPCC.. As you can see TSI as measured by both Lean and Hoyt and Schatten shows a steady climb to the end of the 20thC. But it is not so much the level of TSI but whether the TSI is above the average TSI for the period which should be considered in correlating with temperature. David Stockwell explains it here at Figure 2.
When you consider it is whether TSI is above average or not which is the factor to consider with temperature than a proper correlation like this can be produced.
So, to recap; when the TSI is above average temperature will increase; the temperature increase rate will be rising if TSI is rising above the average but declining if TSI is declining above the average.
As for PDO warming the atmosphere; what don’t you understand about the upwelling and TSI warmed water remaining on the surface? And SST have been falling since 1998 when the upwelling resumed.
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.
Thank you for the PDO graph Sillyfilly.
For those of us who were taught in high school in the Sixties that “climate” worked on a natural, roughly 30 year cycle of warming and cooling, it was most helpful.
Particularly since back then it was believed (but not established) to be influenced by major ocean currents.
I note from the graph linked below – based on yours – that while the natural warming cycles – 1910 to 1940 and 1970 to 2000 – are virtually equal, the natural cooling cycles – 1880 to 1910, 1940 to 1970, and 2000 to current – appear to be getting progressively more dramatic – dare I say “extreme”.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1900/to:2012/every:13/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1900/to:1910/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:2000/to:2012/trend
.
Perhaps someone as wise as yourself might have an explanation for that?
You know – in terms of ever and constant increasing anthropogenic CO2.
[Credits ] ED
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M, it’s called asymmetry and can be shown as this:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2702/4503452885_79b5c09c4f_o.jpg
There are a number of papers on it by Akumura, Khider etc; this in turn can lead to ‘accumulation’ of either the El Nino or La Nina characteristics:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~sun/doc/Sun_Yu_JCL_2009.pdf
Sf never stays to add to the discussion; she is a drive by troll.
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Thanks for the link to the paper cohenite. Assuming they’ve done the maths right, there definitely was a step in the late 70’s.
It seems that these ocean oscillations govern the distribution of heat between the atmosphere and the oceans. We certainly see it on a shorter timespan with the el nino/la nina cycle.
But none of this says anything about the total heat content of the atmosphere/ocean system and its long term trend. I’d still bet on a continued increase…
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Yep, that “missing heat” aka “Trenberth’s Travesty” must STILL be accumulating somewhere, and the latest
guess*calculation*prediction*projection*astrology chart readingclaim by theteam*spin doctors*defenders of the causeclimate scientists is that it is being “transmitted to the ocean deeps” – their words not mine.Perhaps you’d like to describe the process for us John?
.
Of course, there’s always the outrageous idea that the “missing heat” isn’t “missing” at all, because it never existed in the first place, which would account for why no-one can seem to find it.
Trouble is, without the “missing heat”, the whole CAGW thing becomes a load of crock.
Comments John?
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Time will tell MV, time will tell.
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Yes. Little is known here but one of the four temps records used by David Evans tend to exaggerate the PDO’s oscillations – when get you cooler conditions it appears we are swamped again and again from a bunch of skeptics that the earth is cooling. When this well known oscillation is warm the articles disappear for about five years and then re-appear on PDO cooling oscillation.
They following the well known “Dog Wag”. They should know better.
The dogs tail believe or not and now swinging back. It’s all in them their darn charts since 1970!
A Warming Planet never left us.
Ross J.
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Would that be every 25 to 30 years as per the graph I posted # 51.1.1.2 above?
Perhaps you’d like to post your own graph showing how and where the dog’s tail is now “swinging back”?
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Ross, well done on answering the question by not answering it.
How does warming in the atmosphere transfer to “warming of the deep ocean”, considering we cannot find the warming in the atmosphere? Especially when it takes more than 4 times the amount of energy to raise the temperature of water by x many degrees as it would for air.
Values for specific heat capacity Cp
Air: 1.0035 J/(g*K)
Water: 4.1813 J/(g*K)
A few extra parts per million of a greenhouse gas warms the deep oceans? You and skeptical science are surely taking the piss.
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What is more Ross, any heat transfer from the atmosphere to the ocean can only occur via conduction and convection across the surface of the water. That is surely where you would expect to find “warming”. The deep ocean does not even directly recieve warming from the sun yet you expect us to believe that convection and conduction processes that occur at the surface will somehow warm the deep ocean – kilometers down? The very idea makes absolutely no sense at all. Take 1 degree of warming over the entire ocean surface (acting for 100 years) and show your calculations to work out how much heating there would be 1000m below assuming even mixing. There is no point Ross, because you and I both know that it would be hundredths if not thousands If not millionths of a degree. All easlily within measurement error.
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Still full of hot air I see aren’t we “Stupid Horse”…..
Have you been been banned from Andrew Bolt’s blog?????
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No yet, but the new mods are certainly less inclined to “free speech” than was in yore.
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Welcome to a sample of the new world of the Finkelstein Gillard/Swan/Brown/Milne Labor/Green version of “free speech”! You’ve backed the wrong horse sillyfilly!
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I do, Star Wars was released that year, given the IPCC’s methods of linking random things together to formulate a theory I’d say it’s safe to to assume that The Force is responsible for global warming… it all makes sense now. If we want to save the planet we need a George Lucas tax.
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the CAGW gatekeeper at the Canberra Times, Rosslyn Beeby – just like the CAGW gatekeeper of the NYT, Andrew Revkin, who, the minute the “death threats debunked” news spread around the world, rushed out a month-old students’ interview with Michael Mann, in which he talked of hundreds or thousands of death threats received by dozens of “climate scientists” – has now dug a deeper hole for mainstream journalism. this is too weird a piece for me to excerpt. perhaps i’m “immature”:
7 May: Canberra Times: Rosslyn Beeby: Mature debate, not abuse, the only way forward
That scientists received death threats is sad, but irrefutable, ROSSLYN BEEBY writes
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/mature-debate-not-abuse-the-only-way-forward-20120506-1y6r5.html
funniest bit in the MM interview:
3 May: NYT Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin: Student’s Conversation With Michael Mann on Climate Science and Climate Wars
MM:…I had an envelope sent to my work address that contained a white powder, obviously it was intended to make we think I had been exposed to anthrax. The FBI had to send that off to the regional lab to test it, and it turns out it was just cornmeal, but using the mail to intimidate in that way is a felony… I’m not sure if they were ever able to track down the person who was responsible, but there are dozens of climate scientists who had been subjected to threats of violence and death threats….
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/a-students-conversation-with-michael-mann-on-climate-science-and-climate-wars/
LOL. if the FBI tracked down anyone, would MM not be informed immediately? just asking.
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Pat,
Whenever I see the old redneck-bogan-lynch-mobs-are-out-to-get-us-smart-people trope dragged out.
I reach for the EPIC GREEN FAIL!!! link….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfnddMpzPsM&feature=player_embedded
Lest we forget
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[…] following comments by Mike Buckley (referenced here) are more revealing about the state of climate science than any errors on Evan’s […]
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Silly billboards eh?
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Totally O/T but I’m in Maitland at the moment on a contract and freezing my crown jewels off.
Could someone please send me some global warming?
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Sure MV. Methane is best for warming. HERE HAVE SOME
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Have a look at this nonsense from the warmist Green Mafia, courtesy of Andrew McKillop, a poster at Fenbeagle. Tony from oz for one, will find plenty of ammo there!
“In a bizarre presentation at the April 25 London conference of the IEA the agency held fast to the now heavily shopsoiled doctrine of catastrophic global warming, and used that as its main plank to put out the begging bowl for $5 trillion. This is the IEA’s estimate of what is needed for its unreal mix and mingle of energy gimmicks and real energy solutions, that it calls Clean Energy Progress.
‘To contain climate change’, as it repeatedly states, the International Energy Agency demands the spending of $5 trillion in much less than 8 years.”
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article34335.html
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Steve McIntyre does it again. Why do these fraudsters have to resort to coverups and bare faced lying I wonder?
http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/06/yamal-foi-sheds-new-light-on-flawed-data/#more-15956
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John Brookes
May 7, 2012 at 8:39 pm
Thanks for the link to the paper cohenite. Assuming they’ve done the maths right, there definitely was a step in the late 70′s.
It seems that these ocean oscillations govern the distribution of heat between the atmosphere and the oceans. We certainly see it on a shorter timespan with the el nino/la nina cycle.
But none of this says anything about the total heat content of the atmosphere/ocean system and its long term trend. I’d still bet on a continued increase…
John, I appreciate the acknowledgement of there being a step. I actually gave you a thumbs up earlier in the thread when you were calling us “lazy bastards” for not checking the math, because I considered it a very fair point (and the thin-skinned faux offence-taking that followed from others was disappointing to me). However, the step has now been verified as far as I can see.
I see that despite this you’re still “betting” on a “continued increase.” I would hope that now you would also accept the observation that the general increase (late-70s step aside) has been absent for quite some time now. I’m sure you’ll have many takers for your bet.
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Looks like there’s some (political) climate change in the making in “oh so PC” Sweden.
http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/07/70-of-swedens-local-politicians-dont-buy-climate-change-results-take-defense-agency-by-surprise/
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I note that the Swedish Defense Research Agency claims that “It’s a threat to national security” that Swedes don’t believe in AGW. While this might, at first, sound like hyperbole, they may have a point:
Since Sweden’s defense strategy is essentially appeasement (defined by Winston Churchill as “Feeding a crocodile in the hopes that he will eat you last”) I can see why they might be alarmed by an outbreak of people thinking for themselves, rather than sheepishly following their leaders.
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Vukcevic has recently detected a warming step change in 1970 in Russian temperatures. The reason is that Russian villages got extra rations if winter temperatures were below a certain threshold so the local meteorologists helped it a little. In 1970 it cooled a lot naturally so from that time on they started reporting the real temperatures.
This was his comment on WUWT:
vukcevic says:
March 19, 2012 at 8:20 am
I blame Soviets for inflating their temperature in wake of Czechoslovakia invasion:
See graphs 2 and 3 here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GT-AMO.htm
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“Andrew McRae
May 7, 2012 at 5:27 pm · Reply
I note that 5% is ten times smaller than 50%. To argue, as you have, that the maximum (in 2004) +5% year to year (or averaged over 28 years a compounding growth of 1.55% p.a. ) variation in human emissions is somehow significant year to year compared to the +/- 50% year to year variation in final atmospheric increase is just being stupid. As I said, human output hardly changes year to year.
You declined to answer my question and then attempted to hide the decline.
A simple Yes or No would have been a good starting point.”
You didn’t say who the “you” was you were replying to. I assume that this is in response to my argment that human CO2 production is insignificant. I’ll clarify what I was reasoning, which may well be wrong:
If the “BERN” model is correct,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/06/the-bern-model-puzzle/
the ratio of CO2 between the top layer of the ocean and the atmosphere will quickly reach a pseudo equilibrium with a CO2 pressure of
p in the atmosphere and (1-p) in the ocean. If humans dump an additional 1.5% of an atmosphere’s CO2 in the atmosphere in a year, the next year’s balance will be 1.015 p in the atmosphere, and 1.015(1-p) in the ocean.
In such a case, with everything else stable, we’d measure the atmospheric CO2 balance changes over the years as
1
1 + 0.015 p
1 + 0.03 p
1 + 0.045 p
…..
and at the end of 28 years we’d get 1 + 27* 0.015 p – a straight linear correlation with the sequence of years.
note that vyr was one of the 3 variables I was measuring against CO2 changes- temperature, human emissions, and year.
I thought that the increase in CO2 to current amounts was partly due human emissions. If human emissions were a significant factor, that vyr should also have had a reasonable p value of 0.05 or less rather than the large value given .
vyr -0.09469161 0.09209872 means that at the 95% level, we can be sure that CO2 change based on the year change was somewhere between minus 0.1 ppm and and plus 0.1 pppm-.
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A good read…….
How much will Gillard’s carbon empire cost?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/how_much_will_gillards_carbon_empire_cost/
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Stop Press. UAH Satellite Temperatures now shown to have an exaggerated cooling bias.
When they applied their correction to the Alabama-Huntsville climate record for a UW-derived tropospheric temperature measurement, it effectively eliminated differences with the other studies.
Scientists already had noticed that there were issues with the way the Alabama researchers handled data from NOAA-9, one satellite that collected temperature data for a short time in the mid-1980s. But Po-Chedley and Fu are the first to offer a calculation related to the NOAA-9 data for adjusting the Alabama findings, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“It should therefore make for a better record, as long as UAH accepts it,” he said. To come up with the correction, Po-Chedley and Fu closely examined the way the three teams interpreted readings from NOAA-9 and compared it to data collected from weather balloons about the temperature of the troposphere. They found that the Alabama research incorrectly factors in the changing temperature of the NOAA-9 satellite itself and devised a method to estimate the impact on the Alabama trend.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120507151209.htm
Ross J.
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Another “correction” temperature upward.
Ross you rant fever pitched about how hard it is to get “good” at statistics. (see post #28) Lets assume for a minute that you ARE that good: What are the statistical likelihood that NO adjustments are ever done showing lower temperatures?
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No one’s job is dependent on finding adjustments like that (that produce lower temperatures than the sensor data), and hence, no one looks for them. If anyone found them, it wouldn’t get published (the crew at CRU would see to that) and it wouldn’t get used.
Ross ought to understand this — he uses exactly the same selection process for deciding which new research to focus on and which to ignore.
Recently, the group at the University of Colorado that tracks “sea levels”, decided that what they really needed to track was “sea volume” — that allowed them to add the (largely modeled) rebound from the last ice age due to the release of weight on the land as ice melted to the data and keep it moving upwards (or, at least, not reversing direction and going downwards).
When I questioned someone about this, the response was “Sea volume is the more basic quantity, and the one that people are more interested in”.
I’m sure that a local government wondering how much to budget for sea walls is really interested in the sea volume. /sarc
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So “the people” are more interested in “evidence” that they know cannot be found and is impossible to measure, to replace evidence already found to not support the favorite conclusion of “the people”(i.e. sea levels)?
So sea volume will become yet another rabbit hole, down which to conceal their inconvenient truths………
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Would someone like to try an explanation as to how 390 molecules of CO2 in amongst 999,610 molecules of mostly nitrogen and oxygen can absorb and then reradiate enough heat back towards earth to raise the temperature by degrees?
Explain why the reradiation isn’t projected in all directions including towards space
Why the nitrogen and oxygen are being ignored as heat absorbers and reradiators?
What about convection and conduction of heat between all molecules that are touching these hotter CO2 molecules?
What is the effect of the currents of rising and falling air in massive air circulation around the globe all the time?
Enough questions for starters
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[…] So let me get this right. Prior to the late 1970′s the consensus was that the globe was cooling, not warming. Then the consensus shifted towards the belief that the world was warming due to increasing CO2 emissions. Now the evidence suggests that this period of warming has stopped, paused, ceased, plateaued, or whatever term you want to call it. There is also substantial evidence to suggest that global temperature is not correlated to CO2 emissions. […]
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