A Concern: Ken Fritsch makes the following comment:
While your efforts to avoid the implication of censoring of opposing views should be commended, I am not a little distracted by the noise levels that I find come from (a) personal debates that frequently do not add to the knowledge base of the specific topic at hand, (b) posters who seem to come to the discussion with the intent of having their feelings hurt or to uncover evidence of a bias towards them and/or people with their points of view, (c ) posters who raise to the bait of these posters and thus contribute to wasted space (ad hominem ad infinitum), (d) posters who merely seem to want to let skeptics and agnostics know at every opportunity that the circumstantial case is closed on AGW and only fools would question what they surmise to be an overwhelming and proven consensus from the climate scientists, (e) those who make their personal cases against AGW with little or no evidence to back it up and (f) those who seem to want to show that they can turn your efforts as a critic of some sometimes sloppy and vague climate science publishing back on you.
There are lots of places in the world where people can discuss general issues of AGW, but not many places where technical discussions of proxies can take place. I’m getting really tired of technical threads getting hijacked. If there’s a thread on Lago Paco Cocha or Quelccaya Plant Deposits or a technical topic, please do not hijack for general fuming. If anyone wants to vent, vent on the National Post Op Ed sort of thread and stay away from the technical threads. In order to encourage this, I am warning that I may start deleting off-topic posts on the technical threads. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure that somebody will claim that they are being censored, but I’m going to try it and see if the noisiness will reduce.
Posting Suggestions: You can insert images into posts – see instructions here. For adventurous people, you can insert Latex commands for math formulae.
Some Site Rules: I have previously said that I have total contempt for the censoring of scientific comments at realclimate and do not do that here. However, light moderation opens the door for ad homs and taunting, which quickly involves everybody. I don’t have time to monitor everything so my handling of taunting has been inconsistent: sometimes I’ve let it go because the person is just making a fool of themself, sometimes I’ve got fed up and deleted it. A reader has written with the following suggested ground rules which are hereby adopted:
Blogs like this one provide a wonderful opportunity to people like me (a retired scientist) to get involved in an ongoing debate and it is very disappointing when the debate generates into one of these slanging matches. May I suggest some ground rules for posts:
1. Refrain from personal abuse and swearing,
2. Never attribute ulterior motives to another participant
3. Be patient with people who know less science or maths than you do yourself.People who consistently break rule 1 and 2 should be issued with a yellow card by the moderator. If they continue they get a red card and are banned from the site.
While there’s a little politics from time to time, by and large, I would prefer that you don’t talk politics; there are plenty of other perfectly good places to do that. I don’t allow discussion of religion and will mark anything even close as spam.
New Posters: You sometimes get tripped up in our spam filter. Unfortunately in today’s world, a blog like this gets attacked by hundreds of spams a day and they are screened by a computer filter. Some of the things that the spam filter looks for is a sudden burst of activity from an unrecognized address; it may allow some posts through and then get triggered after a while and start rejecting posts. If one of your posts doesn’t go through, don’t keep sending them in; it just inflames the spam filter. If you have yahoo or hotmail address, the spam filter may also screen you. Sometimes people get filtered for reasons that I don’t understand. However, despite this, we are reliant on the spam filter. Contact us by email if you get caught up- see contact category at right.
Site Road Map
The main topic here are the multiproxy studies of millennial climate, which is what I work on, with some discussion of climate models. I want to keep the focus fairly narrow as there are plenty of other places to talk about things and I think that sticking to a niche is a good idea.
This site used to be pretty easy to follow through, but it’s now sprawled out with lots of little nooks and crannies. Here’s a roadmap to the site, which covers quite a bit more than our criticisms of MBH.
The Categories bar at the side is quite useful in reflecting what I think are the main themes here. Most posts that I wrote in the spring are just as topical (or untopical) now as they were then. Feel free to revive any of them. It’s also surprising what you can find on google. If you do "climateaudit" and any any other word, you can usually find an old post. You can find our articles on the right frame.
A recent exposition to the NAS panel is here.
(It’s surprising how high we get on google even on topics like "briffa climate" or "mann climate" or even other oddities like "preisendorfer".)
Obviously, the main calling card is the critique of the Hockey Stick diagram of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH), that was featured in the IPCC Third Assessment Report and many government publications.
If you go to the Articles sidebar, there are links to our formal publications. Ross has written an overview also linked there, that many people like.
My own short-form summary of our views on MBH98 is this. MBH98 made 5 main warranties: statistical skill, robustness, careful proxy selection, appropriate methodology and relatively even geographical balance. These warranties were fundamental to its acceptance. (My background is in business and I think in contract terms.) All their warranties have been breached. Their reconstruction failed critical cross-validation tests (we have publicized the R2 failure, but it fails others as well); it is not robust the presence/absence of bristlecone pines; the supposedly carefully proxies included bristlecone growth, which specialists say is contaminated by 20th century fertilization; their methodology includes a wildly biased "principal components" methodology (which is not actually a principal components method). The hockey stick is an imprint of bristlecone growth rate and reflects a non-temperature proxy from an isolated geographic region of the U.S.A. Again read through the articles and the exact language there should be preferred to this short re-statement.
There has been extensive coverage -see News and Commentary – the most notable of which are the profiles by Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (translated into English) and the front page coverage by the Wall Street Journal – but there has been extensive coverage elsewhere in Science, Nature, The Economist, National Post and European newspapers. Listings here are by no means complete. There have been two published Comments – one by von Storch and Zorita and one by Huybers, both of which we made detailed (and IMHO) complete Replies. realclimate has also criticized our critique on numerous occasions. If you go to the Category – MBH98, you’ll see some of our direct responses to realclimate at Errors Matter #1, # 2 and #3. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce (Barton Committee) has taken an interest in these matters and it has a Category as well.
One of the "so what"s sent our way is that the other multiproxy studies show the "same thing" and so, even if MBH is wrong, it "doesn’t matter". I’m not convinced that these other studies are much good either. I’ve posting comments about these studies from time to time. Again go to the category Other Multiproxy Studies and there are subcategories for several of the major studies. There is a fantastic amount of overlap of authors and proxies, so that these other studies are not "independent" as ordinary people understand the term and their findings of the relative position of the Medieval Warm Period and the 20th century are very vulnerable to the bristlecones and Polar Urals series being unusable.
I’ve collected information on individual proxy series (see Category), which I’ve posted up from time to time e.g. on bristlecones, on Thompson’s ice cores, etc.
I’ve also started to make posts on statistical topics that I think are relevant: "spurious" regression as this is understood in econometrics (where there is a much more advanced understanding of autocorrelation than exists in paleoclimate); some posts on ARMA time series – I’m interested in ARMA(1,1) processes with AR1 coefficients >0.9, which are characteristic of many processes and have some odd statistical properties.
I have an ongoing campaign to improve standards of data archiving, disclosure and due diligence -(see Category) – which are independent of any particular substantive points on paleoclimate studies. I have no idea why the "Hockey Team", as they styled themselves, have elected to withhold data and methods from scrutiny; it’s an unwinnable position, but they’ve done so and I’ll continue to criticize them on this point.
Sometimes I lapse into controversy, mostly after I’ve been slagged in print somewhere, but I try to stay cheerful.
As to your host, I’m pretty good at answering many questions, but have difficulty answering the question: what am I? No two public descriptions of my occupation are the same. I studied mathematics at university in a fine undergraduate program at the University of Toronto and was very competitive at it. My skills, as refreshed, are more than sufficient for what I’m doing. I’ve been in business nearly all my working life, most recently in financing and promoting mineral exploration projects. That gives you a lot of experience in the school of hard knocks and that counts for a lot in my opinion. (One of my underlying themes is that disclosure standards for climate scientists should be at least as high as that required of mining promoters.) One public mineral exploration company with which I was involved underwent a reverse takeover and became an oil exploration company (when I ceased to be an officer and director of the company.) I’ve done a very small amount of business consulting for it, but no energy consultant would call me an "energy consultant", nor would I describe myself as one. In terms of occupation, right now, this is what I’m doing. No one’s paying me to do this and there is a substantial opportunity cost for me personally in doing this, but I enjoy it and can afford to do it for a while. (Given that our work has attracted enough interest that public funds have been employed to criticize it, I see no a priori reason why I should do it for nothing and make no long-term commitment to wear a hair shirt.)
I like the feedback. So look at the Categories to crosscut the sprawl here. I’m amazed at the number of hits that the blog receives. It seems to have found a niche and I’m amazed at some of the people who have found it. I particularly welcome the comments and feedback. Lots of hits are for that exchange rather than for me and, if I didn’t get the feedback, I wouldn’t keep up the blog.
Climate Audit 
431 Comments
I’m going to establish a policy for comments at the Road Map. I don’t want people coming to this site have to wade through people’s hobbyhorses one way or another, so I ask that people with topical comments post them on a topical thread of which there are many. I’ve requested this in the past, but some people ignore the request. I’ve already transferred some comments to another thread, but this is laborious for me. I’m reluctant to get into accusations of censoring adverse comments, so here’s the policy for this thread:
Comments on this thread will be treated as temporary comments and will be deleted after a week or two.
We do appreciate comments on how to improve things and welcome them here. We’ve responded to suggestions in the past and will continue to respond to them. But they will not be permanent on this thread and will be periodically peeled back. Use topical threads for topical comments. Thanks.
John Hunter has just submitted a post transferring his feud with John A over to this thread. Marked as spam and yellow card hereby issued under John Reid’s rules, not for data archiving but for breach of John Reid’s tules.
I’ve asked John Hunter not to post here for 6 months. Despite this, he’s continued to experiment with the effectiveness of the rejection and resolve of the decision.
While under a yellow card warning, he posted up comments first impugning John A professionally and then claiming that John A “wrote filth” on the web, linking to a site of, shall we say, erotic fantasies. I reviewed my decision with the person who suggested that the rules were overdue and who happens to know Hunter.
I am sure that his life is not so empty and unfulfilling that he will be unable to cope with a moratorium from posting here. I do not wish any online discussion of this. If anyone feels the need to discuss the matter (and I hope that they don’t), contact me offline. I will also delete this comment in a few days.
#86. Hi. Part of the latex is generated by the Sweave package in R, not R itself. For example, you need to run Sweave(“script.R”) in the R console. This passes the latex you write untouched, and processes the R commands, particularly plot() that produces plots. There is also a package called xtable that produces latex from data.frames, and model result and time series objects. To you it you run your analysis, store the results in the appropriate object then call xtable(x) and all the results come out in formatted latex.
With the latex, you then compile it with any of the compilers, e.g. a typical sequence that would
automaticly do all the table of contents, bibliography, index, figure and table references and list of such would be:
pdflatex mastermasterbibtex master
makeindex master
pdflatex master
pdflatex
This should produce the finished pdf. I should add all this to the post. Thanks for the question.
People are sending in links to some interesting articles which typically get buried in other threads.
For those that are interested, could you do this: if an article on a topic within the scope of this blog catches your fancy, if you send in a short discussion, I’ll post it up as a thread. As a bit of editorial policy, I’d like that you clip out the most interesting graphic from the article and include it in the post. It would be helpful it you email me the text and graphic at smcintyre25 AT yahoo.ca.
Ken Fritsch makes the following comment:
There are lots of places in the world where people can discuss general issues of AGW, but not many places where technical discussions of proxies can take place. I’m getting really tired of threads getting hijacked. If there’s a thread on Glacier Bay, Alaska or Lago Paco Cocha or a technical topic, please do not hijack for general topics. If Dano or anyone else want to fume, fume on this sort of thread and stay away from the technical threads. I’m going to start deleting tendentious posts on the technical threads.
I completely agree with Ken’s comments. In fact, in the space of a week the blog has gone from rather wonderful to completely unreadable.
I think opposing views are important. The censorship over at RC is the main reason that it is a very dull blog. While I have criticised Lee for his sometimes shrill tone, countering his objections can lead to new information and additional insights (at least it did for me in the Quelccaya threads).
George, JMS and especially Dano are simply running interference. They want to wreck the site, and they are doing a good job. It would be nice if one could simply ask people not to feed the trolls, but I know this won’t work in practice (though I’ll still ask).
Perhaps you could create a thread for “general AGW discussion” and let those who want to fight it out there? Rather than simply deleting posts, maybe you could move the posts there. I realise that might be an impossible administrative burden, in which case, delete away. Posts on the technical threads should be related to the subject.
Some of the folk will run over to Lambert’s place and cry that they’re being censored, but they do that now anyway, and who cares? They are ill-mannered. I’m sure if you met them socially most would turn out to be nice folk, but the way they carry on here, you’d expect them to crash your party, drink your beer and abuse the host and his guests.
I think you’ve been too tolerant for too long, Steve.
Steve and Ken,
It’s a fair cop gov’nor. As one of those who often posts to express a personal opinion and not necessarily to add technically to the thread, I agree that there is a lot of noise (and the level has certainly increased recently) that distracts from the technical debates. For people like myself, it would be a good idea if you could have some more general semi-technical threads which people can contribute to. Don’t forget Steve that although this is a blog, for it to continue to have the effect it is currently having (spreading the word of poor science in climatology), you need to give people a reason to come here so that they can read what is being posted. If its nothing but dry dendro/other proxy stuff then a lot of them will not re-visit the blog regularly. God forbid they might even visit RC or Lambert’s blog instead.
One of the best things about this blog are the links which people post in support of a particular argument, A lot of them contain ‘nuggets’ which I’ve now got into the habit of bookmarking so that when I’m asked about a particular issue by my friends I can send them the URL very easily. They then send that onto others and so the information spreads. Please take this into due consideration when making any decisions about what to do. But most of all keep up the good work.
KevinUK
Steve,
I have noticed the degradation of the comment quality in recent weeks, probably a reaction following your “victory” at Wegman and NAS. I find the endless shouting matches boring and completely useless. On the other hand, I have given up on following the details of the statistical issues. Too much catching up to do on statistics! My own interests are in the scientific (mal)practice in climate science, or science in general. I’m also interested, as a physicist, in some aspects like the solar influence on climate (my list of post-TAR papers on the topic now reaches 50+). It would be fun to have a technical discussion on that topic, but I realize that most posters here don’t have much of a technical background. My problem is that there aren’t many “serious” blogs on climate change (I read mostly the Pielke’s, and CA; RC just makes me angry for the rest of the day, so I read it parcimoniously…). I think you have two choices: either narrow the blog to specific statistical issues, and censor all off-topic comments. That would also narrow the readership, but hey! this is not a popularity contest. The other choice, IMO, would be to slightly broaden the scope (to a broader critical examination of the “orthodox” theory of global warming, for example), and maybe accept more posts from external contributors, but always from a technical point of view, with the odd foray into politics. In all cases, I think you will have no choice but to censor off-topic comments, just to keep the trolls away.
Somewhat off topic, but perhaps of interest to some people:
Russian Scientists Forecast Global Cooling in 6-9 Years
Created: 25.08.2006 17:47 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:48 MSK, 1 hour 41 minutes ago
MosNews
Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences’ astronomical observatory’s report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.
Environmentalists and scientists warn not about the dangers of global warming provoked by man’s detrimental effect on the planet’s climate, but global cooling. Though never widely supported, it is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation.
“On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth’s climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate’s global warming at the start of the 22nd century,” said the head of the space research sector.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century “¢’¬? when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland “¢’¬? could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060.
He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today because “climate cooling is connected with changing temperatures, especially for northern countries.”
“The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times,” he said, referring to an international treaty on climate change targeting greenhouse gas emissions.
“The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth’s global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol,” Abdusamatov said.
From http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/08/25/globalcooling.shtml
I am told that an article from a different group of scientists supporting this idea will come out in Astrophysical Letters sometime later this year.
Steve,
Do you have a link to where this source code can be downloaded from? I’m intrigued by your comment that it is incomplete. Do you mean that there isn’t code in the source that you expected e.g. the confidence interval calculations to be there. It’s plausible that Mann could have done thes ecalculations elsewhere isn’t it? Either way I’d like to have a look at the code and to analyse it for completeness (missing subroutines/fuctions etc).
KevinUK
I’ve been thinking about the dropping s/n ratio on this blog for a while and I’ve come to the following conculusions:
1) Steve M. and John A. set the overall tone. This is a blessing and a curse for them. When they stick to the science, keep their writing style professional and polite, we get a pretty good product. If they make back-handed insults and take shots at “the team”, then the comments tend to follow suit. I know it’s hard to be polite in the face of sneering taunts hurled by people who have no intention of conducting a rational discussion, but Steve and John must resist the temptation or responding in kind if they want to maintain civility. They must rise above it if they wish to avoid getting mired in the mud. Sometimes this requires self-censorship, I know; I’ve censored myself many times while reading this blog, sometimes after typing in a scathing reply to some troll, only to close out the window without submitting it.
2) There are some people that post on here just to try to shout-down the conversation. I was going to go into a diatribe about who they are, but you all know who I’m talking about, and you can guess their motives yourselves; it’s pretty obvious. Patience is a virture, but allowing these people free reign to destroy this blog with their blatent attempts at disruption is insane. This is your blog, Steve, if you feel that someone is not adding to the debate or is actively trying to stifle it, then censor away. In fact, I’d encourage you to be ruthless about it. You’ll get slammed by them on their blogs, but who cares what they think? And if anybody else engages them in pointless bickering, then censor that too, just make sure you stay above the fray yourself.
3) I’ve learned more about applied statistics here than all my time in school. Don’t let people like bender get discouraged and run off the blog.
The s/n has improved in the last few days.
I acknowledge your point about tone and example setting. At my end, I’ll dial back snarks against the Team. As a writing policy, when I’m writing well, I believe that you can make your point most effectively by arranging facts so that the arranged facts speak for themselves in a lethal way without using adjectives. So I’ll try to stick to my own objectives.
I had a Lonnie Thompson citing while watching a program on the local PBS channel the other evening about the disappearance of the Moche civilization that flourished on the northern coast of Peru with a sophisticated culture from 100 AD until at least 650 AD. Thompson was interviewed about his analysis of ice cores from the Andes that were used to show that a super El Nino existed from the middle to the end of the 6th century AD. His cores indicated that the area where the Moche civilization was located experienced 30 years of unrelenting rain followed by 30 years of drought. Other evidence indicated that the Andes climate would be the reverse of the Moche coastal area. Thompson talked about using the thickness of the annual layers and the amount of dust particles in them to show the results of his analysis. I may have missed it, but I did not hear him or the program commentator say anything about using O18 analysis.
Interesting was that this analysis initially led to the conclusion that the Moche civilization died from the effects of this super El Nino and did not survive beyond it. Later evidence indicated that the civilization survived it by a good 50 years only to finally succumb to a civil war.
Re #10: That’s interesting, although a quick Google shows a number of stories from six months ago featuring the same guy and with seemingly identical subject matter. I also remembered that essentially the same story appeared last year, albeit with some different Russian scientists. Any of the numerous solarphiles here should be interested in taking James or Brian up on a bet with the same terms.
#17 I did look at your AGU link.
Submarine venting of liquid carbon dioxide on a Mariana Arc volcano
“Although CO2 is generally the most abundant dissolved gas found in submarine hydrothermal fluids, it is rarely found in the form of CO2 liquid. Here we report the discovery of an unusual CO2-rich hydrothermal system at 1600-m depth near the summit of NW Eifuku, a small submarine volcano in the northern Mariana Arc”
“The discovery of such a high CO2 flux at the Champagne site, estimated to be about 0.1% of the global MOR carbon flux, suggests that submarine arc volcanoes may play a larger role in oceanic carbon cycling than previously realized. The Champagne field may also prove to be a valuable natural laboratory for studying the effects of high CO2 concentrations on marine ecosystems.”
What was it you did when others were interested in discussing volcanos on this blog?
you also say:
“BTW, how *dare* you assume that bender isn’t TS?”
I have no idea what you are talking about here.
Re #18, These ridges are located deep in the ocean for the most part. If one site is 0.1% of the global MOR cabon flux, 100 like it would be 10%. How common are they? Pehaps much more carbon is being sunk out of the environment than we know of to balance this additional source of carbon out.
#19
I have a tectonic map of planet earth in my garage, and on it the ocean is removed and all the spreading centers, subduction zones, and transform boundaries are shown. These types of undersea volcanos appear to be extremely common, although I can’t actually count them, I can eyeball estimate the number to be in the hundreds. Seems like they might matter, especially considering the lack of good data about them as they are very hard to study.
Re #18/19/20: I think as was discussed before when this came up, many of the sinks and sources for CO2 are estimates (mainly based on samples) and some, like marine tectonic sources, are probably going to stay that way due to the difficulty of ever getting accurate observations. The take-home point is that the sinks and sources pretty much balance, and so a finding that marine sources are a bit higher than previously thought would mean… not much. But that volcano is indeed fascinating.
Re #18 (last sentence): This reminds of my partner’s story of going to get an AIDS test twenty or so years ago. Epedemiological data gets collected when these tests are given, and so she had to answer a series of questions about her sexual history. At one point the nurse read a list of various sexual practices to find out if my partner had ever engaged in them, but when the nurse got to “water sports” my partner had to stop her and ask what exactly water sports were. There followed a longish pause, and then the nurse (an older woman), said “Dear, you’re probably better off not knowing.”
#19 and 20,
here is the link for the study.
There are some really dynamic pictures and maps, as well as figures and tables.
http://www.agu.org/journals/gc/gc0608/2005GC001152/
Interesting finding on the Ross Sea here
http://www.umaine.edu/news/article.asp?id_no=1443
Elephant seal remains suggest the Ross Sea area was much warmer a bit over one thousand years ago than now.
Re #22, from your link
“Liquid CO2 should be buoyant at the depth of the Champagne site, since it has a density less than seawater at depths shallower than about ~2600 m [Brewer et al., 1999].”
Could pools of liquid CO2 exist on the sea floor below 2600 m? You’d think we would have run into them by now if so.
You’re gonna want a new thread for this. The HT now have Ritson bashing Wegman for not releasing source code …
Followup to the “Hockeystick’ Hearings. Watch and learn.
1. It took Ritson exactly two weeks (July 23-Aug 7) to conclude that Wegman was not going to reply? That seems a bit premature. If Wegman replies shortly, Ritson is going to look silly.
2. Two weeks is not enough time to formulate a reply in a case of this magnitude. Realize: this is no longer about turnkey scripts, peer review, and openness and transparency in science. Recall: Mann has retained a lawyer. Ritson’s accusations of a double-standard assume that this is about the process of science. It used to be about that … but that was before there were potential legal ramifications. Wegman et al. are wise to proceed with caution.
I notice that Eduardo Zorita is co-author with some rather interesting people on a couple of in-press JoC papers with even more interesting titles. I don’t recall either being mentioned here.
G. Hegerl, T. Crowley, M. Allen, W. Hyde, H. Pollack, J. Smerdon and E. Zorita. Detection of human influence on a new, validated 1500 year temperature reconstruction. J. of Climate, in press.
Mark A. Cane, Pascale Braconnot, Amy Clement, Hezi Gildor, Sylvie Joussaume, Masa Kagayama, Myriam Khodri, Didier Paillard, Simon Tett, Eduardo Zorita. Progress in Paleoclimate Modeling. Journal of Climate, accepted.
Re #38: I had already searched but wasn’t able to find either one. I think JoC allows authors to post pre-pubs on their own sites, though, so maybe Eduardo would be willing to do that.
Dano, I understand better now your motivations and agenda, which before our exchange were merely puzzling to me. You were not “dodgy” so much as insisting people address your particular agenda. It’s parasitic of you, but that’s Steve M’s concern, not mine. (I think you would get answers more quickly if (1) you would admit your errors, small as they may be, up front, and (2) if you were to clarify what exactly it is you want. But then again it is impolite of me to offer advice when none was asked for.) I wish you luck in your quest to assemble isolated counterpoints into coherent contrarian arguments.
I wasn’t sure which thread to put this question on so chose the most recently active. If its in the wrong spot, move it with my blessings.
My question is, are there any actual people educated in climatology or meteorology at RC?
One of the complaints about ‘skeptics’ is that they’re just a bunch of physicists, geologists and statisticians. But when I read the bios of the RC gang all I see are physicists and geologists (but unfortunately no statisticians). Am I missing something or did I see what I think I saw?
BTW, the level of discourse and debate seems to be signicantly lower there than here, as I’m sure most here already knew.
My jaw dropped
http://tinyurl.com/esb5y
Re #39
Referring to which post in which thread, Dano? Happy to oblige with the info if I’ve got it.
Uh no Steve. It wasn’t the exclusive. Why would that surprise me.
It was that they reduced their temprature rise estimates. Or did you not see that.
I’ve plotted it out, and made a linear prijection.
In ten years the IPCC estimate will be less than one degree.
#55,49
I think Barney pretty much nailed it Bloom.
“Well just off the top of my head Copernicus, Galileo, genetics, plate tectonics, the big bang, Darwiniian evolution, an expansionary universe, subatomic particles, relativity and quantum mechanics” [ Had you forgotten about these when you issued the challange to Barney?]
“A legitimate consensus persuades or convinces critics and thoughtfully addresses and welcomes the critic’s arguments; one based on weak data or an underlying agenda ostracizes, ridicules and demonizes critics.”
Do you receive compensation from any organization that might influence your objectivity? How much per year? Do you have a financial interest in GW being viewed as a crisis by the public?
How about a full disclosure.
re 54: From Knight Science Journalism Tracker
Re #s 47, 49, 55, 59, 61:
As commented in #61:
Thomas Kuhn addressed the issues faced by scientists who attempt to advance a minority view in the face of “consensus” from the majority of scientists. Don’t forget, there was a consensus of “scientists” who “knew” that Copernicus was wrong when he argued that the earth rotates around the sun.
There are many many examples from history including Darwin, Einstein and Wegener’s Plate Tectonics. An interesting recent example may be the 1984 discovery that the bacteria H. Pylori is the cause of duodenal ulcers.
I venture to suggest that there will come a time when we see current minority positions on issues such as the expanding earth hypothesis, abiotic source for oil, crystalline rocks can form from estuarine sediments and muds, the “Big Bang” hypothesis is probably not true, become the new paradigms, and the inadequacies and limitations of the current paradigm views on these matters will be exposed. Of course, even for naming these issues, I will be regarded by many as a crank, rather than the agnostic position that I see myself adopting in the face of significant uncertainty.
It seems to me that the AGW crowd has actually been supremely successful in purveying the view that Global Warming is happening, it is happening because us humans are increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, and oh, by the way, it is BAD, and if we don’t do something about it, we’ll “all be rooned” to quote Hanrahan.
Of course, it is relatively easy to affect public opinion when you are prepared to, lets say, “exaggerate” (as Stephen Schneider, Al Gore et al have acknowledged), especially when we are dealing with a very large and very complex system such as the earth, and its relationship with the sun.
To show how good their science is the AGW crowd invoke “consensus”. The journals line up with where they think the consensus lies, since they make more money doing that than supporting dissenting minority views. However, Thomas Kuhn basically tells us that whenever we see “consensus” advanced as science, we are looking at a paradigm that may in fact prove not to be true. The real answer is more likely to lie with a courageous radical battling to advance true science in the face of the “consensus”.
There are many references to Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and the history of science on the web. Two sources to start with are http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/kuhnsyn.html and
http://webpages.shepherd.edu/maustin/kuhn/kuhn.htm.
“If you’re passing through London on the way, I have one to which you would be very welcome.”
Yeah but the language wouldn’t be right. Got to be Canaddian.
“Do you want to save the changes you made -Eh-.”
Plus I don’t think that Engurland version will include “Took” in the spell checker.
Actually I don’t even know how your supposed to spell “ttok” (parka)
Tim Lambert is having a big cry about supposed censorship here at Climate Audit.
No matter what the situation is here, Lambert has nothing to complain about:he continues to bounce my links to his old blog; has deleted some of my past comments; and does not allow me to comment at his Scienceblogs.com site.
Lambert’s a shameless, hypocritical crybaby.
bender, I’m replying to something you said on the “Another AGU Submission?” thread here because I think this is the appropriate place for it.
I think this is unfair and you are misunderstanding Dean’s intention. (I don’t know anything about the other guy). Yes, Steve M. is the real deal. But Dean is just trying to help.
I believe I introduced him to this site. Certainly, I gave him a link to it a few months ago, because I thought he’d be interested in it. Recently he has linked here from his site in a positive manner. I think it’s good that more people will be introduced to Steve M’s work.
Dean is a good guy and is just trying to help. You don’t have to like his recommendations. Neither does Steve M. But please don’t treat him like he has some kind of nefarious purpose, he doesn’t.
I really enjoy reading what you write here, but you seem to have a bee in your bonnet about certain issues. I hope you’ll trust what I’ve said here and relax about the issue.
Re #78: Hi Steve B,
Perhaps you can reconcile your comment with my own statement
These seem rather different to me. Is this an example of how you twist things? Rather like the Summary for Policymakers of TAR being so different from the body of the report. I still await your explanation for that!
Don’t quite know where to put this one
But – Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1735810.htm
My approach is that I can’t be bothered with this kind of controversy and, if Lambert wishes to expose his shortcomings, so be it. It’s probably symptomatic that Lambert picks a fight with John A while I’m away rather than dealing with me. John A, I don’t know why you have such a short fuse on this stuff. Don’t rise to Lambert’s bait. When he writes Mann Screws It Up Again, he’ll have some credibility. Until then, he lacks credibility and I doubt that anyone cares much what he says.
OK, I’ve read through this file. Jeez, I’d asked everybody to take a deep breath and not fight until I came back. What’s so hard about that? Please don’t answer. I’ll check in in a day or two.
Steve, I wasn’t “fighting” in the post you just deleted, I was asking you a direct question about why you tolerate JohnA’s ‘short fuse’ when he is acting in your name.
Transfer from Topic post:
: #85
This all comes back to Steve Bloom’s point that most scientists trying to engage on this site, no matter how open minded they are, will quickly become very frustrated. I certainly have.
I can certainly see why scientists and their associates belonging to the consensus on AGW would become frustrated here and why those skeptical scientists and their associates would be frustrated in a venue like RealClimate. The two groups will obviously have a variety of positions within them on the subject but I judge that in general the two groups come at the issue in fundamentally different ways. Many of the people of the consensus have evidently made up their minds by way of their satisfaction with the currently available circumstantial evidence and thus are not terribly interested in listening to skeptics attempting to make points on specific issues. That approach may explain the apparent use of more selective posting at RealClimate than here. The skeptics have not made up their minds and primarily because they seek more than circumstantial evidence and/or at least some associated probabilities concerning the avilable circumstantial evidence and tend to question more and thus the more open forum at ClimateAudit — even though that process has to put up with more chaff to obtain some wheat.
I think the way that I often view the criticism to treatment from some of those in the consensus who wonder in at CA is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of what they anticipated before entering. I have had experiences at other web sites where people with opposing views (and to mine) have had great success in participating in cordial discussions and in the end adding much to the information base and becoming respected contributors. It is rather easy to spot a poster who comes to contribute no matter their point of view or the prevailing one of the site contrasted to one who comes primarily to antagonize and/or be antagonized and prove to all what hostile/ignorant/closed minded/you-pick-your-adjective group they have encountered. When that issue becomes the center of most of their posts than one can make a good guess at their reason for coming.
Comment by Ken Fritsch “¢’¬? 9 September 2006 @ 9:02 pm | Edit This
Ken, in 89 you say:
Many of the people of the consensus have evidently made up their minds by way of their satisfaction with the currently available circumstantial evidence and thus are not terribly interested in listening to skeptics attempting to make points on specific issues. That approach may explain the apparent use of more selective posting at RealClimate than here.
I assume your term “selective posting” is a very polite way of saying “censorship”. I find their censorship both cowardly and offensive, particularly when their own posted policies claim that scientific questions are welcome.
And when they attack someone like Steve M., and then don’t allow him to reply, that goes beyond cowardly to being scurvy, underhanded, and pusillanimous.
So, their policy is a lot of things … but “selective posting” is much too nice a description.
w.
Comment by Willis Eschenbach “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 1:41 am | Edit This
#90
Willis
Once the mob are in charge, step back and let nature take its course, despite the damage expected.
To resist it is futile.
In the meantime let the record attest our opposition.
Comment by Louis Hissink “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 4:27 am | Edit This
Real Climate is full of chaff. They seem to totally tolerate randowm pro-warming posts of infantile nature on threads that have specific other topics.
Comment by TCO “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 5:30 am | Edit This
Let’s not be too hard on RealGoebbels, TCO. After all, it’s their job to conceal the truth.
Comment by Kevin “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 6:34 am | Edit This
Re #93, try posting something off message here
Comment by Peter Hearnden “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 6:48 am | Edit This
#94
You just did Peter and the Content Nazis havn’t removed your post.
The difference between us and your lot sad to say.
Comment by Louis Hissink “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 7:23 am | Edit This
Re #95 – it wasn’t off message…
But, Louis, you can either believe me when I say I’ve been censored here on scores of occasions or choose not to.
Comment by Peter Hearnden “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 11:17 am | Edit This
Re 96, Peter, I believe you, and I would likely have censored you more than you have been. There is a very large difference between censoring your type of ad hominem attacks and personal comments and insinuations, and censoring scientific questions because they would embarrass the blog ownership. Heck, I’ve had some things that I’ve written snipped out of existence here … and on reflection, deservedly so.
On the other hand, I have had a number of simple, easy to answer, scientific, pleasantly posed questions censored at RC because they did not want to have the questions raised. That has NEVER happened to me here, and I doubt very much if it has happened to you.
w.
Comment by Willis Eschenbach “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 11:45 am | Edit This
Oh please, Willis. Certain scientific questions are banned from discussion here because they embarrass the management.
I have been frequently censored here. I have NEVER been censored at RC.
Comment by Tim Lambert “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 12:39 pm | Edit This
Tim, please give me an example of a scientific question that has been censored here.
And for me, the fact that you have NEVER been censored at RC is enough to discredit the site in itself … but in any case, surely you are not claiming that scientific questions are NOT censored at RC because they might embarass the management.
w.
Comment by Willis Eschenbach “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 1:25 pm | Edit This
Steve goes away for a few days and up pops Lambert. Its like magic in reverse.
Comment by John A “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 2:32 pm | Edit This
Willis,
To be fair to Tim L, there are certain subjects which Steve has refused to allow discussion of here including at least part of thermodynamics. But this is stated by Steve up-front. Whether you want to call that censorship or merely an attempt to keep things on-topic, or as Steve explains it to keep the subject limited to things he knows something about and is interested in, is, I suppose, a matter of interpretation.
Steve also won’t allow discussion of religion and tends to try to keep politics off as much as possible.
OTOH, I wanted to talk about thermo with Tim and he suggested a thread on his site. But when I posted, he only responded once perfuncturarly and Dano twice and then silence. Don’t know what that means.
Comment by Dave Dardinger “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 2:44 pm | Edit This
I said that I would provide a thread on entropy when I had a related topic that interested me and I did s0 – I provided a thread here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=711 dealing with an interesting entropy argument, suggesting that it would be an opportunity for Tim to use his supposedly superior knowledge of entropy to assist the rest of us. My only condition was that I had no interest in re-hashing an ancient catfight between Tim Lambert and John A about who knew less about entropy. Tim did not participate. The thread is still open for comment and if Tim at this stage wishes to comment on the entropy arguments in Ou’s paper, I’m sure that the rest of us would welcome his comments, but, as mentioned in the thread, I will insist that extraneous catfights not enter into such posts.
Comment by Steve McIntyre “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 3:16 pm | Edit This
I have gotten a lot of Howler Monkey static from the group for pushing Steve on a couple places where he is in error or is not fighting fair. But this place is still way fairer then RC. I actually think your blog is much fairer then RC, Tim (in terms of letting an argument actually occur). Mike does some wierd things. Like that Ritson differencing thing where he had to be asked 3 times and then finally made the most ambiguous correction I’ve ever read (“It is as it was written”) that did not even really clarify whether Mann had been in error.
Comment by TCO “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 6:04 pm | Edit This
I’m going to stop commenting here. Since this was supposed to be an ice core thread. Let’s move the blog discussion to the Europe thread or the Road Map thread.
Comment by TCO “¢’¬? 10 September 2006 @ 6:08 pm | Edit This
[snip] It’s your blog, Steve. [snip]
Comment by Tim Lambert “¢’¬? 11 September 2006 @ 3:48 am | Edit This
Tim, you’re posting here, free to blather on about nothing scientific at all … meanwhile I’m totally censored from asking scientific questions at RealClimate.
If you don’t see the difference, I pity you.
w.
Comment by Willis Eschenbach “¢’¬? 11 September 2006 @ 4:05 am | Edit This
Unfortunately Lambert tries to use this blog in the same way he conducts his own blog: as a platform for character assassination. It’s never about the science, because science doesn’t get snipped here. The moderation happens when Tim indulges in his favorite subject: Tim Lambert and who Tim Lambert doesn’t like.
So rather than let him trash the comments on Steve’s blog – out come the scissors.
If Tim actually stopped whining about himself and talked about science, then there’d be no problem. But alas, science isn’t about Tim Lambert, so he can’t manage it.
Comment by John A “¢’¬? 11 September 2006 @ 5:31 am | Edit This
>102, S. McIntyre, says:
“I said that I would provide a thread … here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=711“ⱍ
Something’s broken about the weblog software, making that thread impossible to follow. I tried hard. But the logical order falls apart, maybe it’s indexing broke?
Look at it:
44 is a reply to 48
47 is re 55
55 is re 59
63 is re 67
64 is re 72
65 is re 67
66 is re 68
67 is re 76
71 is re 73
72 is re 76
73 is re 82, and 82 is attributed to Bloom
75 is re 82
76 is re 85
77 is re 86
78 is re 88
81 is re 92-93
88 isn’t by Steve Bloom, it’s re 87, and is by Dardinger, dated 8/28
92-93 do not exist.
This is just broken. Is it possible to fix it?
Comment by Hank Roberts “¢’¬? 13 September 2006 @ 10:29 pm | Edit This
>102, S. McIntyre writes:
“I said that I would provide a thread … here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=711“ⱍ
That thread appears broken “¢’¬? weblog software corrupted? The number sequence falls apart halfway through it –indexing that broke?
Look at what’s left for references in it:
44 is a reply to 48
47 is re 55
55 is re 59
63 is re 67
64 is re 72
65 is re 67
66 is re 68
67 is re 76
71 is re 73
72 is re 76
73 is re 82, and 82 is attributed to Bloom
75 is re 82
76 is re 85
77 is re 86
78 is re 88
81 is re 92-93
82 isn’t by Steve Bloom, it’s re 87, and written by Dardinger, dated 8/28
92-93 do not exist.
This is broken, not possible to tell what refers to what. Is it possible to fix the thread so it is readable?
Comment by Hank Roberts “¢’¬? 13 September 2006 @ 10:34 pm | Edit This
Argh. The “preview’ stayed open, but I somehow posted in the middle of editing as #108 “¢’¬? half-drafted. #109 should be correct as intended.
Comment by Hank Roberts “¢’¬? 13 September 2006 @ 10:37 pm | Edit This
I didn’t intend my question about the sequence problems in topic 711 to be temporary, can I repost it _in_ topic 711 and have it persist? I see it’s moved here and this one is labeled “this thread will be treated as temporary comments and will be deleted after a week or two.” I meant to ask people to help sort out the mangled topic 711, which will take longer to do I suspect.
Hank, sure, that’s fair enough and I’ll attend to it in a few days.
I moved it to the end of the thread it asks about, thanks for the permission.
Flash not the warmest summer ever.
Yep, only the second warmest… Damn. But it was the warmest Jan-Aug on record and given the climate forecasts for the next 3 months it has a good chance of being the warmest year on record for the US.
Given the climate forecasts of June it was going to be the warmest summer.
Given the hurrican forecast last spring it was going to be a heavy hurricane season.
Notethat the warmest summer on record was in 1936, so whats up with that.
Re 89, JMS, you say:
Actually, the move from La Niña was foreseen, by Theodore Landscheidt, who wrote back in 22 December 2003:
Landscheidt also used the method which he used to predict El Niños to forecast general cooling as we approach what is to be called the “Landscheidt Solar Minimum” around 2030. As he is the only person ever to be able to predict El Niños years in advance (this was his third or fourth correct prediction), I suggest that his method should be taken seriously …
w.
Bulls eye willis,the opposite forcing correlation.The effects of Cr AND gcr(neutron counts are also more pronounced at solar minima the energy equivalent is normally equivalent to volcanic signature.(1.5-2.5k at Poles.
Datasets are here for anatarctic,they closed the SP station in decemeber ,moscow station also has on line datasets…
these are in real time and if you do runtime analysis for la-nina-el-nino you will see some interesting phenomena,
http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/~pyle/bri_table.html
“PC/8 in 2007.2 has El Niño potential. As the date 2007.2 is closer to 2006/2007 than to 2007/2008 it is to be expected that El Niño will already emerge around July 2006 and last at least till May 2007 (Probability 80 %).”
Well, he may have got this ‘right’ (though it’s not 2007 here in the UK afaik…), but has an EN been called yet? How many months out is allowed? Why isn’t similar error allowed for climate models?
Let’s go back to #86. 70 years of carbon dioxide addition to the atmosphere and we can’t beat a temperature record set in 1936? What’s gone wrong?
#94 and the powers that be,
why are you really trying to scare me with your fractions of C°?
http://tinyurl.com/ltnty
( “on record” or “ever” or “time of industry” isn’t the real age of the globe either Peter, yes really.)
Re #89 – Now we have El Nino as an excuse – last year it was the AGW which was the cause of increased hurricanes and the increased intensity. So has AGW retreated?
#80
Most of 2006 was influence by La Nina. Only during the last 4 weeks has SSTs begun to climb. That is, most of the hurricane season wasn’t under El Nino influence. The SOI has only very recently begun to rise. The forecast for the remainder of the year and into the winter is only for small increases in the SOI.
http://tinyurl.com/ncbdc
95: Rocks: You are the one who is scaring people :). According to the chart you link, we are on the verge of the next ice age!
Peter H, you say:
Peter, regarding your question “has an El NiàÆàⳠbeen called yet”, there’s this amazing thing called “Google” that you can use to answer questions like this …
w.
RE: #87 – “But it was the warmest Jan-Aug on record”
Where? Here in NoCal it was a year without a summer.
The only “summer” we had was in July, when a classic EARLY AUTUMN synoptic pattern (triple barrel high with offshore flow) gave us a so called “heat wave.”
That’s all she wrote. Now we’re into late October weather.
RE: #87, I agree, has it really been that warm of a summer? Up here in Boston July was quite warm, but both August and September so far have seemed cooler than usual. We’ve had several days where it never got out of the 60s, and much of August was dominated by low/mid 70s.
RE #101
The Upper Midewest/Ohio Valley have had a normal to below normal Summer as far as temperatures are concerned, and above normal for precip. Many reporting stations reported record rainfall for the month of July. Last weekend, the UP in Michigan issued frost advisories, and I noticed the leaves of some hardwoods around northern Indiana have begun to turn color (about 3-5 weeks early).
The latter half of July was the warmest of Summer,but few records were set.
RE: #102 – Here on the Pacific Coast, we’d normally see the following progression of leaf turning:
1) Buckeyes – July (due to drought stress)
2) Big Leaf Maples (combined drought stress and sun angle lowering)- Sept
3) Cottonwoods – Sept
4) All others – Oct – Dec
This year, it seems compressed. 1 and 2 were more or less on time. But three and four are either there or starting. For example, most of the non native eastern hardwoods typically don’t start until late October. Some of them started in late August this year.
Re #100: Possibly Steve S. lives in a different Northern California than I do.
Re #104: “So where exaclty has it been warmer than normal for the entirety of the summer of 2006.” In England and Wales, e.g., according to the Met Center. August was cooler than July, but was still .6C above the 1961-90 average. The summer as a whole was the second warmest since these records started being kept in 1914.
and below 1936 by how much?
England and wales have been experiencing a cool August, just as we have. I’ve spoken to people there.
Re #104. As Steve Bloom say’s, it’s been a warm summer in the UK (July the hottest month ever recorded in many places). But, I don’t expect you to believe me. Nor do I expect you to believe this.
Oh, and September, pretty much UK wide, is, so far, experiencing temperatures way above normal.
I notice you make no reference to August.
No one is arguing that July has not been warm, it has been, we all know, we’ve been here. August however was cooler than July, this is not the norm.
That’s why we lost the record for warmest summer.
Re #109: Peter didn’t need to refer to August since I already had. Sid, you might consider having a look at the monthly data. Apparently it is very much the norm for August to be cooler than July in England/Wales (by .2C).
Re #70 (bruce discussing Kuhn and Popper)
There is another philospher of science named Lakatos who is also highly relevant to the current debate. Check him out in Wikipedia and its links. Lakatos describes how the core ideas are endlessly defended by “auxiliary hypotheses”. “Good” theories are those which lead to new insights. “Bad” theories are not overthrown so much as superceded.
Re 108, 109, 110, is this a hot year in England? Except for July, no … here’s the data from the link Steve Bloom kindly provided in 110. One graph is worth a thousand words …
As an interesting aside, the data shows that 2005 was far from the hottest, or even the second hottest, year on record in England. Didn’t make the top five, in fact, it was sixth hottest … and the hottest year was 1990, sixteen year ago, which makes one wonder about the claimed acceleration of warming due to something or other …
w.
Here’s an interesting article from Roger Pielke that states his concern on the methods used to assess tropespheric temp trends. He argues that using constant pressure thickness differentials instead of surface temperatures may give a more accurate picture of the atmosphere. He did a comparison of 850mb/500mb as well as 500mb/700mb thicknesses, and he had some interesting results.
http://tinyurl.com/fldtp
Re 116, Pat, the integrated area is not much different from the average … I tried it using Simpson’s rule, and the results were only slightly different from a straight average.
w.
With however the hottest being in 1936, before large CO2 emmisions.
Re 118, Steve, Bloom, you really should try looking at the data before you uncap your electronic pen. You say:
In fact, the average for the 2006 year to date (January-August) is only number 15 in the ranking of the warmest years in the entire 93 year record you cited … do your homework before posting, you won’t look so foolish. And by all means … keep trying, Steve …
w.
Willis, where exactly did you contradict what I said? Somehow I missed it. 15 out of 93 does seem to be on the hot end of things, which if I recall correctly is what you were trying to refute back in #113. Thanks for doing the calculation that demonstrates it.
Re 122, of course you missed it, Steve. Peter Hearnden and you both claimed that it was an unusually warm summer and year to date in the UK.
It has not been, it has been cooler overall than all but 2 of the last ten years, and is 15th out of the last 93. This is not unusually warm, it’s not even in the top 15%.
In fact, it’s only 0.8 standard deviations away from the 93 year mean, which is not unusual at all.
Short version? It’s not unusually warm as you and Peter claimed. It’s not unusual at all Did you get it that time?
w.
Willis, July ’06 was the warmest calendar month ever recorded in the Uk. Is that not unusual? Do warmest ever months happen every decade?
See here and here
August ’06 wasn’t very warm – which is why the summer as a whole came out less exceptional. September is, atm, exceptionally warm…
I wonder how long it’ll take the warmarians to figure out that whenever the climate emerges from a cold period, there will be repetitive instances of “the warmest year since…,” as well as periodic “warmest decade sinces…,” when that ‘since’ is only since 150 years after the end of the cold period, and especially because relatively accurate global-scale temperature measurements began that same ‘since’ 150 years ago. Regional ‘warmest sinces’ will occur far more often than global ‘warmest sinces’ over equivalent periods.
Climate chaos ensures repeated happenstantial high/low records over any relatively short period of transitional warm/cold emergence.
Anyone want to bet that AGWarmsters will never admit that bit of climate obviousity no matter whether they figure it out, or not? Can’t have upset propagandapple-carts, and all that. “Propagandapple”: n.; ‘fruit of the tree of the knowledge of spin and dissemblance.’
Bloom, Hearnden, your entire argument is arrant nonsense, much ado about nothing, a warmarian tempest in a climatological teapot, the crock-a-doodle-dooing of a chickenlittlesian, the febrile squirmings of a can-o-warms.
So, what else is new?
So what? If the US isn’t the globe, then neither is the UK.
So what if its the warmest in the last 120 years in the UK for the month of July? When there are cold records broken you ignore them. When they’re warm records (and somewhere in the world is bound to be at or close to record warmth just by the law of averages) you trumpet them as if they meant anything.
It was certainly warmer in the UK 800-1000 years ago, when Chaucer could write about March being regularly very dry and when grapes could be grown easily in Northumberland (its too cold to do that today). Nothing to do with “greenhouse gases”. Everything to do with the large natural variation of climate that you seem hellbent on ignoring.
In #93, I remarked that the temperature record of 1936 has not been exceeded, and a number of contributors to this site offered their own current experiences of the climate where they live. I got a great sense of community from this. The fact remains though that the 1936 record has not been exceeded. Year after year passes, and yet no new record. How can this be reconciled with the science that has been settled? How can Nature fail us so? This is like a Japanese surrender, we must endure the unendurable.
Err, hold on a minute John. I didn’t say it’s not been warm in the past. Indeed, I didn’t state anything. And, trying to paint me as an ‘alarmist’ is all to typical I’m afraid.
I suggest you start here and work forward in time. When you’ve found thiry years ‘certainly warmer’ than the most recent thiry years post a link to that time period’s weather here will you?
RE 129:
David, indeed, the high temps occuring during July 1936 are rather shocking compared to recent “records”. Just in my local mid-atlantic states, nearby Cumberland, MD hit 109 F, Moorefield, WV, 112 F, and just north in a south-central PA town, 111 F. All currently standing state records (by far). The hottest temp I experienced in western MD was ~104 F in July 1966 (I was a kid & we had to sleep in the basement to avoid the heat). Extreme dryness certainly contributed to the 1930’s heat-waves.
Re #130
I inquire about why you persist in talking up warm records in the 20th and you point me to someone’s personal webpage concerning oral reports on weather events in the 11th Century. Since people are more likely to record the occasional storm than the mild weather in between, it poses an insuperable question about publication bias.
How about some actual measurements?
Here’s a quote for the “non-alarmist” Hearnden
– Brian Fagan, “The Little Ice Age” pg 21
#133
Central Asia is also suffering through one of its coldest Summers in decades.
Re 138: Northeast Asia has been cool two summers in a row.
ok.
#142, Tom
I agree with you. what Peter H has neglected to say is that August was in general terms cool compare dwith recent years and unusually wet. So if you add June, July and August’s mean CET’s together and divide by theree then I suspect the average CET temperature this summer has been pretty unexceptional. This is called WEATHER! As a farmer Peter J surely understands this. WEATHER is not CLIMATE. As a kid back in the late sixties, my recollections of summer was that it was much hotter. I recollect digging out the melted tar in the road with matchsticks and swarms of flying ants – events which I’ve never witnessed since. Again, another personal recollection and not very scientific I know, but my recollection from kidhood is that the difference in temperature between winter and summer was greater then i.e. winters nowadays in Northern England seem much milder than then and summers much cooler.
KevinUK
The days were longer when I was a kid too, Kevin…
Sorry Peter,
I did miss #124 so apologies for saying that you did mention August as clearly in #124 you did.
Do you agree that al in all this summer has been pretty unexceptional overall. We’ve had variable weather fair enough, and uneventful June, a hot July and then a relatively cool and wet August. I presume you’ve been listening to Radio 4 this week Peter? Have you also been reading The Independent? Are you going to see ‘The Inconvenient Truth on the cinemas when it come out shortly?
KevinUK
July was, for the UK, a really hot month – no dispute about that. June was warm, August about average (just ‘warm’ I think). Overall a very fine summer. According to the Met Office large parts of the UK were 2C above average for the summer – not to be sniffed at imo.
A bit, no, probably 🙂
RE 103: Steve Sadlov wrote:
Interesting. Here in MD because of a very dry Aug, some sensitive hardwoods are turning (mostly yellow/brown) early, like Sugar/Red maples & Tuliptrees. Black walnuts too, but that’s mostly from anthracnose.
Eastern NA trees would seem to suffer generally from lack of summer rain when planted in the PNW, at least the sensitive species.
PS. I’m having some success growing Ponderosa & Jeffrey pines (even Longleafs) here in MD. Needlecast infection from the heat/humidity (not cold) are the western pines’ problem here in the east US, but avoided it so far.
Peter, in #146 you point out correctly that I misunderstood your question. You ask:
Unfortunately, this question can’t be answered. The problem is the shortness of our datasets, because we don’t have temperature records back to EVER.
According the the Greenland ice cores, for example, we haven’t had a warmest month EVER for about 8,000 years, and this July didn’t even come close to the record set in the “Holocene Optimum”. We’re currently at the cold end of the Holocene.
According to the CET, on the other hand, the last time there was a “warmest ever” month was in 1984. July this year was 19.7°C, July 1984 was 19.5°C. It’s not clear what this means, however, for two reasons.
The first reason is that the CET has only been partially adjusted for the Urban Heat Island problem. Thus, we don’t know if this latest “record” is really a record or not. See here for a discussion of this difficulty.
(As an aside, the UHI was first noticed by an Englishman, Luke Howard. In The Climate of London (way back in 1820), he commented “Night is 3.70°[F] warmer and day 0.34°[F] cooler in the city than in the country.” Despite his finding UHI in 1820, the CET is adjusted only about 0.2°C for the UHI, and in a stepwise fashion, for the post-1960 period.)
Second, the confidence interval for the monthly CET is quite wide, at +/- 0.6°C (3 standard deviations). This means that two monthly temperatures have to differ by more than 1.2°C before we can say that one is significantly larger than the other. (We could use 2 standard deviations as our criteria, but with 4,172 monthly data points in the CET, we’d have over 200 erroneous conclusions using 2 SD, so we should adopt a stricter standard).
So with a difference of only 0.2°C between now and 1984, we don’t even know if the most recent July is warmer than the 1984 record or not. There is a full review of these uncertainties here.
So, after all that, the short answer to your question? The answer is, because of the shortness and uncertainty of our records, your question is unanswerable as asked.
w.
Steve M, if I remember correctly, I believe you or Jean S. were going to post on RM05 and their RegEm methodology. How is that coming along.
One of my friends, Paul Cavalluzzo, is going to be on US television tonight = the Lehrer Newshour on PBS. He’s been counsel to a Canadian royal commission into how a Canadian citizen got turned over to Syria to be tortured.
Today’s Winnipeg Free Press has the following article on Human induced warming:
Fri Sep 22 2006
**Human influence found on Canadian climate change
By Dennis Bueckert OTTAWA — Canadian and British scientists say they have found human fingerprints on climate change in Canada, southern Europe and China. Researchers at Environment Canada and the British Meteorological Office conclude that human activities have contributed substantially to climate change seen in Canada over the second half of the 20th century and that the change cannot be attributed to natural climate variability. The findings, published in the current issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate , say Canada’s average annual temperature increased by one degree Celsius over the last century—**
The catch?? — They determined this by computer modelling – again, no scientific measurements.
The Royal Society attacks big bad oil here.
Incidently, notice the concern with “statistical issues” in Exxon-Mobil’s statements and in the Royal Society’s letter of protest. Could be a result of Steve M making waves…
jae,
Did you listen to Radio 4 on Thursday? On my drive to work while listening to Radio 4 I had to listen to this crap from the Royal Society’s PR man. I couldn’t belive what I was hearing. In effect the Royal Society are telling ExxonMobil not to fund any organisations who present explanations on the causes of global warming that differ from the IPCC claimed ‘consensus’ explanations. So it appears that our distinquished national academy now feels that any dissention should be quashed. The application of the scientific method to the IPCC’s claimed (anthroppgenic)causes of global warming is no longer needed as the ‘science’ is now settled. NOT!
KevinUK
Of possible interest.
An interesting article, Steve, if a bit biased. There was one probable misstatement, however. It said that as a species the bristlecone pines had been around longer than Pikes Peak. That’s pretty unlikely, even given the longer than normal lifespan of the trees. It’s quite possible that the genus the tree belongs to is older than Pike’s Peak, but I doubt the species is.
Another false statement in that article: that 4862+ yr-old bristlecone that was cut down by a graduate student in 1964 was not “the oldest living thing on Earth” – although that may be have the view at the time. We know now there are aspen clones in Colorado and fungal growths in Texas that are much, much older than that.
PS
You could also try reading the manual that came with the lappie. But everytime you do, as a guy, a kitten dies and you loose a little masculinity. Just like looking at a map.
A little PR for the great work that goes on here. This from The American Thinker today:
The comment “instantly” helped – I wasn’t holding the F5 key down long enough and nothing was happening. This time I held it down and then toggled over and everything worked. I did read the manual – but it didn’t tell me to be sure to hold the key down long enough. THx.
I saw Mann and company on the Lou Dobbs program on CNN a couple of months ago. When Dobbs asked the simple question that assuming AGW as a fact, what should be done, Mann was left mumbling about moving beyond false controversies. He had absolutely no answer and seemed very unwilling to say so. One of his colleagues stepped in to save the day with some comments about cellulose-derived ethanol. However there was no real enlightenment given on the issue.
Given the political importnace of the Kyoto accord, I found the above to be very surprising. So is there any document available to the genral public that details the amount of reduction in carbon emissions that anthropogenic global warming advocates would find to be sufficient. I understand that Kyoto was upposed to be the first of many but how many?
Stan Palmer
Mann wants stuff done. It is the standard stuff: carbon taxes/quoatas. Fuel changes, bla bla. But his stated deal is that he is just a scientist, not a policy guy. Dobbs got him confused.
The curious irony about scientists who seek to influence policy. As long as there’s debate, the scientists are in business. Once the debate has been settled to the point where policy can be formulated, the scientists are no longer needed. Indeed, they are an impediment. Mann may live to regret his expressions of certainty and alarmism. He is working hard to make himself obsolete. You would think he might have understood that and had some answers prepared for the Dobbs interview. He’s obviously not interested in saving the planet. He’s too focused on winning an argument.
I think he is better off staying in deep cover, so that he has faux objectivity.
Dear Steve,
sorry for that off-topic comment in the other thread. Please always feel free to erase my postings.
When I was writing it, the Earth was warmest in 12,000 years although I wrote 18,000. But other media have improved it to one million years.
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0925-nasa.html
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0925-nasa.html
If they extend this record high temperature to the last 13.7 billion years, we will start to have some real trouble with physics. 🙂 Because 12,000 years is more than 5,767 years, the orthodox Jews already have some problem right now. 🙂
Best
Lubos
I forgot to link the original new PDF paper by Hansen et al.
Click to access 0606291103v1.pdf
I am curious what Steve will write about it. It is very hard for me to read such papers seriously. If you look on page 5 of 7, bottom, there is a graph and you see that the ocean surface temperatures have been essentially constant since 1870 when the effect of industry was much smaller than today, almost negligible. Then you see all this noise in the previous millenia that is hardly statistical significant.
Meanwhile, the text of the article contains hundreds of distracting comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the question that they pretend to study. For example, at the end they criticize the “engineering fixes” because they are dangerous because they reduce our drive to reduce the CO2 emissions. I almost exploded by laughter when I read this sentence because this is just so incredibly stupid. The very purpose of the “engineering fixes” is to do something more efficient and cheaper than CO2 reductions, if these things are needed, and Hansen et al. complain that it is bad because it reduces our good will to do these things in the silly way. Their way of thinking is just so incompatible with mine that it would be hard for me to start a meaningful debate with them.
Well, it may still be a good paper if you forget all these funny things. I am curious what Steve thinks.
#126 — Notice, too, that Hansen’s Figure 2 is exactly the vertically-displaced global surface temperature plot that Willis critically destroyed some time ago.
Yes, I noticed that. 😉
Re #126: Lubos, you refer to “all this noise in the previous millenia that is hardly statistical (sic) significant.” Any idea what that “noise” might be plotting?
Re #127: Pat, you are *such* a true believer. Head on over to Deltoid and check out the neat deconstruction of Willis’ efforts. I’d link it, but John A. doesn’t allow that.
More on the ground observations from the mid West Coast.
The reason for these is the general theme of the NWS’ long term temperature and precip forecasts being flawed due to their reliance on the same faulty GCMs that have led to incorrect climate predictions.
So, after the nearly non existent Summer (with only late July featuring real warmth of any scale) and the onset of overtly Autumnal synoptic conditions during our cool August, I had thought that we may have actually snapped back to normalcy by mid September. It got nice and warm in a typical early Autumn manner, and fool that I can be, I had imagined this continuing through into October. Well, silly me. It now looks as if the pattern may be setting up for record cold by mid next week – in other words, typical late October – Early November conditions. I wonder when the rains will start this year?
Dear Steve #129,
yes, the noise on the plot is a measured feature of the ocean sediments that is hypothesized to be a good proxy of the ocean surface temperatures in the past.
If this hypothesis is correct, then the plot is correlated with the actual temperatures although the overall trend and the relative shift with respect to the present temperatures can distort the reality because of various systematic errors and changes in the sediment-temperature links that are not accounted for.
If you ask me what the seemingly random graphs of temperatures in the past indicate, then my answer is that we don’t quite know. There are certainly aspects of it that are astronomical in character and reflect various astronomical cycles.
The random portion of these graphs can reflect the internal dynamics and historical accidents on the Earth that we will never reconstruct quite exactly – patterns in the volcano activity etc. (or mammoths’ factories producing CO2, to use a more acceptable example for you).
But it is also plausible that an important driver of these temperature fluctuations in the past were external factors such as the cosmic rays from the galactic neighborhood and oscillating solar activity that were driving the climate in both directions.
We know for sure that the concentration of gases has been a secondary consequence of the temperatures – because of the full agreement between all types of gases and because of a 800-year-long lag of the concentrations behind the temperatures.
What was actually driving the temperatures to behave in the way it did is mostly unknown although some contributions are known.
Best
Lubos
INHOFE SPEAKS. See his Senate speech 9/25/06
===============================
According to his website he last spoke in april 2005. so please provide a link.
Re. #133
link
Re #131: Those fluctuations are the glacial/interglacials, Lubos. On the scale represented (1,000 years for each data point)I think it’s fair to say there’s not much noise. I think it’s also pretty well agreed that Milankovitch cycles are the primary driver, although of course some of the details remain in dispute.
“Climate alarmists have been attempting to erase the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period from the Earth’s climate history for at least a decade. David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Geosciences, can testify first hand about this effort. Dr. Deming was welcomed into the close-knit group of global warming believers after he published a paper in 1995 that noted some warming in the 20th century. Deming says he was subsequently contacted by a prominent global warming alarmist and told point blank “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” When the “Hockey Stick” first appeared in 1998, it did just that.”
From Inhofe’s speech, link in #134
re #136: bender, see “What is the Hockey Stick Debate About?” linked in the right panel 😉
Re #136: It’s great to see you guys aligning yourselves with the likes of Inhofe. Keep up the good work.
Dear Steve #135,
yes, I agree, they are glacials and interglacials, but this insight is just a translation of the question into different words, not an answer. When it’s cold outside, it could be a glacial, and vice versa, but why did one period last longer than another one?
As you know very well, the glaciation “cycles” are not really periodic, and we can’t derive the right behavior by any known combinations of the Milankovitch cycles. They just seem to operate at the same time scales which is why we believe that they are related.
But I don’t think that the primary reason for the glaciation oscillations is well understood. Do you disagree?
Best
Lubos
RE: #138 – Ooooh, oooh ….. Inhofe …. Red State … Bible belt ….. flyover …. woundn’t want to be associated with any o’ dose bumpkins …. thanks Steve B … you’ve saved us once again! 😉 /sarc
Re #138
Since when is quotation “alignment”?
I guess since “hodgepodge” work became a sure sign of “idiocy”.
Dano, I think Bloom is trying too hard.
Climate outsiders throwing solar rocks …
Here is the latest venture into doom mongering…check this out:
Doom and Gloom
RE: #145 – Ever wonder why there are so many indentions of the coastline along the Atlantic (including Gulf) coast of the US? It’s because it’s what’s know as a passive margin. What that means is, it is on the trailing edge of continental crust meaning that it is moving away from a mid ocean spreading center. Given that plate tectonics are driven by mantle convection, what that means is, a passive margin is subsiding due to the gradual loss of heat from the slab. At some point, the Atlantic Coast will be at the Fall Line, even if there is Global Cooling and generally lowering sea level world wide. This is a topic warmers do not want to discuss.
Perhaps because it doesn’t matter.
A back of envelope estimate:
The pacific and atlantic have sunk 3 km /60 My
ref: Parsons, B. and J.G. Sclater (1977) An analysis of the variation of ocean floor bathymetry and heat flow with age. J. Geophys. Res. 82, 803-827.
which is approximately 5 mm/century.
see? doesn’t matter.
see also:
http://www2.ocean.washington.edu/oc540/lec02-4/
and:
Donald L Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, 1982, Geodynamics: Applications of Continuum Physics to Geological Problems, John Wiley and Sons.
Not sure if this is the appropriate place for this or not. I just started reading “Fabric of the Cosmos”, by Brian Greene. In the preface, the author often thanks various people who assisted with the book. One of the first names mentioned was Lubos Motl, who I know posts on this site. That’s very cool. Congrats Lubos. Not sure what all you do, but being referenced in a book is a good thing, IMO.
John A/Steve M,
Following the Royal Society’s recent attempts to remove funding for organisations that present alternative explanations for the causes of global warming, is there any chance you could start up a thread in which we could debate the politics of AGW and in particular the politicisation of the science underpinning the AGW debate? You could start the thread off with the following link here.
KevinUK
RE: #147 – Ooops, now I am seriously embarassed. You’ve referenced a book I have on my shelf, and I have not read that particular part of it for about 20 years. Well, thanks for catching that nonetheless, this is what makes truly GREAT science!
Over on his blogsite Mann writes (bold face mine):
we know that this rise in CO2-concentration changes the radiation balance of the planet and leads to a warming of global surface temperature. This is scientifically undisputed and well-established physics, which has been known since in the year 1896 the Swedish Nobel prize winner Svante Arrhenius calculated the climatic effect of a rise in CO2.
Is there any experimental evidence from atmospheric analogs with varying levels of CO2 that support this claim?
I protest my banning from last night. I was more mild then bender, yet I was banned and he continued. I think me pushing for answers is the reason for that. I also think that it is worthwhile to do so and I won’t back down, no matter the howler monkey community cacophony. Since, even on simple issues of fact, the discussion last night, showed that bender can be wrong and thus it is worthwhile to push for clarity, step by step.
re 153: tco
Six of the 15 “recent comments” are yours and my opinion is that you are one of the most prolific and least interesting posters to this blog. If you are unhappy with your treatment, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are standing ready to give you all the free blog space you can use.
If you exercise a little discipline and limit yourself to five posts per 24 hours your quality may improve. In any case the smaller volume will make you less annoying.
Re #153
This is incorrect. I referred to the tracking down of documents as secretarial work – which is not at all demeaning. Secretaries are powerful people. I never got to see TCO’s reply because it was removed so quickly. Much like the disgusting attack against Pat Frank from the previous night – which I did have the great misfortune of reading during the ~30 seconds it was up there.
Slow learning, tag-team, today’s TCO should ask TCO of two nights ago what was posted on that occasion before protesting any further. One more peep out of any TCO players that “bender was wrong” and I’m finished here. So you dummies watch yourselves, and stop being cute. You’re largely ineffective.
Re #156, bender
Bad plan. Speaking personally, I’d rather you ignore tco, and carry on providing more of your good stuff.
#153,
it is worthwhile to push for clarity
There is pushing for clarity and then there is pushing just to be pushy.
If you would practice the former more and the latter less, everyone would profit.
BTW, while I thought your comment a couple of days ago was funny it was, as I said at the time, a personal attack and entirely inappropriate.
I apologize for the 2 day ago remark. I do not apologize for last night’s remark. I am quite happy to let community examine it and bender’s remark (which was very mild also).
Some of the exchanges are not necessarily offensive; the majority of people are totally uninterested in such exchanges; I don’t want the bandwidth of the blog filling up with them and I especially don’t want them on topical threads. If necessary, I’ll develop some rule to deal with it, although I’d prefer self control.
Sorry. TCO. You’re on moderation. It’s not because you’re a critic, but because you’re getting like Hartlod – too many posts. I’ll let most of the posts through eventually, but I’m going to put you on time delay when I’m online.
Steve, ref your update to your “keep it on topic” policy above, a few thoughts:
Off-topic posting falls into three types :
Type 1 – stuff that is useful in its own right but which is in the wrong place. I am particularly thinking of KevinUK’s ruminations on nuclear power, which I have found very educational, but there are other examples. It would be a shame to lose these contributions.
Type 2 – stuff that you would rather had not been posted, but are leaving in place because you don’t like censorship.
Type 3 – Spam, profanity and everything else that goes straight in the bin, so I’ll ignore that here.
Type 1 is probably less common than Type 2, but is prone to lead into Type 2.
From your point of view, you have to draw a balance between heavy use of the delete key (your easiest response), and excessive demands on your time. It would be good if the policing function could be distributed – so cooperative posters could help – and, where possible, automated.
I suggest setting up a new category “Open Threads”. Most of the posts in this category would be titled “Open Thread on Subject ABC”, and have a header post that goes something like :
“This is an open thread for posters to discuss ABC. I do not claim particular expertise in this subject, and do not necessarily endorse any of the views herein.”
If anyone who is knowledgable on a particular subject wanted to submit a possible header post for your approval, that would be a bonus.
Possible values for ABC are : { Energy , Media , Politics , … } – I’m sure posters could suggest more.
These ABCs should be kept fairly general – you don’t want too much faffing around between sub-divisions. You might reconsider this if any of them get too full, too quickly.
The other sort of open thread would be titled “Current General Open Thread”, with no particular subject. This would probably be the destination to which you move Type 2 posts.
This thread would probably fill up more quickly than the Open ABC Threads. If so, change the name to “General Open Thread, closed 1st October, 2006” and open a new “Current General Open Thread”.
Regarding distributed policing by cooperative posters :
If, for example, KevinUK says something interesting but off-topic about nuclear power, I can make a one-line post saying “Re #99, KevinUK, please see my response in ‘Open Thread – Energy’. We can then carry on a conversation there without disrupting the original thread.
It would also be possible for posters to look over old threads and submit to you a list of posts that you might like to transfer at your convenience.
Regarding automation :
Apologies in advance to John A for this one.
I am completely ignorant of WordPress so I don’t know what admin functions are available to you. However, I would guess that hitting the delete key is quick and easy, and that moving a post to another thread takes a bit more time. In particular, if you are moving a Type 2 post to the Current Open Thread, you want to leave a marker in the original thread saying “moved to current open thread”, to avoid the censorship howls, and to encourage any subsequent conversation to take place there.
It would also be nice if a deleted Type 3 post could be replaced with an empty post saying [Deleted]; this avoids screwing up the numbering.
Things that are quick and easy are more likely to get done. If this were a system I knew, I would probably be able to write some macros to make these edit functions a two or three click job. But I don’t know WordPress – so, John A, is it easy to do what I describe ? (Sorry)
One other minor thought: it would help to remind some of your more slapdash posters, like me, to keep on-topic if there were some sort of visual cue to do so. I am thinking of minor things, like a different base colour in the technical threads.
This will either be very easy to do, by selecting a different style flag in the original header post or some such, or else – not.
Apologies for the verbosity. Please feel free to ignore all this if it does not suit you.
Steve,
I concur with fFreddy’s suggestions some of which I’m sure will not be possible because of the limitations of WordPress. Sadly WordPress is blogging software and not full-blown discussion forum software. As I’m sure you are already aware your blog is visited by many people who are not just interested in temperature proxy re-constructions but who are also interested in the wider evidence (or non-evidence depending on your point of view) for AGW. In this respect your blog is by far and away the most informative blog/discussion forum on the internet. Your blog (thanks to people like yourself, bender, willis, ferdie, dave d etc to name only a few) is playing a very important role in educating non-climate experts (like myself, fFreddy, welikerocks etc) on the science of climate change.
Web sites whether they be blogs or not often develop into communities of like minded people some of whom choose to regularly contribute to the debate and others who don’t. Their contributions don’t always have to be technical ones e.g. like welikerock’s contributions which I always enjoy reading. Indeed it’s also important to remember that someone must first ask questions in order for them to be answered (even when they are difficult ones to answer that TCO’s).
I hope you’ll agree a lot of very interesting (often fundamental) questions are asked by non-experts and are subsequently answered very well by experts on this blog. As with a lot of blogs/discussion forums getting the balance right is not easy. My personal feeling is that you have almost got the balance right and that if you can in someway implement, some of fFreddy’s suggestions at least, then the balance will be pretty much spot on.
KevinUK
I think that the suggestions make sense.
Steve
Please do not talk about lack of WMD evidence anymore. It is one of my hot buttons that I have not replied to yet and I don’t feel like it.
Dear Steve,
I think it is completely necessary to moderate discussions at any kind of a publicly available forum that discusses topics that are not entirely comprehensible to the broad public.
This statement may be not entirely obvious but the experience shows that without any regulating mechanisms, the discussion usually reduces, after some time, to the lowest common denominator of the participants – which is usually pretty low. 😉
Requirement of broadly on-topic comments is not a terribly demanding one. On the other hand, it is clear that your blog is such an important place for climate discussions in general that there should always be space for people to announce some more general news and/or new ideas from this field.
Best wishes
Lubos
I have no problem with keeping things on topic. It should apply to all, however. Not just the critics. And supporters (to include Steve) should not be allowed to get away with off topic comments unchallenged and then having discussion shut down when critics come in to debate or even just to extend discussion.
Dear Jonathan #148,
this is really off-topic even for an off-topic thread but thank you. 😉 Sadly, it would be expected from me (by others and me) to do much more radical revolutions for the humankind than being thanked in a book 😉 but there have been too many negative things recently (like the witch hunts at Harvard organized by the far Left) that made it less unlikely and distracted me in various ways, and keeping an optimistic mood became an important part of the efforts.
I’ve read Brian’s second (great) book several times before it was completed and we had many interesting discussions with Brian, and I have also translated his first book (TEU) to Czech which went very well. My e-friend Olda Klimanek was also picked to translate the Fabric of the Cosmos to Czech which he did.
Brian is a cool guy, who would reject.
Feedback for similar books became a kind of well-defined activity that I started to like many years ago, and also did it for Lisa Randall’s, Mike Dine’s, and several other books – whose authors are cool as well, of course. 😉 In some sense, when the progress in the field is reduced, doing similar superficially “inferior” activities often seems as a better time investment. This is about a dynamical calculation of priorities. But I hope it will change again. When the feeling that we are very close to a substantial progress returns, you don’t want to be editing popular books. 😉
Paradoxically, I was also thanked in the two recent books that I don’t like at all, those by Woit and Smolin. 😉
All the best
Lubos
less unlikely -> less likely, sorry
#166, Lubos
“This statement may be not entirely obvious but the experience shows that without any regulating mechanisms, the discussion usually reduces, after some time, to the lowest common denominator of the participants – which is usually pretty low.”
While I agree with your statement (here is a good example of what you are talking about) I don’t think there is any danger that discussions on this blog will get to LCD depths. Most people who post on this blog are polite, indeed IMO surprisingly polite given the often emotive subject of the discussions (global warming). I think Steve and John A do a pretty good job of stepping in when it looks like things are about to head to LCD depths.
KevinUK
From today’s Wall Street Journal Law Blog:
The article links to a Medill Journalism (Northwestern Universtiy) overview piece which gives a good rundown of the groups involved and which side they’re supporting. It ends with the following quote (of special interest to readers of this blog) from Mary Nichols, a UCLA environmental law professor:
“The scientific case on the harm caused as a result of a failure to curb emissions is so overwhelming that it’s reasonable to think that the Court will send the case back to the EPA”
Steve,
This is your blog, so do what you think best. That said, I’d personally like to see you keep it focused on what you started out doing here. Having “open” threads containing topics that you are not particularly interested in sounds inclusive and all that, but in reality will just take away time that could be better spent because you will still have to moderate them. I don’t think you ever intended this site to be a general-purpose message posting facility. This is your blog and to some extent you will be judged on all the content. Nobody has the “right” to post here. It’s a privledge and one that should be taken away if someone misbehaves. Keep in mind that your tone can have an effect on the overall tone of the posters as well. If you are snarky and snide, then you’ll get more of that from them as well.
You don’t need anymore lecturing from me. Just please, keep it tight and keep it focused.
steve,
your daughter should not need an external card.
make sure she reads the toshiba instructions
typically she will have to turn on the internal card since it is normally off to save power
she will probably have to set up her computer for network connections
(writing this on a sony laptop on a lynksys wireless network.
Wi-Fi: general troubleshooting tips, XP-specific considerations
Make sure the switch (normally on the back/front near all the flashing lights) for the WiFi is ON.
She’s away at school but she says that the switch is on.
Steve, when you were trying to use an external monitor, you had to toggle it on with the blue ‘Fn’ key and one of the function keys.
There is a similar thing with a software switch for wireless, in addition to the hardware switch.
On a thinkpad, the blue symbol for wireless is on the F5 key and has a little picture of a computer with broadcast waves coming out of the side – dunno what is the equivalent for a Toshiba.
Congratulations, Steve!
Tett SFB, Betts R, Crowley TJ, Gregory J, Johns TC, Jones A, Osborn TJ, Ostrom E, Roberts DL and Woodage MJ, “The impact of natural and anthropogenic forcings on climate and hydrology since 1550”. Climate Dynamics, is out (online):
Of course they still haven’t overcome the ideological barrier of actually citing M&M-work, but it seems to me that the impact of your work is now recognized (even within the Team). From Introduction:
So, does this mean that they actually now acknowledge that the “spaghetti graph” is not worth the paper it is printed on?
Those interested in the status of current climate models should also take a careful look on the paper.
Steve
One possible issue, but only possible, is that there are different types of wireless cards. Mostly they later standards all intertalk. But if it is an older laptop she may be operating on a protocol/frequency that is incompatible with the wireless network at school. Manufacturer is irrelevant, it is the type of card. (There are many, but it will be a wireless A, B or G, N is the latest)
Not likely if it is a newish laptop, but it is a possibility.
There is also the issue that the Admins may have changed the log in, bot accepting connections from unkown computers.
Best bet is to talk to the IT guys. IT may be necesarry for them to input her computer into the system, or do a little fiddadling with her computer.
IT’s brand new. It’s a D-Link local network at their house; it’s not a university house.
Follow up.
If she had a desktop with a card given to her by University. It was probably a known card. THey should be able to input her laptops Mac Address and make it a known card too.
IT isn’t anything to do with the university. They have a router hooked in to the local cable provider.
Ahhhhhhh
In that case, it (Lappie) will likely do b, g, and pre-N. So long as the D-link is not an A protocol (older and pretty much non existent now) it should be fine. If it is, then the D-link needs to be upgraded (wireless routers are real cheap nowadays). If it’s not, well……
They have everything in their control i.e. security procedures on their router. And no one can really talk them through that because we wouldn’t know the setup.
Other than the protocol issue, there should be no problem between a Toshiba Lappie and a D-Link router.
Having said that. If they do go to replace the router don’t buy a D-Link (my opinion). SMC and Netgear seem to be the most reliable. Although all have their issues.
Steve;
Does your daughters laptop see other WiFi networks, say at a cyber cafe? Or, the university network? Once we have we know the laptop WiFi card is OK, then we can attack the other issues.
Russ
#173, Steve
It looks to me like (as you’ve said that she used to be able to connect to the wireless network but can’t now) who ever has configured the security settings on the router may well have changed the setting from a lower level encryption e.g. WEP to a higher encryption level e.g. WPA. Depending on the age of the laptop it may well have client software that only supports a limited number of encryption options. I’ve had a similar problem recently with an older laptop I have which uses a PCMCIA wireless card (because it does have a built in mini-PCI wireless card). It would help us all a great deal (and then hopefully your daughter) if you could quote the exact model of the laptop. We can then check any on-line manuals for configuration settings etc.
KevinUK
Steve,
First thing to check is if her computer is picking up the signal from the wireless router. If she is using Windows XP navigate:
Click on “Start”(lower left hand corner)
“Settings”
“Network Connections”
A window will open up. Double click on “Wireless Network Connection”.
Another new window will open up, click on “View Wireless Networks”. This will show all available wireless networks in range.
If she cannot see the network then her computers wireless is off or not functioning (provided other people can get on the network). If she can see the wireless network then she needs to verify that her settings are compatible with the wireless routers settings.
Alternatively she could go down to a location that has free wireless internet, like a coffee shop, to test her computers wireless.
Steve,
On other point. could you let us know what the model no is of the D-Link wireless router as again this will enable us to check what security settings are possible? It sounds like you daughter is in a very similar situation to my daughter i.e. living in an off-campus private landlord shared house with other students. My daughter’s landlord is about to have a wireless router installed in their house connected to an ISP (sadly BT Internet) so I’m bracing myself for a visit to her house shortly to ensure that everyone is connected up properly. I managed to fix her friends desktop PC recently (it had a ‘blue screen of death’ on starting up Windows XP) so I am now the (sadly) unpaid IT tech. support for all her other friend’s at the college.
KevinUK
Steve
Having wrestled with a Belkin wireless connections for about six months, my advice is to unistall and re-install the wireless software on both machines, with standard settings. If the connections both work then the settings for encryption/hiding your wireless from others etc can be tweaked.
Also, I have found that some techie forums suggest that Windows XP itself has a problem with wireless, specifically, that when a connection is lost it hunts for any available wireless connection, instead of trying to reconnect with the original known wireless, or cable source.
It is quite possible that another wireless user is trying (inadvertantly) to share your daughters connection, or that her laptop is trying to share with someone elses wireless.
Also power off, and restart for the cable modem and the router can sometimes be successful.
I’m afraid it is all a bit of a minefield.
Way off topic, but some of you stats guys might appreciate this…
NetFlix Prize
In case you haven’t heard, NetFlix is sponsoring a contest for the person/team that can improve their customer movie rating/recommendation system by 10%. The grand prize is $1,000,000.00. Not being a stats guy, just a business programmer, don’t think I will bother. But Steve and some other people here just might have what it takes to get the job done. Now, in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t compare to the important work being done by Steve and many of the other posters here. OTOH, $1 Millyunn dollars is a good chunk o’ change. Anyway, sorry for the WAY OFF TOPIC post, but maybe some or all of you hadn’t heard about the contest.
173 Steve. This may be a stupid comment but are you sure that there is actually a wireless card in the laptop? We have a cheap and simple Toshiba but because it was cheap and simple, didn’t come with a wireless card in it – there is still a switch on the front that turns a little light on and off but that’s all folks. We use an plug in wireless card which you can get quite cheaply. Simple test for this of course is has the laptop ever found any other wireless networks?
#190,
That’s a good point. When I ordered my son’s laptop this summer I had to specifically upgrade it to get an internal WiFi card.
John A is on holidays and I need some WordPress assistance. Jim Barrett writes in to say:
Sometimes this problem occurs with hotmail and yahoo email addresses; he uses a gmail address. I’ve suggested that he try another identifier. Jim Barrett goes on to say:
That’s not the case.
Allan MacRae writes in to say that he has a similar problem and now he cannot even read CA.
RE: #151 – Fascinating….
THE GFS SPREADS LIGHT TO MODERATE PRECIP
ACROSS MOST OF OUR CWA LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AND WEDNESDAY EVENING
AS A POTENT SHORTWAVE ROTATES AROUND THE CUTOFF LOW AND ACROSS
CENTRAL CA. THE GFS FORECASTS SOME IMPRESSIVE QPF VALUES FOR SO EARLY
IN THE SEASON WITH SIX-HOUR TOTALS FROM 00Z TO 06Z THURSDAY REACHING
THREE-QUARTERS OF AN INCH IN THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS. LATEST
GUIDANCE FROM THE RFC SHOWS SIMILAR AMOUNTS IN THE SANTA CRUZ
MOUNTAINS…AND A LITTLE MORE THAN AN INCH IN THE SANTA LUCIAS…WITH
A QUARTER INCH TO A HALF INCH COMMON ELSEWHERE. GIVEN THE
UNSEASONABLY COLD AIRMASS ALOFT ASSOCIATED WITH THE UPPER LOW…THE
AIRMASS WILL BECOME RATHER UNSTABLE AND ISOLATED THUNDERSTORMS ARE
POSSIBLE…ESPECIALLY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AND WEDNESDAY NIGHT. WILL
ISSUE A SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT SHORTLY WHICH WILL INCLUDE
CAUTIONARY STATEMENTS ABOUT WET AND SLIPPERY ROADS…LIGHTNING
DANGER…AND CHILLY DAMP CONDITIONS FOR OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES.
RE: #193 – We’ve unmistakeably flipped back into the Siberia Express pattern that dogged us here on the mid W. Coast clear into mid June. 2006, the year without a Summer (regionally speaking ….).
I agree. I have from time to time commented on this blog. I see now that my largely non-technical comments have contributed little to further blog quality. That doen’t mean I no longer value my own opinion – quite the contrary – but only that my voice isn’t needed or useful here.
This will be my last posting although I will continue to read. I recommend a self imposed silence to others.
I had the problem and fixed it by turning of the software accellerator on the dial-up connection.
Cool use for tree rings: new study on hurricanes in PNAS. Shows the 50’s had higher hurricane frequency than recent years. Looks like the statistics were addressed, too!
I can’t see the most recent graphic posted by Steve M. Nor can I see my own graphics posted near the end of “next generation models”. Is this just me?
Re #198 clarif. on missing graphics
#222 in “Kth Stockholm”
#212 in “climate models next generation”
RP Sr. website has a comment that references the following paper which I found to present a solid argument that the solar impact is the dominant force in our climate by Dr. Vizimer of Ottawa, Canada.
Click to access veizer2.pdf
201: Thanks for that link. What a great comprehensive review of probable solar influences! It even references MM03 on p. 19.
My goodness, whatever will the usual suspects do? It seems they are already calling this hurricane season.
Here’s the latest AGW story from Boston:
The Northeast is at Stake
I got news for them. Summers in Boston are already like Summers in South Carolina, not far removed anyways.
What is more likely to happen, if AGW is a given, is that Winters in Boston will be closer to Winters in South Carolina.
Well I looked, and the D-Link is a G router. so there should be no conflict there. The issue has to be in the security configuration.
Does it even see the local wireless network at the house? There is a security option to not broadcast the SSID (Required for the computer to see the network). In which case the easiest way to solve this is to turn it off temporarily (the do not broadcast SSID option) the computer will find it, you log in, then turn the option back on.
But that is just one of many possibilities. Incluiding encyrption and MAC address filtering.
Someone is going to have to talk to whomever set up the router.
Steve,
There are usually plenty of guys around good with computers who are more than willing to help (women especially). This is the advice I have given my daughter. A good opportunity to make a friend.
Steve
I wanted to ask you a couple of Geology questions.
I’ve spent much of the past week sitting on a barge in the New Haven harbor doing pressuremeter tests. We’ve been testing the bedrock (we’re trying on the soil but their have been issues), so the rock has been cored. I find it all a bit interesting with each core like a little Christmas present. Maybe like a hanukka present.
Anywas my questions are (I’ll start with the simple one). Maybe before that I could describe the geography as best I can. The area is a tidal Estuary (lots of clams and hermit crabs, snails are a few hundred per suare foot). There is obviously a layer of silt, then comes muck, basically a red muck, claylike if not clay. then are golf ball sized sedimentary rocks with lots of embedded smaller rocks (all kinds, lots of quartz) very rounded. The rock layer is just a solid version of the rocks, in what I believe is called a concretion.
1. During a core about 45 feet into the bedrock (20 feet overburden) we found a vary bright lime green deposit. Any thoughts on what that could be.
2. Between the muck/clay/silt layer and the bedrock are the sedimentary golf balls . Are the golf balls at the top layer of the bedrock the bedrock being broken up by the tidal action? or do these get compacted into the bedrock below? Basic of my question is, if the golf balls are broken up bedrock, how does the bedrock come to be compacted?
Second one is one I know I should know, but for some reason loking at it in-situ it seems to be different than what I would suspect.
Can’t hellp, sorry. Ask Louis Hisisnk next time he turns up. As to the golf balls, I can’t help but think of Seinfeld’s Kramer driving golf balls into the ocean. Maybe it was paleo-Kramer.
Hey I thought you were a geologist type.
As to the Seinfeld episode.
Best episode ever.
“The sea was angry that day, my friends – like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. “
As to humourous beach episodes.
We left early this morning. Seas as calm as can be. Visibility of 10-15 feet. We head out with a GPS, but no radar. Laughing and joking going about 5 knots. Until we heard the large foghorn to starboard and well above us. We all got serious quick.
First test was a bust.
Then late in the day as the tide was leaving, the big bosses showed up. YEah we want you guys to stay out to finish this hole. But can you bring us back before the tide goes out so we aren’t stuck.
So the tide leaves and we’re in a tidal flat, haven’t had lunch.
So one guy went out and found the address for the nearest building. And I called dominos. Sent another guy out to wait for the pizza to arrive. Gate was locked, so he had to climb the fence out and back.
We all thought it funny that we had pizza delivered to a barge and boat that were high and dry in the mudflats.
#212. That sounds like a Seinfeld episode in itself.
#209. #1 what was the texture of the lime green deposit? what sort of rock was it like?
I would be interest in everyone’s view of this:
http://spacecenter.dk/cgi-bin/nyheder-m-m.cgi?id=1159917791|cgifunction=form
charles, did you read #201?
Carl Christensen – you’ve got a history of making intemperate remarks here, which, in part, led to the posting of blog rules. I am unaware of any of your posts that rise above taunting. I’ve deleted a post including the term “Fuhrer”. You now have a yellow card. Please do not post here for 24 hours. ANy posts in that period will be deleted.
#216
bender, i’m hoping steve will start a thread on the topic.
#206 and #207
Steve, I concur with Sid the most likely problem is that the wireless router is not broadcasting its SSID. Ask your daughter to look at someone else’s desktop (with wireless card) or wireless laptop in the house and see how thay are connecting to the router. Most computers that connect wirelessly have a program on them (that sits down oin the system tray i.e. the icon son the task bar at the bottom and to the right) which will when clicked or double clicked pull up a display which shows what network they are connected to. One o fthe bits of information dipslayed is the SSID of the wireless network. In my case at home its ‘shannet’ (clue to my surname in there). Once she knows this then she will be able to set up a connection to this network using here equivalent bit of software on her laptop. There is as Sid ha spointe dout also the issue of what encryption technique (WEP, WPA etc) is being used and possibly if MAC address filtering is being used but the latter is unlikely. You have to be very paranoid (from a security perspective) to put MAC filtering on a wireless router that is in private accommodation.
KevinUK
#214
The texture was a bit waxy. Hard to say what kind of rock it was like, because it was embedded in the core. But it was definitely interacting with the surrounding rock. Kind of a white smoodge around it, like corrosion.
I would also describe the bright green as milky.
It was like a Sienfeld episode, kind of a wierd day. I didn’t have much to do, so I spent a lot of time playing catch and release with Hermit crabs.
Here’s an interesting htread at UKweatherworld in which posters are simply posting up topical references on the HOlocene Optimum – no discussion permitted. This might be a handy type of thread for certain topics.
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=5124&posts=42&start=1
re: #221,
One I’d like to see would simply have links to important climate papers which are available free online with a sentence or two for each one stating why it’s important. Perhaps there could be several such threads, one for each proxy area: Links to dendro papers; Links to borehole papers; links to Hurricane papers, etc. A sidebar box could then give a link to each such thread.
You or the poster might even use a *** system to rate the importance of each paper. This would give new readers a quick way to get caught up in a given area (and would incidentially help solve one of the problems Judith Curry’s students reactions to the site brought up.)
Dave if you look at the Right frame PAges – multiproxypdf’s, you’ll see links to most of the multiproxy papers cited here.
Count me as paranoid then. MAC address filtering insures that only authorized users can connect, SSID is far to easy to get around to be considered secure.
My biggest complaint about CA is the way the literature is inconsistently cited and made accessible. How hard would it be to maintain a searchable annotated bibliography centralized and accessible via one link? If we were to merge our collective reference databases together, we’d probably have half the literature covered – which is surely good enough. And if we add 1-10 a day, that’s not a huge pile of work. Copy and paste.
“You have to be very paranoid (from a security perspective) to put MAC filtering on a wireless router that is in private accommodation.”
When it comes to networks, the question is never if you are too paranoid, but are you paranoid enough.
MAC filtering is the single best way to restrict access, it is somewhat easy to circumvent, but only if you have the the MAC address that has clearance.
My latest router does not have MAC filtering and that bothers me (But the variety of gigabit home routers is limited), I think it should be standard on all home routers. and turned on by default, forcing the user to set it up.
But that’s just me.
re: #224
Yes, but that’s just one sort of paper. More importantly, if the purpose of this site is to audit papers and post the results then we need to have reference material. All the multi-proxies depend on past work of various sorts. As you try drilling down to see what people have done, you end up needing some reference you don’t have and then where are you? A large database of links, particually if arranged by general topic would enable people to find what they’re looking for much more easily.
re: #226
Most papers are copyrighted (actually they all are, but for some, at least, the authors wouldn’t take kindly to an open site; particularly one they’re not in agreement with, posting their material.) Steve doesn’t need the hassle of lawsuits or cease-and-desist orders to eliminate papers that shouldn’t be available without cost. But apparently many authors have the right to post up their own papers on websites and have done so. So linking to them is perfectly fine. I suppose individuals here could post the availability of specific papers they have .pdfs of and invite others to contact them via Steve or some other way (say a web page contact me button.)
But one problem with using Steve as a conduit for “illegal” paper sharing between individuals is that this might fall into the same category as what got Napster and its clones in trouble with the recording industry. With Steve being an outsider in climate research circles, someone with lawyers could file a suit in court, which might never result in anything, but which I’m sure Steve wouldn’t want to deal with the cost of.
Re #228
Where is the copyright breach in an online annotated bibliography if it is us doing the annotation?
I’m all for the idea of an online annotated bibliography. It would be much easier to do disconnected from the blog software – we can link to here. Ideally what you want is a little online data base with keywords with password access for editing. We’ve got lots of computer people online – any volunteers?
#220 – Based on your description it sounds similar to the Franciscan Chert we have as bedrock underneath the ubiquitous California adobe muck (especially now that it’s started raining) at my place. I live on a classic Franciscan terrain. Very close to the San Andreas Fault (but rest assured, my dwelling is locked down tight where it needs to be, and flexes in all the right places … bring on a 9.0 … 😉
Did a search on Franciscan Chert but couldn’t find anything that was close enough to compare. But did find a reference to “greenstone” and got some better images there.
Very much like that, but lighter in color. But I saw many pictures of greenstone that had similar color.
Is the church very granular? This stuff while mostly red, you can see a lot of white spekles after drying.
Interesting post of Professor Philip Stots blog about new revelations concerning Cosmic Rays and Climate change.
“Do I detect the first tiny rumblings of a paradigm shift in climate-change science?
“The greenhouse effect must play some role. But those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification. It’s pure guesswork.” [Henrik Svensmark, Director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, joint author of the new research]
Yesterday, some extremely important new research on climate change was quietly released. Few newspapers picked it up, The Daily Telegraph (October 4) and The Copenhagen Post (October 4) being but slight exceptions, both carrying only brief reports.
This key research, long in gestation, and embargoed until October 4, appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Here is the press release:
“‘Do electrons help to make the clouds?’
By H. Svensmark & J.O.P. Pedersen et al. (doi:10.1098/rspa.2006.1773)
Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists trace the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than atmospheric scientists have predicted. That may explain the link proposed by members of the Danish team, between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
Envirospin Blog
RE: #232 – The chert around here is greyish white to yellowish white in color and looks to have incurred moderate metamorphosis. Sometimes it grades into outright shale. There is clearly a high percentage of silica. It appears nearly amorphous and is not distinctly granular. It seems to weather rather easily, as you dig down you grade from adobe to a mixture of it and small chunks of soft chert, finally getting to the harder mass. But even there, it can be easily chipped away with a standard pick axe. There are, in the midst of this type of assemblage, areas of fine sandstone as well as gneiss. We also have “knockers” (which end up being small pinnacles) of things like peridotite, basalt, jasper, and schlickensides. You can tell there has been obduction of ocean crust. The theory is that as the East Pacific Rise was subducted, the western margin to it (essentially the axis of origination of the Pacific Plate) was somewhat obducted prior to moving into strike slip mode as the San Andreas Fault system (encompassing all the parallel traces from the continental shelf to the western edge of the Great Central Valley) formed.
Another thing to note in my series of posts here regarding the clearly bogus 90-day outlooks being presented by NOAA:
http://www.weather.gov/climate/three_month.php?wfo=mtr&site=47769&lead=2
They are still sticking to the warming story with their 90 day for N-D-J, in spite of the past two “warmish” ones (J-A-S, A-S-O) being clearly wrong and the currently in process one (S-O-N) standing a good chance of being wrong.
I would have to reckon that the exagerated warming in the GCMs also results in exagerated warming in the 90 day outlooks.
Steve et al,
I just had a bit of an epiphany after reading the CO2 attribution posts on Pielke, Sr and the RC websites. Currently there is a little bit of wrangling going on between the two over just what level of attribution should be subscribed to CO2. The Pielke discussion was very good, but Gavin’s discussion of how they quantify the signal was what tripped the lightbulb.
According to the RC post, they check for correlation between using an A/(A+B) model. From my own world of signal processing that is similar to the standard C/(C+N): carrier/(carrier + noise). The problem is that you assume a clean carrier being injected into the system. But what if the transmitter itself is noisy or has interference. Then the equation becomes (C+I)/(C+I+N). Using this model you would still find correlation with the carrier signal, but you now have to separate the carrier from the interference. OR…you could find correlation with the interference.
Here’s what I am leading up to. RC claims “good” correlation between CO2 and temperature increases, but what if CO2 isn’t the carrier, but is instead, the interference. Suppose the carrier is actually “industrialization” or “modernization” or some such term (which includes in addition to CO2, clear cutting, other pollution, UHI, etc. etc. etc.). Its a little hard to explain what I mean by this, but it the sum total of human expansion. Now there is an approximate linear relationship between modernization ( C ) and CO2 emissions ( I ), such that when we increase one the other also increases (standard gain equation G(C+I)/(G(C+I)+N)). The problem is sorting the carrier from the interference. This is where Bayesian techniques have a basic problem. Just like in FM radios, you end up with a “squelch capture” issue where you may lock onto either signal.
Sorry all, I realize this is a little disjointed, but its late afternoon, and my mind is already fuzzy. I guess what I’m asking is whether the current climate models should really model CO2 as a primary forcing or is CO2 itself a proxy for some other forcing?
If you start using the “hurricane data dump” thread to try to allow one-sided discussion, I will invade it. Am staying out for now…
236: It is more likely that solar influences are the “driver” and CO2 is the “follower.” See the excellent paper linked in #201, and backed up by the link in 215. I think Steve should have a solar attribution thread, since there is so much good literature on the subject out there, it is so logical, and the physics is there.
#238. I’ll do something soon on solar. IF you want a tune-up, look at the posts on MBH98 Figure 7 where he purports to atribute warming to solar rather than CO2 – look at that analysis in signal detection terms and weep.
Re #238
If you’re going to start talking about cosmic ray flux I hope you’re all busy reading up on it and not just clutching at straws here. You could end up looking awfully silly.
If there is anything to Veizer’s treatise, then it should be easy to control GW. When she gets too hot, just bypass all the pollution controls on industrial sources of SO2, wait for the clouds to cool her down, then start controlling again ;).
RE: #236 – I understand you perfectly. We are dealing with a semi chaotic massive system. To get the ball rolling, some of the paradigms embraced by the “Climate Science” orthodoxy were useful back in the 1970s and 80s. But clearly, the system does not quite operate as depicted in their now aging paradigms. It’s sad to see seemingly smart people dig in their heels and call any who honestly investigate a better paradigm (or set of them) a “denialist” or worse. Who is being the stumbling block here? To me, it is the orthodoxy, not all the so called “skeptics” who are the stumbling block to true progress in understanding the climate system.
Re: #238 I believe this experiment was proposed at CERN back in 2001 or so http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/
I guess they got tired of waiting for CERN to get back on line.
Ironically (or not) the Rahmstorf critique
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_etal_eos_2004.html“>http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_etal_eos_2004.html“>http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_etal_eos_2004.html
of Veizer and Shaviv’s 2003 paper
http://www.gsajournals.org/pdfserv/10.1130%2F1052-5173%282003%29013%3C0004:CDOPC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
on the influence of galactic cosmic rays on climate revolves around proxies for cosmic rays and statistics.
#236: Is this what you are talking about?
Received 8 November 2003; accepted 9 February 2004; published 11 March 2004.
Re #233 Cosmic rays and warming. Here is something from today’s Copenhagen Post, copied from a website that bills itself as Denmark.dk official website.
It provides fodder for Veizer’s hypothesis.
From today’s Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal:
Under the Microscope When science and politics become worlds in collision.
RE: # 247 – “But few would deny that money can’t buy the most important element: a society that encourages independent thinking, open debate and an unbounded spirit of inquiry.”
And sadly, that very thing, which welled up out of England and a few other isolated Continental places after the Rennaissance, is both organically withering away and being attacked vehemently from without *and within* by those who have always hated it and have always looked upon it as an upstart child. The saddest thing is that, whereas, some 100 or even 60 years ago, most of the latter was clearly from without, now the forces within who seek its demise are prominent. Part of it is due to globalization, whereby initially the UK and now North America, experience pressure to renorm to Old World points of view.
Compounding matters is the blessing and curse of affluence, which, while providing an excellent funding method, has also led to the rise of a culture at large that is engrossed in what I’d refer to as the shopping mall mentality, with a large dose of attention deficit induced by fixation on multi media entertainment thrown in. Already, in order to make our universities and other research bodies effective, we import extensive talent from the non British / non Western normed world. At some point, our ability to birth home grown talent may be nil. It is only a matter of time before research groups in other parts of the world start to better retain their own home grown talent. The science mechanisms we nurtured are slipping from our grasp and increasingly are controlled by organizations and societies that are not only not normed to the aforementioned British / post WW2 Western European / North American frame of reference, but are actually inimical to our values and wish to overturn them, in some cases violently, with their own.
Re #245:
That’s it, I’ll have to read that paper. Thank you.
243: I can’t get the top links to work.
This “consencus in science” is a term i’d like to put in “sunlight”. I quess good science needs nothing less than “consencus”. Perhaps it’s quite usefull (sometimes) for politics but not for science. Am i totally wrong?
251: Of course you are not wrong. Any scientist that leans on a “consensus argument” is not a good scientist in my mind. Consensus is antithetical to science. As bender (I think) said, science is a blood sport.
Daughter’s computer fixed but needed a visit to St Catherines which I was doing anyway. She had connected at one point to an Ethernet and the computer thought that it still connected to the Ethernet but unplugged. So I disabled the Ethernet setting and everything worked fine. Thanks for the assistance.
70 years of carbon dioxide addition to the atmosphere and we can’t beat a temperature record set in 1930’s also in Lapland of Finland (Sodankyla)? What’s gone wrong? Good question.
Yesterday evening i take a look 6 years old article about climate change for Finland. 4-5 C warmer for Lapland and 3-4 C for southern part of country until 2100. Even there are problems with climate change in Lapland, the past cannot give anything better for MBH98 and Hansen.
Let’s take a look. “Holocene changes in treelines and climate from Ural Mountains to Finnish Lapland…Seija Kultti :Academic dissertation To be presented with the permission of the Faculty of Science of the University of Helsinki, for public criticism in the Lecture Room E 204 of Physicum, Kumpulaon April 2nd , 2004 at 10 a.m. Helsinki 2004”
I’ll take Part 6 “Conclucions” (some main points).
“…The Usa basin experienced a climatic optimum during the early Holocene. The onset of the Holocene appears to be at least as warm as at present. The summer temperatures have been at least 2 ºC higher between 10 500 and 10 000 cal. yr BP and possibly even ca. 3-4 ºC higher between 10 000 and 6300 cal. yr BP. The gradual cooling from
Mid-Holocene towards present culminated at 2900 — 2100 cal. yr BP, when the lowest temperatures are inferred in the area. The mean July temperatures in Finnish Lapland have been ca. 2.5 ºC higher during the maximum extent of pine, between 8300 and 4000 cal. yr BP. According to the pine forest line-climate model, mean July temperatures
ca. 0.5 ºC higher than at present prevailed during the Medieval Warm Period in Finnish Lapland.
During the early Holocene, forest expansion and climate amelioration in the Usa basin occurred ca. 1000 years earlier than in Fennoscandia. The summer thermal maximum compared to the present was more prominent in north-eastern European Russia than in northern Fennoscandia. The cooling may have started earlier in north-eastern European Russia than in Fennoscandia. The present record suggests, however, that climate fluctuations (i.e. cooling at the first millennium BC, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age) during the late Holocene have been simultaneous in both areas.”
Two weeks ago Mauri Timonen and Jan Esper said it quite direct to Finnish Broadcasting Radio: “climate change is mostly natural”.
Timo, check out the thread on the Sierra Nevada CA forest recosntructions by Millar et al. 2006
Danish scientists have demonstrated cloud formation from cosmic rays in the lab.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Exploding_Stars_Influence_Climate_Of_Earth_999.html
Exploding Stars Influence Climate Of Earth
Cosmic radiation entering Earth’s atmosphere. Credit: Danish National Space Center.by Staff Writers
Copenhagen, Denmark (SPX) Oct 06, 2006
A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate.
An essential role for remote stars in everyday weather on Earth has been revealed by an experiment at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.
It is already well-established that when cosmic rays, which are high-speed atomic particles originating in exploded stars far away in the Milky Way, penetrate Earth’s atmosphere they produce substantial amounts of ions and release free electrons.
Now, results from the Danish experiment show that the released electrons significantly promote the formation of building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei on which water vapour condenses to make clouds.
Hence, a causal mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the production of clouds in Earth’s atmosphere has been experimentally identified for the first time.
The Danish team officially announced their discovery on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, published by the Royal Society, the British national academy of science.
The experiment
The experiment called SKY (Danish for “cloud”) took place in a large reaction chamber which contained a mixture of gases at realistic concentrations to imitate the chemistry of the lower atmosphere.
Ultraviolet lamps mimicked the action of the Sun’s rays. During experimental runs, instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.
The data revealed that electrons released by cosmic rays act as catalysts, which significantly accelerate the formation of stable, ultra-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules which are building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei. A vast numbers of such microscopic droplets appeared, floating in the air in the reaction chamber.
“We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei,” says team leader Henrik Svensmark, who is Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research within the Danish National Space Center. “This is a completely new result within climate science.”
A missing link in climate theory
The experimental results lend strong empirical support to the theory proposed a decade ago by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen that cosmic rays influence Earth’s climate through their effect on cloud formation.
The original theory rested on data showing a strong correlation between variation in the intensity of cosmic radiation penetrating the atmosphere and the amount of low-altitude clouds. Cloud cover increases when the intensity of cosmic rays grows and decreases when the intensity declines.
It is known that low-altitude clouds have an overall cooling effect on the Earth’s surface. Hence, variations in cloud cover caused by cosmic rays can change the surface temperature. The existence of such a cosmic connection to Earth’s climate might thus help to explain past and present variations in Earth’s climate.
Interestingly, during the 20th Century, the Sun’s magnetic field which shields Earth from cosmic rays more than doubled, thereby reducing the average influx of cosmic rays.
The resulting reduction in cloudiness, especially of low-altitude clouds, may be a significant factor in the global warming Earth has undergone during the last century. However, until now, there has been no experimental evidence of how the causal mechanism linking cosmic rays and cloud formation may work.
“Many climate scientists have considered the linkages from cosmic rays to clouds to climate as unproven,” comments Eigil Friis-Christensen, who is now Director of the Danish National Space Center.
“Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. The SKY experiment now shows how they do so, and should help to put the cosmic-ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research.”
Published online in “Proceedings of the Royal Society A”, October 3rd Title: “Experimental Evidence for the role of Ions in Particle Nucleation under Atmospheric Conditions”. Authors: Henrik Svensmark, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Nigel Marsh, Martin Enghoff and Ulrik Uggerhoj.
I’ts obvious that high speed particles, even low speed particles, can produce clouds, using that term in th egeneric, not taking into account the size. We know this because one of the ways to examine such particles whether terrestrial or extra is with, wait for it, a cloud chamber. Such a mechanisim has been known for many years and is well proven.
But did the Danes quantify the amount/volume of clouds from cosmic rays? What is the ratio of extra terrestrial cloud formation from the other terrestrial cloud formation mechanisims?
NOAA 90 Day Long Lead Critique continued….
So they blew the J-A-S long lead (predicted warm, only July warm, A and S cold) and the A-S-O long lead (O below normal to date in most locations) and now, there is this, from Yeager’s blog at Accuweather:
“Wild Weather Pattern Next Week
Friday, October 06, 2006
The weather pattern so far this autumn has been extremely active, with numerous bouts of damaging thunderstorms and tornadoes, along with a couple of unusually strong storm systems on both coasts. The weather pattern might get even more wild during the next week.
For the past couple of days, computer models have been consistent with the general idea that a surge of arctic air from Canada would bring true winter weather to the northern Plains next week, with the potential for winter weather shifting to the East Coast by late in the week. The details of the computer models have changed from day to day, but the overall idea of the arrival of true winter weather has not.
The arrival of true arctic air at this time of year would result in a very wild weather pattern. It’s too early to talk about details, but a pattern like this has potential to produce the following…
1) The southerly flow of warm, moist air ahead of the front would set the stage for the possibility of another round of severe thunderstorms (which have been unusually common so far this autumn) from the eastern Plains and Midwest to the East.
2) Depending on where all of the weather ingredients come together, a major wind-whipped snowstorm (perhaps an authentic blizzard) is possible in the Plains and Upper Midwest.
3) The water in the Great Lakes is quite warm at this time of year, so arctic air passing over the Great Lakes would set the stage for heavy lake-effect snow downwind of the lakes.
4) Record cold is also possible in a pattern like this, and daytime high temperatures in the core of the cold air could be 20 or 30 degrees below normal, which means highs could be in the 20s in many areas.
This will, obviously, be a major story on AccuWeather.com in coming days–in the news stories, videos, and blogs.
Updated: 10/6/2006 1:25 PM”
Break out the snow removal equipment east of the Rockies! 😉
Has anyone with access to the actual article read it? All I can get is the press release (and I always doubt the press release til I see the article).
Is the thought that with a decrease in cosmic rays in the 20th Century, there would be fewer low clouds, so a greater cooling effect because clear nights are colder than cloudy nights (radiation to dark space being so efficient for cooling)?
257: Don’t think they quantified it. But for some reason just the connection between Cosmic Ray Flux (CRF) and cloud formation seems to be a hotly contested issue, according to Jan Veiser (see link in 201, page 15). Like you say, the cloud chamber has been around for a very long time, so it is puzzling that there is so much argument about a connection between clouds and CRF.
I have to think the arguement is over amount, and not the possibility of clouds being created. Kind of like aruing that up is down if you ask me.
Unless the specifics was the creation of clouds at a particuarly temprature/humidity/pressure representative of the lower atmosphere. I believe cloud chambers use saturated/supersaturated air, but the mechanisim of cloud formation by particles is well understood.
259. The argument is that when the sun is brighter (and hotter), the Sun’s and Earth’s electromagnetic fields shield the Earth from cosmic rays, which leads to less cloud formation and higher temperatures. However, the opposite effect occurs when the sun is less active (not as much protection from cosmic rays/more clouds/higher albedo/cooling).
Then I can see where the Danes experiment would have value if they established particle count vs solar activity.
PS
Would have an interesting correlation with the current state of the earths magnetic field. But that is becoming a bit random (or maybe chaotic is a better term) so without real time mapping would be difficult to correlate, and would definitely be a confounding factor.
ET: Veiser’s paper is a good read, if you haven’t done it
I would. But…
Tomorow I have to fix my car
Sunday have to do work on the “pimp my ride project”
Monday to NY for work.
Tuesday two clients
Wednesday more time on a barge in New Haven
Thursday meet a friend who’s in town.
And somewhere in that guy is flying into town to visit one of his clients and want’s to interview me.
That’s a full week, and I still have a weeks worth of work. In the past two weeks I’ve done 3 or 4 (I honestly don’t know which) round trips to the Manhattan area.
But maybe I’ll print it our at some point and stick it around. Lot of time on the Barge is sitting and watching others work.
RE 258:
Steve Sadlov, in the higher Appalachian Mtns in MD & PA there was an early snow event the 3rd week of October just last yr — fortunately limited to above ~2000 ft, where there was considerable local damage from 6-12″ wet snow on still-leafed trees.
Cold air now over the Great Lakes would prb’ly cause lake-effect showers! over the lower lakes.
Really cold air in western MD in late October 1976 (following heavy rains) signaled the start of one of the longest cold-spells in the 20th century there — Nov 76 thru Feb 77. But there have been colder Octs followed by mild winters too. Or brutal early winter cold waves can occur in Nov/Dec then abruptly cease the rest of the winter, like 1989/90. You can’t ever tell in advance…
Svensmark et al. first published a correlation between cosmic rays and clouds in 1997. See here and here for more details. That paper was heavily criticized, as have been most papers suggesting a solar effect on climate. Here’s a quote from their reply to those criticisms:
This new work has now shown that there is a physical basis. There is much more work to be done in quantifying everything, and eventually adding this mechanism into GCM’s.
I have now and then posted here about this. In IPCC TAR, solar influence on the climate (other than the 0,1% total irradiance fluctuation), was granted a one page discussion, in the whole 700 page report. The papers on the subject were still relatively few. Since then, however, there has been a flurry of papers looking at the correlation from various angles (sunspots, cosmic rays, UV, geomagnetic activity, etc.). I have a collection of about 60 papers mostly published after IPCC TAR (there is also a list of papers here). I have attempted to make a review for this blog, but it proved to be a lot of work, and new papers are published almost weekly!
Be sure, however, that the “warmers” are terrified by all this mounting evidence. This new paper will certainly be violently attacked.
Steve, when you write “I am warning that I may start deleting off-topic posts on the technical threads…,” I disagree with that general approach as often non-science logic can refute science claims. Scientists rationalize and compete for grants with claims that get sillier by the day, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know it. For instance, Gavin over a Real Climate replied to me that the ASU was having a conference and that all the papers to be presented supported AGW. That was his so-called proof of “consensus.” I didn’t have to know science to understand that a global warming skeptic is as welcome at a AGU meeting as a rabbi is at a Taliban convention and that dissenters were not welcomed and need not apply.
I meant “AGU”, not “ASU,” in that first reference above, which was later stated correctly. Sorry.
RE: #267 – my main purpose in critiquing the 90 Day is to highlight the appearance of what seems to be exagerated warming. The 90 Day is 2.5% of a decade scale prediction. If decade and greater scale predictions using GCMs predict more warming than actually realized, then things like the 90 Day will also tend to show warmer-than-actually-realized 90 day periods, assuming they were developed using the same or similar GCMs as the longer time frame predictions most often used by so called “climate scientists.” That is what these posts are about – an indirect method of assessing the GCMs without waiting 10, 50 or 100 years.
Re
#271
Your purpose in those posts wasn’t entirely clear to me, either. Thank you for clarifying. Interesting. Logical. But is it really the same model (set of models) being used for both purposes?
Re #268
While the correlation between solar strength via GCR (galactic cosmic rays) and cloud cover is reduced in recent years (according to satellite measurements, see Fig.1 in Kristjansson is reduced, the link still is strong for solar irradiance and cloud cover. This fortifies the effect of solar luminosity changes (na matter the mechanism) over a sun cycle, and possibly over longer term solar changes. This is not included in any climate model.
Interestingly, even the Asian monsoon shows a moderate correlation with 14C levels (as proxy for solar luminosity) in stalagmites (see Fig. 2 in Wang ea. in Science. The d18O data between the stalagmites in China and of the Greenland ice core match each other, with some 150 year lag for the ice core. Probably the monsoon directly follows the solar strength, while the North Atlantic changes are induced by ocean flow patterns, which need more time to change.
Re #273
There is a nice formula from Quenouille (1952) in that paper showing how the effective degrees of freedom in an autocorrelated time-series changes as a function of higher-order autocorrelations, as opposed to just first-order.
The solar connections have the very big advantage of possibly being able to explain both high frequency and low frequency (even millions of years) variations in climate. We know enough about CO2 cycles now to know that it can’t explain these things (e.g., CO2 increases lag temperature increases). CO2 may exert some small impact, but it cannot be the “driver” of climate change. As shown in Veizer’s paper, there are many good correlations between solar parameters and climate shifts, and there are strong physical bases to support the relationships. Don’t think bender can nail me on overfitting here, since it’s all simple correlation and no “curve fitting” (with one exception, maybe). I don’t see any other hypothesis out there that makes anywhere near as much sense.
RE: #272 – I’m not sure. Presumably, when you get to that scale, using some sort of GCM (as opposed to a weather model) would be needed. It might be as simple as run it until t = 90 days and stop, using an identical model as what would be used for decade and greater scale. Would be good to …er … um …. audit!
The Idsos’ CO2 science site has summaries of several papers that relate to solar effects and climate. The best place to start would be via the subject index tab and then select S .
The site’s quite well organized so one can locate papers related to solar effects and cosmic rays, decadal cycles, centennial cycles, etc.
I think there is a small fee for patronizing that site, but looks like a very good place to start. [No, I don’t get a finder’s fee.]
Turbulence, anyone?
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061002/full/061002-14.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0609740
277: Be careful, Indur, there are some posters here that abhor the Idsos summaries, and you may be verbally thrashed. If you are a “warmer” you have to say that the Idso’s are just biased, oil-funded, non-scientific, non-concensus, crackpot contrarians. (I think they do a great job of summarizing the literature, BTW).
Re #261 “Unless the specifics was the creation of clouds at a particuarly temprature/humidity/pressure representative of the lower atmosphere. I believe cloud chambers use saturated/supersaturated air, but the mechanisim of cloud formation by particles is well understood.”
Having just read the new Svensmark et al paper I can confirm that the claim indeed is that they have verified that cloud formation is increased by ionizing radiation of the energy of cosmic rays in the presence of UV light of the strength coming from the sun in an atmosphere with temprature/humidity/pressure and gaseous composition representative of the lower troposphere. If their experiments hold up we will have a powerful alternative theoretical paradigm to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for thinking about climate change — and one that already has masses of empirical evidence to support it.
280: right on target!
Anyone interested in #201 on cosmic ray flux will also be interested in some related material
282: LOL, this has RC’s shorts tied in a knot. And they are acting accordingly.
The solar stuff is the nemisis of “climate science” as we know it. And they will fight this to the max. BUT THEY ARE WRONG!
Re #284
You don’t know that for a fact and so you may want to be careful how you package your skepticism. All-caps belief statements don’t move me much. If this really is the one deadly arrow in your quiver, you had better make it count.
re 285 This subject was a matter of discussion at the Russian international solar conference last weekend.There is substantial emperical data and observation for the Total solar luminosity budget.This includes its attributes observable and conjunctive.
The astrophysicists reviewed some 50 years of Russian and international earth-solar connections.The 20 russian solar and astrological observatories have more then a single arrow in their quiver being some of the leading physicists in thier fields.Here the
british model makers of RC are very underskilled in this area and in keeping with your weapons analogy will meet the same outcome as their compatriots at Borodino.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AdSpR..35.1472Z
or this
Empirical evidence for a nonlinear effect
of galactic cosmic rays on clouds
BY R. GILES HARRISON* AND DAVID B. STEPHENSON
Proc. R. Soc. A
doi:10.1098/rspa.2005.1628
Published online
Harrison & Stephenson paper mentioned in #286
Re #286, maksimovich
Ahem. Referring to Brits as compatriots of the french is liable to lead to … unpleasantness.
maksimovich, thank you for the paper in #287. When these authors on p. 11 write:
What is your interpretation of the word “small”?
P.S. Thank you for the history lesson. That (Borodino) musta hurt.
re 288 apologies I meant of course the 13th at Balaklava
m
Re #282, bender
You will notice the conclusion of Rasmus’ article in your link :
All so true. Of course, it couldn’t possibly apply to the warmers …
Re #290, heh, fair enough.
Re #291
Oh yes. The irony of them offering an R script to replicate Veizer’s graphic was not lost on me either.
Re 289 small is of course related to the physics measurement.Here the terminology is of course important.
Solar luminoisity being all emissions from dissipative processes of solar activity the fractions changing from event to event and frequency of events.Here total solar irridiance is only a partial component of the free energy emissions.
As a cartoon analogy instead of thinking of the solar component as being of a power source with and on and off buttons with increasing or diminishing energy there is also a third button(state) both.
Here of course a small change is conjunctive (inverse) over the de vries cycle say 1.5 k .
The common mistake made is in quantifying the GCR and SCR(Gamma and xray) events is the energy levels released.An often overlooked measurement is the quantum(V/hv)ie one quantum of gamma is equal to 3.6×10 6 visible light quantums.
The changes are of course evident in the ionosphere with both the chemical morphology and secondary kintetic joule heating by energetic electron excitation.IZMIRAN measures by scattered radar imagery doen to 1kev and secondary effects in MT.
279 JAE: I didn’t say you had to accept their summaries as gospel — only that it’s a good place to start looking at the literature. I presume readers will get the papers the Idsos have summarized and use them to track down other references, and so on, always using their own judgment.
Based on comparisons of papers that I have read and Idsos’ summaries, I too think they do a very good job — generally a lot better than the abstracts themselves or the accompanying PR pieces. But, of course, there is no substitute to reading the original.
But it’s a free world, one has the right to dissent.
284, 285, 288, 290. Re 285, or this could be the charge of the cosmic ray brigade — since it’s charges that might be responsible (smile!)
Maybe soon there’ll be no global warming discussion.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1782/
One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing “climate change denial’. “David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, she wrote. “Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’ Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the “global warming…Holocaust’.
Cosmic rays, industrial activity, solar variability..
perhaps one reason why Curry’s students got a false impression of this blog could be that all these papers that suggest or demonstrate a connection between climate variability and non-GHG causes are mentioned here but they are not
deconstructed in the same way as the mainstream proxy studies. And yet they also apply similar statistical methods. Are they all sound, free of errors?.
Just a constructive suggestion..Douglass, Scafetta, De Laat, etc.
No! I think many people are trying too hard, trying to explain everything. IMO it is all about y=s+n, observation is signal + noise. s is the part that we can explain by some physical theory, n is the part we can’t explain (read cannot predict).
Now, we can use y=n (instrumental global temp by AR1 with p=0.93). Or y=S(CO2,Solar,Volcanic,…)+n. Second is clearly better, it can be used to predict what happens if CO2 increases. But the danger is that if the function S is not fixed a priori, it can be used to explain all events. I think MBH98 Fig7 shows that there is something seriously wrong with y=S(CO2,Solar,Volcanic,…)+n model. But that’s kind of subjective personal opinion.
#298. I started reading a borehole paper a random and it was all about PCA and Mann’s EOF’s! Willis’s excellent auditing of forams and borehole data indicates they are not free of fairly obvious problems that could lead to overturning of conclusions. It think it really needs a comprehensive audit by qualified non-climate scientists, to restore confidence in the proxy conclusions, and an anarchic blogosphere approach is problematic in itself. There also no need for for another literature review by people with vested interests like the NAS panel. This seems like an opportunity for someone like yourself to put together a properly funded, highly interdisciplinary study. My 2c. Cheers
289: a “small” effect on cloudiness, but also an effect on the diffuse fraction (DF) of light reaching the surface, which also has an effect on temperature. From the discussion:
#298,
On one level this is a legitimate point but on another it kind of misses the main point of why this blog exists.
In any field the dominating theory or hypothesis is the one that receives the lion’s share of the attention, so of course the AGW theories receive far more scrutiny.
And if one’s suspicions have been confirmed that potentially bad science is being pushed on policy makers it is rather more important to discover just how bad that science is, as opposed to determining whether some poor underfunded schlep knows what he’s talking about regarding solar influences that nobody even listens to anyway.
I suspect if GHG AGW theories fizzles and other causes are pushed on policy makers which are also supported by bad science that they will receive the same treatment as Mann etal.
#298
But this model y=S(CO2,Solar,Volcanic,…)+n is essentially also the model used in the papers demonstrating the role of solar forcing in the 20th century climate.
I am not saying that they are right or wrong. I am only pointing out the MBH is analyzed here at length (ok) but also other papers- from the “other side”- should also be looked into in more detail. For instance, Emanuel’s paper has its own thread; Klotzbach’s 2006, which shows that there is no trend in global hurricane numbers, is not even considered for discussion.
#303
Yes, I know why this blog exists. But for people that perhaps do not know (e.g. Curry’s students) it could seem that the view conveyed by the threads is biased.
The question perhaps boiles down to “does CA exist to compensate or to boost an open discussion that is clearly not present in other blogs?”
In any case, the origins should not determine the future path
I think the thing that one has to be careful of is cherrypicking the cherrypicking criticism, so to speak. IOW, when Steve says that he has surveryed the bcp literature and studied the issue and bcps are a bad proxie, are they worse then other trees? If not, then he is just finding fault with the particular data points that he wants to. Is trying to exclude outliers. Also, Z, there are a lot of sillies posting here. Not everyone has Steve’s brains, time and dedication. So you get people who just jump on the anti-AGW bandwagon. They have the same thing over at RC, with some of the ninnies in the comment section there. That said, I think your efforts to critique the direction and try to influence it are highly helpful. It shows you at least see some promise in things.
Oh…what is the mathematical definition of a bad apple? And is it a particular functional form (i.e.) an apple? Or is it “bad” (i.e. the source of the data is the important thing)?
Re: #304
As a rank amateur in the field, I found the Klotzbach 2006 explanation of hurricanes (actually PDI) more complete and logical than what I found in Emanuel 2005 and in other papers that have been linked here, but have not been able on first pass to reconcile his statistical evidence with it very well. I have a problem that my views may well be more due to my rankness than the author’s arguments and would much appreciate some expert comments on his paper.
To be fair to this group, I think David Smith has been finding these articles and linking them for future discussion as he did most recently with Klotzbach 2006. It evidently takes time to get those articles read by the more knowledgeable participants here and start the discussion going in earnest. As a rank amateur I found Emanuel 2005 easy reading and I think this made the analyses performed easier to undertake and more straight forward to present. It would appear all that remains of those analyses are application of filters to data by bender in determining the occurrence of lower frequency events.
On reading Mann and Emanuel 2006 my rankness index reached an all time high and was placated somewhat only after hearing bender’s views on it. Dr. Curry’s comments helped my understanding of it but I am hoping that we can have a more in depth discussion of not only the contents of it but the clearness of the writing used in the presentation and, particularly for my edification, why would one attempt to separate local temperature anomalies from the global ones and was the method used by ME, and Klotzbach, for that matter, able to account for all the apparent complexities of this interaction.
I have become fascinated of late by localized temperature anomalies and the fact that they can actually be trending negative in certain areas and much more positive than the average in others. I know the Pielkes talk about the importance of local climate change as opposed to global, but I cannot recall seeing a discussion at this blog of any climate science done to understand these differences other than some general references to oceans up and down wellings. Could not the ME paper be a place to start?
#36
Yes, I also agree with your comments on Steve. I am often impressed by the depth of his analysis and the amount work he is devoting to this blog, in particular when the topic is related to proxies and geology (Thompson or Hansen, for instance). I find some threads very interesting and useful, although I do not agree with each of them. I also think the degree of openness is here much large than somewhere else. However, every blog can be improved..
A bad apple..? we are still mooting about it, and we are trying to implement statistical properties of bad apples. So, Steve´s suggestions is being taken seriously. Perhaps we will see soon a paper entitled: non-gaussian apple-pie
#37,
I would also agree in general terms. I think ME offers may (many,many in my humble opinion) points that can be criticized. But you would probably agree that, for whatever reason, there is an imbalance on the papers that are commented here. To some extent and for a certain time , this is understandable, considering the histoy of this blog. But again, all depends on the envisaged goal, climateaudit or just AGW-audit.
#308. Eduardo, I did a pretty analysis of the impact of one nonclimatic series on a VZ pseudoproxy network which I presented in Stockholm as one of a number of slides. I had a nice chat with Hans about it afterwards – it was a very pleasant summery afternoon for a chat – and he thought that the idea was very interesting and worth writing up. “Bad apple” is fairly easy to define in the context of your pseudoproxy network. It’s a series that has nothing to do with the signal imposed on the network by definition.
“Robust” statistics as defined by Hampel or Huber is statistics directed at dealing with potential contaminants/outliers/leverage points. I think that our approach has been entirely consistent with Hampel’s philosophy – you identify leverage points, retention of which is determined scientifically and on a priori statistical grounds – the latter being the approach of the Team towards justifying the retention of bcps.
HEre I use the term “robust” as Hampel would use it; the Team uses “robust” in its own way – mostly as term of self-approval and not in its statistical sense – attention has to be paid to this.
Steve, it is not that the series is nonclimatic. It is that it is of a particular form, mathematically. If it were climatic, it would get amplified just the same. There is no reason for a matrix to know if a signal is climatic or not. They just churn the numbers.
I observed the following link on UKWW from contributor
Ferdinand Engelbeen that may deserve mention here.
http://
Studies of the Holocene focused on Europe
But even if you constructed it and it “were climactic”, or took real world climactic examples, the matrix would still function the same. The matrix can’t read a time series’s head. It just churns numbers.
309: I know what you mean by robust, but it’s funny that I think you use the word a bit with the “connotation spin” also. You address a situation of Hempel robustness, but the drama for not being robust, is more of using the popular connotation of the word.
308, the Wegman example of the IPCC cartoon (MWP) being retained is interesting, when considering how to define an apple. I hope that you and I, EZ, agree that “badness” is a seperate issue.
EZ: What’s your view on the publishability of the work on this site? How would one properly break it up and what venues would it go to?
TCO,
Your manners are slipping again. Do you really think you know Mr. Zorita well enough to be calling him by his initials? I notice you also did that with Dave Dardinger the other day. Whether they care or not, or as I suspect, are irritated but just don’t want to make an issue of it, I, and I’m sure others, do care.
If I as a reader want to see what the person you reference has to say, I would have to know the persons name in order to search them out in the thread. Why do you want to make it harder to keep up for those who don’t know the names of the players?
Searching the thread for EZ returned only your references and one each for Hezi, and Jeez. Not very helpful.
Re #298, #300
Read the paper in #287 and tell me where the errors are. I’ve read it over twice and don’t see any. Look at the precision of the language, the completeness of the graphical presentation, the error bars, the reporting of standard errors with parameter estimates, the conservative conclusions. A delight for statistics skeptic.
General comment: if treatment of the hurricane climatology literature seems “unabalanced” it is because only one person (David Stockwell) thus far has asked a precise answerable question (has PDI really doubled?) in relation to a specific paper (Emanuel 2005). If there are other papers, other questions, that you believe deserve audit, by all means bring them up. You can’t expect “balanced treatment” when the auditing process is piecemeal. And if you want to really pique an volunteer auditor’s interest you have to present him something that looks like it could be a problem. Simply stating an author and a year – like Klotzbach 2006 – doesn’t really do it for me.
re 319 There is an interesting ppt here from some respected authors,
http://www.esa-spaceweather.net/spweather/workshops/eswwII/proc/Session2/ESTECsww_20051.pdf#search=%22haigh%20cosmic%20rays%22
Bob, I used DD instead of Dardie, to satisfy him. Dardie was always meant friendly anyhow. I think he is cool with it. EZ, I think is sorta snappy too. What’s the big deal?
Oops, I meant “Bob K”. 🙂
Re: # 326
Peter Hartley, a rendition like yours is needed periodically to keep all that transpires on this subject in perspective with a view to the positive as well as negative aspects of it.
Bender, Eduardo, and others on solar influence:
I think we are at a very early stage of understanding how the sun influences the climate. the paradigm, so far, has been: the TSI (total solar irradiance) only varies by about 0,1%, so it’s not enough to explain the climate fluctuations. Now it appears that there are INDIRECT ways that the sun affects the climate, and probably more than one.
I agree with Eduardo Zorita that the papers looking at a possible correlation between the sun’s activity, or cosmic rays, etc, and the climate, should be under the same kind of scrutiny than, say, the paleoclimate reconstructions. I have read many of those papers, and they all more or less rely on correlations. I am myself no expert on statistics, but I wanted to review those papers to draw the attention of the statisticians here on whether or not they make sense.
But on the other hand, the physical mechanisms behind it are probably quite complex. For example, I don’t think you can express the cosmic ray influence on cloud formation just as a radiative forcing, in W/m.sq. . Maybe you can do so with CO2, because it is more or less evenly distributed, and it’s effect is, indeed, a radiative forcing. But cloud formation is a very complex phenomenon. It just does not happen anywhere at any time. It’s a very local phenomenon. Also, it will happen, whether you have cosmic rays or not, so it’s likely to be highly nonlinear. At the moment, we know next to nothing about cloud formation, and it’s still the BIG weakness of GCM’s. To include GCR’s (galactic cosmic rays) into GCM’s, you first need a detailed picture of the physical mechanism. It may take some years before we get there. Just attributing it a radiative forcing value is to overly simplify the problem.
And that’s just one way the sun can influence climate. The UV part of the spectrum has more fluctuations than the visible spectrum (about 10%), and acts on ozone in the stratosphere (see the work of Labitzke), and has recently been shown to act on the growth of cyanobacteria in the oceans, which in turn has an effect on atmospheric CO2!
This will, in my opinion, turn out to be a very fruitful field of investigation in years to come. That is, if the political activism does not succeed in shutting down the scientists who wish to pursue it (e.g. insinuations of not being a honest scientist, àƒ➠la Rasmus).
319; Well, I’ll be da….! We finally agree on a paper!
330: I think we understand quit a bit about Solar forcing now. Certainly enough that the modelers should stop ignoring the effects. Have you read Veiser’s paper? BTW, I completely agree with your post 329.
#332 JAE
Apart from Veizer, look up for work by: Christl et al. 2004, T. Egorova 2004, D. R. Gies, Klvana 2004 (who links porcupine feeding scars to the solar cycle !…), all the work by K. Labitzke, U. Langematz 2005, the Ph.D. thesis of Daniel Palamara on geomagnetic activity, papers by Palle et al., D. I. Ponyavin 2005, J. Ramirez 2006, N. Scafetta 2006, Nir Shaviv (who also published with Veizer), P.A. Stott 2003, Thejll 2001 and 2003, Tinsley and Yu on another mechanism linking atmospheric ionization to clouds, S.L. Weber 2004, G. Zherebtsov 2005, all the papers by Solanki, by Usoskin and by V. A. Dergachev.
There is also an excellent review by Gray, Haigh and Harrison published in January 2005, which is a technical note for the Hadley Center, available on their Web site.
I don’t have the time to retrieve all the links, so the way to find them is to do an advanced search in Google scholar, with author name, and the year. The papers are most often available from multiple sources, and at least one of them is free. Prof. Dergachev was kind enough to send me his papers by e-mail.
I’ll add that if you read all those papers, and don’t come away thinking that there must be more to the Sun’s effect on climate than a 0,1% variability, then your name must be Rasmus something…
“the TSI (total solar irradiance) only varies by about 0,1%”
In W/m.sq how does that compare to the forcings from CO2
I ask because even the usual suspects have not come in and answered my numerous questions as to why positive Feedbacks are invoked with CO2 warming but not with Solar warming.
So I assume that the numerous feedbacks for CO2 work just as well with Solar warming. Considering the amount of Solar warming, 0.1% could easily match warming from CO2.
Hey Steve M. How about setting up a category for Solar attribution studies (allowing only literature references and data, no comments), similar to the one on hurricanes?
#323. Yes, I like off-topic contributions to be posted here as they are easy for me to locate and transfer. I’m moving comments to the thread.
BTW, it’s nice to have gone offline for a couple of days and find that there was no brawl. It was a time for minoring in “crisp fall days” in Ontario – for “crisp fall days” see the Resident Expert here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=843.
Help me out here I need to respond to this.
[quote]
[quote]
quote:Originally posted by s243a
380 ppm is a very small concentration of carbon dioxide and says nothing directly about it’s impact on global temperatures.
[/quote]
Are you speaking rhetorically, or scientifically. I mean, are you a bad person, or just a bad engineer?
[/quote]
http://www.canadawebpages.com/pc-forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7432&whichpage=4
I recalled Willis did some excellent posts a while back about earth as a heat engine. Where the black body law was used to estimate the effect of doubling the CO2. I would like to reference it.
I understand the models show you can ‘explain’ all the temperatures determined for the entire history of the earth by varying insolation (incoming solar radiation) by just 6%.
Re #303, 304
The generally accepted figure for TSI is around 1365 w/m^2, so 0.1% variability is +/- 1.365 w/m^2
re: #309
Doesn’t that 1375 w/m^2 have to be divided by 4 to allow for the fact that the earth is a sphere rather than a circle? IOW that the 1375 would be the solar intensity if the sun were directly overhead and there were no atmosphere.
Any TSI number would have to be some form of an average to account for orbit, at the least, and as such should also be preaveraged for spherical effects, though not sure, when talking about atmosphere that would count, as we aren’t talking about 2 dimensional surface, but a column. My point being any number would have to be pre-averaged.
J Edwards, or Willis, what is the CO2 forcing for a doubling of CO2 again?
re: 311
Unfortunately, that turns out not to be the case.
My Earth Radiation Budget graphic which I just looked up, shows the incoming solar radiation as 342 W m-2, very close to 1/4 of the figure in #309, as I expected.
Possibly not for that, but it would still need to be averaged for orbital issues.
As far as to the validity of either number, neither of you have posted a reference.
1368 W/m^2
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/SORCE/
Oh Sid, don’t do this to me! It wouldn’t have taken you more than a minute or two to search the net, as Earle did, and find a reference.
Now you look silly while you wanted to look even-handed.
Re 311, Señor Viscous, the generally accepted figure for increased forcing for a doubling of CO2 is about 3.7 W/m2. However, like almost all climate numbers, there is some dispute about this.
Where the real dispute starts, however, is what difference this will make to the temperature, which is called the “sensitivity” of climate to a given forcing. My previous post on this subject said:
My own take on the subject goes like this. Without the “greenhouse effect”, it is generally agreed that the world would be about 33°C colder than it is. Net downward radiation is currently on the order of 324 W/m^2. This makes the sensitivity about 0.1°/W^m2, which agrees with Idso’s ten natural experiments.
Climate model results show much larger sensitivity numbers than this, on the order of 0.6°C/watt. However, since they don’t include such things as cosmic ray forcing of climate, and they use albedo as an input rather than calculating it, they need to have such high sensitivity numbers to get realistic trends in their results. To explain that, they posit a positive feedback from water vapor. This feedback, to my knowledge, has never been demonstrated in the real world.
w.
Dave. I’d been up since 4AM, and travelled about 350 miles, and met with two clients, I apologize if my googling skills weren’t up to par. Regardless Earl’s number and reference do not confirm yours.
Thanks Willis. If a doubling is 3.7 W/m2 then what we have seen to date (70-80 ppm), put’s it squarely into the same range as solar variability. Which means two things.
1. Solar influence is all that is required to show current trends, using the same arguements used for CO2
2. Anytime anyone says “Solar variability is too small to account for the observed warming” the best reply us. “Then so is the increase in CO2”
Sid, this is where you feel sometimes that you’d like to argue just to be arguing. A) you still didn’t check things out and give us a link. B) Yes Earle’s link does confirm mine, assuming you understand what it’s saying, and C) this is way too simple a matter for it to be worth your effort arguing about. Measuring the solar flux is among the most simple experiments which can be done (you could do it yourself simply with a couple of thermometers, a pot of water and perhaps an aluminum reflector or two. You could certainly determine which of two figures which differ by a factor of 4 are correct.
Dave, I would would reverse that and say that of you. But I would agree that I may have a tendency to argue with those who are antagonistic to me. I would put you in that category.
But I will look into it when I’m not sitting in a parking lot trying to catch up on work before I head back onto the river.
But your experiment, while correct so far as it goes, doesn’t show your point unless I start traveling among a signfigant amount of longitude.
You are also right that it is to small to argue, but for a different point. It is true for energy that reaches a certain square on the surface, but is irrelevant to a column of atmosphere.
I’m confused, as usual. If the amount of energy absorbed by additional CO2 decreases logarithmetically (I guess that’s a word) with concentration, then how can you go from 1.4 W/m2 to 3.7 W/m2 by doubling CO2? A linear relationship would predict 2.8. A log relationship would predict only 0.16 W/m2. What am I missing?
re: #319
I’m not antagonistic to you, I just don’t like anyone saying things which reflect negatively on the knowledge of skeptics. And you seem to do that way too often. But you do often say things I agree with. I just don’t normally then jump in and say, Yeah, Sid!” But while I very much disagree very often with people like say Peter Hearnden, the trolls do have a point in that it’s hypocritical to complain about every little thing warmers say and give skeptics a break. So… well, you get the point, I hope.
This is partially true in that there will be more energy absorbed by the atmosphere vs the ground at high angles, but that wasn’t the point at issue. The point was what the average vs total solar irradience is. Total irradience is 1370 +- a little watts per square meter, but the average per square meter, over the course of a day (or a year to be more precise) is about 342 watts per square meter.
The initial question you posed concerned what % of the solar irradience the greenhouse forcing of CO2 was. But that’s an ill-formed question, at least in the way Mr. Edwards answered it. The usually stated greenhouse forcing for doubling CO2 is something like 3.2 W/m^2, but that’s averaged just as the 342 figure I pointed out is. Except at noon on equinoxes you’re not going to have that much (1342) irradience. So I suppose if you want to compare CO2 forcing vs total irradience you’d have to multiply the CO2 doubling number by 4 getting 12.8 peak forcing and again we’re back to about 1% of solar irradience.
re: my last message.
Actually I may need to retract my 12.8 peak forcing figure. I believe that warmer theory is that even at night where solar irradience is essentially 0, there is a CO2 forcing because the earth’s surface is cooling from heat absorbed during the day and thereby emitting IR. So the CO2 forcing effect at a given point can’t be calculated in the simple geometric way solar irradiance can be (modified by some absorbance figures, etc.) Therefore the peak forcing will be somewhat less than 12.8 watts per square meter.
I hope this is some looney and not Mann’s revenge. Steve B., are we in trouble?
Re 320, jae, you ask:
I’m confused as well, about where you got the “go from 1.4 W/m2 to 3.7 W/m2 by doubling CO2?”. In any case, the formula for forcing increase from a given increase in CO2 is generally accepted to be
where $latex log_2{/tex] is the logarithm to the base 2.
w.
,,, and where![log_2{/tex] should have been](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=log_2%7B%2Ftex%5D+should+have+been+&bg=ffffff&fg=000&s=0&c=20201002)
latex log_2 $ … dang shift key.
w.
I think Dave is right, but it doesn’t totally invalidate the point others are trying to make.
If the generally believed effect that CO2 has on the *average* amount of energy reaching the surface is +1.4W/m^2 (what’s the uncertainty on that?), and if we have good evidence that solar irradiance has varied by +0.1% or +0.342W/m^2 over the last couple of decades, solar influence can clearly not be “insignificant”, as it is roughly 25% of the CO2-forcing figure. This puts it in roughly the same order of magnitude.
Of course there are theories that this is not the only influence the sun has on the earth’s climate. And there are also clearly other factors – changes in land use, other gasses, orbital changes, etc. So ruling out the solar angle isn’t as simple as dismissing it as being an insignificant factor without good evidence.
Well, now you can throw this into the mix. I’ve read a number of posts here about solar variability, but don’t think I’ve read much in regards to the earth’s actual orbit and/or tilt. Now, solar variability could be partially due to tilt and wobble changes as well, or may simply be based on the actual amount of solar activity, which we also know varies over a multi-decadal scale.
Willis: so the current forcing is assumed to be 3.7 W/m2, not 1.2 W/m2?
Willis: I was responding to 317, which says the 3.7 represents the doubling. I thought the current forcing was 1.2 w/m2.
Aha, maybe the 4.7 W/m2 includes all the hypothetical positive feedbacks, which cannot be proven. Excuse my rambling here; it’s a good pinot.
Jae, not sure if you are using “current forcing” to mean the total forcing from CO2, or the change in forcing since pre-industrial times.
The current total forcing depends on where you are and when. The Kiehl-Trenberth global energy budget puts the average total forcing from all GHGs including water vapor at ~324 W/m2.
How much of this is due to CO2? Well, the MODTRANS calculations (available here), say that in clear sky conditions with the US Standard Atmosphere, the down-welling long-wave radiation (DLR) with the current CO2 levels is ~259 W/m. With 0 CO2, it drops to ~230 W/m2, meaning that the current CO2 forcing is ~29 W/m2.
The remaining forcing (~230 W/m2) is due to water vapor, methane, and other trace gases.
(To make these calculations, set the direction to “Looking Up” and the “Sensor Altitude (km)” to 0. This gives us downwelling radiation at the surface.)
Being naturally sceptical and inquisitive, I ran the model at a variety of CO2 levels and graphed the results. Let me show you two graphs of the same results. First, a graph showing the change from pre-industrial to present …
Note that the line fitted to the MODRAN results shows a smaller change in forcing (2.9 W/m2) than the IPCC figure (3.7 W/m2). However, remember this is clear sky, no clouds or rain, US Standard Atmosphere. Results would differ under other conditions.
Next, the same graph, but starting at zero to put the CO2 forcing changes into perspective regarding the overall total forcing …
Hmmm …
Finally, the net change in forcing since pre-industrial times is (by IPCC figures) 3.7 * log(380/285,2) = ~1.5 W/m2. We have a long ways to go until doubling the pre-industrial figure to 570 ppmv.
w.
#323, Dave S
I think that this article and the Spiked article show that the warmers are desperate, very very desperate. They clearly know that they have lost the scientific debate and so are now resorting to Nazi style tactics. Not content with their Goebles style argumentum ad nauseam lies like ‘there is a consensus, all scientists agree that global warming is caused entirely by man’ etc etc ), they are now attempting to round up those (like me) who disagree with their eco-theologically inspired political extremism.
KevinUK
Transfer:
#
Hello everybody, we are here. We are back from camping in a redwood grove, Northern California, on a Friends Of Pleistocene (FOP) field trip. Happy to report: skies blue, wind sharp, air moist, trees tall, seas are blue, seals are swimming, and sea level rise is nothing to write home about, even in Crescent City, which is sinking. We also got to tour the campus of the College Of the Redwoods. It was one site on the field trip being studied. What a lovely place to go to school. They’ve spent 16 yrs trying to figure out where is best to move the library building! It’s built on a really narley complicated earthquake fault. Guess geologists move slower and more careful then other branches of sciences do?..ahem.
And sheesh, do they pass that IPCC/Mann stuff around like a fruitcake! Nobody has the guts to throw it out and nobody wants to eat it. So the IPCC Projections/predictions were included in the 4 inch thick FOP note book full of research: but did abstracts, physical evidence, charts or data provided for the field trip support or match any of it? You guess. (or ask Mr.welikerocks opinion on that)
Anyway, we say may the truth be told.
And thank you CA members, Steve and Ross for helping to make that so.
Comment by welikerocks “¢’¬? 11 October 2006 @ 12:06 pm | Edit This
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Dear Mr and Mrs welikerocks,
You’re just saying that to be annoying. Everyone knows that we are about to sink under the waves (Holland first, of course)
Comment by John A “¢’¬? 11 October 2006 @ 12:11 pm | Edit This
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Yes, #74. You’ve got us pegged. We live to be annoying! 🙂
Comment by welikerocks “¢’¬? 11 October 2006 @ 12:18 pm | Edit This
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(Holland first, of course)
What happened to Tuvualauafvadldl…?
Comment by Dave Dardinger “¢’¬? 11 October 2006 @ 1:13 pm | Edit This
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Welcome back, “rocks.
w.
Comment by Willis Eschenbach “¢’¬? 11 October 2006 @ 3:23 pm | Edit This
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#73, Welcome back “rocks’ (plural as there are now two of you contributing)
“So the IPCC Projections/predictions were included in the 4 inch thick FOP note book full of research: but did abstracts, physical evidence, charts or data provided for the field trip support or match any of it? You guess. (or ask Mr.welikerocks opinion on that)
”
Sounds like you’ve just returned from an AGW propaganda pushing holiday? You must have had to bite your tongues through most of it? I’m glad to say that thanks to people like Stve and Ross the truth is being told. The “warmers’ don’t like and so some of them are now recommending that us deniers are put on trial, Spanish inquistion style.
KevinUK
Comment by KevinUK “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 5:53 am | Edit This
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Thanks for the welcome back guys.
KevinUK you say:
“Sounds like you’ve just returned from an AGW propaganda pushing holiday?”
Not really Kevin. It was a gathering of the geology department of the local university- students, alumni, professors, phds etc. People came from all over. Really fun! And there were site trips every morning and presenting of data at each. Mr. Welikerocks was a presenter and an expert about a couple of sites in the Crescent City area, at Point St. George. (really a beautiful place).
The crazy thing is the IPCC stuff was inside the book, we think for “official” reasons, but no one mentioned it or talked about it, or used it. It didn’t even apply! That’s what I mean about the fruitcake. It’s just passed around but no body used it or even made a slice into it. It just sits there being “official” Husband finds it ridiculous. There were over 100 people on the camping trip, and I heard not one peep from anyone about GW or AGW.
Here in California, there is a proposition on the ballot coming November that Al Gore is endorsing. So his ad is played over and over urging California’s to pass it because “this will help stop the climate crisis”
So now it’s a crisis, but from what we know, this crisis exists only in the minds and computers of certain types of political propaganda pushers, and the data they pass around isn’t valid nor is it truly represented in reality.
Comment by welikerocks “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 6:31 am | Edit This
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#79, rocks
Thanks for the further explanation and apologies for my dig. I’m still reeling from two recent articles that are now labelling me and others like yourself as “Holocaust deniers’ who should be sent for trial. I’m relieved to hear that the “offical’ documentation (euphemism for propaganda) went largely unread.
In UK plc we are being told this week that there are lots of business opportunities in climate change. I’m sure that those who have recently re-located to Exeter, England at the tax payers expense no doubt agree. I’ve just been watching TV and there was a piece on this in which they said that one example of climate change business opportunties is the 2012 UK Olympics. An amazing 5% of the electricity needs of the Olympic Village will be met by wind turbine generation – again no doubt heavily subsidised by UK tax payers like myself.
I’m also glad to say that recently I made another convert to the ranks of the “deniers’. I didn’t even start the conversation off, but after mention of the BBC and its coverage of global warming, I managed to point the gentleman concerned to a number of other web sites (surprising funnily enough not linked to by the BBC) which are not quite so biased. I left him to do his own research and as I suspected might turn out to be the case, he came back to me later with lots of questions along the lines of “Did these things really happen (e.g. the HS fiasco)? “Are you sure these things haven’t just been made up by lobbyists paid for by the oil industry? etc etc. and we then discussed several things in turn. Now he tells me that he is definitely no longer a “warmer’ and is instead a ‘skeptic’. After he’s researched some more I’ll bet money on him becoming a confirmed skeptic just as I and several of my friends have now done (thanks to Tim Lambert).
KevinUK
Comment by KevinUK “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 7:05 am | Edit This
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Re #80, KevinUK
I’m sure that those who have recently re-located to Exeter, England at the tax payers expense no doubt agree.
Kevin, what does this refer to ?
Comment by fFreddy “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 8:08 am | Edit This
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#81, fFreddy
The UK Met Office’s new HQ (since 2004) is now the Hadley Centre in Exeter, home to the UK’s Climate Research Center.
Here is a direct quote from the Hadley centre web site.
“It currently employs around 100 staff and uses two NEC SX-6 supercomputers. Most of its funding comes from contracts with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), other United Kingdom Government departments and the European commission.”
So as a UK tax payer I am helping to fund all this bloody non-sense.
KevinUK
KevinUK
Comment by KevinUK “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 8:31 am | Edit This
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Kevin, presumably you’re equally unhappy about the vast ammounts of tax payers money that your profession – nuclear power – soaks up?
That said, you view, #80, seems to be “I don’t like Tim lambert so therefore his opponents are right’? Doesn’t sound very scientific to me.
Comment by Peter Hearnden “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 8:45 am | Edit This
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#83, Peter H,
Your memory doesn’t appear to be as good as mine otherwise you might have been able to remember some of the posts I’ve made in the recent past in which I’ve explained that I used to work in the nuclear industry over 10 years ago now. Never mind Peter, we are used to “warners’ like yourself, Steve B et al making up or quoting facts incorrectly to suit your own purposes on this blog.
For the record I now work for a private company that a) is not involved in any work that is financed by the UK taxpayer and that b) doesn’t rely on politically funded research like climate research to make a profit for its shareholders.
Now Pete, aren’t you supposed to be a farmer? What do you think about the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)? Is it a good think or a bad thing for global warming? Have you received a share of Virgin’s $US 3 billion funding yet to grow some bio-crops?
KevinUK
Comment by KevinUK “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 9:09 am | Edit This
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OK, ten years ago then I’d not noticed, and not, as you seek too imply, deliberate – OK? C’mon the UK nuclear industry has been showered, not to say hosed down, with taxpayer money.
Nice try wrt the CAP though 😉 However I’ve never liked the CAP, we’ve only got a smallholding, and I recieve no significant direct (difficult to explain, and I’m not bringing other family members into this) CAP money.
What about TL, why are you a sceptic, just because you dislike TL?
Comment by Peter Hearnden “¢’¬? 12 October 2006 @ 9:23 am | Edit This
Latest post relevant to my critique of the 90 Day / 2.5% of decade US NWS forecasts which depicted warmer-than-normal J-A-S, A-S-O, S-O-N, O-N-D, etc, etc, etc.
To wit:
Here we sit, October 12, with a mid-to-late-November-ish surface map!
Thought …. if the persistent Low south of Hudson’s Bay moves out over the Grand Banks, it’s going to be a memorable early noreaster.
#333, In reply to Peter H
Thank you for your reasonable reply to #84 and I apologise if my reply was worded in a belligerent way.
I agree with you. I’ve posted about this previously, namely that the UK nuclear industry was founded on a lie in order to justify the UK tax payers funding of it. That all changed with the “dash for gas’ the best example of which I can give is that BNFL built a combined heat and power (CHP) at Sellafield (Fellside CHP plant) to provide steam for processing heating and electricity for THORP as well as surplus electricity to the national grid. If they actually believed in the econimics of nuclear power generation then they would have built a NPP. The fossil-fuel levies as they were called back then have now been re-directed into the renewables industry to enrich the likes of John Selwyn Gummer who a cabinet minister (with MAFF portfolio) under Maggie T was involved in the whole “dash for gas’ decision making process. One of the reasons why I post on “nuclear stuff’ on this blog to to hopefully ensure that any resurgence of nuclear power generation in theUK isn’t based on another lie, namely AGW.
Other than the fact that its definitely off thread, I also agree with you that its not worth discussing the CAP.
On the subject of T(im)L(ambert), I’ve post this before but I have him to thank for getting me onto the subject of global warming in the first place. As I suspect you already know I am a big fan of John Brignell’s NumberWatch web site. Up until seeing a criticism of John B (he called him a crank and wouldn’t justify why) I hadn’t taken the time to get seriously into the whole AGW debate. After reading the thread on his site, I got far more interested as IMO (perhaps not yours) I think a lot of what JB posts on Numberwatch is bang on the mark. For example read this months (October) Numberwatch particularly the bit about the BSE fiasco. If TL hadn’t called him a “crank’ there’s a fair chance I wouldn’t have put the effort in (nor have persuaded a lot of my friends to do likewise), hence my thank you to TL.
KevinUK
PS Steve could you delete the same post in the Bill Gray thread. Thanks
re #336 No worries Kevin that explains it :). Obviously I don’t see things as you do in your last para but in my case seeing the ‘Li*’ or ‘Fr***’ word puts me off.
Vis a vis the “sea level rise” proxy, I think the first abstract here is of interest:
http://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/abstracts/p-co-1.htm
There should be no surprise that places like the Gulf Coast, much of the Atlantic Coasts on both sides, and other Coasts are subsiding. After all, they are located on passive margins and ought to be subsiding in the abolute, x-y-z coordinate sense. This is Plate Tectonics 101 type stuff. Given tide gage distributions, how large is the bias induced by tectonic subsidence of passive margins?
It’s snowing outside on Oct 12 in Toronto. I wish that more meteorologists had majored in “crisp fall days” (see Resident Expert video)
Same in Chicago with record cold temperatures forecast for the coming days. This should, however, be considered just a blip on our way to a globally warmed climate and Canadians should not reconsider wintering here in a few years.
RE: #339 and #340
If one would have looked at the US NWS Climate sections of NWS web sites back in June, for the 90 Day outlooks one would have found a succession of 90 day slices starting with the one commencing July, which depicted warmer than normal conditions over most of North America. Thus far, we’ve seen that not come to fruition for any of them yet. The first one, while certainly “helped” by the July heat, was discredited by August’s and September’s cool. October to date is off to a cool / cold start, so at least the second one is also looking suspect. Unless something major breaks in the hemispheric patterns prior to the solstice, I doubt that any of October, November or even December will be warmer than normal. We’ll see. This actually probably warrants a study of skill, using comparisons of these forecasts with actuals over some period that is a significant fraction of a decade, I’d go for 3 – 5 years.
Its sunny and 75 degrees here across the street from the Orange County Calif John Wayne Airport. I thinks that average? Was well below normal in Nor cal for the last several weeks till about last weekend, then some warming, but not much.
Snow storm warning
OK, so we are driving through Wisconsin looking at fall colors with some white stuff on top!
Snowfall Sets Record As December Comes Early
Break out the wintertime gear
A classic Alberta clipper:
[img]http://sat.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/showsat.php?wfo=mtr&area=west&type=wv&size=28[/img]
Oops, I see straight up html does not work here. Simply follow the link(y):
http://sat.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/showsat.php?wfo=mtr&area=west&type=wv&size=28
Re: #345
OK, you skeptics, have your fun about this cold blip (record setting though it may be), but I have recently learned from some of those members of the AGW consensus (and this would be those who have recently published peer reviewed papers) that unless you have a better explanation for this episode it must fit the AGW hypothesis. That means we can expect bone chilling cold as well as life threatening hot spells. So be worried, be very worried.
RE: #348 – Unless you are attempting dry humor, I think you may be missing the point. The point is, the 90 Day outlooks of the US NWS, done by their Climate Prediction functions, are showing poor skill. That’s the point.
348: Good comment. I never thought about it before, but this notion that “It must be AGW, because we can find nothing else can explain what is going on,” is a terrible error in logic for scientists to make. Just because we cannot explain it otherwise doesn’t mean there is no other explanation.
349 steve
#348 is dry humor …. quite good.
RE: #350 – Hemispherically speaking, it would appear that the jet stream has some really prominent southerly dips for this early in the season. So, upstream from that Alberta Clipper is another big dip affecting far northeast Europe and Northern Asia. The snow cover is pretty far south for this time of the year:
Wavy jetstream, early onset of winter pattern. I pointed out on Pielke Sr’s blog, the heat wave in July occured when there was a synoptic pattern typical of September, aka “Indian Summer.” This is particularly true for the Western US, but was also true, more subtly, in other areas as well. Notice how right after that heat wave, with the notable exception of the lower Mississippi Valley, (and in Europe, Iberia) there was quite a change to a cooler than normal pattern in many places. One might argue that Fall weather started in early August, at least early Fall weather started then.
re 348 It is called solar minimum,as it has been since march.The ionspheric measurements of both GCR and its evident ozone depletion is quite evident and was predicted and observed to be substantial in the Antarctic as sunlight returned to the Antarctic the increased photolysis was again evident due to GCR.
Interestingly the Russian emergency services ministry on advice from the Russian Sun-Earth council on solar variability(22 institutions) have been preparing for 2 years for the colder regime 2005-2008.
RE: #353 – “Interestingly the Russian emergency services ministry on advice from the Russian Sun-Earth council on solar variability(22 institutions) have been preparing for 2 years for the colder regime 2005-2008.”
That would also be good advice elsewhere in Asia as well. I hope all the greenhouse farmers in Korea and Japan have beefed up their structures.
FYI:
http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=1
Even if the ridge builds along 130W, I seriously doubt that we’ll have above normal warmth here out West. In fact, next week a snow event is a possibility in parts of Nevada and points north. Not if but when the hemispheric pattern shifts, either to the east or retrograde, the cold blasts hitting east of the Rockies or in northern Asia will come our way. Can’t escape the wavy jet stream.
Re: #355
Good stuff Steve S, but as a more personal practical matter could you tell me what to expect weatherwise for the remainder of the NFL season for all home Chicago Bear games (assume that they will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs). Thanks.
RE: #356 – Gatorade deluges
Here’s a game we can all play. Take the posters (include RCers if you want) and say who you think each’s Harry Potter analogue is. I’m Fred AND George, btw.
Re #357
That would be predicting Bear victories and that being the case the weather would become immaterial. My problem is that I have seen neither your weather nor football prognasticating put to the test.
Lot’s of weather on the Buffalo stations which are on Toronto cable. There was a couple of feet of snow in mid-October!?! Dave Dardinger must be shoveling right now.
Here an interesting perspective on how a small reduction in solar output can affect the continetal climates,
“Based on climate modeling, we have proposed a solution to the apparent paradox of extreme cold with only a marginally dimmer Sun. In our simulations, we find that the reduced brightness of the Sun during the Maunder Minimum causes global average surface temperature changes of only a few tenths of a degree, in line with the small change in solar output. However, regional cooling over Europe and North America is 5-10 times larger due to a shift in atmospheric winds.”
Interesting group of authors also,
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_06/
re: one complete circle
No, no! I’m from the Phoenix, Arizona area where the temperature right now at 10:30 PM is 80 deg F. I used to be from central Ohio, but my brother, who came down here the other day for a month’s respite says it was still in the 70’s for highs when he left thought they’d had some colder weather earlier. Last time I was anywhere near Buffalo was in 1995 when my wife and I went to New England on our honeymoon to see the fall colors.
I think Judith mentioned that a sociologist friend of hers may be reading this website and making sociological observations. I have one for the friend.
Let me digress for a moment. I’ve watched athletes for many years. My observations are that (1) they are excellent at what they do, (2) they work very hard to excel and (3) every so often they just want to go out and knock the bejesus out of another athlete. Wham. They can’t help it, they are not bad or rude people, it’s just in their blood.
What I see at CA are intellectually-talented people. They (1) are excellent at what they do, (2) they work very hard to excel and (3) every so often they just want to go out and knock the bejesus out of another smart person. Wham. They can’t help it, they are not bad or rude people, it’s just in their blood. It seems especially true of academia.
Athletes play on sports fields while intellectually-talented people play on the field of ideas.
That’s how I interpret much of the personal wham-and-bam at CA.
#336 KevinUk – numberwatch needs to update their complete list of things caused by global warming they forgot CA :>
#364, Proxy
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but thanks for providing the link to the ‘complete list…’. It’s always a please to go to it and see just how farcical the whole issue of global warming is. You are indeed correct that but for (anthroprogenic) global warming and the antics of a ceratin Michael (I not a statistician) Mann this blob would not exist :-). I’ll send JB an email and recommend that CA be put on the list.
KevinUK
#365,
I must spellcheck what I type before clicking that bloody submit button.
Except that a spellchecker wouldn’t find “blob.” In fact if it’s very old it might “correct” blog to blob. Of course if you mean you personally should reread what you write, I’m all in favor of that.
I kind of like the blob word. 🙂
Here’s an abstract for a paper about sea level pressure in the Indian Ocean. “Recent trends in sea level pressure in the Indian Ocean region”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027175.shtml
Abstract
During the second half of the twentieth century the Indian Ocean exhibited a rapid rise in sea surface temperatures (SST). It has been argued – largely on the basis of experiments with atmospheric GCMs – that this rapid warming was an important cause of remote changes in climate, in particular an increasing trend in the North Atlantic Oscillation Index and decreases in African rainfall. Here however we present evidence that the Indian Ocean warming was associated with local increases in sea level pressure (SLP). These increases are inconsistent with results from experiments in which an atmospheric GCM is forced by historical SST, which show robust decreases in SLP. The clear discrepancy between the observed and simulated trends in SLP suggests that the response of some atmospheric GCMs to the Indian Ocean warming may not provide a reliable guide to the behaviour of the real world.
Look at the last sentence. Have you ever seen that before?
“clear discrepancy–warming–GCM–not reliable guide–behaviour of the real world ”
Wow!
Cheers!
Wavy gravy:
http://sat.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/showsat.php?wfo=mtr&area=west&type=wv&size=28
#368
Watch it welikerocks, you may find yourself having to retain a lawyer if some people have their way.
See this hilarious link:
http://tinyurl.com/hhwtw
Here’s my favorite excerpt:
Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
North Asia:
http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Weather/Ulan_Bator/ZMUB.htm
Will the Western US experience above normal temps for the months of October, November and December, as progged by the NWS Oct-Nov-Dec 90 Day outlook issued back in September?:
http://headlines.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&article=2
We’ll see …..
JP,
If a serious effort is made to reduce GHG emissions using a Kyoto like mechanism, economic growth in the third world would be substantially lower. I wonder what would happen if the AGW hypothesis is found to have been greatly exaggerated. Would there be a “climate Nuremburg trial” for AGW advocates because of the 10s of millions of deaths caused by that lower economic growth?
#368, rocks
OK from now own this blog will henceforth be known as the Climateaudit blob (not blog).
Thanks for the link. I wonder whether this one was on Nancy Oreskes list of anti-AGW reports?
KevinUK
RE: #373 – Read what Chrichton wrote at the end of Climate of Fear. I would not rule out something Nuremburgesque – to be applied to the 21st century’s more extreme utopians.
#372
Steve,
You’ve hit on a god question concerning the delineation between forecasting and climate studies. With so many people attempting to mix 2 such different animals, there is a muddying of the waters. NOAA, like most forecasting agencies have had a rather mixed record on thier medium range forecasts. The theories that many activitst cilmate exports have produced have rarely (if ever) been accurately applied to weather forecasting or synoptic meteorology.
On the one hand, many AGW skeptics are told not to confuse short term synoptic weather patterns with long term climate trends; on the other hand, when short term climate trends coincide with AGW theories they immediatly make headline news (see the 2005 Hurricane Season as a prime example).
What is interesting is that this recent bout of cold weather across North America was totally unforecasted – even 15 days out; niether medium range forecast models nor the short term numeric models came close to forecasting this event outside of 2 weeks.
In any event, NOAA is banking on on medium ENSO event to moderate the upcoming Winter for North America.
Two relevant posts to check elsewhere in the blogosphere:
RC has just posted on the cosmic rays and clouds thing. Of particular interest is that co author Martin Engelben is commenting.
Andrew Dessler http://sciencepoliticsclimatechange.blogspot.com/ blogged on weather vs climate models (Oct 12), he did a pretty good job.
RE: #376 – You might find it interesting to look at the procession of 90 Day outlooks into the future – they go pretty far out, over one year.
#377
Reluctantly, I went to RC to read what they had to say.
I threw up…
#370 JP
I could react sever ways to that link. LOL or – or-Ok, that’s scary! And even- Mmm Hmm! wouldn’t surprise me!
Think about it though, what lawyer wouldn’t kill for at a chance to cross examine Algore on the stand for their career? Tee hee. What a circus that would be.
#374 that’s a new paper she might have missed it. Maybe it’s a trend?
Thank you for contributing to this blob. 😉
#379 ok that made me LOL
#380 correction of course sever=several. sheesh.
I did proofread and skipped right over it.
Re #381: rocks, IMHO you shouldn’t bother with separate comments to correct typos unless it’s really necessary to clarify the meaning. It’s understood that we all make spelling/grammar mistakes.
Thanks SteveB I think that too. I was iffy on that one.
#382 Steve B.
Do you call the linked RC post “science”?! Discrediting a theory because of a press release? In such case, all of AGW should be discredited!
What makes me throw up is the scientific dishonesty and the demagoguery of the RC bunch.
As for the “solar stuff”, I have the right to find it a fascinating hypothesis. I can judge by myself if the papers on the subject make sense or not, the same way that I judge other papers I read on climate science. My critique of the climate science community is addressed to its ideologically-driven obsession for AGW as an explanation for everything, at the expense of other explanations, and its attempts at discrediting those other theories as well as the scientists who propose them. That is BAD science.
I don’t like it because I’m a scientist. You, as an environmental lobbyist, make a living off it.
Re #385: Francois, the RC post discussed the paper itself as well as the press release. Plenty of papers have press releases, but what was remarkable about this one was the extent to which it made claims that were not included in the paper. Note that one of the authors commented at RC and rather than defending the press release disclaimed any responsibility for it.
I should take this opportunity to point out that the fact that you accuse me of being a paid environmental lobbyist shows the extent to which you fail to pay attention to details. When those accusations were first made on this blog, I explicitly stated at least twice that I am not paid and then stopped responding since I was clearly wasting my breath. FYI, the Sierra Club (and this is true for Sierra Club Canada as well) does indeed have paid staff, but has a much larger number of volunteers who are part of and control its governance structure.
Re #386
FO didn’t say you were paid by SC. He said you “make a living off it” [environmental alarmism]. You are “Steve Bloom” the wildlife photographer who makes money selling nature books, are you not?
Re #387: No, which I seem to recall noting here as well. Just to cover all the bases, I do not make my living in anything remotely connected to environmentalism. Would that I did.
ME TOO!
The real issue here is that the “Climate Science Community” is in denial: the Solar connection hypothesis makes SO much sense that they have to fight it tooth-and-nail, and they will, to the end. IMHO, the Sun is the key to what is going on on this planet, as it has always been, except for extreme pertrubations, like meteorites and volcanoes. There are ample studies to prove this, as well as history and plain common sense (TCO will have a problem here). There is such a rich treasure of knowledge, regarding the Solar influences on climate (refs available on request). No hypotheses of the AGW Community can compare to the simple, observable, undeniable effects of the Sun. CO2 might exert an influence, but it’s likely very small, compared to the hydrogen bomb overhead. The future of Climate Science is looking at the Sun, not the afteraffects, like hurricane intensity, melting glaciers, sea levels, etc. I know, I’m blowing in the wind, but years ago, someone might listen to this post.
Re #388
My apologies, then. (Too bad, in a way. Those wildlife photos by the other Steve Bloom are pretty amazing. I especially like the BEARS. Go Bears!)
Re #391: No problem, but I predict that within a month or two Certain Parties (see #390) will be repeating it again. I haven’t seen the photos, but I’ll have a look. BTW, I understand that the way to tell the difference between da Bears and the bears is that the former are hairier.
re 382 Here I suggest that your belief in the expertise of the modelmakers at RC compentency to comprehend the intricacies of the Astrophysics,and the Heliophysical-terrestrial coupling is beyound belief.Indeed if you read the comments by GS on solar physicits you will find a fear of some intersting times ahead.
And of course there are next year is the celebration of the satellite,and it is international heliophysical year.This involves some 1100 institutes and the astrophysicists.
The themes are .
* Solar Physics
* Planetary Magnetospheres
* Heliosphere and Cosmic Rays
* Planetary Ionospheres, Thermospheres and Mesospheres, and
* Climate Studies
* Heliobiology
On cosmic and solar rays alone there are 259 studies in progress.
Reading the discussion,on RC in regard to SCR GCR and ASR they are either being very selective in their observations and references or they are incompetant to discuss the astrophyics.
The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.
Pierre Laplace
Here I will leave you with one small aspect of the phenomena.
Cosmic rays form the lower parts of the terrestrial and planetary ionospheres. They create in the Earth environment independent cosmic ray layer, so called C layer in the ionosphere D region, which is situated at heights 50 – 80 km (Velinov, 1966, 1968). Therefore they influence on the propagation on radiowaves, particularly in the range of medium, long and very long waves. The cosmic rays maintain the ionization not only in the ionosphere but also in the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the lithosphere of the Earth.
CR determine the ionization rate and conductivities in the atmosphere and the ionosphere and therefore the atmospheric electric fields. The last influence the thunderstorms, Earth’s global charge and global electric circuit between the ionosphere and the ground. It is already established (Ermakov, 1992; Ermakov and Stozhkov, 2003), that the main cause of thunderstorm discharges are external atmospheric showers (EAS) of high energy primary CR particles with energy more than 1014 eV. CR produce also nuclear reactions with ground, water and air atoms. On this way cosmogenic nuclides in space, in bodies, and in atmospheres are created. Such cosmogenic isotopes are 10Be, 7Be, 3He and 3H (Dorman, 2004). All this shows the great importance of cosmic rays for the processes of solar-terrestrial relationships, solar-terrestrial physics and solar-planetary physics in the whole heliosphere.
Re #393: Perfect. Thank you.
Steve M,
Are you really sure you’re interested in hurricanes? TO be honest, they just don’t hold the same fascination for as hockey sticks and global climate models.
Perhaps it’s a “big fish”, “little fish” thing, but they just don’t appeal to me as having the same level of importance in the big scheme of things.
If I might ask – what is it, exactly, that you find so interesting about the hurricane research? It evidently intrigues you, because the diversion of thread topics into that area is obvious to Blind Freddy.
To my way of thinking, hurricane frequency/intensity may or may not be linked to temperature change. Whether it is, or not, all it would ever be is an effect of that change, not a cause.
It seems to me that the vast majority of posts on this blog in the past have been concerned with topics which go right to the heart of modern climate science.
It seems to me that hurricanes are far more meteorological events than they are climatic events (although I concede that some hurricane specialists see their relative frequency in the broader context of the warming debate).
So, given that they are subsidiary events – at the most – in the overall climate debate, are you making the best use of your time in pursuing this line?
If it’s just an immediate interest in the overall scheme of things…any idea when you might get over it? 😉
BradH
I know you won’t be interested but the fascination with hurricanes and prediction in the centre of the universe(a.k.a USA) is mirrored in Australia (cyclones) except there aren’t enough of them thus not turning into rain depressions, thus not filling up the dams.
Bloody Global warming !
Re: #395
Sorry that post was a bit disjointed. Somewhat distracted by a wife and two small children.
BradH,
It’s not about hurricanes. It’s about whether activisim/alarmism are interfering with scientific integrity.
It’s about understanding why the statistics in these papers (be it paleoclimatology or hurricane climatology) are often flaky. Is it incompetency or intent to advance a hypothesis/agenda?
#395 Brad,
I too, find the hurricane threads quite boring. In the end, it’s a very US-centric debate. If hurricanes would only land in such countries as Costa-Rica or Nicaragua, there would be no “hurricane wars”. Nobody would care if there would be 20% more cat5 or not 20 years from now. Let them all be buried in mud!
But now, we must suffer Dr. Curry’s fights with Pielke Jr., and her hypocritical attacks on Bill Gray, not to mention her promotion of RC. Sadly, CA is becoming less and less interesting every day.
#400 Thats why I asked “How many scientists does it take to forecast hurricanes?”
I google different stuff on my own from the comments in the other threads and that goes on and on-you could do it for hours! Just for example: “space dust” was mentioned- Search NASA it seems to matter to the global radiation budget, down to particle shape and size. Dust Devils, Wil’o the Wisps that happen can effect local climate. Whitecaps on the ocean matter: “Whitecap effects on surface albedo should be taken into account explicitly in the numerical modeling and analysis of climate change””Influence of oceanic whitecaps on the global radiation budget”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GL012657.shtml
…interesting!
Here is the NWS’ 90 Day outlook series for the next year. The last in the series actually encompasses time more than one year from today. I have prefaced outlooks that show warmer than normal as the dominent anomaly for the USA with “W.” In fact, they are all prefaced this way, there were only two periods that showed *any* cold anomaly and in them the cold anomaly was much smaller in areal extent than the warm anomaly. Further operational definition – periods that show mostly neutral anomaly for the greatest areal extent but show warm for even small areas are prefaced by a “W”:
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=1
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=2
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=3
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=4
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=5
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=6
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=7
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=8
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=9
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=10
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=11
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=12
W – http://www.weather.gov/climate/l3mto.php?lead=13
Again, I don’t know which model they are using to do these. But based on the above series, it would appear that there must be a rising “warming” signal applied, else, how could there be succesive outlooks all dominated by a warm anomaly? Perhaps AGW bias has invaded this outlook series by way of a model which assumes aggressive AGW warm up.
Very much off topic, but I wanted to park this here for the record. RealClimate tried to trash the latest results from Svensmark by claiming it was science by press release. Actually it’s science by doing experiments, an astounding development in climate “science.” Here’s my comment, let’s see if it appears:
I find the discussion here, especially the posted plot, quite misleading. Svensmark, et. al., claim that cosmic rays have a strong effect on low cloud cover, not a direct effect on the temperature. There is extremely good evidence that is true as can be seen from Figure 4c in link. I also find it appealing that they test their proposed mechanism with an experiment, not a computer model, which can be refined until the details of the cloud modulation are understood.
Posted to RealClimate, 10/17/06, 10:51 am, EDT
Brad H,
I have to write a reply to Wahl and Ammann, which people like Nanne Weber and other scientists have foud impressive. I found their article turgid and uninteresting, raising no interesting issues and re-hashing points that have been around since 2004 with much mis-characterization. I can’t just leave this hanging as the last word on the topic although no one in climate science seems to have the faintest interest anymore in what exactly happened with the HS. It is particularly frustrating that neither of the two panels dealt with Wahl and Ammann.
Anyway I’m a squash player; this particular ball has been hit to me so I’ll return it. Hurricanes were a pleasant little distraction.
Anyway, as Steve M has said before, he’s not really doing much on the Hurricane threads but leaving it to others.
I think people should realize that blogs like this will have ebbs and flows. Sometimes big things will happen in the “real world” that make every message fraught with meaning, while other times an occasional look-in will cover it all. While I don’t like them around, you can figure when the fraught time are here by the presence of the heavy-duty trolls. [While I usually disagree with him, Steve Bloom only occasionally engages in really trollish behavior.]
While the hurricane wars have been in the forefront here the trolls have been generally absent. So I suppose there has been no big news on the warmer-skeptic front.
Of course there have been a lot of very interesting posts lately if you’re into reading up on the background science of the climate debate. I admit I have saved many papers to my hard drive but haven’t read more than a handful of them very carefully. Perhaps everyone here should take a few hours off blogging and spend it reading one of the papers linked here in October and make a “book report” on it.
#405. I’m all in favor of “book reports” by others – anyone doing so, please clip out and post the key graphic.
Maybe list the top ten “books” worth reporting on and let’s generate some critical mass.
A new elemenent has been discovered as reported by CNN in this URL . Of special interest to readers of this blog is the requirment reported in the story for confirmation of the discovery. The article reports this as:
Climatology and physics seem to have different philosophies regarding confrimation.
Re:# 404
Fair enough, Steve. Thanks for the response.
Interesting, a former believer in alarmist global warming is changing over to being skeptical about it:
Claude Allegre
I googled “emanuel climate” to locate Kerry Emanuel’s email address. Guess what is at the top of the google pile right now?
Re: #411
To avoid the appearances of self-promotion the answer is:
Climate Audit: Emanuel 2005 Figure One
410: Interesting. All the hot air from the “warmers” seems to be causing another type of hurricane in the scientific community.
Steve McI, (Kevin, Bender, Francois, Willis,BradH,Rocks et al),
Some thoughts:
First, I’ve been an attentive reader of this site(but not hurricanes in which I’ve not a lot of interest) although I’ve posted little
Many thanks to Steve McI and Ross for shedding some well needed light on some dark recesses of “science” that well needed illumination.
The nuclear industry has just announced they will save us from the demons of CO2. It’s worth reading this article carefully, because there are good hints IMHO as to what is really going on, if one reads between a few lines
I’ve quoted the most important (IMHO) snippet below
Nuclear needs ‘huge expansion’
“The well-documented concern that oil may be running out”
http://tinyurl.com/y45wvn
Of course phrasing as it as “oil running out” is misleading. What one should really discuss is “production peaking”, about which Chevron CEO had this to say
Keynote address by
David J. O’Reilly
Chairman and CEO
Chevron Corp.
at the 26th Annual Oil & Money Conference
London, England
September 20, 2005
All of these initiatives reflect the fact that energy is one of the most critical issues facing the global economy. And at an inflection point like the one we are witnessing now – when the demand curve has closed in on the supply curve – much attention has been focused on the issue of so-called peak oil.
Most of the debate about whether peak oil is imminent, however, misses the point. Oil will peak – that is a geologic fact. But the new energy equation is not static. It is dynamic and variable
Current prices, for instance, are moderating demand growth and will bring about increased emphasis on conservation – whether it is through changing individual or collective behaviors. There is still enormous potential to further reduce energy use through conservation. In many ways, it is the lowest-cost new energy we have.
And as we begin to contemplate the future decline of oil resources, we are also beginning to contemplate where the next generation of energy will come from.
For the near future, extending oil production and expanding the global natural gas market will play primary roles. But we need to make sources such as coal and nuclear energy a larger part of the global supply mix for power generation.
http://tinyurl.com/y9davw
O’Reilly is one of the more forthcoming CEOs it seems.
Exxon and the Saudis recently had a PR blitz, to imply all is fine but their assertions and the assumptions they are making really deserve critical scrutiny
Industry officials say oil supply OK
http://tinyurl.com/y8vohf
They are seemingly counting a lot of chickens before they are hatched
Note also, this recently appeared in Siam
“ROLE FOR FISSION
The Nuclear Option
A threefold expansion of nuclear power could contribute significantly to staving off climate change by avoiding one billion to two billion tons of carbon emissions annually
By John M. Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz”
Snip
“Nuclear power becomes distinctly favored economically if carbon emissions are priced. We will refer to this as a carbon tax, but the pricing mechanism need not be in the form of a tax. Europe has a system in which permits to emit carbon are traded on an open market. In early 2006 permits were selling for more than $100 per tonne of carbon emitted (or $27 per tonne of carbon dioxide), although recently their price has fallen to about half that. (A metric unit, one tonne is equal to 1.1 U.S. tons.) A tax of only $50 per tonne of carbon raises coal-powered electricity to 5.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. At $200 per tonne of carbon, coal reaches a whopping 9.0 cents per kilowatt-hour. Gas fares much better than coal, increasing to 7.9 cents per kilowatt-hour under a $200 tax. Fossil-fuel plants could avoid the putative carbon tax by capturing and sequestering the carbon, but the cost of doing that contributes in the same way that a tax would [see “Can We Bury Global Warming?” by Robert H. Socolow; Scientific American, July 2005].”
http://tinyurl.com/kg37y
Nuclear ‘unviable till coal price rises’
Matthew Warren
October 18, 2006
NUCLEAR power is too expensive to be developed in Australia and would only become viable through a massive spike in future coal and gas prices or a significant government-imposed impost on carbon emissions.
Energy generators claim current nuclear technology is between 50 to 100 per cent more expensive than conventional coal-fired power, and faces a range of political and technical hurdles before the first nuclear plant could be built.
http://tinyurl.com/y8hsjn
The Nuclear propaganda and spiel is pretty easy to spot
mantra is
“nuclear is benign, but beware the demon CO2. World about to end..
Amen”
Also will regularly see supposed imminent spokespersons for “science” like David King and Hans Blix opin that they are more worried about climate change than WMD’s or terrorism.
Hans Blix,
Norris: Speaking of multilateralism, do you notice, as many have suggested, that there’s an increasing unilateralist bent in the United States government?
Blix: Yeah. On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There’s no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way. I regret it. To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I’m more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.
http://tinyurl.com/otoke
Hans Blix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix
Earlier article about Nuclear PR
Coal vs. Nuclear in an Uncertain Future
http://tinyurl.com/y96y87
Kevin, I note with interest your background in the nuke industry and views on Candu. Here’s some info that may be of interest. As an Ontario resident, I fervently hope Ontario does not decide to continue to shoulder the overhead of it’s own unique Nuke technology . We cannot afford to do this again IMHO
A Submission to the Ontario Power Authority (OPA)
http://tinyurl.com/y2wq3x
A Submission to the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) Concerning the
Selection of New Electricity Generation Capacity for Ontario
By F. R. Greening Ph. D.
Unfortunately, as Ontario’s Candu reactors approached 20 years of operation, serious problems with critical components started to emerge. Pressure tube integrity became a major issue in the 1980s, while steam generator corrosion and annulus gas problems dominated the 1990s. Outlet feeder pipes are the latest CANDU components to suffer from premature failures. Thus, looking at the status of CANDU in the year 2005, we see many of the 22 domestic Units in need of major refurbishments or already abandoned as beyond repair. This situation has arisen within 30 years of the commissioning of most of these Units; worse yet, some Units were shutdown for long periods during their lifetime.
The hard pill for AECL to swallow is that CANDU’s innovative engineering, seen as leading edge in the 1960s, has become its Achilles’ heel by the year 2000. This is perhaps not so surprising for 50 year-old technology. After all, many engineering marvels from the 1960s, such as the Space Shuttle and Concorde, have now outlived their usefulness as recent events have so dramatically shown. But, to return to the main thesis of this submission, CANDU was destined to run into difficulties due to the complexity of its design. Corrosion is a well-known concern for all nuclear plant, but when it occurs in essentially inaccessible pipe work, such as the annulus gas system, it presents a problem that is next to impossible to fix.
As we have shown, each new problem that developed in CANDU reactors – whether it was leaking pressure tube rolled joints, annulus gas system flow blockages or feeder pipe thinning — has required more inspections leading to more outages and higher OM&A costs. The CANDU reactor was always an experimental venture; it has had its successes and was probably a worthwhile undertaking because it added to our understanding of nuclear science and engineering. However, it is time to declare the CANDU experiment over, and move on to something simpler, something proven, something better
http://tinyurl.com/r3f9p
http://tinyurl.com/m6595
There are a few specific points I would like to highlight
First, imposing carbon limits as CO2 emissions DOES act as a PROXY for Hydrocarbon depletion
Secondly, there is no option but to invent a “reason” to demonize Carbon as CO2 if one wants to use an environmental diversion or ruse as a PROXY for HC depletion, instead of directly addressing depletion directly. The reason for this is that predominantly the real pollution issues have good technological fixes, even if we’ve been regrettably tardy implementing certain of them..
The third and most important point, is that conceptually, if one wanted to pull a “ruse” purportedly justified by “science”, then strategically the best option would be to pose a question that was actually or virtually “intractable”.. i.e. Beyond the means we have to address it in a comprehensive sense.
A supposedly scientific “ruse” that could be easily disproven would be ineffective
I thought this was one of the more revealing articles that actually managed to make it into the mainstream press (on the BBC no less!!)
Sceptics denounce climate science ‘lie’
http://tinyurl.com/sfpk8
What means do we actually have to “validate” these GCMs, considering the class of problem?
I’m one of the old school (as most here), that simply formulating an hypothesis as a math model is not enough. For an hypothesis to be accepted one must “validate”
My old modelling prof used to like to quote with a smile, “Once one has formulated a model, the last thing one should do is believe it! 🙂
What means do we have beyond data splitting, or making a prediction then waiting to see what happens to actually contribute to even minimal testing for this class of problem?
Can the very limited testing that we can do remotely be considered “validation” considering the class of problem? àⰃ à ➍
John A I believe brought to group attention the problematic issue of model “validation” as below
What is Meant by Evaluation?
We recognise that, unlike the classic concept of Popper (1982), our evaluation process is not as clear-cut as a simple search for “falsification”. While we do not consider that the complexity of a climate model makes it impossible to ever prove such a model “false” in any absolute sense, it does make the task of evaluation extremely difficult and leaves room for a subjective component in any assessment. The very complexity of climate models means that there are severe limits placed on our ability to analyse and understand the model processes, interactions and uncertainties (Rind, 1999)
snip
We fully recognise that many of the evaluation statements we make contain a degree of subjective scientific perception and may contain much “community” or “personal” knowledge (Polanyi, 1958). For example, the very choice of model variables and model processes that are investigated are often based upon the subjective judgement and experience of the modelling community.
http://tinyurl.com/y6l4wx
I’m pretty comfortable reading between some lines, but quite frankly even without applying some interpretation, purely as read, it’s quite clear to me that I would put NO reliance on such “unvalidated” and probably unvalidatible models for policy reliance, no matter if on a conjectural basis it may be fun to ponder the “unknown” and “unknowable”. I enjoy conjecture too!
The reason that if one wanted to use an environmental “ruse” as a PROXY for HC depletion, that one must demonize Carbon as CO2, is that predominantly the real pollution problems(in terms of fuel quality, and utilization IMHO) have sound techological fixes.
(note here, I’m not addressing issues pertaining to mining of coal)
In terms of Petroleum fuel quality, the biggie pollutant is generally deemed to be sulfur. However fortuitously, processing for sulfur removal, can have a lot ancillary benefits in alleviating other problematic issues as well. So sulfur levels in fuels can be a good general PROXY for fuel quality
For modern gasification which can be applied for coal for power generation (or refinery bottoms), along with associated cleanup for the raw syngas, sulfur is recovered as elemental sulfur, heavy metals remain in non-leachng slag(if gasification is operated at slagging conditions), chlorides would be converted to HCL, Nitrogen to ammonia, which can all be handled in cleanup steps, and mercury can be carbon filtered.
Syngas after cleanup is a clean fuel like Natural Gas. The only remaining pollution issue to fuss at all is NOX
So its quite possible to utilize coal cleanly for power generation for example. We have the technology to do it. It simply hasn’t been widely implemented previously because of higher capital cost
Gasification hasn’t been the predominant process for upgrading refinery bottoms however it can be quite applicable and I mention it because it is convenient to address tech fixes applicable to both refinery bottoms and coal. For the purpose of the argument I’m making, the point is that tech fixes do exist, not that we have implemented them all as promptly as we perhaps arguably might have
We are going to see a lot more gasification applications IMHO. Nexen/Opti application at McMurray one example
http://tinyurl.com/tmtzu
What is referred to as a “cracking” refinery ( fluid cat cracking) in North American would produce as broad product types; gasoline, middle distillate ( #1 and #2 fuel oils…jet, diesel, furnace oil) and the bottoms product heavy fuel oil. (plus some light ends eg propane)
Longtime sulfur specs for gasoline and #2 Fuel (diesel, furnace oil) were 0.1 and 0.50wt% (1000 and 5000wt ppm) respectively. These specs can be met utilizing sweet (low sulfur crude) in a simple “cracking” type refinery configuration without resorting to sulfur removal from the gasoline and middle distillate component streams, There is one exception. Naphtha reformer ( a unit to upgrade octane) catalyst is poisoned by sulfur so feed to this unit is always desulfurized.
We are now at or imminently phasing in gasoline sulfur down to 30ppm and 15ppm for #2 oil.
(and reductions for heavier products such as marine fuels are in planning stages as well)
The reduction has been tremendous. There is not a lot further we can do to produce clean fuels than the steps implemented or in the planning process already. One further fuss I guess is higher Cetane in Diesel as in California (as a further “finesse” wrt particulates)
In context of Canadian energy supply, the Alberta Energy Utilities Board report below gives a quite useful summary. Note page 10 . We are well down the depletion curve for Conventional Light and Medium crude, which is why such a high reliance will be placed on Oil Sands going forward.
ST98: Alberta’s Energy Reserves …. and Supply/Demand Outlook ….AEUB
http://tinyurl.com/fbfrp
Ottawa takes a darker view of Canada’s energy future
http://tinyurl.com/y6semp
Summary
I think the reason it seems so perplexing and frustrating to many on Steve’s blog (and to myself) that supposed AGW “scientific” studies seem so questionable, is that the unmentionable and officially unacknowledged agenda is that the demonization of Carbon as CO2 is actually being used as a PROXY for HC depletion.
Of course although we often use proxies in many situations, there are downsides and potential counterproductive consequences, compared to addressing real problems directly. Much better to address real problems directly in my view whenever one is able
What we can say is that imposing Carbon limits in fact does act as a type of PROXY for HC depletion.
Sometimes IMHO, the politicians slip up and a small glimmer of truth is revealed, as I think happened with Stephane Dion here:
Dion admits Liberals’ Kyoto goal impossible
“In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don’t think I will make it. Everyone is saying target, target. But … it is to be more than to reach a target. It’s to change the economy. It’s to have resource productivity, energy efficiency when we know that energy will be the next crisis for the economy of the
world.”
http://tinyurl.com/ns7po
So since Stephane Dion knows we have an impending energy availability crisis,. why does he not make this a major issue and directly address it instead of constantly yapping about CO2?? :àⰃ à ➩
All the best
brent
P.S. I’m a longtime resident of Ontario and an old/former downstreamer (refining and supply)
Here’s an example of some of the exaggeration coming from certain oil companies presently
An Oil Habit America Cannot Break
John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil, claims that the oil shale in Colorado amounts to another 1 trillion barrels and that Canada’s oil sands total 1.3 trillion barrels. Indeed, the oil sands are already producing.
http://tinyurl.com/y8lyu3
Shell has a research project for insitu recovery from shale, but it is not proven on technical, let alone commercial basis yet. No decision on further stages till 2010 I believe
Wrt oil sands. AEUB link above, table on page 10 lists
Initial in place 1694 billion blls
Initial established 179
Cumulative production 5
Remaining established 174
Annual production 0.388
Ulimate potential 315
(recoverable)
Where Hofmeister gets his number of 1.3 Trillion for oilsands, I’ve no clue. One would have to “dramatically” raise insitu recoveries
In any event, although oilsands is seen as booming, the benefit of such a resource is probably that it could be produced at rates which are significant in local North American terms, for a long time. However oilsands production cannot easily be ramped up quickly. It will be a challenge to get up to 2 to 4 million bpd. By comparison, world demand is about 84- 85Million bpd presently
Those who present oilsands as some sort of panacea for World HC production capacity and depletion of other resources are doing a disservice. Ditto in spades for oil shale.
Re #410: That’s worth de-spinning a bit. The author of the press release linked in #410 has an interesting history, BTW.
Good (whitch)hunting Steve B. Like Judith notes its the reputation not that content that counts.
I kinda hate the whole conspiracy theory stuff wrt money for carbon tax trading. That said, I know of ex-Firm consultants starting business(es?) in this area. One could see how this might end up being like the bandwidth sales where some FOBs got wealthy in the 90s.
Cliff H, in another thread, requested a response from me. SteveM suggested this topic should move here for now. Honoring both requests, here’s my response. Since the only on-topic relationship is to this blog as collaboration experiment, I’ll try to keep it short. My hope is that this will be my last statement on this matter. SteveM already understands my point, and I do not have time to debate the topic.
Please re-read my post. I bquoted her statement and responded. Then I bquoted your statement and question and responded. My response to you was in direct response to your statement and questions.
It may have helped to preface my comments with this: Cliff, your questions, and the answer to them, only make sense in concert with an understanding of the context. Based on my own experience, your reactions are based on an assumption of a temporary face-to-face conversation. This is different: a permanent, international, screen-to-screen community.
You suggest my example is “a scenario involving a chain of idiots that have access to the internet, that somehow converts an innocent comment into a crime against humanity recorded forever on the internet…”
If we remove the heated terminology from that statement, to get “a scenario involving a chain of people that have access to the internet, that converts an innocent comment into a [comment] recorded forever on the internet…”
The latter is exactly what I was suggesting. I’m not suggesting we are idiots, nor that we’re dealing with a crime of any kind ;). We’re intelligent adults working in a relatively new social context that few of us understand very well — few understand its strengths, few understand its weaknesses. [FYI, part of my day job involves helping professionals learn to be productive in this kind of environment, and how not to get burned, either in the short run or the long run.]
Again, to turn down the heat and give respect to all of us here, the question becomes: “Why would any thinking person grant that power to people on the internet?”
Answer: if we don’t know that we’re doing so. That doesn’t make us idiots, it makes us normal. Yet ignorance isn’t always bliss. Today’s mistakes in this regard are destined to come back and bite us. That’s not sky-is-falling alarmism. It’s a carefully considered perspective gained over a very long time, by a guy who is actually incredibly optimistic. (BTW, I’m no Luddite: I’ve been involved in the development of many many groundbreaking technologies.)
The various comments, and your questions, about the relationship between personal online photo/profiles and professional respect are in my opinion actually unrelated to my comments about the science discussion here. In that regard (suppose that poster’s photos were put in the comments!), I urge posters to treat one another even-handedly, and continue to refocus on the topic rather than extraneous ‘stuff’.***
To repeat an earlier statement: my response was triggered by the fact that “women are gauged on how they appear but men not at all.” Please think on that one a bit.
I would hope not.
Probably not. Depends on the blog topic/purpose.
Hotbed? Nawww… inadvertent for the most part.
My logic applies equally across the board and thus is not sexist. If it were, my solution would not survive such a “reversal” test. SteveM appreciates and took action on my suggestion. If you do not, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Because we all have much to learn, beginning right here with me. (With respect to noise levels: as a participant in this sub-thread, I’m not a good candidate to audit its noise characteristics. 😀 )
MrPete (now returning to lurker status…and heading on the road for a while.)
*** I actually encourage online communities, wherever possible, to use real names AND real photos. It makes the whole thing a lot more ‘lifelike.’ Most of the time, this can only happen when the forum is restricted to members.
Too much text, Petey. Very boring boy, are you.
#417. It’s probably already happened to a considerable extent in Europe. I talked to a businessman in Sweden who had invested in European utilities; some of the utilities obtained very generous grandfathered carbon credits and this had a significant impact on their stock market valuations. Why wouldn’t it be bandwidth II?
HNRG
Steve, because “we’ve learned our lessons”. No dotcoms or Enrons can plague the HBS-trained elite again. They could only be wrong, once, no? Firm I know of is UK based and hiring quite good people. It looks highly speculative though.
Re: #418
I watched my Bears embarrass the whole metropolitan area of Chicago and in the meantime something transpired here that I totally missed. I had left with the hope that I had perhaps interested someone, anyone, in looking at the skill in Gray’s tropical storm predictions from a different perspective. When I got back I had to weed through some sermonizing here on off-hand remarks about a climatologist’s good looks.
Mr. Pete, I hope you can appreciate my frustrations with this distraction and might I remind you that we are all mature adults here and can pretty much judge and handle these situations on our own. I would have predicted that at some point Steve M. was going retract these references more because he did not want any distractions than for any other reason.
Just my way of saying, Mr. Pete, thanks for nothing.
Re #423 Somehow I managed to watch both. One was more entertaining than the other however. (Is Rexy for real or what?) 😉
Unfortunately I think the book is still out on Rex. On the other hand, I would think that Matt is for real.
I am thinking that last Monday night football is better forgotten and can only guess that the same is true for this blog. If only Steve M could wipe out the results of a football game like it appears he has done with part of a thread –well maybe not the end results which appear to be win-win.
#425 – I watched the end of the game too – it was painful to watch. You just knew that the guy was going to miss his field goal. Leinart looks like a quarterback; Edgerrin James looks like he’s washed up.
We have one good Georgia Tech product in Toronto – Chris Bosh. It also looks like our basketball team is going to be decent this year.
I tuned in at 23-3. I swear I willed him to miss that FGA. What a comeback. The commentators made me ill with their pro-Leinart bias.
re 419, 423
few words often misconstrued
glad to save room for science
peace
#428 MrPete, I have no problems with the intent of all your comments, but I have just one thing for you to think about in lurker mode. I dislike PC spin about men being such petty beasts all by their lonesome.
Think about that some. I do not think it’s “fact”. You should also understand that as a women, reading that statement on its own whether silly of me or not could also be understood as:
-MrPete thinks women never attain any position of luxury /authority/ success/ power/ or certain mindstate to judge a man [or even a women] by their appearance and have it be one of the deciding factors-whether she’s choosing an employee, a TV show to watch, a scientist’s view to embrace, a mate, a US President to vote for, a CEO for her company, or a pool cleaner, and whether it’s petty, wrong, un-wise, or otherwise to guage someone’s worth in such a manner.
Here’s a clue: it happens all the time.
😉 peace
Re: #429
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to explain the facts of life to Mr. Pete. I have often had to wonder whether I earned my success or was I just another pretty face. (:>)
I’m working out…I’m working out.
Sigh. Brevity really doesn’t help much, does it.
I commented on the “fact” of gauging women but not men on appearance…not in general but in reference to this blog.
My statement about appearance-gauging has zero bearing on any aspect of the face-to-face world. Rocks, 100% of your examples are for the face-to-face world; here we’re screen-to-screen which is entirely different.
I made no comment on other aspects of how we decide the value of each one’s contributions, scientifically or otherwise. (FWIW, I am a very strong supporter of almost every aspect of this blog and of SteveM’s work, and increasingly talk it up in my “real world” conversations.)
This group truly has no clue of my perspective or experience on this topic in the face-to-face world. I’d be happy to talk about that sometime, but certainly not here 😉
Pertinent to this online science collaboration experiment:
a) How many of us believe it’s valuable or a fallacy to expect online personality/character extends to the Real World?
b) How many of us believe it’s valuable/fallacy to assume “real world” relationship experience is basically a good guide to the “screen to screen” world?
I leave those as rhetorical questions NOT to be answered here, unless SteveM wants to create some kind of a space for such meta discussions.