(Updated to recover from the deleterious effects of posting at midnight after a long day.)
(Updated even more to include this link to Curry on her own web site reacting to the Daily Mail story. She’s not happy with the headline, among other things. See at the end of the article.)
One reason I’ve been more slack about the details of current climate science controversies than I was is that I’m frankly tired of the whole thing. It’s predictable: the simplest climate post is immediately followed by the following comments from someone.
The consensus of climate science agrees that global warming is being caused by human emission of CO2. Now, the real answer to that one, frankly, is “So what?” Science isn’t established by consensus, and the number of scientific theories established by consensus that later dissolved under experimentation ranges from Aristotle’s ideas about falling bodies (obviously, heavier objects fall faster, right?) to quasicrystals — which got Danny Schechtmann dismissed as a crackpot 20 years ago and got him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. This is the classical fallacy of argumentum ad populum, and the fact that it has a Latin name tells you how long it’s been recognized as a fallacy. (This is often followed by the argumentum ad baculum, appeal to force: if you keep saying that we’ll beat you up/you won’t get tenure/you should be treated as a war criminal and executed. Those don’t show up very often here at PJM, but don’t doubt I can find you examples, here and elsewhere.)
That’s usually matched with the favorite unscientific “skeptic” answers: No one has proven there’s any such thing as a greenhouse effect and the notion of a global average surface temperature isn’t even well-defined. Both of these really come down to “I don’t believe in thermodynamics at even the most basic level.” ”Scientific fact” is different in a very basic way from facts like “2+2=4″, but the basic idea of a greenhouse effect is awfully well confirmed. Among other things, it’s easy enough to calculate that the Earth’s “natural temperature” without the greenhouse effect provided by water, methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases would be something like -33°C. If you’ve ever seen a lake or an ocean with liquid water, you have experimental confirmation of a greenhouse effect. A slightly more sophisticated version of that is the one about there not having been significant warming in the last 200 or 1000 years; again, sorry. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Thames river regularly froze over. It has been warming. What we aren’t as sure of is precisely how much. In 200 CE there were wine grapes being grown in northern England, and about 1000 CE bread grains were being grown successfully in Greenland: it is really warmer than it was then? Doesn’t look like it — but that makes trouble for the idea that we’re warming unusually.
The global average surface temperature (GAST) objection makes at least a little more sense: it’s almost true. Since we can’t put a thermometer on every infinitestimal spot on Earth and take its temperature continuously, we’re inevitably making an approximation. But that just means we can’t take the GAST precisely. When a bunch of thermometers are averaged together, the resulting number is a temperature, and along with it (although this is often ignored) we can make an estimate of how much error there may be. There’s a major, active subtopic of mathematics called “statistics” that’s concerned with how to deal with that kind of uncertainty, its error bounds and so forth. But think of it like when you take a child’s temperature: maybe at the mouth it’s 99°F while at the other end it’s 100.1°F. You don’t claim that means taking a child’s temperature is “not well defined.” You just know it’s somewhere in that neighborhood, and you don’t worry that a boy child’s testicles are usually cooler than his pancreas.
And, of course, there’s the usual run of people who say skeptics are “in the pay of Big Oil”, “brainwashed by Fox News”, or simply “denialists” with arch connections made to Holocaust denial. The interested student is encouraged to consult a list of classical rhetorical fallacies for the Latin names for those; I promise you’ll find them all.
Perhaps the most annoying to me are the people who say The University of East Anglia cleared the scientists involved. It’s more precise to say UEA whitewashed the scientists involved; anyone who actually read the files and emails saw there was a lengthy effort to suppress opposing ideas and coerce journal editors.
For all of that, there are real, serious attempts being made to get the science right. I wrote about the preliminary results in one such case here: the Berkeley Earth Project reported that they were preparing four papers, one of which confirmed that there had been a general rise in global average earth-surface temperature over the last 200 years. The actual papers hadn’t been peer-reviewed or published, and it was, ahem, very unusual for the results to be pushed by press release before a paper had even been accepted. If a climate skeptic had done that, the derision would have been general, and would have included remarks about pseudoscience and muttered comments about cold fusion. Still, the paper itself was decent — it has a number of statistical flaws (finding that kind of thing is what peer review is for) and the results weren’t really all that dramatic — the general response was “well, duh!” It was the PR that was flawed.
Unfortunately, it’s beginning to look more and more like the PR effort was the point. Dr Judith Curry, who chairs the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is second author on these very papers, has now gone public in an interview in the Daily Mail (UK). The story, entitled “Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague” starts with:
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.
Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.
Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.
[That's much stronger than the actual papers justified, as we noted here when they first came out, but a good summary of the way the results were reported in the press.]
The story goes on:
It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.
“A slightly more sophisticated version of that is the one about there not having been significant warming in the lat 200 or 1000 years; again, sorry, in 200 CE there were wine grapes being grown in northern England, and about 1000 CE bread grains were being grown successfully in Greenland. It has been warming. What we aren’t as sure of is precisely how much.”
The first and second sections of this section don’t fit together.
It has been significantly warmer in historical eras — it’s too cold to grow grapes in Northern England today, and Greenland can’t grow much more than lichen — cereals are out of the question. So it’s been cooling from then until now.
On the other hand, during the “Little Ice Age” around the 1600′s, the Thames froze over in London, so there’s been warming since then.
The problem is that neither datum supports the “something humans are doing is screwing up the system, and humans had better change it right now” theory. If climate can vary so much independently of human input, how can human input be the primary factor?
Furthermore, the practice of choosing timescales to bolster one’s thesis is so transparently counterproductive as to provoke ridicule — we’ve been cooling since the dinosaurs; we’ve been warming since the mammoths…..what does this have to do with gasoline engines? Observation is not understanding — and trendlines with only two data points are idiot bait.
Great comment! What’s missing here is the fact which I have read several times that the flattening of the GW trend over the last ten years corresponds fairly well with the decrease of sun spot activity. Place a graph of sunspot activity against a graph of GW and we might be able to determine if those scientists who claim a correlation are correct. If it can be determined from the data that the sun has something to do how warm it is outside, then we would all be relieved that the warming going on for the last 200 years is not solely due to the presence of more SUV’s which as far as I can tell haven’t been in general use for 200 years.
Then we can determine how much in taxes we have to give to the government to finance a scientific bureacratic panel of experts to determine what the Western powers should do about the sunspots while the rest of the world plays capitalistic catch up.
Back in the late ’80s or early ’90s, when the Economist wasn’t in on the whole AGW deal, they published a correlative chart displaying 20th century sun activity along with warming data. This chart showed almost complete correlation. While not exactly implying causation, it was pretty darn indicative that the sun has something major to do with the warming trend on earth.
Although, as a policy concern, AGW was in its infancy at that time, I pretty much dismissed the whole AGW movement then.
Check out the website by Israeli/American physics prof. Nir Shaviv (click on my handle for the link — this is not my website nor am I involved with it).
Shaviv has significant evidence that cosmic ray flux variations (and their impact on cloud formation) are a major driver of climate change on geological time scales, and that CO2 concentration changes are of secondary (albeit nonzero) importance.
Yeah. That was the basis for the folks at the LHC to investigate cosmic ray particles and atmospheric aerosols not too long ago.
The problem is that neither datum supports the “something humans are doing is screwing up the system, and humans had better change it right now” theory.
I should have included “warming doesn’t imply AGW.”
“warming doesn’t imply AGW.”
That is the second most important point.
The first most important point is that humanity would be insane to jump from
1. global warming (likely, but not certain), to
2. AGW (based on fake data, and quite possibly wrong or insignificant), to
3. fossil fuels must be foresaken and human population must be reduced by 2/3
People with brains don’t like using (and manipulating) science as a tool to forward libwit agendas.
(But Mr. Martin’s article is very good)
Have a look at my previous piece Reasons to be a Global Warming Skeptic.
I looked. Also a very good article. We don’t always agree, but on this topic, we are definitely in line.
You have probably seen Walter Russel Meade’s recent articles on the topic, but in case you haven’t http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/01/the-death-of-global-warming/
His basic point is also that it hardly matters whether the science is valid or invalid when the proposed solutions will throw humanity back to the stone age.
We don’t always agree,
Hell, I don’t always agree with myself.
First, as you point out, “correlation isn’t CAUSATION”.
Second, as Anthony Watts has pointed out, there is a great deal of disparity in the locations, numbers, and historical time-line of surface stations. Many in colder northern latitudes have been closed/shut down. Whether the historical data is adjusted for this isn’t mentioned (that I can see).
I stopped reading the article at this point. Almost all articles by “skeptics” acknowledge there has been warming (everyone agrees North America is no longer covered by 2 miles of ice). The issue is whether any of the warming is caused by CO2 added to the atmosphere by humans and if so, to what degree. The author of this article lost all credibility because he could not accurately repeat the most basic tenet of the “skeptics” position.
And yet, you stuck around long enough to comment on it.
I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions.
You do realize that you just pointed to the last friggin Ice Age right?
Actually, you stopped reading it rather before then.
The above portion stood out to me also, and there was this: “Dr Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of XXXX at YYYY” — thinking this was intended to be addressed before publication.
Unless you’re going for subtle irony here (writing about sloppy academic work), a bit of proofreading might be in order.
The proofreading of the post certainly left much to be desired….
I’ve dropped Charlie an email about it.
Pfui. It was midnight and I was tired. I’ll go over it in a minute.
One word, Charlie:
Caffeine.
Or perhaps sleep. Take your pick.
(Just razzin’ ya!)
If I could have slept, I wouldn’t be posting at midnight.
Okay, ya got a valid point there.
I.am the Midnight Poster what posts at midnight!
Actually, it was even worse, as I’d taken lorazepam in a (then unsuccessful) attempt to get to sleep. I’ve gone on nighttime O2 and having that thing in my nose disturbs me.
Charlie, on this subject I’ll take your work even without proofreading. (Of course, proofread better.)
Thanks for making this clear once again. Your a Godsend to ex-English majors.
Man, I’m tellin’ you, it was the drugs. Yeah, that’s it.
(Thanks!)
I have always been open to the possibility of AGW, angered by Hollywood types who pretend to know more about it than I do, and furious at the people who think that the world can be saved only if I install a curly light bulb in the little closet where I store my Christmas decorations.
Good post, and thank god for the lack of hysteria! Can’t say that I agree with all your conclusions, and the Northern England/Greenland example left me scratching my head too. But it’s nice to read a post that focuses on the science without screeching either way.
BTW cthulu, I would suggest a logical timeline would be “the time period in which human civilization developed and flourished”. Not that long, really, and we are pretty dependent on climate being more or less what it is now.
Bottom line is that the planet is warming and climate becoming unstable. Whether humans are causing all of the warming or not, we are along for the ride and realistically can’t do anything to stop it at this point. Even with the modest temperature rise we have seen so far, glaciers are melting ridiculously fast in SE Alaska and all over the world. Big fires and big weather. Islands disappearing. Big chunks of Asia flooding frequently. Since it’s going to take a long time for things to cycle back down again, whether it’s all solar variation, precession, etc. or anthropogenic is kind of moot.
The only thing we can do now is to mitigate. Think about what to do with all the coming refugees. What about fresh water? Fire suppression?
Geoengineering anyone? That gives me the bad willies, since the possibility of a well-intentioned epic blunder is obvious. However, one other obvious thing that we could do now is to stop pumping well-studied forcings into the air such as CO2. It may not stop the rise, but would certainly damp it.
Yes, that is incredibly painful too, since there will be serious economic adjustments to be made, still probably lots of refugees, and we will have to find ways to get energy without burning things. However, if the models are right, the probable alternative will be worse. If temps rise to the level of say, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal max, Homo sapiens might not even survive the extinction event.
The problem is that climate has changed before, drastically, rapidly, and outside of your suggested time-frame.
Siberian mammoths were pulled out of the permafrost with buttercups in their bellies that had only been digested a few hours…..it was warm and springlike, and a frost blew in that could freeze animals accustomed to serious cold, and it didn’t thaw for thousands of years.
Climate changes during the existence of our civilization are pebbles compared to the mountains of ice ages and warming periods of the past. You cite this yourself with this “Paleocene-Eocene thermal max”. It is abundantly clear that we are not driving this, we are but passengers — and the obvious policy prescription should be that we focus on dealing with the changes rather than trying to halt or reverse them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranunculus_eschscholtzii
The Alaska Buttercup. Very hardy, and often grows near glaciers in Alaska (other places, too).
Much of the “soil” up here is nothing of the sort, but a type of peat bog, called “muskeg”. We have what is for all practical purposes a pond or lake full of loose, half rotted, moss in suspension covered with a weak layer of mosses. Anything, or any one, who falls in a “pond” in the middle of a muskeg can easily end up under the moss layer and drown. (The “pond” might be 3′ across at the top, a half mile wide a foot down, and 50′ to bedrock.) Visibility is, of course, zero as the water is full of loose “junk”, so “up” is who-knows-where. We probably lose a few tourists, and locals, that way each year. Scary stuff.
I can look up at the mountain tops and see snowpack well into August. Just a tiny flux in climate could preserve a mamoth that drowned in muskeg, very easily.
“the time period in which human civilization developed and flourished”
The problem with that is that human civilization developed and flourished BECAUSE of warming, so there is no question the planet has warmed since the beginning of period. Likewise, there is no question that human activity 10,000 years ago could possibly have impacted the climate.
The answer is that there there should not be a single time period. When there is a single time period in a paper, it is a red flag that there could be an underlying agenda.
Likewise, there is no question that human activity 10,000 years ago could NOT possibly have impacted the climate.
There is no evidence of climate becoming “unstable”.
On the contrary, thee’s no evidence of climate becoming stable.
I’m trying to understand all the contradictory reports I read.
(Yes, I followed “ClimateGate” (and now this) and it’s clear there has been a lot of nastiness — but I still want to hear more about their claims.)
A number of reports have claimed/shown that there has been no warming since the late 90′s. Yet, I keep reading/hearing reports that 20–, 2010, 2011, and/or other years — have been shown to be the “warmest on record.”
Then, there comes “Climate Change.” Are they saying that even though there has been no warming in the last 10-15 years, that because CO2 levels keep rising, that that in itself is evidence of Climate Change — which is causing the unusually intense weather conditions of late (tornados, floods, drought?)
Is there a theory that regardless of no very recent “warming,” that because CO2 levels are rising, there will be Climate Change/Chaos? Is that what they’re saying? If so, whose theory is it? What is it based on — if not “warming?” Or is there a theory that the lack of recent warming is just temporary? I’d like to know at least what they are claiming — and it’s just not clear.
Also — the main instrument for measuring CO2 is just below Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Mauna Loa has been active in the past few years, causing fog and very poor air conditions. Doesn’t this have a negative effect on the measurement of CO2 there? Evidently, there are those who believe it has no effect, or they wouldn’t take those numbers seriously. Has this been seriously and scientifically discussed? I can’t find any info on it.
A number of reports have claimed/shown that there has been no warming since the late 90′s. Yet, I keep reading/hearing reports that 20–, 2010, 2011, and/or other years — have been shown to be the “warmest on record.”
Usually, the original report starts out as “second warmest on record,” “third warmest on record”. The explanation is simple: if 1999 is thwe warmest year on record, and temperatures stay roughly flat or decline slightly, you’ll have a lot of “nearly the warmest year on record” to follow.
Is there a theory that regardless of no very recent “warming,” that because CO2 levels are rising, there will be Climate Change/Chaos? Is that what they’re saying? If so, whose theory is it? What is it based on — if not “warming?” Or is there a theory that the lack of recent warming is just temporary? I’d like to know at least what they are claiming — and it’s just not clear.
There are a bunch of such theories. Some of these theories suggest that we’ll have lots of violent weather. The problem being that actually what we have is a lot better press coverage of violent weather — if anything, violent weather is decreasing. (But then there are theories that climate change will lead to less violent weather too.) If you have enough theories that contradict one another, then one of them will certainly be right.
Roger Pielke, Jr has been following the violent weather story. Here’s one such blog post and you’ll find many others.
No one contributes to the “violent weather” meme more than Drudge. He’s weather-obsessed.
Aqua – You wrote: “A number of reports have claimed/shown that there has been no warming since the late 90′s. Yet, I keep reading/hearing reports that 20–, 2010, 2011, and/or other years — have been shown to be the “warmest on record.”
With all due respect, I think you are confusing level and change. We know (or at least I think we do) that it has been getting warmer since the 1600s. So temperatures now will be higher than temperatures at an earlier date. Suppose that increase stops. Then the higher temperatures at time the increase stops will, on average, be higher (warmer) than averages of the lower temperatures of earlier periods. Hence, the statement ‘there has been no warming since the late 90′s’ does not contradict the statement that the years 2000-2011 have been the warmest on record.
The “hottest year on record” you keep reading about is probably based on a mangling of this press release by the World Meteorological Organization:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_906_en.html
which begins “Geneva, 20 January 2011 (WMO) – The year 2010 ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Data received by the WMO show no statistically significant difference between global temperatures in 2010, 2005 and 1998.”
If you parse this carefully, you realize this means that there has been no rise in temperature since 1998. This is not the conclusion they wish you to draw, but they are apparently too honest (or maybe too dumb) to camouflage this. Note that this confirms the second graph above.
Actually, Aristotle turned out to be right — ever so slightly. Depending on the scale. A heavier object WILL “fall” faster, because it travels a shorter distance! When two masses come near each other, they gravitationally attract each other. The larger object will do most of the “work” by drawing the smaller object toward it. But the reverse also happens — the smaller object will draw the larger object toward it as well, though to a proportionally smaller degree. The most obvious example is that the Earth pulls on the moon and keeps it in orbit, but the moon is also pulling on the Earth (to a much smaller degree, due to the moon’s much smaller mass), causing tides and wobbles and so forth.
Now accentuate the mass differential a zillion-fold, and you have a classic Aristotle/Galileo experiment. If you were to “drop” a golfball on the ground — in other words, release a very small mass (the golf ball) and let it gravitationally interact with a very large mass (the Earth) — then the Earth would draw the smaller mass “downward” toward it, but the smaller mass would also draw the earth upward, in this example to an infinitesimal degree. But if you were to allow a somewhat larger mass — say, a cannonball — interact gravitationally with the Earth, then it would also draw the Earth upward toward it as it “fell,” but it would do so somewhat more than the smaller golf ball did.
Of course, at this scale, the amount that either ball drew the earth upward is so sub-microscopic that it is far far far beneath our ability to detect it. I doubt anyone has ever done the calculations, but as the two spherical masses meet in a gravitational collision (i.e. “the ball fell on the ground”), the percentage of the distance traveled by the Earth upward in this scenario would be a decimal point followed by a line of zeros extending off to the horizon, and then maybe a 1. But if that cannonball was made of black-hole material, then the story would be different — everyone on the whole planet would feel the lurch as the Earth leapt up the meet the black-hole-cannonball halfway. (Even though, from the frame of reference of someone standing nearby on the surface of the earth, it would still appear that the super-dense cannonball just fell to the ground. This, as everyone knows, was Einstein’s insight.) But less known is that the insight restored Aristotle’s reputation and damaged Galileo’s, because yes — as Einstein proved, “heavier” objects warp space more and thus draw mass toward them to a greater degree than do “lighter” objects, and as a result the larger the combined mass of a two-mass system is, the more quickly they will crash into each other, and thus a “heavier” object will indeed “fall” faster than a smaller object, though the tiny difference can only be observed on a planetary scale, not on the scale of things you can hold in your hand.
Today’s science may have proven that Aristotle’s hypothesis was correct by an infinitesimal degree but it certainly didn’t “restore his reputation” because his judgement was the simple common sense conclusion that obviously something heavier would fall faster. ( I know that your comment was whimsical.)
The AAGW “climate scientist’s” hypothesis is not much better than Aristotle’s. Ever since records started being kept following the Industrial Revolution, temperatures have been rising, Co2 levels have been rising, and since the latter factors relate to the consumption of fossil fuels, that must be the cause. That’s just common sense and they will only accept research that supports our premise. They are like the blind men groping the leg of an elephant and concluding that it must resemble a tree. Common sense tells me that that this tiny planet’s climate and many of its other properties has always been unstable and a millenium or two are no more than a blink in time. It is measure of the arrogance of the hubris of the over-educated that they believe that puny humans can, like the President, make the seas rise or fall, hurricanes change their course, predict the shifting of tectnic plates, and generate energy in any consequential measure from “biomass.”
My hypothesis is that If we were to cut off all man-made Co2 production, the climate would keep on getting warmer at the same rate, with any dampening effect on about the same magnitude as the the heavier object falling faster. My hypothesis is just as good as Al Gore’s and just as unprovable. May the Force be with us.
You’re making it too complicated. Aristotle was wrong, because he was conflating two separate phenomena into one theory; basic Newtonian mechanics, and fluid mechanics (which is wholly responsible for the smaller object falling more slowly). Much of getting to the bottom of physics is the important work of separating out entangled phenomena like this.
Which brings us to AGW. They make the exact same mistake in reverse.
They take the uncontroversial Tyndall effect, and go from that the uncontroversial but poorly named greenhouse effect, and from there leap the Grand Canyon of non-sequitur to AGW, completely leaving out all manner of fluid mechanics, aerosol effects, heat exchange with oceans, etc., etc.
If you can’t resolve these things to their elements, and then demonstrate all of the elements in isolation, it’s not science. It’s sophisticated alchemy.
I occassionally see a specialist Doctor, who is listed as one of the three experts in his field, in the World. His answer to almost any inquiry as to cause and effect is, “Depends”. If I keep it up, applying my 5 years of chemistry ang 6 years of physics, to my own medical observations, and thereby extrapolating simple, elegant, solutions, he always says something like, “But, alas. The human body is not a petrie dish. Sometimes, when we want more of something, we give you more of it. But sometimes, we give you less, as that causes your body to make more.” So, I asked, how did he know which to do? He said, “First, we try it one way. If that works, fine. If it doesn’t we try the other way. If it really doesn’t work, we’ll know not to try that next time”.
If the human body is no petrie dish, imagine how much more complex weather is, let alone climate.
These “scientists” must justify being paid large sums to navel-gaze, so they must scare their financiers. Being that their financiers are mostly unscrupulous politicians, spending your money, not theirs, the standard of evidence doesn’t usually have to be very high. The mistake that the climate shills have made is the usual one con-men make: they get greedy. Now they have our attention, because they threaten our well being. They should have just taken what they had, while the taking was good.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with all of these climate food fights. The real answer, in almost all cases, is “depends”.
Actually, Aristotle turned out to be right — ever so slightly. Depending on the scale. A heavier object WILL “fall” faster, because it travels a shorter distance! When two masses come near each other, they gravitationally attract each other.
That’s not really true: since the space between them is “shortened”, the time is dialated: the Lorentz transformation is a rotation in Minkowski space, and when the distance gets shorter, time gets slower.
So there.
(Rewritten in English this time.)
Yes. The equations are all mass independent.
Well, yeah, but seeing it as a rotation in 4-space is just ever so much cooler.
Especially when the “angles of rotation” are “imaginary” numbers.
Much like the phone number I got the other night.
I hate winter.
I was counting on global warming.
I was robbed!
I’m with you, Pecos. Here in New Hampshire I got 14″ of snow last night. More global warming, please!
The plant kingdom is working for the vote. Internal polls show that plants will go strongly for more CO2 and warming. The CO2 deficit has become critical and they just want to breath easier. There is a large strike scheduled for the next few months in the plant kingdom. They promise to shut almost everything down
Also, with the AGW movement faltering, large internet data companies are taking the hot air produced by all the online ranting over the melting Arctic straight to the Arctic. Google, Facebook and others are building data centers at the Arctic circle cutting out the whole CO2 feedback mechanism.
Yeah, but I hear only about half of the plants are supporting the strike.
What will the reaction be to this from climate activists? Judith Curry got bought off by Big Oil? Maybe “a physicist” will come back and tell us the Truth.
My apologies to John, I should have said “Big Carbon” or “Muslim Oil”, not “Big Oil”, as I believe these are his preferred conspiratorial terms. Because he’s an Islamophobe!!!!!!!!!
Global warming was the biggest hoax of the twentieth century, rehashed as climate chGlobal warming, the biggest hoax of the twentieth century, has now been rebranded as climate change for the twenty-first.
Proponents, like Gore and Obama, argue for policies that would essentially destroy our economy today, in the hope of preventing something that might happen in a hundred years.
Keep in mind, if they get their wish, it will still be for naught. Nations like China and India are not willing to sacrifice prosperity on a prospect.
ange for the twenty first. Proponents, like Gore and Obama, argue we should destroy our economy today to prevent something that might happen in a hundred years. Keep in mind, if they get their wish, it will still be for naught. Nations like China and India are not willing to sacrifice prosperity on a prospect.
I disagree — socialism was the biggest fraud of the 20th century, followed closely by eugenics.
(I say this because AGW is just another “carrier” for the ideals of socialism and eugenics.)
Let not your animus for liberals make you forget that this so called “hoax” infects the other side too.
Maybe someone else can fill in the names but the first scientist who decided CO2 was the culprit has bowed out of the debate. He also made a statement to the efffect that he should have chosen a better gas.
We know that ice cores do not come with the dates marked on the layers so it would be fairly difficult to determine whether the increase of CO2 causes the warming or is a result of it. We do know that cold water holds more CO2 than warm water.
Someone stated earlier that we should work to mitigate the effects of climate change instead of trying to control it. Potatoes became a staple during the mini ice age when the climate caused wheat to spoil to quickly. We may have better ways to prevent our food stores from spoiling now but think about this. Warm weather and an abunbant amount of CO2 means more agricultural production. If the climate is going to be cooling possibly due to the reduction of sun spot activity then we need to start planning our meals.
Maybe we need to find a better gasoline additive than ethanol and go back to eating corn instead of burning it.
Whatever choices we make we need to realize that while everything is warm we make more food. When everything is cold not so much. No debate from any group of scientist can change that.
My place in this discussion, is fully behind the scientists that are still operating in the realm of scientific rigor, standing next to and shoulder to shoulder with those who find the tactics of leftists despicable and untrustworthy and chest to chest with the liar, cretins and frauds who are seizing this issue for leftist political purposes.
AGW is a hoax. The science may have SOME particulars that are worthy of further pursuit.
But the ISSUE of AGW has been permanently stained by fraud, corruption, graft, distortion, slander, and the whole Pandora’s box of leftist ills.
It was used as a money-steering scheme for leftist distortion purposes. And no lie was too big to tell in order to divert funds to leftist coffers.
I believe in pollution. I believe that the earth warms in periods and cools in periods. I believe we were in a warming period. I do not believe a word that comes out of a leftist’s mouth. They are liars by brand.
(I make a distinction between liberals and leftists…and am record doing so in a column by Roger Kimball quite a while ago)
The leftists have adopted taqiyya and teamed it with “the end justifies the means” approach to science and have ruined both politics and science in the process.
What makes this scenario geometrically more diabolical, is that the conspiratorial Journolistas have become the propaganda machine for the leftist distortions. The truth is not only not sought…it is brutally raped in the process. If the mass media instead was doing it’s job …it’s mandate…for the people fairly…criticism and kudos would flow equally to left and right….or land somewhere in the middle.
Inquiries and investigations would be pursued with vigor in any direction.
As conspirators in leftist taqiyya and end justifies the means distortion…we are fed a steady diet of coverups, lies, corruption…mirrored by smear campaigns, slander and hit jobs against non-leftists. Not only is the distortion and the lie created to put a thumb on the scales…it is then sold by the propaganda machine to ensure protection…and encasing in the shell of popular opinion.
Finally, the left then peer pressures the hell out of the weak, the timid and the faint of heart…forcing them to “accept” leftist dogma or be shunned, ridiculed and cursed.
The hoax isn’t the lack of scientific rigor, it’s the political rigor mortis that has descended upon the west through rampant unchecked leftism and their co-conspirators in our mass communications channels.
The political elite are attempting to use AGW as the medieval kings used “divine favor” — to establish a rationale for their power and privilege. Fortunately for the rest of us, they haven’t the brains to even ACT like they believe it.
Yahoo News is still repeating the lie (posted a bit over an hour ago): http://news.yahoo.com/skeptic-finds-now-agrees-global-warming-real-142616605.html
It’s disgusting that the AP publishes garbage like this, complete with the phrase “global warming deniers”.
Greg – the AP is afflicted with the same disease as the NYTimes: All the fiction that fits our views, that’s what we print as news.
The fundamental problem with the theory of anthropogenic global warming is that it suffers from scale problems, experimental error, and finally, corrupted data. Experimental scientists, such as chemists and physicists as well as engineers, threw the BS flag on this almost immediately.
The term “scale problems” means that other factors swamp the effects of carbon dioxide by better than an order of magnitude. The main determinant of the temperature of the Earth (and Mars) is the sun, and there is a better correlation between what we know about the earth’s temperature and solar activity than there is between the earth’s temperature and carbon dioxide concentration. It’s true that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but there is not very much of it, and the major greenhouse gas is water vapor, which unlike carbon dioxide, does show predictable localized effects.
The experimental error is by no means mitigated by increasing either the number of measurements or the sensitivity of the instruments. The experimental error in temperature measurements arises because the atmosphere is not homogeneously mixed. Every experimental chemist, every chemical engineer, and every plant technician knows that you cannot control a temperature-sensitive reaction without a working mixer. That is because hot spots and cool spots form in random places that cannot be predicted. If that were not so, you could stick a thermometer anywhere in a tank, below a level of liquid, or above it, or in an exit line, calibrate and be done with it. Every student that takes high school chemistry is exposed to this principle.
The essence of good science often lies in the design of a good experiment. I’ve seen people work in good faith to pursue a theory they know should be right, through failure and success, until they get an experimental design that yields information. Until that time, real scientists will often flounder, sometimes trying to get results out of experimental noise. I credited the environmental scientists with that good-faith effort, until they disclosed that they had lost both their original data AND the information on how they had normalized it (adjusted the raw readings).
Scientists who are not engaged in fraud do not lose their data. And, the adjustments to the data are routinely included as part of any published work that relies on it.
Yes, exactly. What you said. The fact is that if there is anthropogenic “signal” in the general warming, it’s right barely on the edge of what’s detectable within the other error terms; the conclusion that it must be the major forcing in recent warming is based on modeling. While I’m by no means opposed to modeling — did my PhD work in modeling — there’s always the issue that a model doesn’t know any more than the modeler. These models turn out to have little skill; they can’t responsibly be relied on for long-term predictions, nor can their models be considered to be confirmed.
If you bone up on the theory behind spread spectrum communication, you’ll learn that you can quite reliably pull a signal out of the weeds of a lot of noise if you have enough oversampling. That’s not the problem here; the problem is attribution. The temperature zigs month-to-month. How do we know what caused it?
The problem is more fundamental than signal-to-noise; it’s the old adage: you can’t tell which way the train went by looking at the track.
The climate scientists need to start listening to the statisticians. They’re throwing good information away with their filtering, and once thrown away, it can’t be retrieved. People like Mann are either too ignorant of stats, or know full well what they’re doing. Neither possibility is very flattering.
figures don’t lie. Liars figure.
There are recent studies that show that even scientists who are proactively and rigorously objective are influenced by their pet theories. Humans simply can’t get around it.
It’s really quite interesting. There are an astonishing number of “objective scientific results” that simply cannot be replicated a few years after the initial experiments. And that spans all fields of science.
It doesn’t say that all scientific results are bogus, but rather that even supposedly scientific results should be viewed sceptically.
Another interesting and related phenomenon is placebos. They almost always work. The human mind has properties that are magical.
There are recent studies that show that even scientists who are proactively and rigorously objective are influenced by their pet theories. Humans simply can’t get around it.
Yes, exactly. Perception is altered by thought. (As a Buddhist, this is no surprise to me!) That’s exactly why replication and peer review are essential.
One of Feynman’s famous quotes: “the easiest person to fool is yourself”.
Nooooo!! You can’t be a Buddhist! You have to be a Christian snakehandling fundamentalist!!! They’re the only ones who are deniers!!! You can’t be in favor of peer review!! You hate peer review! You’re anti-science!!! Because…because… Chris Mooney!!!!!!
I know, I’m such a disappointment.
A dirty little secret about science is that journals promote conformity. People do what they have to do to get published. If reviewers ask for certain experiments, the researchers will do them. Do you think they will do the requested experiments and get results that disagree with the narrative being pushed in their papers? If you want to get rid of global warming, stop funding the research.
Actually, the problem is more fundamental than that.
If a scientist goes to the government and says, “I looked at X and we’re good, there’s no crisis, nothing needs to be done,” they’re likely to be told, “thank you, now go away.”
If, on the other hand, a scientist goes to the government and says, “I’ve looked at X and if we don’t do something, catastrophic event Y is going to happen,” the natural response of most bureaucrats is to shovel money at the scientist so that catastrophic event Y can be avoided, or if it can’t, at least they won’t be blamed for not doing enough to stop it.
In other words, government funding of scientific research is biased towards finding crises, and that’s where the problem is.
Speaking of climate food fights Charlie, Curry really stepped in it Friday with a thread about Evangelism and climate. Willis Eschenbach, the Climate Curmudgeon, did a Pat Condell on the minister who wrote the piece. Then the mashed potatoes started to fly.
It belongs in the internet hall of fame for food fights. It was quite a spectacle of friendly fire.
You know, I looked at the hed on Climate Etc and decided on the better part of valor….
Link? Sounds like fun.
Knock yourself out: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/28/is-there-any-good-news-for-the-environment-among-evangelicals/
1. The earth may indeed be warming as it warmed and cooled for eons before there were any humans here.
2. Human CO2 emissions undboutedly impact the earth’s climate although it is unclear those emissions are the MAJOR determinant of in light of #1.
3. Even proponents of the political “fixes” that have been proposed agree that they will not have much of an effect on average temperature for decades, if not centuries.
4. Given 1, 2 and 3, what Al Gore and others are proposing to do is analagous to taking a cup of water out of the ocean. In point of fact, if the sun has decided to fry us to a crisp, buying and selling carbon credits and such is less useful than re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
5. So it’s all BS.
I completely accept the laws of thermodynamics and completely accept that the Earth is or may be warming. I’ll never accept that human beings, and let’s reduce this down to “western human beings” and let’s reduce that even further to “American western human beings” are the primary cause of the Earth warming. We can’t solve human created problems, yet during our lifetimes we have somehow managed to cause the Earth to rise in temperature and it is because of our cars, our homes, our businesses, oil, natural gas, flatulence, cutting down trees, building high-rises, commuting, flying from point A to B, and because I refuse to “go green” and receive paperless credit card statements.
When my family was driving to a Halloween festival last night, I let my kids use my Droid X to watch Netflix. My wife commented that she and I did not have such things when we was kids and my son commented did we have cars. We said yes, we had those, and he commented back, “Well, you had technology. Cars are technology.” Out of the mouths of babes. Little does he know that we are in the process of trying to becoming technological Luddites because many of us believe that cars are destroying the planet.
I sincerely believe that my kid and others of his generation will look back and think, “What in the hell happened at the beginning of the 21st century?”
I wish most adults understood that simple fact. Because people think that “technology” is electronics, they can imagine that an energy technology company like ExxonMobil isn’t technology, and therefore is evil, where a gadget technology company like Apple is groovy, because it’s “technology”.
And to these people who slobber about how cool Apple is ever give thanks to the real silicon technology companies like Intel, or the real internet technology companies like Sprint?
For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention – certainly everyone here qualifies – doesn’t it raise warning flags for you that every – and I mean every – “prediction” from pro-AGW proponents is of a catastrophic nature?
That realization was when I knew these people were pushing an a-scientific agenda.
Oh, and follow the same folks back in time: not only are the predictions catastrophic, the mechanism of catastrophe changes over time: global warming, coming ice age, over-population, malthusian catastrophe.
But the solution always seems to be the need for an extra-national cadre of elite superscientists who will control things “for our own good.”
Oh, I dunno, they seem to have perfected at least one science…
The science of getting taxpayers to buy them a new Lexus every year.
“…the notion of a global average surface temperature isn’t even well-defined.”
Well, it isn’t. We know that a real plot of the Earth’s historical temperature is going to be roughly sinusoidal in shape, right? It oscillates between warm periods (like the Triassic period) and cold periods (like our last Ice Age).
Any attempt to display temperature data as a “hockey stick”, or any other form of linear, geometric, or exponential graph is an outright lie with the sole intention of trying to panic people.
If these “scientists” displayed the true graph of the Earth’s temperature, rising and falling in cyclical patterns for thousands of millenia, the public wouldn’t freak out about a little rise of a single degree at the end of the graph, assuming that it would just be a matter of time before it went back down, and would in no way, shape, form, nor fashion get behind a movement to up-end the entire world’s economic order and plunge the globe into chaos over it…
The author makes a very specific point about the problems of “scale” when discussing the two charts in the article, and how a shorter scale on a chart makes small changes look huge, and he should’ve pointed out how that problem is systemic, extending to the entirety of the debate. The 200 years’ worth of data displayed in the “Graph which fooled the world” is an invisible tic on the 4 BILLION years the Earth has had a surface temperature.
Give the public the whole story, please. Put everything into perspective.
Any attempt to display temperature data as a “hockey stick”, or any other form of linear, geometric, or exponential graph is an outright lie with the sole intention of trying to panic people.
See, I told you, there’s always one.
Get a careful look at the hockey-stick graphs — like the ones included with this post. There is a distinct periodic signal in there.
There are also longer term trends that can be fit to various functions. Yes, that’s a curve fit, and so it has flaws. But that doesn’t mean the GAST isn’t well defined.
There’s always one because it is really quite obvious to anyone who thinks about the problem for half a minute.
Yes, there is a periodic signal in the graph. So what? you can’t have a really big sinusoid made up of a lot of little sinusoids?
We get 500 year floods, 100 years flood, 50 floods, etc. All of these little cycles combine to form a giant cycle, which itself probably forms an even bigger, geological scaled cycle as well that we haven’t been on Earth long enough to witness. It’s like electrons floating arouns atoms floating around the sun which is floating around the center of the Milky Way.
When viewing a graph of the entire historical temperatures on Earth, these little blips at the 200 year scale wouldn’t even be visible.
What you need to do, sir, is look at statistical methods and research design. Even EA University had to admit that the stats work on this stuff was horrible when they whitewashed the scientists. Observe:
IF a pollster must interview 1,000 people to get a reasonable sample population for a total population of 300 million people, how many samples must we have to get a good sample population when the total population is 4 billion? At the very least, 1,000. You’re trying to get us agitated over a graph which shows us just 20% of that…
Mike, are you actually reading any of this stuff or are you just on your own trip? I’ll grant that my PhD work was in Computer Science, but I’m heavy on math and worked with a lot of experimenters when I was a staff programmer at the National Biomedical Simulation Resource; I’m pretty hip to experiment design. You’re attempting, apparently, assuming you actually are trying to respond to anything I wrote, to argue that (1) there really isn’t such a thing as an average temperature, and (2) that if the average temperature varies widely over long periods, it doesn’t make sense to look at it over a shorter period.
Your sampling point is almost a good one. The difference is what we have a pretty good idea of the physical processes involved; we can be pretty durn certain that the temperatures at points “in the neighborhood” of a thermometer are going to be close in some sense — covariant — to the temperature measured by the thermometer. You then can use that assumption by doing some kind of regression based on covariance, like “kriging” or Gaussian process regression to estimate the temperatures in between before integrating to estimate the actual average.
Yes, this introduces error, and Briggs has a nice discussion of how this introduces error and how the error is estimated. He thinks the BEST error estimates are only about half as big as they should be.
“it’s almost true. Since we can’t put a thermometer on every infinitestimal spot on Earth and take its temperature continuously, we’re inevitably making an approximation. But that just means we can’t take the GAST precisely.”
I’m sorry but, you are wrong on this point. The problem isn’t about granularity, it’s about heat capacity. This actually is basic thermodynamics.
If you have two objects, one at temperature T1 and one at temperature T2, when you bring them together and they settle out to a uniform temperature, the resultant temperature is not the average of T1 and T2, but the weighted average based on the heat capacities of the two objects. Temperature is an intensive property.
So, for an average temperature to have meaning, the heat capacity must be uniform among the sampled volumes. That presumption may be reasonable in the upper atmosphere, but it is assuredly false on the surface of the Earth.
We know the global average surface temperature means something, but we really do not know what it is, nor have a means of quantifying its consequences. Your analogy of a child’s temperature breaks down because we have observed over a very long time relative to the processes involved and over virtually unlimited specific cases the correlation between body temperature and health. We have no such data record with regard to land temperatures.
I’m sorry but, you are wrong on this point. The problem isn’t about granularity, it’s about heat capacity. This actually is basic thermodynamics.
Um, Bart, which part of what I wrote was was wrong again? I think you need to go back and give this another look.
I’m reading this stuff.
My education is in botany/forestry and political science. I’ve been reading up on this AGW stuff for the last ten years thanks to my job as a natural resources researcher, thank you very much. I’ve read at least as much of the science behind AGW as many other of my fellow PhDs, and you and I both know that the only real difference between the blue collar worker and us PhDs is that we PhDs have simply read a pre-approved list of books on a certain subject and passed a test on them (and don’t like manual labor so much). I’d stack my understanding of the Earth’s climate up against anyone else’s, with no fear.
My point on sample populations was a very good one, one which you either didn’t understand, or inentionally misread because it points to an error in the system you’re defending, sir. I wasn’t talking at all about where we were measuring temperatures, or the number of places on the Earth’s globe where we do so. I was clearly discussing the number of years for which we need an “average temperature” in order to make statistically viable claims about it. We cannot take 200 years worth of data, build models on it, then claim they can predict what will happen in the future with any degree of statistical certainty. You know that, I’m sure. If you must have 1000 samples to estimate the views of a 300 million person population, then you’re going to need at the very minimum 1000 years worth of temperature measurements to make any kind of claim about the Earth’s average temperature, since the Earth is 4 billion (with a B) years old.
There are forumlas and equations which we use to set these sorts of studies up, which tell us how big a sample size we need. I’ve yet to see a single one which states that a population of 4 billion years, with wide variation from year-to-year, can be adequately measured with 200 data points.
Let’s try a real world example, maybe it’d make it easier for you to understand?
The New York Stock Exchange, for instance, has been around since 1792. That’s 219 years, and during that time period it has had drastic, yet cyclical, swings both up and down, just like Earth’s temperature. Now, imagine that this is a problem of similar triangles. If the NYSE was the Earth’s climate, you’d get [219 years (NYSE's existence)/4 billion years (Earth's climate's existence)] = [X (number of years examined from the NYSE)/200 years (number of years of Earth's temp we have measured)].
Do the math and we find:
(219/4,000,000,000) * 200 = 0.00001095 years, or 345 seconds.
IF what you’re claiming is true, we should be able to take roughly the last 5 minutes worth of Friday’s data from the NYSE and predict what the closing bell’s ring will leave the stock market at 100 years in the future.
Think you can do that? Me either. In fact, I bet the last 5 minutes worth of data from Friday won’t let you predict the closing for tomorrow. The NYSE ended up +20 something points on Friday, but it could drop 300 points tomorrow for all we know.
And yet the entire AGW movement is built upon such a premise. It is intended to do nothing but scare people, to generate a crisis, which can then be exploited by the powers-that-be.
I was clearly discussing the number of years for which we need an “average temperature” in order to make statistically viable claims about it.
Which is why I wondered if you’d read what I’d written. I said it was an error to claim that global average surface temperature was not well-defined. You’re arguing about whether the error terms are small enough based on the sample to make statistical assertions about GAST. Now, I — and lots of other people, eg, Matt Briggs who I linked previously — have argued that on both sides, and Briggs just a couple days ago argued that the error bars in the BEST study are a factor of two too small. But all of that, and your argument, presume that the concept of GAST is well-defined.
Charlie – The notion of a global average surface temperature isn’t well-defined. Nobody knows what it means. It is not a measure of energy content in the system. We cannot draw any conclusions of consequences from it.
This is why reputable climate scientists like Roger Pielke, Sr. have been advocating that ocean heat content be used as a more reliable measure of climate change.
“Yes, there is a periodic signal in the graph. So what? you can’t have a really big sinusoid made up of a lot of little sinusoids?”
Ah, no. Sinusoids at different frequencies do not simply add into one big sinusoid. They “beat” against one another, alternatingly interfering constructively and destructively.
I disagree.
Observe my NYSE example. The NYSE goes up, then drops, day to day, week to week, and yet we can still build 6 month and year long trends which are also up and down as time moves forward.
I can easily draw a picture showing what I mean, and even a 7 year old can understand it when I do so (my kid did anyway), but I don’t have to do so since “The Graph Which Fooled The World” shows it easily enough.
See how the graph is made up of a lot of ups and downs on the year-to-year scale, and yet still fits the curve for an even BIGGER curve over a 200 year scale? Same idea. A lot of ups and downs strung together to make really big periods of really large ups and downs.
Oh, and you don’t have to call me “sir”.
No, Charlie actually prefers “Your Excellency” or “Lord High Marshall Of Debunking.”
I’m KIDDING, Charlie!
You just think you’re kidding.
The charts are misleading, because the top chart is over more than 200 years, while the bottom chart is over only about 10 …
They’re misleading in another way, I believe. IF what I’ve read is correct (and I can’t find the original reference, but it may have been at Anthony Watts’ site) the two graphs aren’t displaying the same data. The first graph, the hockey stick, shows a data set that has been smoothed with a moving average! (IIRC, it’s +/- five years.) Take a look at the 2000-2011 interval on the hockey stick graph, at the extreme right — there’s still an upward trend, which is not present in the unsmoothed data. The 2001-2011 high-res graph apparently has not been smoothed with the same huge window, and therefore doesn’t show contamination from previous years of lower temperatures.
Charlie – Well done. I’m surprised our friend, ‘A Physicist’ has not put in an appearance yet.
Thanks! We haven’t seen him in some time. I don’t know if the regular editors finally had had it with him, or what.
Another possibility: The Powers That Be at UW might have decided that Dr. Sidles needed to spend more time on his work and less time arguing online about something clearly outside his professional sphere.
Is that who he is? Thanks for the information. I had to look the guy up, of course. Not sure how his expertise in the field of mechanical engineering and human prosthetics qualifies him to lecture people on climatology. Or to be so damn smug about it…
Different guy… “A physicist” was Dr. John Sidles of the University of Washington.
Just a thought – what’s the chance that knucklehead “physicist” is in Zucotti Park, pounding on a mop bucket and lifting his leg on the shrubbery.
Given that he works for the University of Washington, I doubt he’d fly cross-country to camp out in Zucotti Park.
And if memory serves, we noted his absence of trolling before the whole Occupy thing got started, though I could be wrong on that.
I have to agree with Jack.
Not only have you presented us with a thoughtful essay, Charlie, but your moderation of the ensuing discussion has been top-notch. This is one of the smartest blog discussions I’ve read in a while.
Why thank you!
typo: “significant warming in the lat 200 or 1000 years” — “lat” should probably be “last”.
For the life of me, I can no longer find the link, but just yesterday or the day before, over at Wattsupwiththat.com, someone posted a link to a video displaying year-to-year the spread of all the land-based sites measuring temperature data, from the early 1700′s to the present.
(if someone can post that link here, it would be very helpful)
From the link, one can see that there were virtually no sites outside Europe until the very late 1700′s, when a few start showing up in North America. By the 1850′s, Europe and the US had about 90% of all sites, and it is not until the spread of the British empire that temperature stations start appearing in Africa, Asia , Australia/NZ and, eventually, South America. Yes, island stations show up, but the stunning conclusions are that the “global temperature averages” are based on exceedingly thin, or non-existent data, right up until the late 1970′s when satellites became available to measure temps over the 70% of the earth that is covered with water. HUGE areas of the earth were never measured, and various (many spurious) statistical methods were used to add data where none had been gathered
And even though proxies (tree rings etc.) were used to attempt to past reconstruct temperatures, “climate scientists” arrived a precisions to a tenth of a degree! It’s bloody nonsense. As any engineer will tell you, the precision of any group of measurements is determined by the least precise datum.
So beware of anyone telling you how robust the temperatures and trends are.
If I remember correctly, an IPCC Report characterized the climate as a “nonlinear stochastic system.” Assuming this is correct then by definition it is impossible to predict the future state of the climate to any degree of certainty.
Um, I think you mean “with any degree of precision.” I can be very certain, for example, that the average temperature here in Colorado in February will be considerably less than the average temp in August. But temps here have a high variance and, like all weather systems, they’re chaotic — sensitively dependent on initial conditions. So what I can’t do is predict that THIS February will have an average temp of 18°F with any confidence.
The environnuts multi-pronged agenda to ruin our capitalist system:
* school indoctrination on AGW to brainwash the next generation
* shutter coal-fired power plants & nukes
* subsidize inefficient “green energy”
* carbon taxes
* regulate SUVS to death
I read a half-dozen different websites on climate daily, and I hit five or six others regularly, but not daily. The one thing I’ve learned from doing that for the last six or seven years is that we really, REALLY don’t know that much about what affects “climate” here on Earth. We’re constantly learning, and each new revelation changes something. The one thing that I’ve brought away from all of this is that “climate” is in constant flux, that there are multitudes of different mechanisms involved, and each of those mechanisms may be regulated by either or both positive and negative feedbacks. The Earth’s climate most closely resembles an application of chaos theory, and simple climate models (all we have right now) cannot even replicate the past, much less predict the future. We need to treat everything that’s said about future climate with skepticism until the “climate scientists” acknowledge this fact, and act accordingly.
Not to mention that, historically, CO2 rise FOLLOWS temperature rise.
Another gigantic problem with ‘The Chart That Fooled The World’:
A standardized for-sale thermometer with a temperature scale was not offered until approximately the Civil War and from 1865-1905 the entire United States had approximately 6 recording temperature stations. (Many more after that. Dates and quantities of recording stations similarly explode in other countries after the year 1900.)
Any graph or chart that includes data from before the year 1900 with data from after the year 1900 is junk. If it is using temperature data from thermometers it is far too sparse. If it is using ‘temperature correlations’ from tree ring studies and so forth, it is mixing data types.
This might well be why that graph looks so wacky in the year 1800, as opposed to being much smoother starting the year 1900.
That is why the AGW hucksters are so fond of temperature proxies.
There is nothing so precise and accurate in the world as the temperature derived from Joshua Tree tree ring width.
I think that I shall never see,
A thermometer as accurate as a tree.
This seems pretty simple to me: in the past, before man, it was much warmer than it is now. And in the past, before man, it was much cooler. In the past, before man, there were tremendous fluctuations over short periods.
For AGW to be true we have to see something that is new since man. That does not exist.
My favorite is the argumentum ad Scott Bakula which posits that time travel can be proven by reference to a television show.
Argumentum ad baculum is a lot more difficult to pull off when the person you’re trying to use it on is in a different timezone.
Why does everybody assume that it would be bad for the earth’s average temperature to rise several degrees? The daily swing behind low and high temperatures is much greater than that, and according to the AGW models the rise in the average temperature is supposed to take place mostly near the poles and mostly because the lowest night temperatures will not be quite as cold as before. The historical evidence strongly suggest that civilization flourishes when the earth’s average temperature rises. Just look at the names of these periods of warmer weather: the Roman optimum, the Minoan optimum, the medieval optimum (when Vikings lived in Greenland which, as Charlie Martin pointed out, they couldn’t do now).
These historical peaks in civilization are associated with relatively small temperature rises. During the ice ages, when the climate was much cooler, there is evidence that a larger portion of the earth’s surface was desert — for example, there was a Sahara-like desert at the top of South America (Venezuela, Columbia) where today there is tropical jungle, and the present-day Sahara and middle east suffered through hyper-arid conditions. It is easy to understand why. All that water locked up inside continent-wide glaciers could not fall as rain. Warmer earth, less permanently frozen water, fewer deserts — you don’t need a computer model to understand that. It even seems to work for very much smaller temperature changes. In the 1970′s and early 1980′s environmentalists worried about the drought in the Sahel — the Sahara desert seemed to be moving south and destroying fertile grasslands. Then the climate warmed slightly over the next three decades, and now we no longer read about the plight of the Sahel (because rainfall has increased and the Sahara is retreating north).
The debate about man-made CO2 acts as “bait” to divert attention from the unstated and weakest part of the AGW argument: that a few degrees more global warming would be bad instead of good.
Why does everybody assume that it would be bad for the earth’s average temperature to rise several degrees?
Models.
I fail to see why models indicate it to be a bad thing if temperatures warm slightly.
When temperatures rise, models, Brazilian supermodels among them, wear fewer clothes. This is a bad thing, how?
Actually, no. The claim that a warmer world will be a world of hurt is a whole plethora of things in WG2, mostly biology. WG2 is probably the worst of the three WG reports.
You can go back and forth in erudite obsession on whether the science is principled or Lyenkian, but the bottom line is that there is no way that “science” can truly determine if what we used to call mankind has had any causal effect on climate, or to predict it, or influence it. Like the doctor said: it depends – on the unknowable. It is todays scholarly equivalent of counting the angels on the head of a pin.
This may be a minor issue, but using delta T on the y-axis instead of T is misleading. Zeroing in on the change in temperature is a poor practice when the delta T is small compared to T. Scientists are disciplined to always have T present in their minds when delta T is discussed, but others may not keep the proper perspective.
Using T or percent change in T is better because it shows the reader a much clearer picture of what may or may not be happening. I suspect the AGW people know this and that is why they prefer delta T. We should not help them by also using delta T. I understand that a small delta T can result in large climate change, but the error bars associated with T are much more informative.
The x-axis suffers from a similar perspective problem. Recent data must be displayed in connection with older data or readers fail to see the whole picture, or at least much more of the whole picture.
Also, it is extremely important to overlay data from various graphs. We need to see T vs. time, vs. CO2 concentration, and vs. solar activity all in one graph.
United Nations … summit … Durban, South Africa
For some reason, this combination of words sends a chill up my spine.
My biggest issue is that they have started fooling around with the data sets. I no longer trust the guardians of the data to be impartial analysts.
Global warming is real. CO2 has gone up. It is certainly possible that AGW is real. The datasets we have fail to confirm or deny this possibliity. The “scientists” who should be trying to determine the actual trend have proven themselves for the most part untrustworthy. Even the ones I somewhat trust such as Judith Curry are at the mercy of datasets which we know have been tampered with.
Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. Over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, water vapor is plentiful at least part of the year (the part that actually gets sunlight, incidentally). Over that portion, CO2 has little to no effect on the greenhouse effect. The sun is the main input into earth’s climate,and anyone who denies that is not being intellectually honest.
All that said, as Jerry Pournelle says, running an uncontrolled experiment to see what happens when you pump as much CO2 into the air of the only earth we have may not be the brightest idea we ever had….(or it may, is CO2 increase the only thing keeping us out of another little ice age, and Malthus’ worst case scenario?
Mostly I agree with the author, we need honest brokers of the data and open minded scientists seeking the truth. But we don’t seem likely to get that from either camp these days.
Modern scientists are like lawyers — they use a body of knowledge to act as advocates for the research programs that support them. It is hard to avoid this behavior as long as we expect scientists to earn a living by convincing others to support their work. The best we can hope for is to have equally matched teams of professionals — like lawyers in a trial — making the case both for and against politically charged theories like man-made global warming. Having a vigorous debate break out between two groups of climate scientists, each annoyed with the other, is today’s best possible mechanism for getting closer to the truth about climate change.
That’s interesting, the analogy to lawyers. I hadn’t quite looked at it that way.
Yes, Lawyers. Who, as a profession, are not a science (though insist they are), but instead a “body of knowledge” (not the same thing), who at base express opinions based on prior opinions and so on, for who knows how many iterations. Who may produce or withhold important facts to achieve their aims, for whom the truth can be and usually is relative. Who frequently “win” using the “truth” by presenting a story to a group of people, hoping they’ll believe the BS.
You’re right, they are a bastard form of Lawyer at that.
Heh. You guys are making me even more cynical than I already am, and I was well along that path.
Imagine if artists could convince the powerful that unspeakable things would happen if we didn’t continue to fund art.
Actually, they have done that.
That’s what’s so disappointing about the Berkeley Project. It started out as, was advertised as, an attempt to get the data, and analyze it transparently.
They didn’t include the part “and then use the program’s credibility to lie about the results.”
The author does us all a disservice by uncritically perpetuating the myths of conventional wisdom.
Lets discuss the first myth namely that global warming is occurring.
GISS records shows temps have been flat for this century.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/palmer_figure3.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/24/unadjusted-data-of-long-period-stations-in-giss-show-a-virtually-flat-century-scale-trend/
These are stations with long term records that are properly sited.
Not the ones sited on asphalt that were just put in a few years ago.
Right, and the Thames still freezes over every winter.
In it’s simplest terms my skepticism is because all the “Solutions” to AGW read like a wishlist of every Progressive wet dream for the last 100 years.
This is not an accident and it certainly has nothing to do with the science.
That is why I’m a skeptic.
Exactly Bob. Debating the minutia of the evidence is fun and interesting, but in the end you dont have to be very scientifically literate to recognize a scam when you see one.
Your skepticism is well founded.
The planet warms. The planet cools. The only constant is change. That and that you can’t get good pizza west of the Mississippi.
The early release of the results prior to the Durban summit is nothing more than another attempt to shape the narrative. Charlie’s post and subsequent comments are an example of a decent discussion of the issues. You will never see such a discussion in any of our MSM organs because they are complicit in the plan to have a one world government that will stop industrial uses of fossil fuels, reduce population, and return to a perfect environmment where no species ever goes extinct.(Snark attempt.)
The mask has been removed. In a stunning undercover video two journalism professors and consultants to the New York Times reveal that they are, in fact, constantly working to shape the narrative – not to report the truth.
The video is at the Ace of Spades blog:
http://minx.cc/?post=323105
The theory of catastrophic AGW is not “settled science.” Don’t let the bastards tell us otherwise. It’s a political narrative, not a scientific discussion.
Here is an article from 2008 where Dr Muller was not a skeptic of AGW at all.
http://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com/2008/11/q-with-richard-muller.html
The whole idea of him pretending to be a skeptic was a fraud.
Is it not time to allow “climate science” to amicably divorce into “climate” and “science”?
Folks: I am a retired Seismic Surveyor, with 30 years of field experience, mostly in western and northern Canada. One late winter trip to the North Slope of Alaska; one 1972, February trip to the Sahel in the NE of the Republic of Niger; and one October, 1986 trip to Tanzania, 50 miles south of Dar-es-Salaam. Human-caused-Climate-Change looks very full of hubris, from where I sit.
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Due to being born, and raised, in the SW part of Alberta, I regard wild swings in local weather as _normal_! In Winter, we can easily go from -30°F to +40°F, in 10 hours, when a warm Chinook Wind comes blowing across the Rocky Mountains. You can easily imagine how hard I laugh, when someone is silly enuf to claim that our South Alberta heating furnaces, and 4x4s, “cause” such hot winds….
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Also, we have lots of layers of “The Rock that Burns”, aka Coal, underground, here in Alberta. The record, in the Geology of the Coal, and of the rocks above, interspersed, and below, each set of Coal Beds, show periods of Climates hotter, Climates about the same, and Climates Colder, when compared to those we see today. And Zero Computers involved, just hard-headed Geologists, plus their Rock Collections.
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If anyone is curious, Alberta has a very nice Database, at
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http://www.ags.gov.ab.ca/gis/gis_and_mapping.html
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You may download lots of info from there….
I regard wild swings in local weather as _normal_! In Winter, we can easily go from -30°F to +40°F, in 10 hours, when a warm Chinook Wind comes blowing across the Rocky Mountains. You can easily imagine how hard I laugh, when someone is silly enuf to claim that our South Alberta heating furnaces, and 4x4s, “cause” such hot winds…
Yeah, in Boulder I’m in basically the same climate, just a touch warmer. as I said the other day: “Colorado: Four seasons. In a week.”
Tim mcd brings up the 800 lb. gorilla. Charlie’s article cites a 33°C greenhouse effect, and to the best of my knowledge the claim that 30 of those degrees are caused by water vapor is uncontroversial. That greenhouse effect is the only reason we can’t walk from North America to Africa. We are indeed a water planet. To the extent that we don’t understand the hydrology, we can’t understand climate.
If you’ve never caught Freeman Dyson’s interview videos on Youtube concerning global warming, you should. Dyson may not be a climatologist, but he understands computer modeling and it’s limitations being one of the field’s pioneers. He also has some interesting observations about what we call global warming. First, it’s not global. Over 80% of it occurs in the northern hemisphere. Second, most of this warming is recorded at night. Again, these claims are uncontroversial. They also happen to be consistent with changes in land use and not CO2 forced anything. Think: asphalt.
I believe that the only reason we’re even paying any attention at all to CO2 is because of the hilarity that would ensue if entities like the IPCC were calling for government policies to control global humidity.
“it’s easy enough to calculate that the Earth’s “natural temperature” without the greenhouse effect provided by water, methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases would be something like -33°C.”
This simply is not true. I often met this assertion in debates about greenhouse effect, but this is a fallacy. This calculation simply takes the atmosphere as unmoving medium where all heat transfer is made by radiative cooling. In reality 70% of heat exchange in atmosphere is due to adiabatic convection. Upper atmosphere will always be cooler than the surface, because convection establishes linear temperature gradient with height known as adiabatic lapse rate. It is completely independent on presence or abscence of greenhouse gases, since it is derived from universal law of gas expansion applicable to any gas. Atmosphere of any composition will provide this “blanket effect” and keep surface temperature well above temperature derived from equation of radiative heat balance. (Thermodynamics of gases is my speciality, I have master degree in thermodynamics and fluid dynamics from Moscow State University.)
No, it doesn’t, Sergey. It takes into account the black-body temperature of the Earth if there were no atmosphere at all. See this Wikipedia article: the black-body equilibrium temperature of Earth would be about 254 kelvins. I did mis-remember the number, that’s only about -18°C, but that doesn’t change the conclusion.
What Sergey is saying is that an atmosphere with any vertical mixing gets warmer as you go deeper, due to adiabatic heating. For example, if you take a gas giant planet like Saturn or Neptune, the cloud tops are close to radiative equilibrium with the extremely weak sunlight that far out, but as you descend into their atmospheres the temperature will keep on rising the deeper you go, becauses gases get hot when compressed. In an extremely deep atmosphere the temperature can get so hot that hydrogen atoms fuse into helium.
When Carl Sagan first predicted surface temperatures on Venus, his guess for a nitrogen atmosphere was several hundred degrees hotter than his prediction for a carbon dioxide atmosphere, based on the ratio of specific heats, the depth of the atmosphere, and adiabatic heating. The greenhouse effect wasn’t even mentioned.
So if you look at an atmosphere like a heat engine, with compression and expansion cycles occuring due to vertical convection, some level in the atmosphere (the cloud tops on many planets) will be at radiative equilibrium with the sun and space, and below that the atmosphere will get warmer, following fairly closely to the curve of adiabatic heating.
Actually, the situation is a bit more complicated than that. Widely cited -18C Earth radiative temperature does not correspond to any specific level of atmosphere but is an equivalent black body temperature, that is, the temperature of a fictional black body with the same radiation output calculated from Stefan-Boltzman equation. In reality atmosphere radiates from every level, so these contrubutions should be integrated along all heights. But in any case average surface temperature (globally and seasonaly averaged) is +14C, which is 32C higher than radiative temperature used in calculation of radiative balance. Again, this extra 32C has nothing to do with greenhouse effect and can be fully explained by adiabative heating.
Global temperature (or even local temperature) is like defining the sound of one hand clapping.
For a person (or any living thing) on the ground:
How much of “temperature” is the “heat” of the earth beneath your feet?
How much of “temperature” is the amount of sunlight on you?
How much of “temperature” is the rate that heat flows to/from your body?
How much of “temperature” is the measured temperature of the air at your ground level?
Air temperature seems an inadequate way to express “temperature”.
And, as Bart indicated above, even air temperature is meaningless, since equal air temperatures at different locations can be very different measures of energy in that air.
…equal air temperatures at different locations can be very different measures of energy in that air.
And, stored in the land or water mass in the immediate vicinity.
Temperature is heat energy density. You cannot determine the weight of, say, an automobile by averaging the mass densities of every component and multiplying by the total volume occupied. You have to compute the mass for one component at a time and then sum them up.
“…liquid water…”
Is there any other kind? Frozen “water” is ‘ice’; gaseous “water” is ‘steam.’
If it’s another type, i.e., nitrogen or methane, for example, it’s liquid nitrogen or frozen methane.
As for GW (or CC), this stuff’s changing, folks. Over time, either the Earth is getting cooler or it’s getting warmer. As far as AGW, here’s the $64,000 question, which no one seems to want to answer: Which comes first, the warming or the elevated level of CO2?
Here’s an interesting paper by Danah Boyd.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926431
Suggests that the larger the dataset the easier it is for those with an agenda to torture it into confessing concurrence with an arbitrary hypothesis. The paper is more observations than conclusions, but it reminds us why computational based science that attempts to forecast (rather than interpolate between experimental results where historically most value has been realized) needs to avoid hubris and be so open about their methods (and data) that it’s trivial for others to replicate, both to gain insight and challenge, the essence of the scientific method.. which reminds us that most every discipline with the word “science” in its name is not.
Or.. As a very smart man once said ((Dr.) Michael Crichton before his heirs scrubbed his website in their selfish interest of preserving income from his popular fiction), ~ “statistics-based science that is used to inform public policy should be held to the highest standard, higher than the standards we expect of the drug companies – since many more lives are at risk than even a bad drug, like thalidomide – wich suggests multiple double-blind tests where the desired results are hidden in both the experiment and the analysis.”
Needless to say that we are so far from this ideal that it’s not just sad, it’s farce. Or it’s just politics corrupting everything it touches. Or both.
I think both graphs are a bit deceptive. The first does well in highlighting a general warming trend since 1950, but hides what may be a flattening out since 2001. The 2nd graph illustrates the flattening out since 2001, but hides the general increase since 1950. A shot I would like to see is a graph from 1950 on. That should be both broad enough to see the increase since 1950, but fine enough to see the flattening since 2001. The flattening since 2001 could be a temporary downward fluxuation in an upward trend, or it could signal an end to that upward trend. At this stage it is too early to tell. I would suggest a good exercise though.
Have the global warming proponents, and the skeptics, both make a temperature prediction for the next 10 yrs. Then wait 10 yrs and see who is closer to being right. In any event I see enough doubt that it is worthwhile to wait 10 more years, to confirm whether the upward trend will be sustained, rather than overturning our entire energy economy to fix an upward trend that might be in the process of ending.