Continuation of Unthreaded #17
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Climate Audit 
579 Comments
The Met Office must be using a new algore-rithm… or dancing to it.
Sorry.
A.
#1 – I found the story quite amusing (link in last post of Unthreaded #17), as they can apparently predict (what, they’re no longer ‘scenarios’?) that temperatures will tread water for a couple of years due to ‘natural variability’… still, I supppose it’s quite bold to be making predictions over such a relatively short period of time…
Desperation sets it apparently…
Mark
The Spencer et al paper in GRL
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/warming-may-kill-cirrus-clouds-cause.html
looks pretty interesting. They filter out the low-frequency data and end up with a pretty nice straight curve indicating a huge negative feedback of the cirrus clowds. It would be good if independent auditors looked at it anyway.
British scientists are predicting a succession of record-breaking high temperatures in the most detailed forecast of global warming’s impact on weather around the world.
Powerful computer simulations used to create the world’s first global warming forecast suggests temperature rises will stall in the next two years, before rising sharply at the end of the decade.
From 2010, they warn, every year has at least a 50% chance of exceeding the record year of 1998 when average global temperatures reached 14.54C.
The study’s findings raise the prospect of hotter summers and episodes of torrential rain in the UK; 1998 brought temperatures peaking at 32.2C, although the UK record was set in 2003 at 38.1C.
The forecast from researchers at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter reveals that natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009, but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily. Temperatures are set to rise over the 10-year period by 0.3C. Beyond 2014, the odds of breaking the temperature record rise even further, the scientists added.
The forecast of a brief slump in global warming has already been seized upon by climate change sceptics as evidence that the world is not heating. Climate scientists say the new high-precision forecast predicts temperatures will stall because of natural climate effects that have seen the Southern Ocean and tropical Pacific cool over the past couple of years.
The forecast marks a shift in thinking by climate change researchers. Instead of using their models to look many decades ahead, they will focus on the very near future. The hope is that forecasts will be more useful to emergency planners in governments and companies by warning of droughts and other extreme conditions a year or two ahead. Previously, the models have been used to show that global temperatures may rise 6C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
“If you look ahead on a 50- to 100 year time frame, then global warming is the big thing for the climate, but if you’re working on a project that is only designed to last for the next few years, that information doesn’t make much difference to you,” said Doug Smith, a climate scientist at the Hadley Centre.
Read the full content: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/10/weather.uknews
#382 WaterEng
You’ve slightly misunderstood what they said. They didn’t say the lines broadened with extra CO2. The broadness of the lines mean that the edges are not fully saturated, which means they remain important in changing the amount of absorption with changing concentration.
Until this year, Hadley predicts more hot summers like the last couple of years.
In the UK, June and July this year were much cooler than recent years, and marked by some bouts of really heavy rain.
Then in August, for the first time that I have heard, Hadley starts predicting less warming and more torrential summer rain.
Climatology is so … flexible …
5# during the period 2010-2014; at the peak of solar activity the earth will warm; No S&*t Sherlock. It’s like the Met Office is doing a pre-emptive strike and claming this 4 Greenhouse gases; and because it’s a model the don’t needed to explain why since 2000 global temperatures have stagnated.
Ps any bets this is TCO in disguise.
Thought I would let you know that Steve McIntyre and Cliamteaudit has been discussed on New Zealand talkback radio this evening. A very good caller explained Steve’s latest discovery but remarked that Saint Helen (thats our beloved prime minister) would’nt take any notice as she has already nationalised all the carbon credits from the forrestry sector and farmers so she can make a killing with Al Gore. We have a Minster for Climate Change too, but then again we have a Defence Minister and a Disarmament Minister too! Hey these are strange times indeed. But congrats Steve on more great work.
I am a regular reader of your article. And I am very impress with your blog upon Global Warming. Now I am also write a blog upon effects and causes of Global Warming. This blog is collection of news & reviews like the study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays. Some researchers had also suggested that the latter might influence global warming because the rays trigger cloud formation.
“We wish to thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000 (GISSTEMP).”
Posted a couple of updates here
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/08/value-of-mcintyres-discovery.html#links
…including G. Schmidt’s response in the comments of Real Climate. Also, a quickie on the
“significance” of the discovery as conceptualised by Daily Tech blogger Michael Asher:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/08/value-of-mcintyres-discovery.html#links
Interesting how the story seems stuck in the Conservative talk radio ghetto.
Whoops, sorry, posted the same link twice. Here is the other one:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/08/realclimate-responds-to-problem-in.html#links
I would have sait that it’s interesting how once again the MSM is refusing to cover a story that doesn’t fit in with their agenda.
Death and destruction are just around the corner,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/07/disasters
Apparently global warming is going to cause earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunamis.
By next week global warming will be found to cause psoriasis and fallen arches.
RE 13.
opps.
1. Humans are not perfect.
2. Peer review is not sufficient.
3. Independent outside audit improves the accurracy and reliability of human knowledge.
FREE THE CODE!
But a BIG grain of salt. You are correct about what matters, though.
From 388, Unthreaded 17:
Link.
This link is from a comment at The Reference Frame:
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm
The linked story is about the alleged “fabrications” in Jones et al (1990), discussed here before. Jones’ co-author, Wang, has now been formally accused of fraud. Also, Jones knew there were serious problems with the paper’s claims back in 2001, yet he continued to cite the paper in AR4.
This is the integrity we get from a Co-ordinating Lead Author?
Here’s a look at the long-predicted La Nina (cool event). This is important to global temperature in the coming months:
First, the winds. Wind is what moves cool deep water to the surface. Winds have to be “right” to create and support a La Nina. The longstanding single measure of Pacific wind patterns is the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), which is shown here , courtesy of the Australian BOM . Negative values support the warm El Nino while positive values support the cool La Nina.
As can be seen, the SOI has shown little support for La Nina in recent months although the oscillating pattern trends upwards. We may be transitioning into a more supportive La Nina wind pattern if the upward SOI trend continues.
Another indicator for eastern Pacific winds is here , which is a SST and wind map of the Pacific equator. Ignore the colors for a moment and just look at the arrows, which show wind anomaly. The arrows show anomalous easterly winds, which means that eastern Pacific winds are currently supportive of a La Nina.
Now look at the colors. The colors show surface temperature anomaly with the heavy line separating above-normal yellowish colors (left side) from cooler-than-normal bluish colors (right side). The map shows a lot of blue (below-normal temperature) in the region where La Nina emerges, so one may be emerging already.
Next is a look below the surface, to see if subsurface water is unusually cool or warm. If it is unusually cool then a La Nina can emerge fairly quickly and be enduring as that unusually cool water works its way to the surface.
Here is a cross-section of Pacific subsurface temperature along the equator. It shows the anomalies down to about 500 meters depth, and from one side of the Pacific to the other. The chart indicates a lot of anomalously cool water below the surface in the eastern Pacific, available to support a La Nina. An unusual aspect is the lack of piled-up anomalously warm water in the western Pacific – that, too, a coolish indicator for global temperatures.
Finally, it’s worthwhile to look at the Pacific warm water volume anomaly ( link ). Excess warm water usually gets its heat released to the atmosphere while a warm water shortage supports the opposite. The chart shows that we’re in a bit of a shortage of equatorial warm water at this time.
Bottom line: it’s all about the wind. If Pacific winds continue to move towards La Nina support then we’re headed towards La Nina and a relatively cool globe. If that combines with a cool-phase PDO then global temperatures may continue their flat-to-downwards trend into 2008.
#5
You are evidently not privileged to be one of the consumers of the UK Met Office forecasts. I am.
So today I’m sitting looking at the garden at about 5pm, and on my desk is their forecast of our regional weather made at 10am for this very period. In the garden there are black clouds and a downpour interspersed with thunder and lightning and gusts of strong winds. On my screen is a forecast of sun all day and a pleasant breeze. This is a regular occurrence. They cannot forecast 6 or 8 hours out with any sort of reliability. Sometimes it is going to pour, and we look out at sun. Sometimes its going to blow a gale, and we try to sail in a dead flat calm. Sometimes its going to be sunny intervals and there is not a cloud in the sky. Sometimes they put out severe weather warnings and nothing in particular happens. They claim that going to tighter definitions and smaller grids is going to improve their forecasting. All one can say is, it could use some improvement.
Then you think about the recent deluges and floods in the UK. Did they forecast them a couple months out? No they did not. They were forecasting dry in the South and rain in the North. I guess its a two by two matrix, so they had a one in four chance of being right by chance. Needless to say, what happened was dry in the North and very very wet indeed in the South, in fact several meters wet. The bemused citizens of Gloucester must have looked at the history of the Met Office forecasts with complete bewilderment when their Internet connexions finally came back up and they got their living rooms pumped out.
And now to add insult to injury, we seem to be funding these idiots to forecast several years out! Are they completely insane? Anyone in their right minds would wait until they could forecast a few hours out before trying to manage several years.
Reading here – http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/documentlibrary/tddoc/td3200.pdf
It says:
> The accuracy of the maximum-minimum temperature system (MMTS) is +/- 0.5
> degrees C, and the temperature is displayed to the nearest 0.1 degree F.
> The observer records the values to the nearest whole degree F. A
> Cooperative Program Manager calibrates the MMTS sensor annually against
> a specially-maintained reference instrument.
Walking through that, I think 0.5 degree C is 0.9 degrees F, I wrote up a little table of actual values vs. possible recorded values. Maybe I did something wrong, but it looks like an upward bias to me. Have they accounted for this in their magical adjustments?
Actual | Displayed | Recorded
x.0 | (x-1).1 – x.9 | (x-1)*4 + x*10 + (x+1)*5
x.1 | (x-1).2 – (x+1).0 | (x-1)*3 + x*10 + (x+1)*6
x.2 | (x-1).3 – (x+1).1 | (x-1)*2 + x*10 + (x+1)*7
x.3 | (x-1).4 – (x+1).2 | (x-1)*1 + x*10 + (x+1)*8
x.4 | (x-1).5 – (x+1).3 | (x-1)*0 + x*10 + (x+1)*9
x.5 | (x-1).6 – (x+1).4 | (x-1)*0 + x*9 + (x+1)*10
x.6 | (x-1).7 – (x+1).5 | (x-1)*0 + x*8 + (x+1)*11
x.7 | (x-1).8 – (x+1).6 | (x-1)*0 + x*7 + (x+1)*12
x.8 | (x-1).9 – (x+1).7 | (x-1)*0 + x*6 + (x+1)*13
x.9 | x.0 – (x+1).8 | (x-1)*0 + x* 5 + (x+1)*14
Sorry I don’t know how to format that to be pretty in the web form. That all seems to summarize to:
Actual x, record (x-1) = 10
Actual x, record x = 85
Actual x, record x+1 = 95
So in general, if I’m thinking right, 50% of the data will be high by one degree, 85/190 will be correct and 10/190 will be recorded one degree low. Am I missing something? Is this already accounted for somewhere in the adjustments?
For x.6…x.9 the correct ‘recorded’ value _is_ x+1.
For x.5 it depends on the rounding rule in effect. (Half & half usually)
So “50% of the data will be high by one degree” is, essentially, a completely normal effect of whatever digit you choose to start rounding.
Yes. I see that now. You’re right. Thank you. I also see that my numbers were wrong. x.6 through x.9 will actually get recorded as x+2 in ten cases I think, balancing the x-1 data recorded values. I was puzzled by that imbalance.
Never mind.
Lost amidst the other news last week was some nice research out of UAH. Here are links:
News release
Related article on atmospheric heat removal by Roy Spencer
For those new to CA (from conservative links), I recommend that you take what Steve says with a grain of salt. It looks very impressive at first, but realize that much of it is not pper reviewed and is communicated in a forum that the author controls. (This is not to say it is worthless. Just beware.)
-From a fellow conservative. Who loves truth more than partisanship.
[Steve: snip – that sort of language even in a quotation isn’t allowed here. IF BCL is going permit vile hate messages to be posted at his blog, he’s not going to be allowed to link from here.]
Has this been discussed at any length before?
An interesting graph. With full text.
#28. No, but there’s much to discuss in it. I suspect that much of the decline pertains not so much to closing of stations, but the failure of GHCN to update data from stations other than the WMO airport system and USHCN.
Re #27: Ah, sorry about that Steve. Allow me to repost the first half of that post:
TCO, After reading your posts on both CA and on BCL’s blog, I just wanted to say that I greatly appreciate the very non-partisan moderating affect you try to apply to both sides.
[Steve: snip- I’m not allowing you to link readers to that site (Which has been around for a while. Look at posts on your Hansen thread. Disgusting. Until you remove the hate references, you won’t be allowed to post here. ]
(what hate messages?)
Can you maybe just refer to the comment number? D’you mean the one suggesting I egg your house?
Or the link to the site discussing hard-line Israeli responses to Iran?
Re: #352
(hoping HTML still works)
jae, what do you think an IR emission spectrometer (vs. absorption spectrometer, which requires a light source and measures changes in intensity with wavelength of the light beam passing through the material being measured), or an IR thermometer for that matter, measures? It measures intensity of radiation vs wavelength, frequency or reciprocal centimeters in the case of IR. A Fourier Transform Spectrometer measures the entire spectrum at once, while a classical spectrometer uses slits and a disperser, usually a grating or a prism, and measures point by point or on a linear solid state array detector. Both can be calibrated against known standards to provide measurements of absolute intensity. A simple IR thermometer measures emission intensity at one wavelength and requires an emissivity correction to obtain a temperature based on the intensity expected from a black body (emissivity = 1) at that temperature. More sophisticated (read expensive) IR thermometers measure two wavelengths and use the intensity ratio to correct for emissivity automatically. They work. You can even buy one to use in your kitchen to measure the temperature of your frying pan (works best with a well seasoned cast iron pan, black anodized aluminum is good too).
The satellite temperature record is derived by measuring thermal microwave emissions from water vapor, btw. Why is it so hard for you to accept the fact that CO2 and H2O emit energy over a wide range at the predicted intensities? Spectral transitions for simple molecules like H2O and CO2 have been calculated using quantum mechanics to very high precision and accuracy for some time now. The IPCC is absolutely correct when they say the level of scientific understanding of the radiative forcings is high.
Even the Universe emits thermal radiation. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background Emission. It’s a black body spectrum with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin, which puts the peak in the microwave frequency range at 160.2 GHz. And the emission intensity and spectrum is exactly as predicted by theory.
Anyone have a copy of “Hansen, J., and S. Lebedeff, Global trends of measured surface air temperature, J. Geophys. Res., 92,
13,345-13,372, 1987” that they can send me or point me to? I can only find the abstract online. Either that or a detailed description of the “bias method” used to combine station records at the same location as mentioned in “GISS analysis of surface temperature change, J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and M. Sato, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York”. The description of the bias method in the second paper is not complete, but it implies the description in the first paper is more thorough.
To give Mark Twain a new wardrobe …”Dean(ial) is not
just a river in Africa,it´s also a real tropical storm LATER
approaching Santo Domingo possibly, POSSIBLY at hurricane strength”
…(I didn´t change my seasonal prediction by Aug 1..!)
Quote button, image button etc. can we get them back?
Re #382
If you want to see how increasing CO2 results in increased absorption even though the center of the band is saturated, Eli has some nice graphs and a link to calculate your own here.
RE#26,
Ok, so where are all of Steve M’s errors and flawed posts? Surely you realize there are folks with blogs who are dying to catch Steve M with fibs or errors – where are they?
Has anybody read Tsonos, Swanson, Kravstov in Geophysical Research Letters, published July 12, 2007? Kristen might be particularily interested in the authors conclusions.
Steve, any change to see a non-edited version of your RC comment? Let me guess, something related to MBH98 was left out?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/#comment-47595
Spencer, R.W., Braswell, W.D., Christy, J.R., Hnilo, J., 2007. Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007/GL029698.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/08/14/the-iris-opens-again/
Another study confirming the existence of the “infrared iris” affect.
I wonder when the modelers are going to add this to their models?
26: If I repeat earlier arguments, Steve will accuse me of riding a hobby horse. Of course, if I don’t you will accuse my of not backing up my comments. So at a TOPICAL LEVEL, here are the areas of concern:
-Conflating “centering/decentering” with “standard deviation dividing” (correlation versus covariance)
-Talking about impact on PC1 rather than on the actual hockey stick itself
-not giving the mathematical impact of various individual flaws on HS index (in particular ones that are small in impact, but impressive rhetorically.)
-not supplying details of code and method for the revised RE benchmarking method
-reticence to disclose type of red noise used (and mistaken or misleading brushoff to go study fractional differeninceing)
-failure to publish in peer reviewed journals (publishing in “his journal” instead.)
-poor writing (have to wade through a lot of mystery story, snark, etc. vice just getting clear educative description of issues.
If you want to discuss them further, go read back the basic initial dioscussions and papers first. Than any engagement we have will be at a high level, vice recapping. I suggest, seriously, reading the entire blog. Also, best if you make the followup comments in the respective threads.
P.s. Note, that I think there is still A LOT of good content in Steve’s posts. I’m not dismissing that. But don’t get too blown away by it.
Interesting post on climate feedbacks by Roy Spencer at Climate Science here. The main point is that he thinks that long term averaging of data before analysis makes everything look like a positive feedback. Seems like a topic relevant to this site. There’s also a post on his paper (abstract) on cloud and radiation budget changes that seems to fit Lindzen’s Iris model here as well.
[snip – no c-word here]
One of my posts to RealClimate was censored, so I will post it here. I am sorry Gavin chose not to answer it. I noticed that after I wrote mine, McIntyre wrote something very similar in comment #225, so my contribution may not be important. Gavin replied to Steve but was non-responsive. In other words, Gavin did not have any reassurances that Steve would not hear that he had done the replication wrong. Here’s my comment:
Gavin,
Your response to McIntyre in #207 claims that McIntyre would be much better off just writing new code himself. I disagree. If he writes his own code he will probably be accused of making mistakes as he was once before.
Here are comments written by you and Michael Mann published here on January 27, 2005:
“As detailed already on the pages of RealClimate, this so-called ‘correction’ was nothing more than a botched application of the MBH98 procedure, where the authors (MM) removed 80% of the proxy data actually used by MBH98 during the 15th century period (failing in the process to produce a reconstruction that passes standard “verification” procedures–an error that is oddly similar to that noted by Benestad (2004) with regard to another recent McKitrick paper).”
But if McIntyre is supplied with the source code, (which is a requirement Judith Curry pointed out above (#69) has now been signed into law) then everyone knows he has the procedure that was used. If he finds a flaw, he can point it out and others can evaluate his discovery. If climate scientist continue to hide data and methods, it has to be reverse engineered and that wastes time and science is not progressed. This lack of openness is not a hallmark of science but of pseudoscience – “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
#43,
Only one???
You’re doing better than average.
Gavin, with a PhD no less, doesn’t understand how the method works, either. It is shameful these guys are hired by NASA… sheesh.
It’s not an auditor’s job to correct mistakes, merely find them.
Mark
RE 30. You need to read more of what TCO writes
( Why do I defend your flabby butt?)
TCO is mercurial. He has an approach that I am fond of.
Good ideas can stand the test of criticism.
Bright fellows can endure the test of needling.
So, when a AGW fellow purports something, TCO bites his ankle
So, When a NGW fellow purports something, TCO bites his ankle.
I watched my dogs play the other day. The spunky little terrier
kept biting the haunches of the fat lazy Lab. He put her to work.
They both had a good time in the end.
I think someone should bring a petition, in UK, to ask Hadley Centre why they are still predicting such stuff (2010-2014 warming) when having predicted that 2007 will have overtook 1998 and 2005 with a 60% probability and just a few months before, and why just a few months ago GW was so mighty and now natural cycles are prevailing: do they know words like “humility” and “error” and “shame”, or just they think to be “almighty”?
#9: I heard about a Climate Change minister, but you got also a Disarmament minister along with Defence one?
Mala tempora currunt.
Sic transit gloria mundi…
RE: #45 – We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with NASA. Space Shuttle 25 year boondoggle, mounting astronaut death toll, takeover by the anti-VonBraunites, mentally ill and drunken astronauts and of course, the GISS headed by an arch demogogue …. what else lurks within?
Just like any other bureaucracy, plenty ‘o skeletons.
Mark
On the continuing theme of the early onset of climatic autumn (perhaps due to combined forces of La Nina and emerging negative PDO): Doing a retrospective back to mid July, climatic autumn began on the W. Coast of N. America north of 37.5N, on July 18. We are unquestionably now within climatic early autumn. Closed lows are in inside slider mode, the Pacific High seems to have retrograded and slid far enough south to lead to the storm door starting to crack open. For folks north of the low 40s N, there was not much of a summer at all, more like a handful of typical Indian Summer interludes between the early season Pacific Storms.
You spend waaaay too much time studying weather in general, Steve. 😉
Of course, I’m hoping the early autumn works its way East to the front range region. Hot here the past few days, but very, very wet (well, hot in COS is 92). I hear things are headed for a chill, however. What’s your take?
Mark
RE: #52 – Calgary had some days where it did not reach 50 last week. It was due to cold fronts coming straight down from the Mackenzie Delta. A few more days and it will probably be snowing in the Northern Rockies.
Heck, it was still snowing in the Rockies in June. Of course, A-basin regularly gets snow in July, and Sylvan lake, just outside of Eagle, has snow off and on all year.
Mark
As I posted earlier on Anthony Watts’ blog, as Steve was discovering this error, I was getting motivated to visualize the range and availability of data in GHCNv2. I have updated the pages and graphs since the first announcement. You can find them at http://www.unur.com/climate/ghcn-v2/.
I chose to plot levels rather than anomalies by station because, first, I wanted to see the variation in the data and, second, I wanted to give an idea of the length of the time series by station. With these simple goals in mind, when there were multiple series available for a WMO station location, I averaged the non-missing values by month. I know this is probably not ideal for analytical purposes but does serve my goal of visualizing data variation and availability. Each station page also contains summary tables for each series that contributed to the graph.
I am going to post the Perl scripts at http://www.unur.com/comp/ghcn-v2/
I hope you find this useful and not too far off-topic.
Sinan
#33 DeWitt> Why is it so hard for you to accept the fact that CO2 and H2O emit energy over a wide range at the predicted intensities?
Yes, everything emits radiation, but it is extremely small. Every elecron has an electric field. Every moving electron has an electromagnetic field. Atoms move back and forth, thus radiating an EM field. It’s real, and it’s measurable, but very little energy is transmitted this way. The inverse square law ensures that this radiation is quite localized and limited. The energy associated with an electromagnetic wave increases with wave frequency. I believe molecular movement radiation is mostly in the infrared, which is a low frequency. In terms of thermodynamics, it’s probably negligible in most cases.
>> Even the Universe emits thermal radiation. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background Emission. It’s a black body spectrum with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin
You don’t seem to understand. There are many, many sources of radiation. Black body radiation, ie that caused by the movement of molecules is only one very small source. If a superconductor was at absolute zero, it would emit no “black body” radiation, since it’s molecules are completely still. Yet, one could set up an electric current in the conductor that would produce EM radiation. A lightning strike produces EM radiation that is completly unrelated to the temperature of any molecule. The sun produces radiation completely unrelated to the temperature of any molecule.
It is a glaring scientific error to take a radiation measurement, and then plug that into the black body equation to determine a temperature. That would only be correct if black body radiation were the only source of radiation in the universe. When people do this with solar radiation, they are really talking about an “effective” temperature. They are modelling the sun as a black body emitting only black body radiation, and calculating the so called “temperature” of this black body. It’s just a math exercise. There is no physical implication that solar radiation is caused by atoms vibrating. You model science with math, you don’t do pick a math formula, and then pretend that reality adjusts itself to match the formula you picked. The big bang, as the name implies, was a huge explosion, releasing huge amounts of energy. Just as with the continuous thermonuclear explosions of the sun, the source of the radiation is not related to atoms vibrating. Therefore, the so called “temperature” of the universe is invalid.
I noticed a nice summary of recent developments in climate science at http://blog.acton.org/archives/1870-Environmental-Stewardship-News-Round-Up.html
re: #57 Gunnar
No, it’s a scientific convention to allow you to compare the energy released by various processes. The Big Bang radiation has the same spectra as that of a black body at a temperature of 2.725 K. That’s all that’s meant by saying the cosmic background radiation is at 2.725K. Arguing with such conventions simply marks you as inexperienced in the field. In that respect it’s similar to complaining about the term “greenhouse gas”. Yes the atmosphere doesn’t work like a glass greenhouse, but it’s the term used so get used to it.
#57: indeed Sun is almost a black body itself, but this matters a little for us (we are not on the Sun, we just receive its radiations). Actually, we can use the grey body equations, an approximation of black body ones to more real cases (even if we can model something real with black body: the Sun, but also e.g. snow for IR radiation; but, all these are approximations with an error up to 10%, for the grey bodies too).
For the atmosphere, which is a colored body, the grey body approximation is simply wrong.
According to these websites, the highest temperature extremes of the twentieth tend to occur in earlier years, as compared to the lowest temperature extremes. Is this just a statistical fluke, or could there be some physical explanation?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalextremes.html#hightemp
http://www.vwkweb.nl/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=293&Itemid=172
#57. Gunnar, can you give this a rest for few days, while other topics are in the news.
>> Gunnar, can you give this a rest for few days
Yes, I’m trying to get my own blog up at http://www.critical-thinker.org. My goal was to get it up before you got over the DOS attack. Didn’t make it.
33: DeWitt: Thanks. I think I understand radiation bands fairly well. I’m just trying to figure out how 2 X CO2 translates to 3.7 W m-2.
Oh, let him discuss it, Steve. This is just one thread on the blog. You say you allow discussion, but actually manage this thing a lot tighter than Patterico or JustOneMinute or the like. Is this a salon or is it a Steve McINtyre publication?
gunnar says:
Actually, while the energy that drive’s the sun’s radiation is coming from an ongoing thermonuclear explosion, that happens deep in the sun.
The radiation we see comes from photons emitted by ionized atoms near the surface of the sun.
At least that has been my understanding for a long while. Perhaps I am wrong, and if so I would appreciate being corrected.
>> Oh, let him discuss it, Steve.
Well, I can see his point. He wants this site to be about auditing climate data from a statistical point of view. As such, because of my background and interest, I am constantly getting into science, which is “off topic”. I think Steve would prefer even “unthreaded” to be about various statistical auditing issues not related to a specific post.
Re: #68
Correct. The photons generated by the thermonuclear reactions are absorbed and re-emitted many times before finally escaping from the surface. IIRC it has been calculated that it takes about 1,000,000 years for a photon to travel from the center of the sun to the surface. Of course it’s not actually the same photon. In a sense, this is sort of a “greenhouse” effect too, allowing the center of the sun to be hot enough for thermonuclear reactions to take place while maintaining a surface temperature low enough to keep radiant power in balance with the energy generated at the core.
Re: #66
jae, All I can suggest is that you play with Archer’s MODTRAN calculator. If you look down from 15 km in the tropics (other conditions default), the emitted radiant power drops by 4.3 W/sq.m. when going from 280 to 560 ppmv CO2. Different localities show different ‘forcings’. The tropics is the highest and subarctic winter is lowest at 1.8 W/sq.m. A global average of 3.7 W/sq.m. is not unreasonable. If you observe how the spectra change as you change variables and how they compare to the pure thermal spectra, you should be able to get a feel for what’s happening.
Gunner: Don’t puss out on me. Hang strong.
DeWitt Payne says:
I think it is important to be very clear and careful in talking about these things. My quibble is that it is not the same photons that are absorbed and re-emitted. Of course, it might not matter, since those photons are only packets of energy.
IIRC, the estimate was 1000 years, but it does not matter much.
Welcome back CA. I was having withdrawal symptoms.
“Unthreaded” is once again edging into not recommended territory, which territory is part of the GW picture, but, so far, not part of that CA. (Jerry North was apparently not enough of a nucleus to kick off a transition.) You all may recall that discussions in this area seem to get quite heated, and require constant monitoring. I take the position, and I hope you will join me, that I prefer for Steve M devote his time to errors in data and analysis, since he has an aptitude for it that I do not.
– continuing separately for purposes of snipping — If we are going to have a discussion of the radiation thing, and I would love to, I would like to start here, with the question to which everyone thinks they know the answer, but which will most likely prove wrong:
— What is it that a thermometer measures?
Re: #74
Allan, I would support a complete ban on discussion here of the primary effects of radiative transfer of thermal energy through the atmosphere and the effect of ghg’s on same. As far as I am concerned, it’s a waste of bandwidth on this site. Measurement and theory are in good agreement. While the details of how all this works aren’t neatly wrapped up in one place, it is possible, I think, for someone with a decent physical science background to gain sufficient understanding by looking at the bits and pieces scattered around the Net. There are many important areas (clouds and aerosols e.g.) where the level of scientific understanding is much lower.
It seems a shame, though, that no one has written the equivalent of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe for climate science. Is string theory really easier to explain?
Re: #75
Try a good undergraduate physical chemistry textbook. You can’t explain it in a few lines without introducing many more concepts, such as entropy, requiring even more explanation.
71, DeWitt: Thanks, again. I’m back to computer models, square one. I’ve screwed around with MODTRAN many times. I guess I have to accept the output, since I can think of no other way to view this issue. From what I’ve read, this model is generally accepted as “truth.” For now, I accept it’s output. 3.7 W/sq M it is.
Hmmm, I have what I consider a “decent physical science background,” but just WHY can’t someone “wrap it up neatly?” WHY is it not “wrapped up in one place by some climate scientist?” Steve Mc is looking for this “wrap-up.” Indeed, why don’t you wrap it up neatly for us? This is an auditing site.
Re: #79
Well, for pretty much the same reason I didn’t write a book on string theory. Just because I think I have developed sufficient understanding to accept that the black box that is MODTRAN (being unwilling to spring the $300 for the source code and sign a non-disclosure agreement) produces results in reasonable agreement with reality doesn’t mean I have the credentials and skill to produce an explanation of how it does it that is accessible to anyone else. Hans, are you listening?
Re: #75(again)
You could also try The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol.1 starting with Chapter 39, The Kinetic Theory of Gases, and continuing through Chapter 46, Ratchet and Pawl. I’ll quote from the second paragraph chapter 39:
Or I could get cute and ask what type of thermometer. For example, if it’s a mercury-in-glass thermometer, you’re measuring the volume of a fixed amount of very pure mercury. Doesn’t help, does it.
So, why are you so dogmatic here?
“Dogmatic”?
I’m quoting Feynman on the difficulty of teaching and understanding the basic concepts of thermodynamics. Difficult doesn’t mean unknown or in question. Quantum mechanics is also difficult, but it can be and is used to make extremely precise and accurate calculations of the properties of atoms and molecules.
I’m catching up a bit; and the link in #58 is a comprehensive and informative one — nice quip of irony at the end, to top things off.
Re: #49
In times past in the Air Weather Service of the U.S. Air Force, weather forecasters were required to meet a standard for accurate weather forecasts. If a weather forecaster had to many busted forecasts and failed to comply with the minimum standard, the weather forecaster was required to undergo retraining as a weather forecaster or resign. If the weather forecaster once more had too many busted forecasts and failed to meet the minimum standard for forecasting accuracy after their retraining, they were removed from their assignment as weather forecasters, which often meant involuntary separation (in other words fired).
Does anyone have any information which indicates the performance standards and record of accuracy for James Hansen? Hasn’t he busted more than a few major and minor forecasts? Didn’t he make some climate forecasts in the Eighties and Nineties which were a bust?
I would support a continuing ban on discussion of thermo. If you are not professionally connected with the subject, it is just too difficult to understand. My apologies to those who are knowledgable about the subject, but many postings would be misleading and some would contain outrageous misinformation giving rise to much unproductive argument. Steve is not a thermodynamics expert and it’s his blog.
This blog is focused on empirical data and how it is measured, interpreted and presented to the public. It is already evident that it has provided an invaluable public service. Lets keep it that way and not permit it to degenerate into pointless discussions about what for most people is an arcane subject.
Anthony, John, Steve.
Yesterday’s server IP address had been hard coded within CA pages, replacing
http://www.climateaudit.org.
Fixed.
>> Lets keep it that way and not permit it to degenerate into pointless discussions about what for most people is an arcane subject.
I agree with the point that Steve is focused on auditing AGW data sets, and that science is “off topic”. However, you go too far with this comment, with very loaded words: misleading, outrageous misinformation, unproductive, degenerate, pointless. Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
AGW is about how the temperature will be changing. Thermodynamics is the branch of science that deals with temperature.
Thermo = heat (from greek Thermē)
Dynamics = how things change and the motivating or driving forces
So, I think it’s fair to say that the public would be very interested to find out that the entire AGW pseudo scientific establishment, including all it’s proponents, ignore thermodynamics, and worse, claim as science ideas that violate the known scientific laws of thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics is allowed in unthreaded. THat is the place for stuff that is a bit more off-topic. And heck, Steve has raised questions about energy balance and the like himself anyhow.
# 66
Jae,
Models work just as simulators. My English is not so good, so I prefer to put it into formulas to know how they get the value 3.7 W/m^-2:
¢ T = [¿] ln [(CO2) / (CO2) s] / 4 (Ð) T^3
¢ T = [5.35] ln [(560 ppmv) / (280 ppmv) s] / 4 (5.6697) (300.15)^3
¢ T = 3.71 / 6.13 = 0.61 K
Thus, they just put it into their models and look for a flawed formula to get the cipher 3.71 W/m^-2 that matched with the supposed change of global temperature supposedly given in 1998.
But it’s not true because:
q sto = k (m)(Cp) ¢T /¢s
q sto = 0.016142 (9.07 x 10^-4 Kg)(992 J/kg K) 0.62 K/1s = 0.01 W/m^2
¢T = 0.0022 / 0.215 = 0.01 K
0.01 is not a significant change of temperature if the density of carbon dioxide doubles.
Steve McIntyre,
I congratulate with you. I listened you through the Canadian Radio. Well done!
Hoof!!! What a mess of symbols. It must be as follows:
delta T = [alfa] ln [(CO2) f / (CO2) i] / 4 (S-B constant) T^3
delta T = [5.35] ln [(560 ppmv) f / (280 ppmv) i] / 4 (5.6697) (300.15)^3
delta T = 3.71 / 6.13 = 0.61 K
Thus, they just put it into their models and look for a flawed formula to get the cipher 3.71 W/m^-2 that matched with the supposed change of global temperature supposedly given in 1998.
But its not true because:
q sto = k (m)(Cp) delta T /delta t
q sto = 0.016142 (9.07 x 10^-4 Kg)(992 J/kg K) 0.62 K/1s = 0.01 W/m^2
deltaT = 0.0022 / 0.215 = 0.01 K
0.01 is not a significant change of temperature if the density of carbon dioxide doubles.
Sorry
# 66
Jae,
If they do not introduce that cipher, then their models would not match with reality. They just added the IS units:
(5.35) [ln (560 ppmv) f / (280 ppmv) i] = 3.71:
3.71 W/m^2 / 4 (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m^2 K^4 ) (300.15 K)^3
# 96
To myself,
I’m still wondering from where did those 5.35 W/m^2 come. Someone said that it was obtained empirically; however, I’m still considering it like an arbitrary value obtained by iteration.
I have a few words to those who complain when Steve tries to keep the discussion on a certain path or those who complain when they are edited after making inappropriate comments. It is Steve’s blog and he can keep it on the straight and narrow. As in the saying “it’s my party and I will cry if I want to.”
I had essentially quit posting on Realclimate long ago, but when they posted the 1934 thread and the garbage started flying I had to send some in. It seems that some people are allowed to dissent, but not too many. Certain topics cannot be disputed too much. I got a few posts in but most were censored out. When Timothy Chase posted 297 I sent a response to his first point. It got deleted twice, so the third time I sent the following:
Re #297 Tim says “Personally, I have a variety of problems with Steve McIntyre. First, he is not a climatologist, and he has deliberately made use of statistical methods which he should know are invalid to try and discredit the hockey stick.”
My response the last time was:
Can you demonstrate even one method which is invalid. All of Steve’s points were verified by Dr. Ed Wegman, one of the most prominent statisticians in the USA.
(I must be correct because I am being censored).
So in conclusion, the people who think that RC is giving them “science” are having a joke played on them. I will not even attempt to post there again.
So Great Job! Steve McIntyre, John A, and Anthony Watts.
Indeed, I’m curious.
Mark
#90:
#93: Gunnar,
Steve needs what we in industry call a “Mission Statement.” And, doggon it, if we’re not going to audit every computer model for completeness and correctness, so be it. Examining real-world climate data for provenance, and proper evaluaton and interpretaion is of critical importance, especially when some such as myself suspect that some stakeholders are not being completely objective. You need a fox in the henhouse to keep ’em honest.
I don’t see why you consider evaluation and interpretation of data to be “not science.”
I would say its an important part of science, along with experimental design and correct formulation of hypotheses and, of course the experimental legwork. In fact, that area seems to be precisely where some climate scientists are coming up short.
I’m not getting where he said evaluation and interpretation of data to be not science, particularly in the two posts you reference.
Mark
Does anyone know about Arctic sea ice data pre-1972, overall Soviet data?
I know that there is this reconstruction:
which should be the same accepted by IPCC; but, or it demonstrates that Arctic sea ice extent is regardless of average temperature of the area (having maxima during “hot” period, hot as now, and beginning to get low during “cold” period), then that GW is not a primary forcing (which could be coal dust as AO or other), or it demonstrates that it is a big error if not a false (which I strongly suspect, for the error at least: no uncertainty is given, while we attach satellite measurements – covering all the area every day, even if not so precise – to what are supposed to be old naval measurements – even less precise, and with less cover).
But, I found alternative data, even if I cannot say how precise are they, nor confirmed by other sources.
Basing on Atlas Arktiki, GUGK, Moscow 1985, a “permanent” ice pack for Arctic is given with an area just of about 4millions km^2 (almost as 2005 minimum, and with the same “borders”); “permanent” ice is in antithesis with “seasonal” ice, forming and melting every year, then I can suppose “permanent” one refers to, if not a mean minimum, at least waht could be a “normal” minimum in a decade. Do not misunderstood this “permanent” ice with ice shelves, like those of Antarctica, because it is clearly made different (basing on Atlas Antarkitiki, we have ice shelves, permanent ice pack, and seasonal ice pack).
>> I dont see why you consider evaluation and interpretation of data to be not science. I would say its an important part of science
I think we’re talking about different things. You are speaking generally about some tasks that are necessary to complete a scientific work. In this case, statistical math. Another example is writing.
I’m using the word “science” as in “subject matter”. Math and writing are not part of the subject matter of science.
I wholeheartedly agree that what Steve (and other statisticians) are doing is vitally important. I also agree with Steve’s desire to stay on-topic. Since my background and interest are in science itself, it just means that I need another outlet. My posts are completely censored on every AGW blog I have tried, so I’m compelled to create my own.
It’s interesting that the main AGW “scientists” approach the problem from a math point of view. That is, they take a whole bunch of data, run them through statistical methods, and then make very specious claims about cause and effect. Fortunately, the data isn’t perfect for their agenda, and they aren’t very good at math, so Steve’s role is critical.
Here’s an interesting study
Click to access HeatCapacity.pdf
It’s due to be printed in the Journal of Geophysical Research soon.
The author finds that the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is only 1/3rd that used by the IPCC.
He finds that the climates thermal lag to new CO2 is only 5 years.
He predicts that doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels will result in only another 0.6C rise in temperatures.
Comments?
To Filippo #102
Here is paper on 1953 to 1977 arctic sea ice from Walsh (who is usually cited as the seminal source for historic sea ice) (1961 would be about 1 million km2 lower sea ice extent than today’s record low:)
Click to access i1520-0485-9-3-580.pdf
The rest of these sources I cannot find on-line but there is a dataset for 1870 to 1998 from Walsh and Bill Chapman from the Cryosphere Today which you can find here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/guide/Data/walsh.html
Other papers are the following:
Walsh, J.E. (1978): A data set on Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent. World Data Center-A for Glaciology (Snow and Ice), “Glaciological Data, Report GD-2”, part 1, pp. 49 – 51.
Kelly, P. M. 1979: An arctic sea ice data set, 1901-1956. Glaciological Data, Report GD-5: Workshop on Snow Cover and Sea Ice Data. World Data Center-A for Glaciology [Snow and Ice], 101-106.
[Steve: snip – until you clean up the hate postings at your site, you are not allowed to post links here. You might start with removing odious comments about Jews and the holocaust. ]
Hmmm…I found this article over at Townhall:
But NASA said:
Of course, you know this since you posted it and it’s still on your blog. What’s going on with this “they blocked me!” BS Steve? You leave the mistaken impression that NASA was out to stop you, when it was your mistake that caused the whole problem. This strikes me as rather dishonest.
Steve: Here is the rest of the quotation in which I explained that NASA “quickly” relented and allowed me access. Boris, you appear to have intentionally attempted to mislead readers here by implying that I suggested otherwise. Further, I deny that my downloading procedure was a “mistake”.
Boris, the clue is where NASA says :
Thank you John (#105)!
This too seems to give very different values from Cryosphere Today historical data, and lower as well.
Steve,
You realize those posts were somewhat awkward attempts by your defenders to mock my use of the terms “warmocaust”,
and “warmocaust collusionist”, which I am trying to press into service in place of “Global Warming” and
“Global Warming Denialist”? If you are sure, I will remove them. Howewver, I’d also like your opinion o
on my bio focusing on your pre-denial years. The only thing I’m not sure of is the stuff about Noranda…
# 77
DeWitt Payne,
However, the explanation is simple and one doesn’t need to introduce too many new concepts. The question was what is that we measure with thermometers:
The heat is energy in transit which can exist in the rotational, vibrational and translational motions of the particles of a system, whereas the temperature is the measurement of the average of the kinetic energy of the particles of a substance. The average of the molecular kinetic energy depends on the translational motion of the particles of a system. That is what we measure with thermometers.
RE: #105 – Very interesting that this paper was published in 1979, the very year that “modern” sea ice decline charts start. When these charts are presented, why not include the Walsh reconstruction as well, with a caveat statement? I think I know the answer.
# 110
Bigcityliv,
I would be offended by the words game that you’re playing when comparing a dark event on a people with other non related issues.
#103: Gunnar,
Unfortunately, a blog about Thermodynamics and computer modeling is not likely to be visited often, in contrast to the well-travelled landscape here.
Steve: It’s not at all clear that part of the problem wasn’t just using a robot, rather than who you were. A more fair statement to the interviewer would have included that issue, but you said nothing of it.
re: bunny fence:
The Jennifer Marohasy blog has a story on the Austrialian bunny fence, and a picture which shows the persistent clouds on the non-bunny side.
http://wwwcomm.murdoch.edu.au/synergy/0403/fence.htm
If this is real, it has some interesting implications.
Recently I shared an assessment that climatic autumn began on the North American Pacific Coast N of 37.5 on July 18th. It would appear that in certain parts of central Canada, a similar result has occurred. There have been unseasonable frost problems there the past few days.
Regarding A/C units: For the compressor type, running all the time can refer to either the fan or the compressor. Sometimes the fan runs all the time. If there’s multiple A/C units it’s possible that at least one of the compressors in the group runs all the time. So if we’re talking about fans or groups of A/C units, they could be “running all the time”. (We should also know if we mean window units or central…)
If it’s a swamp cooler type, then the fan often runs all the time, depending on type.
#117,
You mean … Bunnies cause clouds?
#120. I think that you mean Rabetts.
Could be Doc, could be.
Think if you read that blog entry about the bunny fence you will find that it suggests that warmer air at the surface due to darker vegetation leads to greater cloud formation due to convective currents carrying moisture higher into the atmosphere. If that leads to an increase in albedo where incident sunlight is concerned then it demonstrates how convection can introduce a negative feedback. A true greenhouse blocks convection after all unlike the effect of atmospheric CO2.
That should be “moving electron.”
Mark
Protons do occasionally absorb an electron, which results in a neutron and a photon.
Mark
#125 Mark,
Wow, thanks for this great explanation. It’s great to have another EE around.
I was simply waiting for one of their replies before I commented. Dave’s comments above were completely unwarranted.
Mark
re 111 Nasif: Finally a nibble.
I took three thermometers (calibrated for consistency) taped them to polymer block, and pointed them up, down and sideways. Does the fact that they all read differently mean that gas molecules are piling up in my yard? Which do you think read the highest?
Can someone give me a link for where NOAA downgraded 2006 from warmest (as advertised in Jan 2007) to 2nd warmest? I’ve taken a quick look without success.
Re:#125
So from what you say, you don’t really need to ionize atoms or molecules to separate them with a magnetic sector or RF quadrupole mass analyzer? That would be news to mass spectroscopists everywhere. I guess I really didn’t need the Inductively Coupled Plasma part of my ICP-MS to generate ions for analysis.
I will admit to one mistake. I wrote atom when I meant molecule when referring to dipole moment.
There are so many things wrong with your and Gunnar’s replies that it is clear that further discussion is a waste of bandwidth. Another name for my virtual killfile.
Re 131
I checked NOAA this morning and as of these date they have not corrected thier rankings.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
I queried this site to produce in table form the ranking between 1895 and 2006 and had the 1998 still show as hottest.
Re 131,
Steve,
See: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/us-summary.html
Thanks, JerryB. No press release, I notice. BTW I’m glad that you saved the former GISS US temperature history.
Re: #131, #134
Quote:
This report was updated on May 1, 2007 to reflect revised statistics for the 2006 annual average temperature for the contiguous U.S. based on updates of preliminary data available in January 2007 as well as changes resulting from the switch from Version 1 to Version 2 of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data set.
——————————————————————————–
National Temperature
The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the 2nd warmest on record and within 0.1°F of the record set in 1998. Using final quality controlled data from the recently released USHCN Version 2 data set (see details below), the 2006 annual average temperature was 54.9°F, 2.1°F (1.2°C) above the 20th Century mean and 0.08°F (0.04°C) cooler than 1998.
In a mid-January 2007 climate report and NOAA press release, NCDC indicated the 2006 annual average temperature for the contiguous United States was the warmest on record based on USHCN Version 1 preliminary data and that USHCN Version 2 was expected to show 2006 to be the 2nd warmest year on record once operational testing was completed. Now that the USHCN Version 2 data set has replaced Version 1 as NCDC’s official data set for calculations of U.S. national averages, this report has been revised to reflect a ranking of 2nd warmest for 2006.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/us-summary.html
Steve
I’ve read that the satellites that are used to measure our global temperatures are calibrated using 65 some odd ground weather stations around the world. Does anyone one know which ground stations they use for calibration? Are any of these ground stations in the US and if so which ones. Has any one checked these stations for upkeep, location?
# 130
Alan Ames,
It depends on the plane on which the bulbs of the three thermometers were placed. I can put three thermometers at the same height, pointing up, down, and sideways; however, if the three bulbs are in the same plane and they were not placed away one from the others, the readings might be the same, except by microscopic manufacturing defects of the devices, the charge of the batteries and the distance at which each bulb rests from the perimeters of the polymer block.
However, you want to know which read was or might be highest. If it is one polymer block where you inserted the three thermometers, then the highest reading would be from the thermometer closest to the edge of the block. If each bulb was inserted in an individual polymer block, then the highest read could have been that of the bulb closest to any warmest surface facing up.
I wouldn’t venture myself to guess what reading was highest because I don’t know the variables at your yard.
BTW, what’s the meaning of “nibble”?
R. OConnell,
I know at least the location of one station. It’s in the International Airport of Monterey, Mexico.
re 140 Nasif: Thanks for the comment. Since entering the fray, I stumbled over several issues I did not understand, and from the discussions other people have the same difficulties. One issue is that there is radiation running through the atmosphere which can be uncoupled to the molecular kinetics depending on wavelength. Thus, a thermometer (or other object) can and usually will interact so as to display a higher or lower temperature than the kinetic temperature, depending on how it is shielded. One sunny day around 1pm my upper thermometer read 10 degrees F higher than the horizontal, but the down pointing read even 4 degrees higher because it could see no cold sky. In the morning higher and lower are reversed because my patio is a good radiator. To some extent, a thermometer is a (poor) antenna for the radiation stream which may or may not match the molecular kinetics. The basic point here is that temperature does not necessarily indicate local heat content, contrary to what most people understand.
(A nibble is something a fish does before taking a hook. Thank you for the chance to amplify.)
Steve Sadlov,
Have you seen this yet?
I know you’ve made some comments in the past about Cryosphere Today and their calculations. Are their measurements accurate or is this disingenuous.
[snip- Steve: please do not discuss theoretical issues of electromagnetic radiation here. I’ve deleted some similar posts and if I left some in place, it was because I can’t be bothered rooting them all out.]
104, MarkW: The study you linked is extremely interesting and is a “must read” for those interested in forcing, models, and climatte sensitivity.
# 143
Allan Ames, Thank you for the definition of “nimble”. I had the same problem when taking temperatures at the field. If I pointed the thermometers to the sky the readings were lower than if I pointed the thermometers down. It was a big problem that was fixed when I replaced the usual devices with infrared thermometers. However, if I point the infrared thermometers to the sky, the readings are 1/3 or less than the atmospheric temperature, which could be explained by the correction factor for surfaces facing down (I think so).
Your explanation about the cause of discrepancies on the readings is very interesting. Could you expand on it?
Re:#136
Steve M., I promise to try much harder to not get sucked in the next time something like this comes up.
# 136
Jae, yeah! You’re right. Then, alpha = 5.35 W m^-2, which is the suppossed sensitivity of CO2, must be 1.3 W m^-2! Wow! The disclosure of that paper will cause panic among AGWists!
re #131 Steve McIntyre
re #135 Jerry B
Steve asked: Can someone give me a link for where NOAA downgraded 2006 from warmest (as advertised in Jan 2007) to 2nd warmest? I’ve taken a quick look without success.
Jerry B replied: See:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/us-summary.html
[2006 Annual Climate Review
U.S. Summary
National Climatic Data Center
Asheville, North Carolina
21 June 2007]
—————-
1. Jerry B’s link is the same as the link under the label in NOAA’s original press release dated 9 January 2007:
http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2007/jan07/noaa07-001.html
NOAA News Releases 2007
NOAA 2007-001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: David Miller
1/9/07
NOAA REPORTS 2006 WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD FOR U.S.
General Warming Trend, El Niño Contribute to Milder Winter Temps
or the link under the label in:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/global.html
Climate of 2006 – Annual Report
National Climatic Data Center
11 January 2007
Ie the correction was seemingly implemented by editing the original version of ‘2006 Annual Climate Review: U.S. Summary’, and replacing the original version with the edited version as the document that the links under the above labels pointed to.
2. There’s also another document on the web that recites that it was ‘updated on May 1, 2007 to reflect revised statistics for the 2006 annual average temperature for the contiguous U.S. based on updates of preliminary data available in January 2007 as well as changes resulting from the switch from Version 1 to Version 2 of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data set’:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/ann06.html
Climate of 2006 – in Historical Perspective
Annual Report
National Climatic Data Center
21 June 2007
Once again the link under the label in the document is the same as Jerry’s link, ie:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/us-summary.html
So in the case of this other document, the reader gets the same recital twice!
3. NOAA News Releases for 2007 are listed at:
http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2007/
News Releases 2007
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
U.S. Department of Commerce
There is no News Release listed either in June 2007 or later that corrects the original News Release dated 9 January 2007.
Also I have not seen a reference to any other form of NOAA publicity for the correction elsewhere on the web.
Steve Mc and other statistics experts: I would sure be interested in your thoughts about the validity of the statistical methodology employed in the paper linked in 104.
Oops!
I wrote the label names between tag marks, and see that the site software has therefore deleted them.
In order the label names were:
‘Based on preliminary data’
‘U.S. Summary’
‘U.S. Summary’
RE: #134 – My opinion is, most if not all assessments of areal sea ice extent (or even, area enclosed by sea ice edge) which are based on satellite data are not reliable. That would of course include Cryosphere Today, which, I have come to discover, is leveraging data from the NSIDC, which is an overtly alarmist and agenda driven group. This is compounded by another problem. Earlier this year, CT undertook … you guessed it… retrospective adjustments of past and present data, such that the depicted sea ice decline from 1979 was shown to be steeper than it had been. That was a real red flag for me. The only thing I trust are assessments which use a combination of visual satellite images, aerial observations, and surface observations, which are then manually depicted using free hand drawing on a map grid. Unfortunately, at present, you can only find this technique used to depict sea ice on the Chukchi Sea and part of the Beaufort Sea, it’s not currently done for the entire Arctic.
There is also a higher order problem. The current popular sea ice depictions only show from 1979 to present. Some sources claim that the mother of all sea ice minima was actually during the early 1960s! But you won’t see that in anything (this is for Steve Bloom) – new. There is, however, I paper, which I will attempt to get the link for, from … you guessed it …. 1979! ….. which discusses earlier sea ice conditions and shows the severe lack of sea ice, via a reconstruction, during the mid 20th century.
What’s “normal” temperature for NOAA? Is the Earth a living being or what?
# 126
R. OConnell,
I cannot access http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
Re the West Australian vermin fence.
I’m familiar with the area. Along a large part of its length, one side is wheat fields and the other side scrub forest. the soil is light coloured sand. The fence basically marks the limit of the area with sufficient rainfall to grow wheat (around 14 inches per annum). Yields are low and plants are spaced well apart to maximize moisture for each plant. Also wheat is a winter crop here so wheat fields are bare in the summer. On the scrub side of the fence the vegetation is dense and indeed much darker than the sand soil.
Use Google Earth to fly to Ravensthorpe. You can clearly see the difference between green and yellow coloured wheatfields and the much darker scrub on the other side of the fence (north east of the town – the fence runs more or less north south).
BTW, I have seen clouds lining up along the boundary of wheat fields and bush and never appreciated its significance before. I think its a common phenomena.
Oops!
Seems they left something out of the climate models. Like an entire supergyre in the ocean.
CSIRO
Hmmm. Not incorporated yet, huh.
I looked for 2 weather stations on either side of the vermin fence for comparison. The best two seem to be Merredin in the wheatbelt and Southern Cross a 100 kilometers further east on the scrub side of the fence.
Bear in mind that as a general rule rainfall amounts decrease from west to east across Western Australia and consistent with this pattern Southern Cross has less annual rainfall (295.0mm) than Merredin (327.3). However, Southern Cross has substantially more cloudy days and substantially less clear days despite the lower rainfall.
Merredin: mean number of clear days (annual) = 172.0; mean number of cloudy days = 74.8
Southern Cross: mean number of clear days (annual) = 137.7; mean number of cloudy days = 101.6
Average temperatures are similar at the two locations.
Merredin data – http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_010092.shtml
Southern Cross data – http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_012074.shtml
Is there an opportunity to vote TCO off the island?
Assuming there isn’t, perhaps TCO can stick to his biting critique and drop the preaching about publishing. That sermon is so “last year”.
#143,
Thanks Steve,
I only ran across it from Dr. Master’s blog entry at Wunderground. During hurricane season, his blog is a popular spot and I appreciate his updates, except when they digress to AGW. In fact, that’s one of the things that differentiate this blog from so many others. Steve M casts a critical eye towards pretty much everything he blogs on, and many of the people here have varying opinions on so many papers, etc. But most other blogs simply post things that they agree with and just present it as if it were fact. Maybe it is, but if you’re going to cover it, then go into some detail to explain why you agree and how solid you think it is.
Hurricane season appears to have finally appeared. Or at least is now affecting our hemisphere. And “Storm World” author Chris Money’s appearance at the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas has been posted to YouTube, and is viewable at his site here. His book is the subject of his talk.
RE 145
Try this Nasif
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
you’ll have to enter “table” and “rank” for it to query the rankings.
If the satellites that are used to measure our global temperatures are calibrated using 65 some odd ground weather stations around the world and thoes ground stations are not maintained properly whats to say that the data from the satellites is correct? It seems to me that if we can’t maintain weather stations here in this country how would we expect them to be maintained properly in the third world.
Anyone have an answer to this?
#153
I think the satellites are calibrated against on board temperature references, and maybe even the 2.7 K blackbody radiation from the Big Bang. I doubt that they use ground stations. Surface stations are only point measurements, the satellites measure average temperature over a large chunk of the atmosphere. They cover about 60% of the globe each day with 10K measurements, 100% every week. Go to the MSU website at Univ. of Alabama at Huntsville to get the details.
#100
Basic physics suggests the value should be 0.06 not 0.6
>> I think the satellites are calibrated against on board temperature references, and maybe even the 2.7 K blackbody radiation from the Big Bang. I doubt that they use ground stations.
I think that the satellite measurements are, and do need to be calibrated against very accurate surface measurements. It’s a great point that these sites need to be audited.
Steve, you snip EM discussions, yet here is another example where someone took a radiation measurement (from the big bang), and plugged it into the black body equation to calculate an “equivalent” temperature, even though the big bang radiation has many sources besides atomic movement. Then, they claimed this “equivalent” temperature could be used to calibrate the satellites, when as far as I know, no human was there to measure the actual temperature of the big bang. It’s circular logic.
#49
The Hadley centre are brilliant. They have a climate model for predicting hurricanes ( between 7 and 13 with a confidence of 70%. I think I could guess with that amount of confidence) and a climate model for the end of the century, and now a climate model for the nexty 10 years. Hmm, I wonder if they are all the same model in different clothes? The clever bit is that they are selling predictions with the 10 yr model. I think they may also have noted that world sea temperatures are falling and have therefore suggested that the 10 yr model has predicted a relenting of GW for now but increasing in 2010. Isn’t that about the beginning of the peak of the solar cycle?
>> Isnt that about the beginning of the peak of the solar cycle?
Right, man is apparently causing global warming every 11 years.
re #154- Each MSU and AMSU transponder is internally calibrated against a stable on-board reference to reduce instrument drift. This is performed very frequently. The resulting measurements of temperature-dependent microwave emssions from oxygen in the atmosphere are corrected for surface effects (particularly the LT data), orbit drift and inter-satellite changeovers, and then compared with Radiosonde data for final absolute temperature calibration. I do not think surface station records play a role in this calibration process.
#159 paminator,
Phew, that’s very reassuring. Excellent info. It’s great that the questionable surface stations are not used. And of course, the Radiosonde units use accurate thermometers, so we’re connecting the measurement to the real world.
re 137 Nasif: Probably best to avoid anything much beyond the direct observations here, but I feel the need to reinforce the point that thermometers and radiometers measure somewhat different things. (Of course all CA regulars know this, but someone might be tuning in for the first time.) Based on the “asphalt” thread, I think it is safe to say that one needs to consider the total geometry of a thermometric measurement to unravel the factors.
re 153, 154 Satellite measurements: a quick search gets many hits, f.ex
Click to access Blended.calibration.Williams.et.al.BAMS.2000.pdf
Once calibrated it should work anywhere.
R. OConnell… Thank you so much!
Misleading readers, huh? Regardless of whether you think your procedure for downloading was a mistake or not, NASA perceived it as such and said it violated their policy. You violated their policy and they banned your IP. Your action caused you to be banned because you did not put a delay into your scraping program and were leaving the NASA site blocked for other users. You can complain that NASA doesn’t know what they are doing, blah, blah, blah. But you violated their policy. They didn’t ban you because they didn’t want you have to have the data. They allowed you to continue downloading. They got you the data quickly–kudos on at least getting that part of the story across.
Your point about your blog bringing light to the issue is another shot at NASA, implying that if someone else (the hoi polloi 🙂 ) had tried to get data they would have been S.O.L. Yet another unfounded assertion. And interesting that you actually think that statement mollifies your omission.
Funny you don’t mention it was your fault for violating their policy. That you still don’t acknowledge that you violated their policy is likewise funny.
Steve: Again you continue to misrepresent matters. The NASA site was never “blocked for other users”. After access was restored, we tested this online with a CA reader (JAmes Lane ) confirming that he had no difficulty accessing the NASA site while my program was running. As to whether blog publicity helps get access to data, my experience has been that it has.
Ahhh, so now we learn from Boris that Steve is an all-round bad Dude because he violated NASA’s policy on scraping their site.
Perhaps as a result he is as duplicitous as Mann and others in the Global Warming debate. Should we listen to him?
Re #164 – Don’t you have something useful to do?
Boris, if I were as staunch a defender of all things of the consensus as you, perhaps I would miss the points that Steve M has made. I believe we have concluded that what he was doing was not slowing down the site and not generally considered to be robotic action. Regardless, Steve M has explained how he contacted NASA and what transpired before he dug his heels in did appear to me to be delaying tactics on NASA’s part. I would guess that indeed a lesser known without Steve M’s tenacity would have been foiled or at least not helped by NASA’s initial reactions.
I find it interesting if not humorous that people such as yourself who probably have the instincts to stand up for the little guy against bureaucratic organizations in cases like this one defend the big guys and even go out of your way to admonish the little guy.
RE 165.
And you should see the devastating criticisms of Anthony. why He writes snarky
titles above some photos!!! Quite the jester that Watts fellow.
#164,
Boris, please try to get your facts straight. The NASA sight was NOT blocked for others. NASA has not alleged that it was yet here you try to make the unequivocal statement that is was. Please provide proof that the NASA site was blocked to others while Steve’s program was running. I won’t hold my breath waiting on your proof.
Steve, I can’t tell you how disconcerting it is that you just delete our posts, just because they are in the wrong thread. A decent blog software would allow us to reply to someone, and simply change the thread. It would also allow you to simply change the thread. It’s not like we were swearing, you simply deleted our posts because you perceived them as “off topic”. As such, I’m responding to a non-existent post.
>> Any comments from you brainier ones out there?
Well, we’ve been instructed not to discuss that unmentionable article.
>> Only after the bulk of the IR is absorbed does the temperature gradient reverse
Actually, I believe the AGW claim to be that stratospheric C02 would heat the troposphere. 2nd law prevents this. I think they originally claimed that the C02 greenhouse effect would operate in the troposphere, but then this position became indefensible, given the overwhelming dominance of water vapor in the troposphere. Then, they fell back to stratospheric C02 being the agent of warming, but this is where 2nd law invalidates their claim.
Although the upper stratosphere can heat the lower stratosphere, the lower stratosphere cannot heat the troposphere, since the troposphere is warmer. And it gets warmer as you get closer to the surface, with the surface being the warmest. This last point means that any warming cannot reach the surface. If correct, this is quite devastating to the AGW idea.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/secondary/teachers/atmosphere.html
Regardless of whether or not the NASA site was blocked for other users, Steve was still violating NASA’s policy. They blocked him because he violated the policy, not because of who he was or what he might do with the data or because there is some global conspiracy.
Don’t you think he owes Townhall readers an accurate version of the story? Or do you just like the rhetorical flourish of the “They blocked my IP address” line?
Boris, I heard a recent radio interview with Steve M wherein he explained what happened and noted that he was let back online to do his downloading (with no or minimum changes on his part as I recall). His point that was made for my understanding was that he felt that his blog site leverage could have led to a quicker resolution to the problem than one would surmise from the original suggestion that NASA handed him for getting the data from other sources. Like the case of the IPCC reviewer’s reports the initial instincts of these organizations is not to ease the path to obtaining information and by Steve M having the tenacity to push the issue he not only completes the job, but he points out the bureaucratic mishandling of information. For some reason, that seems to aggravate the heck out of yourself and other people. What in heck do you expect of Steve M? Do you want him to go hat in hand to these faceless organizations and say, I most humbly apologize for failing to play along with your bureaucratic rules and gamesmanship and I promise that I will not try so diligently to obtain information that should otherwise be in the public view.
In my book even if Steve M had not been as polite and diplomatic as he was or successful for that matter, I would be thanking him for the efforts.
A quote about programs that buy a sell securities…thought it was appropriate…
Lawyering technical details about rules violations are all a guy like Boris has…
…and Boris can’t even do that correctly. Bringing up old canards that have been thoroughly disproven is a waste of everyone’s time. I’ll summarize the prior discussion conclusions one more time. Hopefully this subthread can come to an end…once more.
1) Steve’s script violated no policy, nor any notice. It was performing a reasonable function in a reasonable way.
* There was no anti-download policy listed on the site for humans to read.
* Computer-based robots.txt policies apply to an app that “automatically traverses the Web’s hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.”
* Neither your favorite browser “site download” tool, nor the normal web programming languages (PHP, etc), provide any support for robots.txt — only the specialized web crawling apps make use of the robots file.
2) The web admin was within his rights to block Steve temporarily. Any web admin might do that for any reason. And, they restored access once Steve made some noise. This too was reasonable.
3) The GISS server was not overloaded; there was no denial of any service to anyone. Nobody other than alarmists has claimed such. Not even the web administrator of the site. This even though the web page in question was inefficient. (Most likely an internal script that had been pressed into use to serve up web pages.)
* The web page was reasonable as an internal tool: select a data set, and the page created all associated (txt, pdf, graphic) files.
* The page was inefficient as a normal web page: no caching, produces output that browsers never request.
* Steve’s script caused less of a load than a normal browser: it only downloaded text data, not graphics.
* Other users were never slowed down while the needed data was being downloaded. (Tested empirically, and it’s obvious: Steve’s single-threaded text-only script places much less load than a typical browser “downloader” tool that grabs all text and graphics, for many pages, all in parallel.)
Steve’s script was reasonable for its purpose. The web server script was reasonable for an internal purpose. It was not designed properly to handle external requests yet was pressed into use for that, probably inadvertently. The admin was reasonable in blocking access (they can do that for any reason), and acted appropriately to unblock after Steve made some noise. It’s not a big deal. These kinds of things happen a thousand times a day all over the planet.
Boris, when all was said and done, it was a non-event. Time to move on 😉
I can’t believe non-US citizens have free access to the fruits of my tax dollars. International IPs should all be blocked.
#176 wildlifer
Who ever you are the internet was in part developed for free interchange of information and you would defeat this purpose. You likewise have access to unclassified information paid for by the British, European, Australian, Russian etc tax payer.
#177
It appears that wildlifer has shot his intellectual wad and is now in full trolling mode.
For those not fluent in American English vernacular, this means he is not to be taken seriously.
#177,
That implies that previously he was to be taken seriously. That scenario ended after his first post.
re 176
I am a US non-citizen and yet I have a US IP address. Mysterious isn’t it?
re 176
Would somebody please list, for wildlifer, the numerous ways in which someone outside the US could access the Internet with a US IP address – all of them quite common, legal and proper.
Sorry, but it’s too welfare-state for my tastes. The same goes for FOIA’s from international entities/individuals. They have no standing.
Re# 148 (Bunnies)
Phil B, I wonder if this is the same partition that is studied in
Click to access R-291.pdf
if so, its quite interesting that the extra 14w/m2 that is reflected back to outerspace by the wheat crop has so little effect on the local air temperature.
If it’s a non-event, Mr. Pete, why is Steve even talking about it? NASA noticed his downloading and blocked him. Your denial of this fact is almost as unsurprising as Jaye’s childish non-post.
Re #176, wildlifer
I suspect you’re joking, but if not, recall that we are also subject to the blight of politically motivated pseudo-science, courtesy of your tax dollars.
Chas #183, the link comes up not found.
Philip B #186 Hmmm. I am not able to get to Pielke Sr’s site at all (which is where the paper comes/came from)
Boris continues to demonstrate an uncommon ability to miss the obvious:
Because, as has been endlessly repeated, it was significant, briefly. He was blocked until he went public; they relented and opened the channel back up.
Please read what I wrote and quote where I denied that they blocked him. You’ll have a hard time finding it, since I said they blocked him. I said it twice in post #175 above, and said it again here.
Once the whole thing was over, it became a non-event. The only item of potential interest is how much effort was required to get them to unblock. Steve did go public about the block; they did unblock after that.
Most of us have moved on. Occasionally someone will bring up a question about it. It’s a minor curiosity in the big scheme of things.
Personally, I’m more interested in what we’ll discover as weather stations around the world start being audited. And as more of the raw data is inspected and brought up to date.
My concern right now: can we find enough high quality uncontaminated long-term raw data to learn anything at all? Or is this whole thing gonna become an exercise in floor-to-ceiling confidence intervals with wishful-thinking trend lines in the middle? It would be pretty frustrating if all the billions spent in climate research results in nothing of solid scientific value.
173 Jaye: Good point; seems inevitable for GCM’s. It would be interesting to compare the adjustable parameters model to model.
Yeah, but all that was beat in court.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/solar_oregon.htm
I wonder if this doesn’t need some auditing. 1365.4 W/M^2 1900 to 1366.4 W/M^2 in 2000. That is a 1.0 w/m^2 in a century. This is an increase of about 0.18C, if I did the math right. So for this time period of about 0.8C, as best I could measure, their models should have said it was about 0.6C. Also, their temperature anomoly for 2000 should have been 0.3C not 0.1C for natural forcings using the data that is shown. I had to get out a ruler since I didn’t have the data. They are showing a negative slope natural forcing by their models when the data they have included in this part of the report shows a positive slope from year 1950 to 2000.
Check out the headline, MrPete:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2007/08/17/nasa_blocked_climate_change_blogger_from_data
Boris,
Whether or not my post was childish, is I suppose, up for debate but this is undeniably true
You have presented no arguments of any substance at all. Just constant badgering. Why not badger some of the MSM when they misuse information that puts an alarmist spin on the A in AGW.
You are clearly agenda driven with little or no interest in what is really going on with regards to the climate and its effect on mankind. Why not complain about the bogus use of the polar bear footage in AIT? If one only complains about a particular sides grandstanding/misuse of info, etc then one is just a partisan.
Boris,
I see the headline. I also see what you posted earlier:
“NASA noticed his downloading and blocked him.”
What am I missing here?
That’s ridiculous. Do you believe that the packets from your last email necessarily stay on US servers.
What does that have to do with downloading information from US agencies?
Re: #195
Don’t feed the trolls! When ignored, they go away p***ed because no one paid them any attention.
wildlifer, We, the ousiders give much more than taxes to the US; however, we don’t asl for a retribution because we pay also our taxes to the US government.
Steve you might find this interesting.
http://www.scivee.tv/
A “Youtube” for scientific papers.
Boris, your comment reflects little experience with the press. Usually, an interviewee doesn’t see the article copy until it’s too late. Often, a journalist has no control over headline text above their own article.
Steve told the truth, and the article properly quotes him. Obviously, you don’t like the emphasis of the headline and “lead.” That’s the other site’s call to make, not Steve’s. The headline is truthful, even if it emphasizes a relatively minor aspect of the story. This happens all the time in journalism.
Your beef, if any, is with the other site, not Climate Audit.
I continue to puzzle about why the 30-year average temperatures in July in low-elevation Southwest areas is about 3C higher than similar latitudes/elevations in the Southeast. This is particularly striking to me because:
1. The albedo in the Southwest is higher, which should LOWER the difference.
2. The quantity of greenhouse gases (HOH) in the Southeast is FAR greater than in the SW.
3. The “low” elevations in the SW are actually a little higher than those in the SW, so that a lapse rate correction would amplify the difference.
This simple observation suggests (maybe) that:
A. The best greenhouse gas, HOH, has an overall negative feedback on temperature (now, I hope nobody starts talking about enthalpy here again; I’m talking thermometers, DEGREES C).
B. Convection, not radiation, exerts the dominant effect on temperature. As anyone who has experience in drying knows, water vapor is much more efficient than hot dry air in exchanging heat and speeding up the drying process; i.e., the maximum drying rate is effected by CLOSING the dampers and keeping a maximum amount of water vapor in the kiln/dryer (short of condensation). Maybe the atmosphere works that way also–maybe water vapor speeds up the convection process and acts as a “damper” to temperature increases.
C. If RADIATION from GHGs were so important, then why is it hotter in the SW?
An alternative explanation would be that the thermal capacity of all those rocks in the SW is just higher than that of the trees/grass/atmosphere of the SE.
Or maybe I should simply postulate that the SW sucks (heatwise).
Now, Steve Mc, please don’t delete this because of your thermophobia. I didn’t mention Boltzman or Einstein or provide any equations… And I think this is a much better use of bandwith than all the arguing with the trolls here.
RE 176.
Tax Dollars? See your accountant Trolls are not required to pay taxes.
They collect bridge fees after asking inane questions.
RE 202
ANd from under which bridge do you reside/work? Probably one in Minnesota, eh?
anyone read this article from Dr. Gray in NZ
Click to access gray.temp%20oscillation2.pdf
seems to tie in the theme that the climate is part of a natural swing and the surface temps are suspect.
#204: I skimmed the pdf. Does anyone one have an idea of why figure 4 is graphed far beyond 2007? I did’t see an explanation.
The problem may not be Gray’s. He may be using a plot as is from another source.
I think the x axis scale is messed up. That spike must be pinatubo’s eruption 1998.
Bob
I just came across the same graph at Nasif Nahle’s Biocab sit. The graph is at http://biocab.org/1979-2000_English.jpg
Bob
RE 203.
See #202. You prove my point, pal. Priceless.
RE 208.
See #203. You prove my point, pal. Priceless.
RE 209… BZZZZZNT. too bad thank you for playing! we have a glorious
collection of parting gifts. Hey, your very own copy of AIT!
As I said. Trolls ask Inane questions.
See 203. QED. Game over, thank you for playing.
Spend less time in the wild and more time in civilization.
It might clue you in on the subtlies and Ironies of human
communication. Ahhh, then again, stick to the wildlife
I bet they love your sense of humour.
Thanks Bob # 207
i think you have the right chart. I wonder if it is peer reviewed?
#209
What are you, 10 years old?
Oops, I meant 208, not 209.
RE: The poor child who doesn’t know to what post he responds:
See that’s your problem, I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was just mirroring back your juvenile behavior. Come on back when you can converse like an adult without all the third-grade name-calling.
RE: 211
No, but I apologize for playing down to Stevie, the 10-year-old troll’s level.
As I mentioned some time ago on climateaudit, Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has selected for its Fall climate seminar (1 cr, P/F) the topic of the “Hockey” stick and the proxy temperature record for the past 1000 years. The course website is at
http://www.7minds.org/climate/eas8001/
In addition to discussing proxies and statistical analysis methods, the issues of policy, media, dueling blogs, etc will also enter into the discussion. The students will be following discussions on both RC and climateaudit (and possibly a few will blog). It would be helpful if you could recommend a few threads that are either general or particularly timely, since the amount of material on this site can be rather mind numbing and difficult to sort through. Thanks.
Still can’t acess the paper in #148, but using the figure you quote of the extra 14w/m2 that is reflected back to outerspace by the wheat crop. That’s a big negative forcing. And it’s interesting that it has so little effect on the local air temperature.
Could it be that land use changes specifically clearing forest for agriculture, result in both a decrease in the heat content of the surface and surrounding air, and produce a (small) increase in temperature (i.e. agriculture produces a similar effect to an UHI). I realize I am straying into thermodynamics here, but I’m wondering if small changes in air temperature over land tell us anything at all about how much warming or cooling is occuring given the scale of land use changes over the last 150 years. Rises in sea temperatures could result from greater efficiency in transfer of heat from land.
I think I’ll go and listen to Freeman Dyson’s talk again. I may have a new appreciation for what he is saying.
#205 Pinatubo’s big eruption was in 1991, not 1998.
Re #214 Judith try the paper linked here as a starting point on the hockey stick controversy.
Phillip B, I don’t think we need any peer-reviewed papers 🙂 to know we effect the temperature (and wind and humidity and heat absorbtion…) by building cities, removing forests and replacing them with huge areas of irrigated croplands, interfering with burn cycles (and putting in our own cycles) in “synthetic” forests where we grow trees for lumber or paper, building artificial lakes, controlling water flow with dams, and the like. Putting thermometers over areas that are predominently man-made materials, and have various contaminations where all the effects are unknown as to specifics and extent, then “correcting and adjusting” for it as indicative of the above might not be the best way to go about it.
Phillip B, I don’t think we need any peer-reviewed papers 🙂 to know we affect the temperature (and wind and humidity and heat absorbtion…) by building cities, removing forests and replacing them with huge areas of irrigated croplands, interfering with burn cycles (and putting in our own cycles) in “synthetic” forests where we grow trees for lumber or paper, building artificial lakes, controlling water flow with dams, and the like. Putting thermometers over areas that are predominently man-made materials, and have various contaminations where all the effects are unknown as to specifics and extent, then “correcting and adjusting” for it as indicative of the above might not be the best way to go about it.
affect
Professor Curry,
Your course looks very interesting. It is a pity I was not able to attend an elective of this type during my school days (1980s Chemical Engineering). The description appears balanced and describes most of the issues. However, you have missed one of the fundamental concerns of the hockey stick, peer review.
I posted the following in John As I Quit thread, which is relevant to peer review. Albeit somewhat polemical, the central premise hits the point. I have pasted it here for your perusal.
The issue with article inflation and trivialities can be vetted by way of massive review before publication. If each potential article is first reviewed by the wiki world, this can ferret out good from bad and at worst eliminate the problem of herd mentality by diversity of opinion. If, for instance, there were a Scorecard like that of the Environmental Defense Fund, and if a particular article did not reach some predetermined level (score), the professional journals do not publishthey have their reputation to defend as well. The onus to peer review is given instead to the wiki commons. The competition between journals to publish only high quality papers will force scientists to do much more due diligence before submitting. Being published in Nature will again have the prestige it once had.
FYI: WIKINOMICS (pg. 202). Scorecard combines data from over four hundred different scientific and governmental databases to profile local environmental problems and the health effects of toxic chemicals, making it one of the most advanced sites on the Web in terms of informatics.
Stated somewhat differently, if a scorecard or rating system was developed for the explicit culture of scientific peer review, the result acts like a Beacon Score used by banks in the credit rating game. If your article does not reach a specific Beacon score after being reviewed by wikis, the banksdo not lend you money, the journalsdo not publish your paper.
As The Wegman report showed, in its Social Network Analysis the coupled arrangement of co-authored relationships can result when a lack of diversity is employed auditing papers. By first using wikis as the auditing process, coupled co-authored favoritism cannot take place, and the paper is now earmarked with a value determined by peers (everyone). I wonder how the TEAM would do in an environment like that. They would not get away with publishing a graph that was not audited first.
Now, how to begin this process? Any thoughts?
Ian
Re: #214 & #217
I would have selected the paper to which David Smith linked also, but I think in the end your students would be better served by you making a direct request of Steve McIntyre for background material. There are a number of papers that I would assume the students would want to read before reviewing threads. The Wegman and NAS reports on the HS subject give good reviews also. I, for one, would be curious as to how much time the students would have for gaining a basic understanding of the issues involved. Blogging here, without fear of being put down, would be a reasonable means of viewing evidence of their learning curves.
Thanks much for all your helpful suggestions, i will continue to check back for others, and I will encourage students to visit the site and post.
#223, Dr. Curry:
I hope when you discuss blogs you specify the existing special conditions that may make “science through blog” [rather than journals and other traditional fora, exclusively…] in retrospective / predictive climatology more pallateable than in, say, pharmacology or physical chemistry.
1. Climatology is an area of profound, immediate interest to the public and public policy makers.
2. The PUBLIC at large is being asked to make SIGNIFICANT, IMMEDIATE sacrifices, unlike most other areas of science where private businesses are risking their own capital to attempt to exploit new scientific discoveries. There is genuine disagreement about whose medicine will cause the worst injury to the world’s poorest people.
3. Journalists, who tend to be schooled in the humanities, almost universally make gross errors when translating the current scientific understanding to the masses. These errors tend to sensationalize; and little is done to correct errors in reporting [I’m sure at least partly b/c the media never corrects their mistakes, even if asked.]
4. Unlike P-Chem and Pharmacology, which do generate profitable results, these areas of climatology have historically had fewer practitioners, leading to a small pool of reviewers for traditional academic fora.
5. A fairly well-demonstrated bias exists against differing views which can slow or even stop publishing communications in traditional academic fora, if one draws the wrong reviewer(s).
6. Because honest scientists may believe that they understand the issues better than the public and may also believe particular action is required, immediately, at least some of the science has a more overtly political component than one would expect to find in other areas of science. Examples include: press releases, Congressional testimony, IPCC summaries of ‘consensus’ for Public Policymakers, participating in various documentaries produced with the specific intent to influence public policy, etc.
Re #214 – Will the students have access to all the material that MBH used?
# 210
jb914
You can get the data from UAH site and draw the graph: http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
Compare your graph with that graph.
John F. Pittman,
Your mathematics is correct. 1 W/m^-2 = 0.185 K or 0.185 °C.
RE 214.
Welcome back Dr. Curry. That sounds like a great class and a very unique approach.
I’m not going to tell SteveMc how to run his blog, but I think it would be great to
have a thread dedicated to the class. It would also be great to have the sharp
minds from RC on the threads. With a small amount of “hall monitoring” I think the discussions
can be kept on point. I think Most of the folks here, even TCO and me, would be on our
best behavior in a thread like that.
jae #200, much more energy is removed from the suface by trnspiration/evaporation in the US southeast than the US southwest. If the energy recived by the suface is the same, the loss by radiation from the surfsce in the southeast must be much less and therefore the surface temperature would necessarily be lower. Of course other factors will contribute to the difference, an obvious one being a probable difference in cloud cover.
RE 211 and 212.
Dang Johnathan I thought I was losing my game there for a second. NOT
He was “mirroring” me. Yes. I was funny and he presented the mirror image.
Can someone look at the page http://www.biocab.org/Heat_Stored.html and tell me what you think of the calculations and conclusions?
Thanks,
Deb W,
Hi, mononafacts- This is a very serious site, as it is biocab’s site. I think you’re many people behind a nickname. Fortunatelly for you this site is open for AGWists also. Dr. McIntyre et al have been very splendid and patient.
# 231
Deb (mononafacts_),
Are you chasing me? 😉
as a non-scientist trying to educate myself on this subject, is there any specific paper that lays
out the actual “theory” of man made CO2 global warming?
#205. The spike in 1998 is El Nino not Pinatubo.
Bob
#234
These papers could be seen as starting the discussion:
S. Arrhenius, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of
the Ground”, Philosophical Magazine 41, 237-276 (1896)
G. S. Callendar, Can Carbon Dioxide Influence Climate?” Weather 4, 310-314 (1949)
So, I’m still looking for one. Most of the current ‘theory’ seems to be based on modelling and compelling verbal argument. On that same basis I feel sure both oceanic and atmospheric water has a dominant impact on climate.
Anyway, I await a belief built on understanding rather than an understanding built on belief.
Well said.
Steven, a thread based on topics discussed by the class would certainly be great from my perspective. Since much of the climataudit activity seems currently focused on the instrumental historical temperature records, it might be of broad interest to use this thread as sort of an overview assessment of the hockey stick situation, hopefully generating some discussion with climate scientists (incl students).
By the way, I have been following when i can the threads on the surface temperature data records. This is something that has long needed doing, and congrats to all (esp Steve) for a job well done. I am not sure how much difference in the end this will make, but it is very much needed to build confidence in the data record.
David, thanks much for McKitrick’s “why it matters” thread, this helps clarify the motivation for the site and the concerns that you are addressing here (which was also nicely stated by Jim)
There are any number of “skeptical” blogs, etc re AGW, but climateaudit is a real standout in terms of supplementing your questioning with actual work and at a level that actually makes an impact, unlike most of the “drive by” skeptics that are out there
I can’t imagine why you would waste student’s time examining the hockey stick.
Just take a whole bunch of proxy records and let the students make-up any co-efficients they want to weight the proxies and come up with any crooked stick they want (straight line going up, straight line going down, a normal distribution curve) – that is the hockey stick.
re: 234
jb914,
For me, the best explanation of the theory is found here. See especially this on CO2.
I don’t buy it, but at least the theory is explained well.
Re: 221 ‘As The Wegman report showed, in its “Social Network Analysis” the coupled arrangement of co-authored relationships can result when a lack of diversity is employed auditing papers. By first using wikis as the auditing process, coupled co-authored favoritism cannot take place, and the paper is now earmarked with a value determined by peers (everyone). I wonder how the TEAM would do in an environment like that. They would not get away with publishing a graph that was not audited first.’
Hi Ian, you’ll be happy to know that we talked about this issue on the very first day of class. I think most of us (even the paleoclimatologists) agree that while, ideally, we should be able to review any paper that we are considered experts on, it is human nature to include (while if even subconscious) bias in our reviews. However, when it comes down to it, paleoclimatologists are experts in paleoclimatology. I would agree that in this kind of math-heavy science we need to include statisticians on the peer review boards for these journals, but it is hard to argue that you cannot have a climatologist review a climatology paper for fear of some underlying bias.
I dont think any of us have the solution yet. But maybe a stronger push for science in the highschool classrooms will eventually incorporate more scientists in the field later on and we just wont have to worry so much about the Social Network Analysis.
Or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking. =)
I look forward to CA providing some insightful discussion topics throughout the semester.
Re #241, A. Fritz
No, they are specialists in paleoclimatology. Not always the same thing.
Complete disclosure of data and workings, always, no exceptions. Or don’t call it science.
# 242
fFreddy,
Exactly, but some people demand that others disclose data and workings when they hold data and methodology under top secret.
Re #238 I like the idea of a special thread on the hockey stick, where the participants are limited to the Georgia Tech students, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry and with an open invitation to Michael Mann and other climate scientists. The GT students could make comments and pose questions, which Steve M or others could respond to.
The rest of us would sit in the bleachers and watch, with the understanding that if we post something on this special thread it will get snipped.
Would this work? Who knows.
Is it worth a try? Yes, I think so.
Judith (re: EAS8001), reading the syllabus of the course I think there is a, IMHO important, recent paper missing from the reading list:
G. Bürger: On the verification of climate reconstructions, Clim. Past, 3, 397-409, 2007.
I think it might be the best first reading, and it should definitely be required reading in statistical methods (Oct 29th) and verification (Nov 12th) classes.
If I were the instructor for the course, the following would be my requirements for the students (about MBH9x):
1) Understands the effect of using the “nonstandard PCA” (=Mannian) in reducing the tree ring networks [suggestion for a lab session: create 70 white noise “proxies” and artificially lift (or lower!) the mean of one of the series in the “caliberation period”. Run PCA (based on covariance and correlation matrices) and “Mannian PCA” on the proxies. Discussion: how this relates to the “bristlecone pines”?]
2) Understands how the MBH calibration-estimation procedure, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=520 , gives weights to the proxies. [Suggestion for a discussion (not discussed in any paper as far as I know!): is the MBH idea of using only few temperature PCs in the regression meaningful and/or justified? How “objective” the temperature PCs selection method is? How “robust” results are to selecting different set of temperature PCs? What effect of the temperature PC selection rule (described in MBH98) has to the caliberation error? Suggestion for a lab session: rerun AD1400 step using the full (16) set of temperature PCs. Another: create a set of red noise “proxies” and vary the temperature PCs used.]
3) Understands how the MBH98 “confidence intervals”, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=647, are constructed. [Discussion: what is the effect of the proxy standardization (or rescaling, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=530) to the confidence intervals (hint: http://tinyurl.com/yd9bmc)? How does the number of proxies or the temperature PC selection rule described in 2 affect the “confidence intervals”? Can you come up with any legimite reason why the verification period error was not used instead? Suggestion for a lab session: Add some extra proxies (e.g. white noise) to the MBH network and recalculate confidence intervals. Extra credit for anyone who figures out the MBH99 intervals 😉 ]
4) Understands how MBH98 attribution of climate forcings, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=692 , is done. [Discussion: what does the sensity of the windows size to the results imply?]
Other things to discuss: how (climatologically) meaningful is it to include SH proxies to a NH reconstruction (e.g., largest weight in MBH98 AD1700 step is given to the Australian tree ring PC1)? How meaningful is it to include precipitation proxies? What happens to the MBH reconstruction if proxies are inverted (w.r.t. their calibration means)? Implications of the existance of the CENSORED directory, http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=608 . Finally, a topic valid for most reconstructions: what would be an adequate spatial sampling for a hemispheric reconstruction (compare, e.g.: MBH99 AD1000 12 proxies (including 3 NA PCs and 4 SH proxies!) and Juckes et al “Union” 18 proxies)?
Re #244, David Smith
I think that could rapidly turn into a massive time sink for Steve, who has other important work to do.
I also don’t quite see why Steve should do, for free, the job which Judith Curry is being paid to do.
Re #246 I wouldn’t want to see something eat up a lot of Steve’s or anyone else’s time. However, my guess is that the student response would be the opposite: a reticence to pose questions or make anything other than general statements out of dread of making a mistake in a public place.
In any case, it would be an experiment in internet use, and sometimes experiments fail, but that’s OK.
Alan Ames,
Could you send me a message to my address? I’m interested in the other mode of radiative heat transfer, I mean, the problems with thermometers.
# 247
David Smith,
I agree with you on the problems that the students could have by getting information from the Internet; however, I have had beautiful experiences when talking before high school students. The students have surprised me with very intelligent questionings and conclusions, many times. I think it’s a matter of a correct guidance or orientation by the teacher.
Jean, thanks very much for these suggestions, I’ve passed them on to the course organizers (ffreddy, i am not teaching this course, merely “auditing” it)
So I had this thought, and I wanted to run it past SteveM (and others)
Given that surfacestations.org now has 25% of the network surveyed, is it possible to flag the database as “compliant” and “non-compliant” based on the surveys?
If so, is it possible to generate a temperature anomaly chart of “complant” vs “non-compliant” stations for the 20th century (or whatever the range of available data is)? It might be interesting to see how such a chart changes as the survey works its way through.
Or is this still way too early in the process to consider doing?
THanks
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM5LLWZK5F_index_0.html
It seems many people is happy for this hurricane is category 5.
RE #252, yes, I’ve noticed that as well. Instead of headlines and discussions of who is next in the path, how much it will weaken in the future, damage, rainfall amounts, flooding, injuries, or deaths, I just keep seeing “Category 5” and the emaphasis of “third strongest to make landfall.” It seems like emphasizing how “extreme” this weather event is became more important than informing the world about its effects.
I have no doubt we’ll see widespread attempts at linking Dean and global warming. As sad and sick as it sounds, I am sure there are even some folks who would have preferred Dean had headed towards Houston or New Orleans to create a few sacrificial lambs for their cause.
re 251.
yes I directed anthony to a siting “scoring” system. Its witten by Leroy
footnote 4.
We need a copy of this doc
231 & Nasif: There are errors in the calculations, and more explanation of symbols is needed.
# 255
Jae,
I would be very grateful if you make me know about that issue. Please, E-mail me to the E-mail address provided in the page and I will answer you from my personal address. Thanks, Jae.
229:
?? I don’t follow this completely. If the loss by radiation is less, how can it be cooler? Yes, the difference in temperature can be explained by evaporation (and clouds). But where oh where is the “greenhouse” effect?
255, Nasif: will do.
The Siberia Express, in place off of the Northern Pacific Coast of North America:
http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=55487&sc=98
Classic …..
Thanks, Jae. I’ve made already some corrections. My interest is to provide real and accurate information to the students.
My bad, wrong coast, I had a brain glitch and read it as Queen Charlotte … not Prince Edward….. nonetheless, there have been some pretty good cold fronts coming down from the north back East as well.
Re Hurricane Dean. Chris Mooney has become a bit of a “hurricane pundit” after publication of his book Storm World. He has posted the following article addressing Dean in the context of global warming over at the very influential Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/what-we-can-and-cant-say_b_61229.html
I think (hope) that the media has matured on the issue and I would hope that there are no articles in credible sources that go beyond what Mooney has stated.
Jae – Thanks for looking. Could you give your considered opinion as to the reliability of the claims and results on the page here?
Thanks,
Jae – thanks for looking. Could you give your opinion as to the general reliability of the results and calculations on the page here?
Thanks,
Sorry for the double post- I got an access violation the first time around and thought it hadn’t gone through.
#228. Steven Mosher
I will echo the sentiments that it would be a good idea to provide a thread on this blog for the course. I believe that it could be an avenue for providing some balance in the course material as well as possibly helping students to form the scepticism necessary for doing proper scientific work. Go for it!
From Chris Mooney’s Huffington link we have:
Let us look dispassionately at the ACE Index over the years for tropical cyclones within 60 miles of land fall. Chris Mooney is obviously saying that since we must be careful about what we claim for global warming effects on tropical cyclones (see Landsea and Kossin) let me give you an index that shows a worrisome pattern.
I personally would have spent much more time pointing to the fact that Dean was a huge monster hurricane that could have (assuming it continues on its current path) created much more destruction had its landfall been off just a little bit and asking the questions about the adverse and unintended consequences of government policies in bailing out those in danger of past and future Deans.
#263
The page is confused and confusing, and contains at least one error in the abstract.
paleoclimatologists are experts in paleoclimatology. …No, they are specialists in paleoclimatology. Not always the same thing.
Given my experience in certain technical fields, I would say if it’s like most, it’s a pretty fair bet the best way to say that is they are supposed to be specialists in field_X but many are not even that, that’s just what they went to school for. A small percentage are experts.
Hi Dr. Curry.
Thanks for the link. I’ll go over it in more detail later. Right off the bat
(i’m kinda ADD)
I have issues with this “batting order business”
“1. With a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars, Dean was the ninth most intense hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic basin (for comparison Hurricane Katrina’s minimum pressure was 902 millibars).”
This is baseball stats. I am assuming that the 906 millibar reading comes with an error
so rank ordering should come with a CI.
2″. That 906 millibar pressure reading was at landfall, making Dean the third most intense landfalling hurricane known in the Atlantic region and the first Category 5 storm at landfall since 1992’s Hurricane Andrew.”
“first since” stats are meaningless unless you have an underlying distribution to judge
if the time gap is narrowing or widening. So, if Landfall events ( TM. roger Peilke Jr.. joke)
are, for example, Poissen distributed then A narrowing gap in time between landfalls could be cool
to study
3. When measured by minimum pressure, six of the ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes–Wilma, Rita, Katrina, Mitch, Dean, and Ivan–have occurred in the past ten years.”
It might be neat to have the students look at rank order stats. Note that he selects a METRIC
‘min pressure’ and then does a ranking. How do other metrics rank?
open question.
Anyway, Cheers to you. Have you asked SteveMC directly about the class Thread?
a number of old dogs here are more dedicated to open inquiry than we are to
particular conclusoins about AGW
263: I don’t think I could help you much, as physics is not one of my strongest subjects. I’m sure there are others here much more qualified than I am to provide a critique of the paper. (Maybe RichardT?). I am just a very interested chemist, who does know some physics and who thinks that it should not be very difficult to sort out the basic physics behind AGW, and who is amazed that the climate science community seems unable or unwilling to do so. As an IPCC reviewer, Steve Mc asked IPCC to do it, to no avail, and he has been welcoming such a treatise here on the blog for over a year (although he’s quite picky about having a suitably authoritative exposition and appears to want a paper that defends AGW and does not refute it). That a suitable paper has not appeared naturally makes me VERY suspicious…
Steven Mosher,
Baseball stats is a good analogy. He should also have qualified it to the modern era.(satellite)
It is only since the satellite era that central pressure readings have been faithfully recorded. The worst year for major hurricanes was 1950. One category 1, two category 2, with the majors including five category 3, two category 4, and one category 5. Several wind speeds were recorded at 155-160 knots.(about 180 mph) Only two pressure readings were recorded for the entire season. Each for a different category 3 storm.
Starting August 12, 1950 two category 3, one category 4, and one category 5 hurricane were spawned by the end of the month.
Must have been global warming.;-)
# 263
RichardT,
Could you tell the auditors why that page is confusing and confused? 🙂
Dean was the first real tropical storm of 2007.
What does that say about global warming?
What does that say about Chris Mooney and his knowledge about the history of Atlantic storms?
Was the main source for Mooney’s book, Judith Curry?
NYC’s coldest August afternoon on record
Anyone interested in looking through old weather and ocean articles (mostly US) can find a nice source here .
Re: #231
I have gone through Nahles technical paper at http://www.biocab.org/Heat_Stored.html. It is interesting. The heat transfer and thermodynamics is spot on. I do not have time to check each line with my calculator, as sometimes these errors can carry through, but I trust an engineer to get that part of the math correct, assuming, of course, Nahle is an engineer? Overall, the analysis is sound.
However, there are problems:
1. Nahle can do better explaining where the KNOWN DATA comes from, known from where and by whom? Data such as heat capacities, weight of one cubic meter of carbon dioxide in air, thermal conductivity, and the stated fact that humans have contributed 11.43-ppmv carbon dioxide to the overall total. This might be correct, but even if that number comes from a creditable source, it is ladled with assumptions: like the system is in steady state, air is consider Newtonian, viscous dissipation is neglected, flow is one dimensional, edge effects are neglected, temperature varies only in the theta direction, perfect mixing, and so forth. As an example, a reference to Perrys Chemical Engineering Handbook pg. 567, would give instant credibility to the data. This also helps the reader understand that the numbers where not merely invented, but in fact measured by careful scientists and published somewhere. Nobody questions the steam tables anymore; you look up the enthalpy, record where you got the info (steam tables) and viola.
2. There are many type-o and grammatical errors. These are trivial and easily corrected, we are all human, and sometimes another pair of eyes spots errors you have missed.
3. Some of the equations need explaining; this will aid the reader and help them understand that the equations derived from first principles. Take this equation as an example deltaT=q/m(Cp). Nahle explained where he got it but not what it is and what it represents. Anyone taken undergraduate heat transfer knows this as Fouriers Law of Heat Conduction. It is an experimentally observed law and serves as a definition for a property of substances called thermal conductivity. Some kind of description like that would be helpful.
4. Show all the units. Nahle did a decent job, but I like seeing all units, no exceptions. Make the dimensional analysis easy to follow. Nahle did not explain that the Grashof number is dimensionless, in other words it is a ratio. For students this is sometimes difficult to understand when drawing meaning. Perhaps explain that the Grashof number be interpreted as the buoyancy forces divided by the viscous forces. You might explain it this way, as a fluid near the warmed surface begins to increase in temperature, the local fluid density decreases. The buoyancy forces cause the less dense fluid to rise, and the surrounding cooler fluid is brought into contact with the surface. Fluid-motion and heat transfer effects are thus intimately related (Engineering Heat Transfer, Janna, 1986).
5. There is no explanation that the Prandtl Number (dimensionless) is a ratio between kinematic viscosity and diffusivity of a fluid. This is also important to help visualize what is happening with the air.
6. Some numbers appear without explanation, as it is so obvious it does not need explaining. Example: The maximum change observed in the tropospheric temperature occurred in 1998 [we now know this is incorrect, please change], and it averaged 0.52 °C [okay, please reference] throughout the year. The discrepancy, regarding the change caused by carbon dioxide is -0.51 °C [where did this number come from?]. The mathematical expression from the experimental data is as follows: Known Data in 14 April 1998: [okay, from where?] These are easy fixes; explain where the numbers come from. There are other instances as well where numbers stated as fact with no reference.
7. I am a picture guy. A pictorial representation of the system you are describing would be most helpful. There is a good picture in the IPCC WG1 on page 4 by Kiehl and Trenberth (1997) http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch01.pdf. Maybe overlay some of the calculations onto that picture for clarity.
8. Lastly, there is no mention of GRAVITY. Sorry to say, but it is non-trivial. The atmosphere has weight. This weight is due to gravity. Gravity influences pressure and temperature at the earths surface, troposphere, stratosphere, and so forth. Recall the ideal gas law, PV=nRT. It seems remarkable that an entire paper about our atmosphere and its thermodynamic properties with no mention of gravity. Have a look at Heinz Thiemes The Thermodynamic Atmosphere Effect Explained Stepwise http://www.geocities.com/atmosco2/atmos.htm. It gives some perspective on the gravimetric heat transfer and the partial role carbon dioxide plays. Here is a quote, the context is important (see link for explanation). The cause for the higher temperature at the base of an atmosphere is that the removal of energy from the atmosphere toward space occurs essentially via radiation from the upper layers of the gas atmosphere, where the transition from the gas state into a vacuum-like state takes place, on the basis of temperature. At lower altitudes, the laws of thermodynamics apply for the gas atmosphere, which means that with increasing gas compression its temperature rises [Venus anyone?]. The increasing pressure with decreasing distance to the planet’s surface is caused by gravity. Thus gravity essentially determines the temperature conditions within an atmosphere. Note: The article translated from German. I think it looses some elegance when read in English, but the central points are clear enough.
I like your paper, this is not meant to be critical. It was meant to be helpful. I hope you see as such.
Ian
Re #214, Judith, glad to hear from you again.
Since you are including the Juckes et al. paper in your course, it is vitally important that your students read the “interactive” discussion of that paper on the Climate of the Past site. While there are several papers there under my name (Multidisciplinary Comments 1, 2, and 3), these represent the combined comments of many people on this blog. Note that there is Supplementary Online Material for the three comments located here.
Given the large number of documented problems with the Juckes paper, I was stunned to see that it is introduced in a class session called “Multiproxy reconstructions : recent advances”. The Juckes paper is many things, but it is not an advance. It provides no new ideas or methods (see the mathematical proof in the SOM that CVM is merely ordinary linear regression times R). It is only a poorly written summary of past work. It does not deal with a number of problems in the past work, despite those problems being spelled out quite clearly both on this blog and on the COP site.
Since the Juckes paper is only a rehash of past work, where is the “recent advance” in the paper?
But I digress … in any case, my best to you, and to all of your students. I encourage them to post their ideas and objections here. I’m sure Steve would be glad to open a “students thread” for them to use to get their views aired and their questions answered. And having had some of my “best ideas” blown out of the water here, I can assure them that it will be a very valuable experience to expose their work to the kind of probing, detailed, and insightful examination available on this site. It reminds me of the old quote about how “if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere” … if you can explain and support your ideas here, you can do it anywhere.
Please pass this post on to the students, and wish them well.
w.
Hi Willis, thanks much for your message, I will pass it along to the seminar organizers.
Nasif,
The problem with your description is this. You go to great lengths to analyse mathematically the effect of thermal conduction of CO2 to show it is minimal. But we already know this – thermal conduction is so unimportant it is not explicitly included in models.
However, when you discuss the radiative effects of CO2 in section 4: CHANGE BY SOLAR IRRADIANCE:, you dismiss it with a few lines of text and a comment that it must be the sun because the sun has been warming for 200 years.
Sorry to be blunt, but I’m afraid your attempt to explain why the air gets colder as you go higher in the same section, reveals a massive failure to understand lapse rates.
Hi,
I’ve just been ploughing through Brohan et al. (J. Geophys. Res. 111) and just wanted to be certain about my understanding of the UHI bias applied to the land station data used to produce HadCRUT3. Is it correct to deduce that a linear correction is applied from 1990 to present day of 0.0055 C/decade (giving a total bias from 1900 to 2000 of 0.055 C) and that this bias is applied to all land station data irrespective of location or surroundings?
Thanks in advance.
To those of you interested in hurricanes, Landsea, Webster and Mooney will be on NPR this morning, Mooney gives info over at the Intersection http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/.
Reading through…Chris Mooney, “Republican war on Science”, and then HuffingtonPost (a left leaning political blog owned by Arianna Huffington) and also NPR mentioned, then Juckes,et al. Wow! Can one get less scientific and more politically PR motivated than all that? Where’s the links for blogs with information coming from for the other half of the story? Just good old ClimateAudit? I suppose SteveM should feel honored – for keeping the “drive by” skeptical people like me who read, vote, pay taxes, care about the earth and our country and have children (who are students) at some standard certain people feel comfortable with! 😉
I agree with Ken in #267!
py,
Or was it just added to uncertainties ? Or UHI corrected with some method, and then 0.0055 added to uncertainties ? See
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1240#comment-94715
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1240#comment-95092
# 277
Ian,
Thank you so much for taking part of your valuable time to review the article. I have perceived the scarcity of explanation about the formulas and who developed them. I will take into account each one from your suggestions for the annexes that will be included in the article. I took the amount of 11-25 ppm CO2 from NAS proceedings, but I had problems with the computers and I lost all my documents. Regarding the units, I was aware of the problem since the article was translated from the Spanish, I was thinking on correct them and Im working on that.
Thanks again by the professional revision of my article. 🙂
# 280
Steve Milesworthy,
Except for the last paragraph :), thank you so much for your suggestions. I’m open to all critics about what I wrote in that article. I’m ammending it to offer trustworthy information to the students.
I was thinking also on write a parallel article without so much formulas and procedures for general public.
Thanks, again, Steve.
#233 >> By ¢ Ý CO2 in the last 200 years = 171 ppmv
Nasif, the 171 figure is unsupportable. Even the ice core data shows 235. Many plant species would die off at 171.
#280 >> when you discuss the radiative effects of CO2
Steve M, the radiative effect of C02 cannot violate the 2nd law of T. Therefore, C02 in stratosphere cannot warm the troposphere. In the troposphere, it’s dominated by water vapor, and still the 2nd law applies, since the temp gradiant increases as we move toward the surface. In other words, nothing in the atmosphere can warm the surface radiatively. AGW is falsified.
Besides, we are removing oxygen when we add C02. The effect would only depend on the difference in radiative effect between C02 and Oxygen.
>> The total solar irradiance incoming to the terrestrial surface is 167 cal (697.04 W/m^2).
Nasif, your paper is excellent. Here is another comment: Your figure of 697 is what is hitting the surface. This figure is important, but the troposphere is being hit with a larger amount of radiation. It’s about 1366 in space, right before hitting the atmosphere, so the I think the value hitting the troposphere is closer to 1366 than 697.
Here’s something that has puzzled me.
I take it as a given that gasses heat when compressed and cool when decompressed.
Now assuming a stable atmosphere (IE, individual atoms stay at approximately the same altitude).
Wouldn’t the atmosphere eventually stabilize at a uniform temperature? That is, even if the atoms themselves aren’t moving up and down, the thermal energy can. Energy would flow from the hot parts to the cool parts until everything reached equilibrium.
Since this doesn’t happen, what am I missing?
Is it the fact that the atmosphere isn’t stable. Constant motion both up and down, preventing equilibrium from being reached? Is it something else?
#289 MarkW
Such a uniform atmosphere will be very stable indeed because a parcel of air that rises, will expand, cool and therefore sink again – ie no convection can start.
But the upper layers will cool (radiating into space) and the lower layers will warm (due to solar radiation warming the surface).
This will continue till a temperature profile is reached such that a rising parcel of air, while expanding and cooling, still remains warmer than its surroundings (so continues to rise). ie. the surrounding air must be cooler as you go up. ie. convection begins.
My basic understanding is that the border between a stable and unstable temperature profile is the lapse rate, and is different for dry or saturated air (between 10-6C per kilometre respectively).
Once convection gets going it is a very effective method for moving energy around and thus maintaining something close to the lapse rate.
Maybe the U.S. isn’t dangerously hot
A responsible scientist, Watts won’t draw any conclusions from his research yet. But one top climate scientist — NASAs James Hansen, the patron saint of the apocalyptic global warming movement — apparently doesn’t think Watts’ dogged pursuit of scientific certainty matters much.
I asked Hansen by e-mail recently, How important is the data from these (1,221 ground) weather stations in your climate modeling?
It has no effect on modeling, Hansen replied. Of course we compare modeling results with observed temperatures. But the observational analysis is based mainly on measurements at places remote from human influence.
The large observed warmings are in remote regions, e.g., the Arctic, Siberia, Canada — the warming is clearly real, as verified in many different ways, as described in our papers. At any given station there can be significant problems, but the uncertainty in global temperature change is rather small.
I also asked Hansen if he was confident that these weather stations were “providing accurate/reliable temperature readings or readings that can be accurately tweaked/adjusted to take into account any heat-island effects or poor site placements.
We have enough reliable stations to get a reliable temperature change for the U.S., which covers only 2 percent of the globe, Hansen answered.
Noting that Watts has found many sites whose readings are clearly compromised, I asked Hansen if that concerned him about the long-term reliability of the temperature readings.
No, Hansen’s e-mail said.
http://tinyurl.com/2529em
# 287
Gunar,
Yes, I found the error on 171 ppm of CO2. I’ll make the pertinent correction. Thanks.
# 288
Gunnar,
And you are right, the amount of total energy that hitts on the surface is near to 1366 W/m^2. 697 W/m^2 is only the incident SIR on the Earth’s surface, not considering the visible light, UV, etc., that is, 51% of the total EMR.
RE: #275 – Summer is over (well actually, was over weeks ago) in the NE and the NW US. It may be over in Central Canada as well.
Milesworthy,
So the main reason why the atmosphere gets colder as one goes higher is because heat can radiate to space more easily from the top of the atmosphere compared to the bottom?
>> And you are right, the amount of total energy that hitts on the surface is near to 1366 W/m^2. 697 W/m^2 is only the incident SIR on the Earths surface, not considering the visible light, UV, etc., that is, 51% of the total EMR.
Oh, I see. I was thinking that you were referring to the fact that 1366 is the total EMR that strikes the atmosphere, which blocks some, reducing the amount which strikes the surface.
Are you sure that the IR portion is such a large percentage of the total energy? The Visible, UV, X-Rays and Gamma Rays are all orders of magnitude more energetic:
Wave Freq energy of one photon in eV
IR 10^-3 -> 10^-1
Visible 10^.5
UV 10^1 -> 10^2
X-rays 10^2 -> 10^19
gamma rays 10^20 +
Ian – thanks for your review. The paper makes an attempt to calculate the effect from CO2, but in the “Example from nature” I cannot find where the radiative transfer between the soil and the atmosphere is included. Do you think this effect is negligible?
Thanks,
>> Summer is over (well actually, was over weeks ago) in the NE
I was in NYC on monday, I can confirm: Arctic August: NYC Sets Record For Coldest Day on Aug 21 High Of 59 Degrees Ties Chilliest August High Set In 1911
Of course, anecdotals mean nothing from a scientific point of view, BUT
This is social science issue. This kind of weather makes the claims of the establishment harder to believe. A poll of New Yorkers right now to the question: do you think GW is happening, the answer would be a resounding “NO!”.
Since the AGWers have eschewed science in favor of a PR campaign, it’s only fair that PR is where the battle is fought. Only, we’ll let nature score the PR points. Live by PR, die by PR.
>> I cannot find where the radiative transfer between the soil and the atmosphere is included. Do you think this effect is negligible?
Any sailor will tell you that it’s not. During the day, land warms quicker than water, causing wind from sea to land. At night, the opposite.
#294 MarkW
Well it’s more correct to say the whole atmosphere and the surface cools by losing IR directly to space (though in the higher layers a higher proportion of emitted IR goes directly to space). The warming of the surface by the sun is the bigger effect in the process I was describing.
# 296
Deb or mononafacts_,
It’s not negligible, but it is not so high if you make the proper calculations. However, you’ll find some examples on heat transfer by radiation to 381 ppmv of CO2 at the end of the article.
# 295
It’s correct. The cipher 697 W/m^2 is the gross percentage.
The Madness of King James. I am being teased by Bloglines. It shows a post by Steve M. that doesn’t show up here. Was something intemperate taken down?
#287 Gunnar
If you created a warm planet with a cold atmosphere, both planet and atmosphere will radiate energy. But as time progresses the planet will cool slower, due to the existence of the atmosphere’s radiation, than it would have been if the atmosphere were not there (assuming heat conduction between planet and atmosphere is minimal).
This is because some of the radiation from the atmosphere hits the planet. It does not depend on the greenhouse effect and is simply a reflection of the law of conservation of energy.
#303 >> If you created a warm planet with a cold atmosphere, both planet and atmosphere will radiate energy. But as time progresses the planet will cool slower, due to the existence of the atmospheres radiation
Steve, you have a good point there. This is basically saying that atmosphere acts as a buffer (or insulator) between the crust and space. I’ll buy that. Although the effect may be minimal, given the mass and density of crust/ocean versus the mass and density of atmosphere. As atmospheric gasses go, water vapor would seem to completely dominate C02 in terms of insulating capability.
However, this is different than saying that if you had a warm surface, and a troposphere that gets colder as you go up in altitude, and then saying that any heating of atmospheric components is going to heat the surface. This violates 2nd law.
Even as an insulator, the effect may be very small, since we’re not just adding C02. We are removing Oxygen. The specific heat of C02 is .20 btu/lb, while Oxygen is .219 btu/lb. From a heat absorbing and emitting point of view, aren’t the two nearly interchangeable?
#304
O2 is transparent to IR radiation, so exchanging O2 with CO2 effects the IR absorbing properties of the atmosphere. See figure on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
#305 >> O2 is transparent to IR radiation, so exchanging O2 with CO2 effects the IR absorbing properties of the atmosphere. See figure on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
True, but not completely, and C02 only absorbs IR in certain limited bands. And in the troposphere, conduction and convection dominate. So, by and large, land/oceans radiate, water vapor (plus C02 a little) absorb IR, and by conduction and convection, this heat is transferred to other atmospheric components like oxygen and nitrogen. Radiation from the troposphere up will be from all the components of the atmosphere, dominated by nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor.
It’s a mistake to consider radiation by itself, or to think in terms of “re-radiate”.
I think the biggest factor that controls atmospheric heat is, by far, convection, especially how it is affected by water (think hurricane, e.g.). Water is the “buffer” that prevents radical changes in the temperature. It has a low molecular weight compared to the most of the gases in the atmosphere, enhancing its convective properties. Radiation and conduction effects are probably minor compared to convection effects. But I don’t know any way to express this quantitatively (and neither do the climate models). Maybe there is no way to treat it quantitatively, especially since the water exists in so many forms, all of which have their own properties. I think the lack of a way to deal with convection is why a solid physical explanation of AGW has not been produced. You can’t just talk about radiation, and that may be where the AGW hypothesis gets bogged down.
#164 in Replication Policy Re-Posted >> Climatology is the study of weather averaged over decadal, or even multi-decadal time periods. As a result its really an observational science
I disagree, since that’s your characterization. Meterology is completely different than climatology, and one is not just a long term view of the other. In the time scales that concern it, Meterology assumes that the sun and earth are constant. Meterology is primarily concerned with atmospheric circulation. There are so many chaotic processes involved that it’s much more of an observational science. Climatology, specifically the AGW idea, is more related to thermodynamics, atmospheric physics, electromagnetics, chemistry, etc. It’s a mistake to approach Climatology like Meterology, which is what the AGWers have done with their “general circulation” models. For the climate, most of the chaos of “weather” is irrelevant.
Gunnar, I fear I don’t understand the distinction you are making between meteorology and climatology.
You say that climate is not “just a long term view” of weather … perhaps you could say what climate has that weather doesn’t? You say that climate is more concerned with things like thermodynamics, atmospherics, and chemistry … but so is weather, so that’s just a question of degree.
You say that for climate, much of the “chaos of ‘weather'” is irrelevant … do you mean that climate is not chaotic?
It would be helpful for you to give a clear definition of what you mean by “climate”, as most people would say that it is the long term average of weather. It seems that you are using a different definition, which is fine, but what is that definition?
w.
#284 UC,
Thanks for the links, and apologies for troubling everyone with a revisit down what is potentially a well worn path.
At the moment the information in Folland/Brohan makes me think that the UHI bias is an uncertainty estimate only and isn’t used to correct any instrumental data before or after gridding. However, this is pure speculation on my part.
I’ve managed to dig out Brohan’s email address and will pend an email – hopefully he will be happy to clarify?
What happened to Dean (the hurricane)? It’s now a category 2 and have not killed people in Mexico.
#175 in Replication Policy Re-Posted >> because its a chamber, and not the real atmosphere, its not clear if that is representative of what goes on in the real atmosphere
A straw man, since it’s not clear that it isn’t. We need a hypothesis of what you (or someone) thinks is going on in the “real atmosphere”.
>> Id like to believe that Svenmark proved that temperature trends are entirely caused by solar and cosmic influences
He wasn’t trying to say that it did, only answer the question “does this input cause that output”. So, we have a coherent hypothesis, ie doesn’t violate any known laws (which is further ahead than AGW), and we have an experiment that shows it’s possible (further ahead), and we have high correlation between solar activity and temperature (unlike c02).
>> theres an absence of natural condensation nuclei in the atmosphere, so that cosmic rays actually make a difference.
So, can you formulate an experiment that would attempt to falsify the cosmic ray hypothesis? We need to try to falsify it.
#309 >> You say that climate is not just a long term view of weather perhaps you could say what climate has that weather doesnt?
Climate needs to consider many variables that are absolutely not considered in weather. Some of these are: solar dynamics, solar rotation, earth orbital variation, solar flares, solar magnetics, earth molten core, plate tectonics, lunar effects, ocean thermodynamics, ocean chemistry, ocean carbonic cycle, biosphere carbonic response, atmospheric physics (weather related, but others as well, like cosmic ray effects), atmospheric thermodynamics, etc.
>> You say that climate is more concerned with things like thermodynamics, atmospherics, and chemistry but so is weather, so thats just a question of degree.
Actually, Meterology does not involve carbonic cycle chemistry. There is thermodynamics, but only some atmospheric Thermo, not considering ocean/crust/atmospheric interactions. There is of course lots of atmospheric physics involved, but the focus would be different than climatology. In weather, the sun and ocean dynamics are considered constant. This is a good assumption, since weather is concerned with the next 10 days.
>> You say that for climate, much of the chaos of weather is irrelevant do you mean that climate is not chaotic?
There is still plenty of chaos, but the source is different: solar chaos dwarfs earth atmospheric chaos. We may never be able to predict a direct hit of a solar flare, but we should get to the point that when we measure one occurring, we can model that input, and say, ok, this is how this direct hit will affect the next 10 years.
>> It would be helpful for you to give a clear definition of what you mean by climate, as most people would say that it is the long term average of weather. It seems that you are using a different definition, which is fine, but what is that definition?
I think I have above. Actually, even the AGWers make the point that climate is not an extension of weather forecasting. That’s why this objection is invalid: “if you can’t predict the weather 5 days from now, how can you predict something about 100 years from now”. The major difference is one of time scale, but that completely changes the nature of the science.
Really obscure example from EE: consider the difference between analyzing a DC circuit in steady state versus the operation of high speed integrated circuits, with microscopic transistors. Time scale completely changes the science used.
Better example: Diet versus Culinary Arts. They both are concerned with our food. However, one is concerned with overall long term health, and the other concerned with predicting how to get the maximum enjoyment from a given meal. Diet is not the average of the culinary arts.
#99: Actually he seems to predict only .4C more for an eventual doubling. Very interesting (though it’s already known that high estimates of warming rely on high estimates of ocean heat storage)
#156, #157: But why would it be surprising if the sunspot cycle had a noticeable effect on global temperatures? In fact, we already know (and in fact this is incorporated into agw models). What the sunspot cycle can’t explain, however, are increasing temperatures over the long term (especially as it is getting weaker…)
Gunnar, in general: I’m a little confused–you are correct that it’s a mistake to look at radiation alone, but from what I can tell gcms are by no means doing this! In fact, convection is explicitly a part of gcms. No one is trying to violate the 2nd law. Changes in the troposphere can cause warming at the surface–but they don’t cause it _directly_ and no one is saying this. Instead, since the atmosphere is a part of a complicated system of feedbacks involving both radiation and actual physical transport, changes in the atmosphere can indeed cause changes at the surface–but indirectly, not directly. Nobody thinks the climate system is a simple slab of opaque gases! (For that matter, agw modelers agree that water vapor dominates greenhouse gases–but it does not “completly dominate” them in the models, i.e. the role of greenhouse gases remains significant.)
And for that matter, it’s silly to say “Well the other side makes unscientific arguments so I can too.” Sure you can, but not if you want to be taken seriously 🙂 Are you really claiming that agw proponents have abandoned the scientific process? Their articles get published in scientific journals, and from this I conclude that agw is not a purely political argument. There is a scientific basis to it which must be dealt with, regardless of what else has been done with it. You can legitimately complain about the political process, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the science.
Re #314, mzed
I don’t know about Gunnar, but I will certainly say this. And until they release all their data and workings, I will continue to do so.
#315: Well, that’s an interesting point. I don’t quite know what to make of that particular issue.
Why does the troposphere (pressure greater than 200 mbar) get colder as altitude increases? According to conventional Physical Meteorology, the answer is gravity. Lets postulate an atmosphere with only nitrogen, oxygen and argon. Such an atmosphere is almost completely transparent in the IR from 5 to 50 microns so heat transfer from radiative emission/absorption can be neglected. Let’s use a column of this atmosphere with a surface area of one square meter, a surface pressure of 101,300 pascals, a constant surface temperature (forget the source of heat right now), no horizontal mixing and a gravitational acceleration g of 9.81 m/sec2. Let the center of mass be far away so g can be assumed invariant over the range of interest, 0 to 20 km. The pressure then is proportional to the total mass of the column of air above the measurement point so it must decrease with altitude above the surface.
If we start with an isothermal atmosphere that is colder than the surface, the air at the surface will be warmed by conduction. As it warms, it expands and becomes less dense (PV=nRT) than the air above it and it will rise and the air above it will sink. As it rises, the pressure decreases, the parcel of gas expands and cools. Air is a very poor conductor of heat, so the expansion is adiabatic to a good approximation (you also have to add a correction for increased gravitational potential energy with altitude to make everything come out right). Eventually, the packet of air reaches an altitude and pressure where it is no longer buoyant. This conduction/convection process continues until a stable temperature gradient is established. I won’t do the calculation, but it can be shown that the stable dry adiabatic lapse rate is 9.8 K/km. The moist lapse rate is less than this and varies with both surface temperature and altitude. Details of the calculations can be found here.
This week’s Nature has a short item on sloppy statistical practices by geneticists.
Even though it’s only a short news item, it is still fully protected by Nature’s $$$-wall.
From what I recall having read it at work, it seems that geneticists have been drawing conclusions not supported by the data by applying inappropriate statistical methods.
A specific problem that was noted is that too many geneticsists are trying to use data collected for other purposes to feed into a statistical treatment aimed at drawing conclusions in other areas.
Sound familiar?
DeWitt Payne #317
There is a problem with the lapse rate you quoted, I wont do the calculation, but it can be shown that the stable dry adiabatic lapse rate is 9.8 K/km. I do not think so, 9.8 Kelvin per kilometer is equivalent to -263.35 degree Celsius per kilometer, which is absurd. Therefore, I checked the source of that number.
In the paper you cited, by Caballero, on page 58, he states the following. At typical Earth-like surface temperatures, the effect is very strong: for a starting temperature of 5ºC, the mean lapse rate over the first 5 km is 7.2 K km−1, for 20ºC it is 4.8ºC km−1 and for 35ºC it is 3.3ºC km−1 (compare with 9.8ºC km−1 for the dry adiabat).
Do you see the problem? I think Caballero had degree Kelvin in place of degree Celsius for the first 5 km at a starting temperature of 5ºC. A simple error makes a huge difference in the calculations.
Ian
Re:#319
No mistake. The lapse rate is the change in temperature per unit altitude, in this case kilometer. A difference of one degree Kelvin is identical to a difference of one degree Celsius. The numerical value of the temperature is different by 273 degrees, but since you are subtracting, the constant difference goes away. To state it a different way. If the surface temperature is 288 K, it’s 15 C in round numbers. At an altitude of one kilometer it would be 278 K or 5 C. The numbers you quote are for the moist adiabatic lapse rate, btw. The dry adiabatic lapse rate is found on page 29:
#319. No, a temperature interval of 1K equals a temperature interval of 1°C. The Kelvin scale is just the Celsius scale shifted upwards by 273 units and somewhat.
http://www.metric-conversions.org/temperature/kelvin-to-celsius.htm
Gentlemen, I stand corrected.
Ian
320 Dewitt.
hansen 1999 uses an enviromental lapse rate of 6C/km, but all the standards I found show
6.5C/ Km. also, doesnt it vary per location and time of year?
RE #322
This is a testable and possibly verifiable hypothesisis it not?
RE 311.
Hurricane dean didnt read the memo about massive destruction.
OK, useless statistics. Somebody go figure the Rank order of damaging land falling
CAT 5s.
In terms of damage was DEAN a clean up hitter as a class 5 or a wimp.
I’ll say this at the risk of being utterly wrong. DEAN set the alltime record for the
lowest Blowhard ratio.
Windspeed at landfall/damage at landfall.
That is my useless metric for the day
Re: #325
This is getting confusing: first we have the Chris Mooney lowest hurricane pressure index (even though he forgot, as Bob Koss noted, to tell us about how far back in time we can track it) that is worrisome. And now we have the Blowhard ratio which indeed probably ranks Dean way down on the list. Seriously though it points to the fact that we find an index to suit just about any of our political needs when we limit our view to partial descriptions of the hurricanes and tropical storms. That is, of course, why Al Gore and I invented the ACE index and use it only for storms within 60 miles of landfall.
re 326.
I think the blowhard ratio is destined for greatness. dollars of damage per knot
or knot dollars…
Now the inverse or converse or obverse is the Dollars of damage per milibar,
and I fear if I name that I will get snipped.
Re: #323
(I think the permalink to a comment may not change even if other comments are deleted)
Indeed, and to a certain extent time of day as well. The 1976 standard atmosphere uses a lapse rate of 6.5 K/km. This gives the -50 C temperature that you find at the ~10 km altitude where most long distance jets fly. All the localities that you can select in MODTRAN use constant lapse rates. However, I wanted to use the simplest possible situation to illustrate why temperature decreases with altitude. The measured lapse rate (that’s one thing that radiosonde’s measure) at altitude will be less than the dry rate because the real atmosphere contains water vapor. Lapse rates are not necessarily constant with altitude either. Moist adiabats are much more complicated than the dry adiabat. The lapse rate doesn’t actually extend all the way to the surface either because the boundary layer is normally relatively well mixed. The boundary layer thickness varies as well, being as low as 100 m at night and as high as 2 km during the day.
Where modeling comes in is when you start to consider horizontal or latitudinal heat transport and that the surface temperature isn’t constant. The tropics receive an excess of solar energy and the poles have a deficit. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Gunnar, thank you for your response. In it you say:
Best example. Diet and one meal. Diet is the average of all of the meals.
I think you are confusing the subject matter (weather, climate) with the things that affect it. In fact, all of the things that affect the climate affect the weather. It’s just that over short time periods, a number of them change so slowly that for practical purposes we can ignore them. Note that the fact that in certain circumstances we can ignore them for practical purposes doesn’t mean that they are not there – we can ignore the change in solar radiation when predicting tomorrow’s weather, but we can’t ignore the difference in solar radiation if we are predicting a winter day’s weather versus a summer day’s weather.
On longer scales, you are correct that many more factors come in to play (changes in CO2, solar output, cosmic rays, etc.). However, this increases the complexity of the forecasting problem. If we cannot predict the weather (when many of the forcings can be ignored because they are nearly constant), how can we predict the climate, which as you point out, is dependent on many more known and unknown forcings?
Or to use your words, this objection is perfectly valid: “if you can’t predict the weather 5 days from now, when we can ignore many forcings, how can you predict something about 100 years from now, when we can’t ignore those forcings?”
Finally, I did not see anywhere that you gave a definition of climate above as you say. Perhaps I missed it, or didn’t understand it. Could you give a straightforward definition? For example, I would say:
“Just as your diet is the average of your meals over a certain (months to years) time period, so climate is the average of weather over a certain (months to years) time period.”
What is your definition, “Climate is ______________________________”?
w.
L Nettles #302. Certainly ‘Madness of King James’ was there last night, I read it – didn’t seem more intemperate than similar posts, but looks like it has gone now, maybe Steve thought better of it.
I have already written it 100 times but somehow there is still the discussion about the issue “climate” vs “weather” .
There is no difference of nature .
None whatsoever .
Both are treated by physics and both obey to EXACTLY the same laws of nature .
The fact that they happen on different time scales is irrelevant and there are no laws of nature that are time scale dependent .
A law of nature is a differential equation and by definition local .
It says what happens in an infinitely small space dS in an infinitely small time dt .
Making predictions over finite times and finite spaces involves solving those equations .
It is completely irrelevant to solve them over 5 days or 5 centuries – it is always the same equations (laws of nature) that are solved .
The only difference being that for short time scales many parameters are approximately constant so their time derivatives are aproximately 0 .
There are less time dependent variables so the system is mathematically simpler .
However even the smallest system reduced to only the Navier Stokes equations exhibits chaotic behavior and the dynamics of the system can’t be accurately predicted .
Now wanting to go for longer time scales makes the system of equations more complex and not simpler .
It is trivial that if I can’t solve a system S , then I can’t solve a larger system L containing S .
So how is the trick done ?
There is only one way , I must eliminate the system S that I can’t solve and pretend that the larger system L does NOT contain S .
In other words the description of “the climate” may NOT rely on solving Navier Stokes equations because we know that by trying that we’d get chaos on any time scale .
So basically I must eliminate the time dependence of those inconvenient variables Y(x,t) .
That happens in 2 steps .
– First step I change the local time dependent variables in a sum of their time average Y(x) and a perturbative term {y}(x,t) .
So far it is legitimate and I obtain differential equations containing Y(x) and {y}(x,t) .
Of course those equations are still as time dependent as before and can’t be solved .
– The second step does the trick . I assume that {y}(x,t) is random et voilà – the time dependence and chaos are away .
Alternatively I can also expand Y(x,t) by some spectral method (Kolmogorov like) and neglect small scales .
Both methods are not legitimate in the general case because there is nothing random or scale dependent in the Navier Stokes equations .
Even if both assumptions have some merits and give semi reasonable results with very specific validity conditions , they do NOT give the general solutions of Navier Stokes equations .
In conclusion
“The climate” and “the weather” are exclusively distinguished by the time scale .
As the laws of nature are time scale independent , both obey exactly the same laws .
More specifically the atmospheric chaos being a property of the natural laws expressed by the N-S equations , it is present at all time scales .
The only difference to be expected is that the “climate” chaos will be much more complicated because it results from the interaction of several chaotic systems (the atmospheric chaos being only one of them) .
Steven,
Dean hit Mexico, so that probably should be Knot Pesos.
To throw my 2 pence in on the chaos / weather / climate issue…
Gunnar, your electronics example is interesting, but invalid, because electronic design is based on simple, linear systems (by design). In these cases, the harmonic model allows you to separate behaviour at different frequencies.
Non-linear systems with feedback, such as the climate, do not tend to respond well to this sort of analysis. A better analogy would be to compare the climate to the coastline. The coastline is shape by complex natural processes (much like the climate). Yet those complex processes influence the shape of the coastlines on a wide range of scales, from centimetres, to hundreds of kilometres. There is no break in scale (such as in the eletronics example) because the small processes integrate up to cause large deviations at large scales.
Likewise, climate is influenced over a wide range of scales by all of the natural processes you described above; averaging merely moves you between different scales.
Now, we can test for this – although we don’t have to, because Benoit Mandelbrot already did it for us, and Steve has already posted on the topic. Read this post: Mandelbrot’s Views Mandelbrot checked, and his statistical analysis suggests that climate/weather behaves more like the coastline than an electronic circuit.
Other interesting side reading: Coastline of Britain
RE 333.
I’ve been struggling with calculating a Hurst rescaling..
I loaned my mandelbrot to my father in law who has not seen fit to return
it. Arggg. Anyway, I havent found an adequate description on line…
the climate signal appears to be fractal. deviations from this are indicia
of interference.
Crude metaphor. The coastline is fractal. Until humans mess with it and
regularize the structure. The climate will be fractal until we mess with it.
Random thought
#329 >> Best example. Diet and one meal. Diet is the average of all of the meals.
Yes, but you seem to be missing the point, and this is a perfect illustration of it. The science, ie the analytical techniques are completely different. A chef like Emeril Lagasse is an expert at the techniques for creating an excellent tasting meal. A dietician is an expert at constructing a diet that is best suited for the desired purpose, ie long term health or optimum athletic performance. The science that Emeril knows is useless to figure out the best long term diet. In a similar vein, the skills and science associated with weather forecasting are useless in determining the long term climate.
#329 >> practical purposes doesnt mean that they are not there –
Straw man, since I never said they weren’t there.
#329 >> If we cannot predict the weather (when many of the forcings can be ignored because they are nearly constant), how can we predict the climate, which as you point out, is dependent on many more known and unknown forcings?
Oh my goodness! One is not a subset of the other. In weather, we can ignore many physical phenomena, since we can safely assume they are constant in the short time scales. However, the ones we cannot ignore introduce a tremendous amount of chaos. This makes weather forecasting exceedingly difficult, and because of the inherent chaotic elements, we may never be able to extend weather forecasting much past 15 days, 30 at most. I mean: never. Climate on the other hand, can ignore the chaotic circulation issues, since they don’t matter on the larger timescales. There are other chaotic elements, but they may very well be easier to deal with.
#329 >> how can you predict something about 100 years from now, when we cant ignore those forcings?
Because there are really complicated dynamics that we can ignore, and less complicated dynamics that we now must consider.
#329 >> What is your definition, Climate is ______________________________?
Climatology is the study of the thermodynamic state of the planet, considering everthing that could affect that state, including the crust, oceans, atmosphere, solar system, deep space dynamics, etc.
#331 >> I have already written it 100 times but somehow there is still the discussion about the issue climate vs weather. There is no difference of nature. None whatsoever. Both are treated by physics and both obey to EXACTLY the same laws of nature
You may have written it a hundred times, but you missed the point 100 times. There is only one reality. However, our study of nature is completely different, based on the timescales involved. You are correct when you say “As the laws of nature are time scale independent , both obey exactly the same laws”. But, that is saying something about reality, not our study of it. Consider the difference between a soccer kicked in the air. Newtons laws are sufficient. Now consider that the soccer ball is accelerated to near the speed of light. Are Newtons laws sufficient? According to you, the soccer ball is the same. Point proven, the science is different, based on different inputs to the system.
#333 >> Gunnar, your electronics example is interesting, but invalid
No, it’s valid, but maybe I didn’t go far enough, since the example was more obscure than what I was trying to illustrate. For you, I’ll go further:
consider the difference between analyzing a DC circuit, which includes a transitor, in steady state versus the operation of the same circuit with an additional high frequency sinusoidal input signal. In the DC case, we can analyze the circuit with only Ohms law (V=IR) and Kirchoff’s voltage law (sum of voltages around circuit sum to zero). It’s quite simple. In the AC case, this “science” is insufficient. To study this, we need to understand Semiconductors, including things like Pauli’s Exclusion Principle and Electrochemistry. The analogy perfectly illustrates my point: the science is different, and all we have done is change the time scale, and considered additional inputs. The circuit is the same.
#333 >> There is no break in scale (such as in the eletronics example) because the small processes integrate up to cause large deviations at large scales.
Yes, but in Climate, there are many different factors that don’t enter into the weather forecasting case, and there are complexities in weather forecasting that can be safely ignored in climate studies. Here is another example:
Dropping a leaf into a river. It can be shown that the position of the leaf cannot be predicted past say 30 seconds. It just too chaotic. Someone else is studying how that same river dumps sediment into the ocean. The sediment study does not need to predict where a single leaf will end up. He deals with bigger time scales, and has a different focus. If you can’t understand this, Sorry, I have to move on.
Re #334
Just to correct you on a minor quibble, the coastline is not a fractal. A fractal is a purely mathematical construct and a physical impossibility. To be more accurate, the coastline exhibits fractal like qualities over a large range of scales. But let me address your substantial point.
Even after we humans have messed about with it, the coastline still retains those fractal like properties. Because although humans do modify it, the changes we make are lost in the noise in the bigger scheme of things. To not understand this suggests you do not understand scale issues. No matter how big and bad we do things, nature always goes one better. The same thing probably (almost certainly, IMHO) applies to climate.
What fractals teach us is not to get locked into one scale. We humans build a harbour, yes we have disrupted the fractal behaviour in one location, on one scale, but as we move to a larger scale, the natural variability just swamps us again.
I would never dispute humans have had an effect on climate. That was true the minute humans evolved; and probably more significantly when widespread farming started thousands of years ago. The chaotic trajectory would be different if that were not the case. But not different in a predictable way.
The weakness of climate science is it locks into one scale to form null hypotheses (e.g. interannual variability) then applies that at a larger scale (e.g. decadal or centennial variability) without accounting for the fractal like behaviour of how natural variability changes with scale.
Re 335
“No, its valid, but maybe I didnt go far enough, since the example was more obscure than what I was trying to illustrate.”
OK, I hadn’t appreciated you were going to the quantum level. But that is interesting in itself. The quantum issue applies to the coastline problem as well. As with your electronics example, at the quantum level, the coastline no longer behaves like a fractal. There are physical bounds limiting it. Please understand though that we are talking massive orders of magnitude difference here – far greater than the difference between days of weather and decades of climate.
But that is the point of the test I linked to. When there is a difference in the physical bounds, you can test for it. You can do tests to show that the behaviour at the quantum level is different to the statistical behaviour at higher levels, just like Mandelbrot did with climate. But Mandelbrot found *no evidence* to support the hypothesis that weather and climate are governed by fundamentally different physical effects.
“Dropping a leaf into a river. It can be shown that the position of the leaf cannot be predicted past say 30 seconds. It just too chaotic. Someone else is studying how that same river dumps sediment into the ocean. The sediment study does not need to predict where a single leaf will end up. He deals with bigger time scales, and has a different focus.”
Likewise, Mandelbrot’s test will highlight the difference between the two scale comparisons you are making. These are things we can test for. Climate vs. Weather failed the test.
“If you cant understand this, Sorry, I have to move on.”
I understand your point. I don’t think you understand Mandelbrot’s test. It isn’t a perfect test, but I haven’t seen a better one offered, or anything to counter the result.
Re 336.
The reason Hurst rescaling interested me is that Oke claimed he could
detect or verifing non random changes in weather stations by looking at H.
Granted, there is always a scale at which our changes are rendered moot
re: Gunnar, Spence_UK: One of the IPCC documents, which reference I could not locate in a brief search, defines
as (roughly) the average and standard deviation of a property over, as I recall, 20 years or so, obviously presuming (with no required proof) that ave, std. dev. would characterize the variable.
Much of the current discussion sounds like a previous one: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1516
#337 >> Climate vs. Weather failed the test.
No, it didn’t. Oh, sorry, did I inadvertantly burst one of your anti-AGW arguments? Sorry, the AGWers are right about this one, although in practice, they still treat climate like the long term average of weather.
First of all, this is a hypothesis, not a first principle law of nature. Where is the SM support for it? In this case, the error is built into this false and unsupportable statement. The first two words end in “ology”. That means “study of”, which means that it’s not implying that the underlying object to be studied is different. They don’t have to be shown by “experiment”, since as I’ve amply pointed out in the last post, they are concerned with different inputs (brought on by different timescales, but this is irrelevant), so the science is different by definition. The test is arbitrary and therefore wrong, but it still passes the test. Leif Ericson lived during a warm climate, and during his lifetime, the weather averaged out to zero. A century or so after his death, the climate changed.
>> I dont think you understand Mandelbrots test. It isnt a perfect test, but I havent seen a better one offered, or anything to counter the result
I do now, and it’s irrelevant. It really shows an unhealthy obsession with math that you think that we need to construct a test to determine if one science is different than another. Simply look at the equations!
>> as (roughly) the average and standard deviation of a property over, as I recall, 20 years
Which is really weak and non rigorous, shows a lack of understanding, and arbitrary. Mine is far better:
>> Much of the current discussion sounds like a previous one
I didn’t know about that one. It would be nice to be able to easily change the thread a message is in.
I believe that some modelers would say that when calculating weather, you can ignore short term phenomena, for example thunderstorms.
As I think about it, I believe that this doesn’t work. When calculating climate, you may not care whether a particular thunderstorm is over Pittsburgh, or whether it tracks 10 miles east of that city. But you do care whether there are more thunderstorms or fewer, whether they are equally intense, and where the rain, on average, is falling.
And to do that, you have to understand the physics of the thunderstorm, plus how the change that you are tracking affects the physics.
It seems to me that the equations for tracking these changes, while not exactly the same as the ones you would use for a weather forecast, are going to be at least as complicated.
Blog software isn’t nearly as friendly as bulletin board software. I wonder how much effort it would take to create a sub-page with all the topics listed under general headings, with BB-style posting? The primary page would be the topic(s) du jour, i.e. Steve’s postings, with links to the BB discussion of same.
Mark
Allan, many thanks for the link. I did comment towards the end of the first part of that thread, but didn’t fully follow the second half. It all makes for fascinating reading.
The assumption that averaging tells us something about the high frequency data, rather than simply moving us to a longer scale, is one I feel very uncomfortable with when working with complex natural systems. And don’t get me started on standard deviation! Even some i.i.d. datasets I work with don’t have a definable population standard deviation, let alone autoregressive data sets like temperature. Of course there is always a measurable sample standard deviation, but what does it mean?
Re #338, It would be good to see more climate analyses accounting for scale behaviour. This would definitely be a good thing!
RE 342 Gunnar: In the glossary of http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/tpbiodiv.pdf is, where — indicate deletions:
To some extent the IPCC definition diverts activities from alternate statistical descriptions, which in turn suggests that some analysis does not get performed. That is our job.
>> Blog software isnt nearly as friendly as bulletin board software. I wonder how much effort it would take to create a sub-page with all the topics listed under general headings, with BB-style posting
Not much effort for me. I’m working on blog software in my spare time. I think I’ll have two things, subject-matter and thread. These would be easily set for each message with a combo box, or a new one can be created.
The point will be to encourage a free flowing discussion. The college degrees in the other thread is an interesting discussion, but you are skating on thin ice. I’m just waiting for the lightning to strike, and snip, snip, snip.
I think Steve’s looking to see if there’s any validity to the claim Gavin pooh-poohed engineering educations. If not, you’re right, snip, snip, snip.
I do think it is interesting to see how everyone is educated, at least from a course perspective. I’ve always felt that climate scientists should have a course or two focusing ONLY on systems/control theory. Understanding how and why feedback works is crucial to their efforts.
Mark
“First of all, this is a hypothesis, not a first principle law of nature.”
Agreed. So is AGW. Hypotheses are quite important in science.
“the error is built into this false and unsupportable statement. The first two words end in ology. That means study of, which means that its not implying that the underlying object to be studied is different.”
Yes, that’s the point. Mandelbrot identified there were two arbitrarily defined areas of study, defined by humans. He was looking to see whether it was just arbitrarily defined, or whether there was a physical reason for it.
“they are concerned with different inputs (brought on by different timescales, but this is irrelevant),”
I agree the inputs driving climate are a superset of those driving weather. But what makes you think that the consequences of the shorter timescales are ergodic? They are only “irrelevant” on this condition. This is an assumption you have made, and is rarely true for complex, natural systems like the climate.
“The test is arbitrary and therefore wrong”
… demonstrating further that you do not understand the test …
“Leif Ericson lived during a warm climate, and during his lifetime, the weather averaged out to zero”
So you are referencing from a single datum…
“A century or so after his death, the climate changed”
to a second datum, and found them different. What does this prove about scale behaviour? About natural variability? What about uncertainty? It is difficult to derive uncertainty and scale behaviour from two points.
“I do now, and its irrelevant. It really shows an unhealthy obsession with math that you think that we need to construct a test to determine if one science is different than another”
The basis of science is to test hypotheses. You put forward a claim climate and weather are different, so being scientists, we need to apply a test. As I have noted, I don’t believe Mandelbrot’s test is perfect. But it is the best test I have seen. And it found climate and weather exhibit the behaviour one would expect if they were driven by the same processes.
“Simply look at the equations!”
Do you have all the equations that fully describe climate? Please, let us have them. You’ll save billions of dollars on research.
>> I agree the inputs driving climate are a superset of those driving weather.
As I’ve already explained, they are not a superset. Read above.
>> You put forward a claim climate and weather are different, so being scientists, we need to apply a test.
A test compares a hypothesis against reality. Your false premise is that there is something in nature called “meterology” and “climatology”. There is no such phenomena of nature. Therefore, a test is a non-sequiter. These things are human in conception. They are different, by definition, since they have different purposes. The sediment scientist wants to know how the sediment will accumulate, while the leaf predictor wants to know where the leaf will end up. The mandlebrot test is a non-sensical way to determine if their analytical methods should be the same. Critical thinking skills is how you determine which analytical techniques should be used.
The weather forecaster wants to be able to tell people in Pittsburgh whether to expect a thunderstorm or not. The climatologist wants to calculate how much energy the thunderstorm transforms. No mandlebrot test will be able to tell us that the two scientists have different aims in life.
Wanting to calculate something different, or analyzing a system for completely different input variables, is quite sufficient to change the nature of the analysis, hence science.
re 338 S. Mosher, 344 Spence_UK: Previous bloggers have pointed out
http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/wavelets/hurst/index.html
and that Demetris Koutsoyiannis has several neat papers on his web site.
>> Do you have all the equations that fully describe climate?
Ahh ha, caught you in a straw man. I don’t need to know all the equations to know that just one is different.
All I need is one example: Occasionally, there are huge solar flare events which impact the earth. Sometimes, these have very high microwaves. And if you have ever used a microwave oven, you should know that microwaves are very good at heating water. This event would heat the water in the troposphere, which would affect the climate.
The weather forecaster does not consider this input, therefore, the science, ie analytical technique, is different.
“As Ive already explained, they are not a superset. Read above.”
As I’ve already explained, unless you demonstrate the short timescale fluctuations integrate to negligible levels, they are a superset. The onus of proof is on you.
“Your false premise is that there is something in nature called meterology and climatology. There is no such phenomena of nature.”
You really have lost the plot here. Mandelbrot made no assumption about natural divisions, as you imply. He observed a man-made division and asked the question whether there was a natural division. He looked for it, and found nothing. The result is that it is quite likely that weather and climate are principally dependent on the same physical processes, on different scales.
I’m not sure you are capable of objectively reading Mandelbrot’s paper, because you are responding with straw men.
“These things are human in conception. They are different, by definition, since they have different purposes.”
Yes, they are human in conception. That isn’t what Mandelbrot is checking. He is looking to see if the variability is driven by the same physical processes. I think this is the cognitive leap you are failing to make. You don’t understand the test Mandelbrot is applying.
“The mandlebrot test is a non-sensical way to determine if their analytical methods should be the same.”
That is not what the test is about. The test is about understanding natural variability.
“The weather forecaster wants to be able to tell people in Pittsburgh whether to expect a thunderstorm or not. The climatologist wants to calculate how much energy the thunderstorm transforms. No mandlebrot test will be able to tell us that the two scientists have different aims in life.”
A Mandelbrot test will usefully tell us whether the natural storm variability shows complex scale behaviour. This can inform us what is driving the variability (short-term integrals or long-term effects). If the long-term variability is being driven by the integral of short-scale effects, the climatologist had better pay attention, or they will never get the right answer.
Let me know when you’ve got those equations.
Re 347:
Mark T: I am the one who incorrectly attributed the “knows just enough to get into trouble” comment to Gavin when I should have attributed it to Spencer Weart. Gavin only agreed in a general way to several points made in Weart’s post but he had no specific comment about the engineer crack by Weart. However, Gavin did not try to correct Weart on this so it is fair to say that Gavin did not disagree with the statement strongly enough to warrant a comment by him.
Yes, Bob, I saw your correction in the other thread. Whether or not Gavin _should have_ corrected Weart on that specific point is a matter of debate, but his silence on the matter is not a surprise.
Gunnar, I have seen Gavin reply to a comment John A. made in response to a question (paraphrased) “Just once I’d like to see historical CO2 vs. temperature plots in which cause [CO2] precedes effect [temperature].” Gavin’s reply was something about feedback changing the way that works, i.e., feedback can imitate effect preceding cause. Hence my assumption…
Mark
>> As Ive already explained, unless you demonstrate the short timescale fluctuations integrate to negligible levels, they are a superset.
Even if they are a superset, they are a superset, therefore, different science is involved, since there are phenemena being analyzed that are in addition to what weather people look at.
>> He looked for it, and found nothing. The result is that it is quite likely that weather and climate are principally dependent on the same physical processes, on different scales.
The principal error you and Mandelbrot are making is trying to use statistics to make specious claims about the science involved. I could say “statistically, I conclude that I cause other people to come to work, since every time I come to work, they do too”, and Mandlebrot would be hard pressed to prove me wrong.
>> If the long-term variability is being driven by the integral of short-scale effects, the climatologist had better pay attention, or they will never get the right answer.
What’s your scientific hypothesis to explain how the thunderstorm hitting Pittsburgh versus Mt Lebanon affects the long term climate. This is a perfect example that illustrates how differently math and science people think.
If the Mandlebrot oriented climatologist simply uses the techniques of weather forecasting, and runs the computer program for 100 years, instead of 15 days, and doesn’t consider all the factors that affect the climate, then he will surely be wrong, and guilty of scientific misconduct.
It’s extremely simple minded to measure a small portion of the output, and based on some statistical techniques, claim something about the analytical techniques that would be necessary to study and understand the science involved.
As Alan once said so elegantly: the average output of a nonlinear system is not the output of the average of inputs
Re #351: Sorry, I missed this as it was cross posted.
I’m not quite sure what your point is here to be honest. I’m probably going to create some more straw men just because your point is so poorly made. I apologise for that in advance 🙂
I said the climate effects were a superset of weather effects. Even if climate were linear (it isn’t), this is still consistent; the solar flare has to dominate over the integral of the small scale effects. So your observation doesn’t disprove that climate is a superset of weather. Although this might not have been your aim (difficult to tell). Without magnitudes, and consequences of integrals, your claim is impossible to determine.
If the climate is a coupled non-linear system (I don’t think anyone disputes this) then the situation is more complex as a progression of time. The solar flare puts the weather pattern attractor on to a different trajectory, possibly causing phase changes. This is on top of the fact that the small scale changes also put the climate on a different trajectory. The net outcome is… well, unpredictable.
Your final point (about analytical technique) is irrelevant. Mandelbrot’s hypothesis was entirely unrelated to analytical method. I have only raised one question regarding analytical method, which is whether long term averaging removes small scale effects. This is a question that Mandelbrot did not ask, although scale behaviour is useful with respect to informing us on this point.
>> Let me know when youve got those equations
Straw man, since I don’t need to know all the equations to know that one is different.
>> Your final point (about analytical technique) is irrelevant. Mandelbrots hypothesis was entirely unrelated to analytical method.
Sails Unfurled! Yes, but I’ve been talking about analytical technique this whole time! We just couldn’t get on the same conceptual page.
Spence_UK,
Sokath, his eyes uncovered.
Now that you understand that I’ve been talking about analytical technique the whole time, please go back and read my last 10 postings. I suspect this has all been misundertanding of terms.
“The principal error you and Mandelbrot are making is trying to use statistics to make specious claims about the science involved. I could say statistically, I conclude that I cause other people to come to work, since every time I come to work, they do too, and Mandlebrot would be hard pressed to prove me wrong.”
Nope. You made an assertion – a hypothesis – that climate and weather are driven by different physical processes. I have made an assertion that climate is chaotic and therefore short scale fluctuations could integrate to become dominant at longer scales (self-similarity). We have a disagreement. The correct scientific thing to do is to devise a test to see whether there is any support for one argument or the other. Mandelbrot’s test supports my point of view. This is how science works.
Mandelbrot could test your second hypothesis easily. I would recommend you do not turn up for work for a number of days. If everyone else still did, that would falsify your hypothesis.
“Whats your scientific hypothesis to explain how the thunderstorm hitting Pittsburgh versus Mt Lebanon affects the long term climate. This is a perfect example that illustrates how differently math and science people think.”
No, my first question is “do the variables that lead to a thunderstorm hitting somewhere different integrate to a negligible level, or integrate up to have a significant influence on long term variability?”. By the way, I’m an engineer who works in a research field, not a mathematician. Some who do the same job as me refer to themselves as scientists!
“If the Mandlebrot oriented climatologist simply uses the techniques of weather forecasting”
Mandelbrot was not referring to the analytical tools. You need to get over this straw man you have set up.
“and runs the computer program for 100 years, instead of 15 days, and doesnt consider all the factors that affect the climate”
I would agree. That is neither my point, nor Mandelbrots as I read it. My point (I don’t speak for Mandelbrot), is that if the climatologist runs a computer program that doesn’t take into account the weather forecasting model in addition to the other effects, he will very likely get the wrong answer. Guilty of scientific misconduct? Not necessarily, it could just be incompetence.
“Its extremely simple minded to measure a small portion of the output, and based on some statistical techniques, claim something about the analytical techniques that would be necessary to study and understand the science involved.”
That’s good, because nobody has done that. Beyond the straw man you have created.
Re #360 (cross-posted again!)
Have we been talking at cross purposes? It wouldn’t surprise me, this is the internet after all 🙂
Trouble is, in the detail, I still strongly disagree with some of your statements, which are unsupportable in terms of non-linear dynamics. Your understanding of systems is typical of someone who has been brought up primarily on the harmonic model, and shows little insight into how this model breaks down when chaotic behaviour occurs. In the harmonic model, scales are trivially separable, in the chaotic model, they are not.
Allan, thanks for the link – I am an avid follower of Demetris’ work, and I like to think I have played my part in introducing several people to it! He shows a very deep understanding of scale behaviour, his work is absolutely fascinating. Network traffic (in your link) I think is a great example – people assumed that it was Poisson until they realised it exhibited fractal scale behaviour, and now model it with FGN, resulting in improved optimisation (I suspect ClimateAudit is an example of this!). I suspect hurricanes very likely follow the same sort of statistical behaviour (and I believe there is a paper, listed on RPSr’s climatesci site, that statistically confirmed this for the Pacific basin from proxy data)
In general, I give up. I was hoping that you would realize that I’ve been talking about analytical technique the whole time, and that you would re-read all my posting in this light.
>> >> I would recommend you do not turn up for work for a number of days. If everyone else still did, that would falsify your hypothesis
No, that would be resorting to the SM. Try to disprove it by measuring the output, and doing some statistics.
>> Mandelbrot was not referring to the analytical tools. You need to get over this straw man you have set up.
Yes, but I AM referring to analytical techniques only! That’s why I say Mandlebrot is irrelevant to my point. It’s a straw man to you, because of your insistence that Mandlebrot can tell us anything about the correct analytical techniques to use to tackle a problem.
re 350 Thanks Allen
Judith Curry-
Your colleagues course EAS 8001, Fall 2007: The Hockey Stick bibliography would be remiss not to include Ross McKitricks early account of this episode in their bibliography. Namely:
McKitrick, Ross R. (2006) The Mann et al. Northern Hemisphere “Hockey Stick” Climate Index: A Tale of Due Diligence. in Michaels, Patrick, ed. Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Published last December, I believe it went to bed prior to the NAS and Wegman Reports last summer. As per Gerald Norths – perhaps disingenuously CYA? or maybe I should just call it *pars-ifal*? – comments afterward, they ought to be read together:
I’m still finding my way around here, and just found this. I gather this is where we can talk about CO2 and greenhouse, and thermo without getting whacked?
354, I think what he was trying to say is that CO2 preceding temp doesn’t disprove greenhouse because you can’t tell by looking at the ice core data whether or by how much there’s a positive feedback on top of the solar forcing. It’s true that it doesn’t falsify positive feedback, but it doesn’t help the case, either.
If you pin him down, he has to admit that Gore was full of it, though.
347, System dynamics is related to statistics is related to DSP. Someone who’s good at all of those things is needed to coax useful information out of the piles of data that they have to work with. It really would be a good idea for analysis to be a subfield of climatology, because the climatologists as a group seem really weak in that.
I think that’s why physicists and astrophysicists are so far out ahead of climatologists in terms of time-series analysis that most of the climatologists don’t even understand what they’re doing. That’s also one of Lindzen’s strengths, btw.
>> greenhouse, and thermo without getting whacked?
I think so, but be careful, or the Man will hear you.
>> Its true that it doesnt falsify positive feedback
I think we can safely assume that the system has no poles in the right half plane, ie it’s stable.
Re:#365
Yes and no. I would avoid thermo as much as possible. Steve Mc. doesn’t think any of us are sufficiently expert. He’s probably correct. Discussion of the details of the physics of the enhanced greenhouse effect usually end up being deleted for the same reason. Linking to outside resources without discussion in response to questions is usually allowed. My #317 comment is probably only still there because it didn’t generate any heated responses. In general, tone seems to be very important. Try not to get sucked into responding intemperately (or at all) to comments you think are beyond the pale. Of course that’s only basic netiquette, but it’s easy to forget.
Gunnar, that’s exactly why the time lag matters. That’s why the Schwartz paper is so important. Not only did he use system dynamics to calculate climate sensitivity, but in the process, he also showed why there are no tipping points. In one fell swoop, he showed why the climate sensitivity is lower than IPCC was claiming, and why it’s not going to run away. All from basic control system theory.
Gunnar said:
So you’re the reason I get up every morning and go to work. I just knew it wasn’t the irresistibly rewarding work that I do. Could you let me sleep in tomorrow?
Thanks,
Bob
I think it’s fairer to say Steve doesn’t think most of us are sufficiently expert. He has stated many times that such a discussion will devolve into sidetracks that he doesn’t want to moderate (primarily because they will mostly be immaterial).
Amazing what some training in control theory does for the analysis. Certainly there can be positive feedbacks, but without something else to balance them, the whole of the system (i.e. as viewed from one top-level system) would be unstable.
Mark
Larry, if you want to discuss such topics, please do so in the context of evaluating mainstream articles. I posted a thread on an article by Gerry North. That puts a discipline on things. I’m not interested in my site being a platform for people announcing their own theories about why AGW isn’t possible or thermodynamic speculations.
Steve, that makes it all moot, since I’m not a supporter of any of the “AGW is thermodynamically impossible” theories (including that recent German crackpot paper making the rounds). The only time I’ve ever brought thermo up is when someone over at RC says something that’s in contradiction to the laws of thermo. It’s not so much an integral part of the mechanisms as it is an overall consistency check. In a sense, it’s primarily an auditing tool.
I just wasn’t quite sure what the issue was, and now I understand.
# 371
Larry,
It’s not my case, but if one took some courses on thermo throughout ones career, I think one can talk about thermo. However, if one is a physicist, or an engineer one would be more qualified to talk about thermo, although it is not a guarantee that what one would say would be true, that is, physics is a factual and accurate science, but physicists are humans.
Nasif, I think his point is that he can’t tell who’s who, and unless the conversation is tied to some literature, the risk is that his blog will be overrun with crackpot dilettante science, which hostile parties will use to discredit him personally. It’s a legitimate concern. And as I say, thermo’s not all that relevant anyway.
If I ever get the urge to be a crackpot, I’ll start my own blog, and just drop links.
# 373
Steve,
You’re right. I’m a happy irrestricted scientist; however, it’s your site and I consider that speaking about our own hypotheses -not stipulated by you and your team- would be a lack of respect and consideration towards your hospitality. Id like to speak on the few notions that I have on thermodynamics, but I have to respect the rules.
# 376
Larry,
I think I got the point.
Gunnar, you say:
Not. See the work of Piers Corbyn, an excellent weather forecaster who considers precisely this input.
Regarding your definition of climate as
it is an interesting definition. The problem is, the rest of the planet doesn’t use that definition:
I’m sure you can see the general thread here. Climate is the average weather over a period of time. While you are certainly free to make up your own definition of a word, it’s a bit much to then argue that yours is the real, true, and correct definition. You are taking the Humpty Dumpty route here, which is interesting, but hardly scientific.
w.
————————————————————————–
379, You just illustrated beautifully why why thermo should be a restricted topic. I think that both of you are partially right, but I don’t want to get into that mud wrestle. Better to go find the article on why mean temperature is meaningless (which I think is what Gunnar was eluding to) than to shoot from the hip in the middle of a mud puddle.
Gunnar,
re: “In general, I give up”, I’m inclined to give up as well; I think we will have to agree to disagree on this topic.
I think I know where you are coming from now with the analytical viewpoint, it reminds me of the view that Dr Browning expressed on this topic (although Dr Browning’s communication and reasoning skills gave an order of magnitude more clarity to his thinking). But to completely write off the empirical approach is naive; as I demonstrated, the empirical approach was capable of answering your employment question quite easily and efficiently. I was going to turn that back on you and ask how analytical methods would help solve, for example, a prediction of the future state of the Lorenz attractor system, but then I saw this:
“>> Its true that it doesnt falsify positive feedback
I think we can safely assume that the system has no poles in the right half plane, ie its stable.”
Hmm. Round peg in a square hole I think. Let’s agree to disagree.
# 379
Willis Eschenbach,
Just a comparative idea: Climate would resemble the biosphere, the whole; while weather would resemble a community. Right?
Re: #373
Thanks for the clarification.
July, 2005 UAH MSU anomalies have finally been posted. Lower troposphere data here.
July, 2007. D’oh!
More from Roy Spencer on feedbacks and Lindzen’s Iris hypothesis at Pielke, Sr.’s blog here.
# 385
Dewitt Payne,
And locally, we have had an “anomaly” of -0.12 K on July 2007.
The current sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly map is worth a glance ( link )
* near-normal temperatures across the eastern tropical Atlantic
* a few “cool” spots south of Cuba where Dean tracked. There is still plenty of deep warm water though.
* no accumulation of anomalously warm water in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool
* an ever-so-slowly developing La Nina in the Pacific
* blood-red in the Arctic where water is quite warm due to less cloud cover and light winds.Note that the choice of map makes the Arctic look unrealistically large.
* oddness in the North Pacific
Not shown here is the subsurface tropical Pacific water profile, which shows more coolish water rising in the eastern Pacific.
RE: “oddness in the North Pacific”
Of particular note is the sudden appearance in the Bering Sea of a cold mass of water. It really came out of nowhere, showing up over the past week. Changes which may impact the Arctic may be a brewin’ …. certainly bears watching.
Gunnar, Spence_UK
Anyhow, thanks for a most interesting debate.
Giving up too .
Willis hit the nail on the head .
Alice was wasting her time listening to Humpty Dumpty .
Gunnar said :
“You may have written it a hundred times, but you missed the point 100 times. There is only one reality. However, our study of nature is completely different, based on the timescales involved. You are correct when you say As the laws of nature are time scale independent , both obey exactly the same laws. But, that is saying something about reality, not our study of it. Consider the difference between a soccer kicked in the air. Newtons laws are sufficient. Now consider that the soccer ball is accelerated to near the speed of light. Are Newtons laws sufficient? According to you, the soccer ball is the same. Point proven, the science is different, based on different inputs to the system. ”
You completely misunderstood my point .
Newton’s law is false because it is derived from hypothesis that are false , it is not clear where
you want to go with the misguided analogy about soccer balls .
If you use the Newton’s law you use a demonstrably false theory, so you don’t do science . The fact that a false theory may give a right numerical result in some conditions doesn’t make it less false .
There are false theories (Newton) and sofar right theories (general relativity) but there are no “different sciences” depending on inputs .
It would be even worse if one confused a right theory (Navier-Stokes) with different more or less legitimate numerical treatements of this one (right) theory by calling them “different sciences/theories” .
My point was that if someone substitutes to a right general science/theory (Navier Stokes) some other science/theory qualitatively depending on numerical values of some parameters then what he does is at best incomplete and at worst false .
Unless , of course , Navier Stokes is wrong what is sofar not proven .
That is a point of mathematical logics .
All scientific theories are just models of reality. Some fit better than others, some don’t fit at all. Newton’s laws of motion apply over a range of scales and velocities, therefore they approximate reality close enough to be useful. His point about soccer balls is that you can use different models to describe the behavior of the ball without changing the fundamental reality of the ball.
Mathematical logic has nothing to do with science. Would be “difficult” to show that all differentiable functions are continuous using the scientific method.
#391 >> There are false theories (Newton) and sofar right theories (general relativity)
Ok, my cousin is driving to Pittsburgh today, let me calculate how long it should take, considering the time dilation effect, hold on cousin, this may take some time.
Jaye has it right.
#391 >> but there are no different sciences depending on inputs.
I think this whole thing is a misunderstanding of terminology. You consider science as synomymous with reality. When I say science, I mean the analytical techniques used to understand some phenomena of nature. And it is obviously inarguable that we use different analytical techniques depending on what we’re trying to determine, and the type of inputs we’re considering.
#379 >> Climate is the average weather over a period of time. While you are certainly free to make up your own definition of a word, its a bit much to then argue that yours is the real, true, and correct definition.
Why because many people say so? Climatology is in it’s infancy. At one time, people considered chemistry to be the study of how one can create gold.
I’m not just “making up a definition”. I’m constructing a definition that matches the reason for people being interested in studying climatology, and considering the inputs that effect the output they are interested in. Do you have any other argument about why my definition is wrong, besides “that’s not what everyone says”?
I can certainly falsify the common definition, since the thermodynamic state of the Earth, as a system, can only be affected by 3 things, based on 1st law:
Energy In = Energy Out + Work Performed
Meterology seeks to understand the atmospheric circulation chaos. It considers all of the above 3 to be constant, and merely tries to predict air flow patterns. Climatology must consider all of these, and everything that affects them, including Energy In, ie Solar variation. Meterology doesn’t and Climatology must, therefore, they are different sciences.
We’re also miscommunicating. Notice that I defined the word Climatology and you defined the word Climate?
I wonder if there would be interest in a thread in which research that has no relation of climate change is cast in that light to gain support.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/08/22/dinosaur.speed.reut/index.html
This CNN story describes research that estimates the speed at which various dinosaurs could run. T. Rex is calculated to run at 18mph which would be faster than most soccer players. One dinosaur could hit 40mph.
This is interesting research but one wonders how it can relate to climate change. This is explained in the story as being able to identify how species can cope with environmental challenges and of curse that relates to climate change
That used to be the most common error but still unfortunately appears from time to time .
Newton’s law is a completely wrong representation of gravity and can’t be derived from any known principles .
It is approximation of nothing and certainly not of a valid representation of gravity .
Its postulates are wrong and its consequences are wrong .
Its status is the one of the epicycles – it works in some cases untill it stops working because it is wrong .
Nobody would dare to say that the epicycles are an “approximation” of gravity that apply over “a range of scales and velocities” , yet there are still people 1 century after Einstein who say that Newton is an “approximation” of gravity .
What IS an approximation of gravity in a specific case is the weak spherically symetrical field in general relativity but that has nothing to do at all with Newton’s postulates .
As for the “fundamental reality of the ball” that is just a buzzword because nobody can know what that is and quantum machanics makes sure that it will stay so .
Untill the quantum mechanics is proven to be wrong what is not yet the case to my understanding .
Besides I am happy that mathematical logics have nothing to do with science so that false may imply true .
At least it is consistent with the fact that a person who uses such a definition of science is able to write so much nonsense in so few sentences .
I wonder if that belief is also shared by some so called “climatologists” 🙂
388
David:
I was looking at the Sea Surface Satellite maps. I am not sure I understand the way they calculate the anomaly. Do you have a simple explanation? What does it mean when some areas have a strong continuous anomaly for 10 years. It seems that the meaning is different from the standard way anomalies are presented, i.e., current against 30 year average.
We probably need a philosphy of science thread. I’ll splash water in your face
with Quine:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections — the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement — especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?
For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances from a sensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience — and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery. But in this relation of “germaneness” I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have already urged, bc accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries — not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits18b comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.
Re #396 bernie this particular anomaly map is based on satellite-only data taken at nighttime. It uses 1984-1991 plus 1993 as its base period. A fuller description is here .
There are other anomaly maps that use other base periods and methods, but I like this one because I consider nighttime satellite data to be relatively “clean” (but not perfect). The things I dislike about it is the use of strong colors like yellow and red to illustrate warmth while a weak color (blue) is used for cool anomalies, and the fact that they use a map projection which makes the polar regions unrealistically large, and the limited base period.
“I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.” ~ Max Born.
Quine = Hogwash
#47 in Hansen and the Great White North >> It is coincidental that there was an X9.4 flare in NOVEMBER 1997, 14 of X size flares and 95 M size flares spread out throughout 1998. No wonder it was so warm in 1998. There was a lot of solar electrical heating taking place.
I had assumed that this information was common knowledge. Out of curiousity a while back, I plotted sunspots, flare data and global satellite temperature on the same graph, and it seems quite obvious what’s going on.
Kinda like the situation where one of my children comes running from the camp fire, screaming that he burned himself. Do I 1) assume that the fire was involved or 2) imagine a complex scenario involving numerous speculative phenomena building for centuries that just now culminated in spontaneous combustion, burning my child’s finger. Hmmmm, maybe I should use some advanced statistical techniques to determine which theory is correct, in complete defiance of Ockam and his silly razor.
RE 400.
Well i did not expect folks to throw roses at my feet!
but you toss Hogwash on me and I might have to think
twice about the high regard I have for you .. kidding ok
( kidding about the high regard? or the thinking twice?)
re #402, I have a high regard for you, so I should have made it clear that I was not referring to you. It’s only:
Quine = Swine wash 🙂
RE 403..
Good one.
Hat tip to Gunnar.
“In addition to mis-stating the NRCs conclusions, another common claim of the skeptics to say that AR4 quietly abandoned the Hockey Stick, which is total nonsense. The SPM expands the period of time from 1000 years (from the TAR) to 1300 years, with a 66%+ (likely) probability. The body of AR4 WGI includes the Hockey Stick, and many other multi-proxies, none of which put past temperatures as high as they are today. Furthermore, AR4 specifically rebukes the M&M criticism.
The notion that the scientific establishment is backing away from the Hockey Stick, or Multi-proxy reconstructions in general, lives on only in the minds of the skeptics.”
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/hemispheres/#comments
This warmer still thinks the hockey stick is a valid temp reconstruction. After reading this site i don’t see how anyone could think there is any validity in the method used to create a hockey stick.
# 401
Gunnar,
I made the same observation on solar flares and published a graph, although I didn’t plot the whole data. Regarding your comment on Occam’s razor, there are many phenomena in nature for which the simplest explanation is not the truest explanation.
#401
Gunnar: It is coincidental that there was an X9.4 flare in NOVEMBER 1997, 14 of X size flares and 95 M size flares spread out throughout 1998. No wonder it was so warm in 1998. There was a lot of solar electrical heating taking place.
As an amateur astronomer I was aware of the solar activity, it made for some spectacular aurora that year. We had Aurora in the San Francisco Bay Area, which at the time was extemely unusual. It has happened a few times since, but would still qualify as a rare event.
When the climate change “science” was presented I was quite sceptical since they were making no mention of the Sun, and yet it was behaving in a quite unusual manner.
Robert
# 407
Robert,
Besides the fact that the unusual Suns behavior was happening in the low portion of the sunspots cycle.
# 405
jimdk,
Yes, you’re right! I still have been seeing the “Hockey Stick” everywhere. Thats because AGWists play the blind, dumb and stupid role because they know that the Media and some science press support them.
Until Steve plotted the Hansen and the Great North, I would have thought the graph on Tamino’s site that you jimdk listed in #405 would be sufficient to prove that more needed to be done before the HS was seriously challenged. However, looking at the number of sites available in other parts of the world, and the adjustments done to US data in comparison, I don’t think I could accept any proxy at this time without a large grain of skeptism. We use the phrase “not ready for prime time” to describe data, new equipment’s track records, new procedures, etc., that though they may look good, some seriuos testing and QA/QC is needed before we would reccommend buying or using them. HS = not ready for prime time.
>> there are many phenomena in nature for which the simplest explanation is not the truest explanation.
Yes, it’s not meant to be what you imply. It’s just a first guess. If one is not going to actually look into something scientifically, then your first guess should go with Ockam. Especially if the complicated, speculative and ill defined possibility is going to cost you a lot of money. Norwegians are personally forking over 1.8 billion dollars to AGW. You know, what norwegians tolerate will not be tolerated in the US. If you added $466 to every US electric bill, you would have a mutiny. Americans are a tough bunch, and if they find that the proponents of this don’t have a coherent theory, have fudged the data, and won’t provide access to their magic adjustments, they will be hunting down the AGWers with dogs. That’s why the Senate voted down a Kyoto type deal by the razor-thin margin of 95-0.
>> unusual Suns behavior was happening in the low portion of the sunspots cycle
Yes, it was quite a shock 🙂
David:
Thanks for the explanation. I checked the August anomalies for 1983 to 1999 & 1993 for the Arctic. What struck me as odd was that this appears to be a cool period – I did it visually not with actual numbers – that wil have to be the weekend. I was expecting that the baseline would at least be a pretty even mixing of blues and reds in the Arctic area. Is there something I am not getting?
>> I still have been seeing the Hockey Stick everywhere
You shouldn’t be surprised. You honest people are assuming that they are acting in good faith. They haven’t given up on Arrhenius (1896) or Callendar. So, you should expect to hear about the hockey stick until at least the year 2100.
413: LOL
I keep thinking about the MET prediction that global air temperatures are going to cool for a few years until 2009. Hoi Polloi (#5) quoted the Guardian as saying, “Powerful computer simulations used to create the world’s first global warming forecast suggests temperature rises will stall in the next two years, before rising sharply at the end of the decade. … Climate scientists say the new high-precision forecast predicts temperatures will stall because of natural climate effects that have seen the Southern Ocean and tropical Pacific cool over the past couple of years.”
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory suggests that as the level of CO2 increases, so too will the air’s ability to trap heat. If the air does indeed cool, then the extra heat trapped by increasing levels of CO2 will have to go into heating the oceans or glaciers since the theory says it won’t be able to escape into space. If the oceans slowly heat up over the next 3 years, that would have a profound effect on the density of the water. The water would increase in volume. The water levels would rise as a result. According to Stephen Richards (#156), “[the MET Office] may also have noted that world sea temperatures are falling…” Which is it?
If the global sea levels do not rise and the global temperature increase does slow significantly, like it already has, then the AGW theory would be proven incorrect. So, how have sea levels been since 2000?
John M Reynolds
>> We had Aurora in the San Francisco Bay Area
Yes, I remember. Of course, it’s still our fault. Gaia is mad at us, and is using the sun to get back at us.
Have I missed something? I keep seeing that increased temperature is going to cause, has caused, the ocean to expand. I even seen estimations of about 2 cm or more increase in sea level from global warming. Given that it would have to rise (the old bathtub analogy), I wonder why they do not talk of air expansion. I know that in a closed vessel air would change the pressure since the volume can’t change. But earth is not a vessel. Gravity diffential with respect to CoE (center of Earth) is known. Why don’t we see these super accurate measurements of the increase in the depth of the atmosphere as proof of increased heat input for the satelite historical period?
# 420,
well put. Math models reality.
Another one bites the dust?
Steve isn’t the only thorn in the side of the true-belivers. Monckton has produced another interesting paper which in very clear fashinon demonstrates that the predicted signature of AGW, the trophospheric “hot spot”, is entirely absent from real world observations.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html
SteveMc,
I emailed you about this but thought I’d post it here also in case it didn’t go through.
In the last few days I can only read about two thirds of your posts as the right sidebar is too wide.
I believe it is because the word “Hygrothermometer:” causes the sidebar to widen when people comment on that thread and it pops up in the sidebar.
I don’t know if others are having the same problem but I can’t get the sidebar to move. Is it possible to put a break in the word hygrothermometer?
I just read that Roger Pielke is retiring his Climate Science blog as of Sept 2. I’m really bummed. I enjoy reading his blog as much as I enjoy reading ClimateAudit.
# 420
George H.,
Not only from real world observations, but from real mathematic formalities. Jae wrote some posts above that he thinks the main mode of heat transfer from soil to air is convection, at least that’s what I understood from his message. I agree with Jae. The problem with cond-conv is that their algorithms are not susceptible to “convenient treatments. For example, if e of CO2 changes with temperature and it doesnt depend on density, but on gravity, why not to take the value á for 0.345, which is the value obtained if we consider the standard conditions for the Northern Hemisphere?
# 422
It’s the fate of almost all sites and blogs not supported by AGWism. That’s the importance of donating some bucks for the maintenance of these sites. Have you seen the box in the left superior margin on this page?
# 424
Yes, I got the point; however I cannot understand why why adhere to constants that empirically are not real.
Re:#425
I think it’s more a case of burnout rather than lack of money. There’s only so much Steve Bloom that a man can take.
# 428
I said that because were experiencing the same situation at biocab. I know that each case has its own motivations, but money is a limiting constant. Besides, many times our work and expenditures of time and money are not well appreciated by the readers.
Hurricane Dean
Some obvious points have been made. Dean’s statement about recent experience simply ignores the fact that good data have only existed since satellites in the 70s, the work done by Pielke et al shows the most destructive hurricane to hit the US was way back in the 20s, etc etc.
Then, we have a classic piece af AGW speak in that warming can simulteneoulsly cause no hurricanes, because that is an extreme as well as make them more frequent and stronger. And this relies on the non-sequiteur that warming will cause more extremes when, with the greater impact of warming at the poles and thus a reduction in the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, the result will be LESS extremes.
Regards
Paul
# 428
Paul, Then the system is chaotic.
One nice thing about the new server is that it doesn’t take forever to download over 400 comments in a thread.
Now it would be nice if everyone used the permanent comment links instead of the comment number, which can change when messages are deleted. Here’s one way:
Copy and paste into your reply the sender and date, removing the carriage return e.g. Nasif Nahle says: August 25th, 2007 at 1:42 pm, then right click the comment number and select Copy Link Location. This gives you the permanent link in the clipboard http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1882#comment-130597. Then select the name and date text with the mouse, click the Quicktags Link button and paste the URL in the box. Click OK and you’re done. If you don’t select the text to use as the hyperlink, don’t forget to close the tag after the text. To keep the preview pane display correct, put a space after the = sign and before the quote marks in the href=”URL” tag. The result is this: Nasif Nahle says: August 25th, 2007 at 1:42 pm . This will take a reader to the correct message as long as it exists. It would also be nice if the webmaster would consistently delete the second post of an accidental double post and everyone remembers to only use the link to the first post. Too bad blog software doesn’t have a reply button to automate this task.
>> Too bad blog software doesnt have a reply button to automate this task.
Mine will.
DeWitt Payne says: August 25th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
# 430
It didn’t work, I didn’t understood something or I made it wrongly.
Nasif Nahle August 25th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Nasif, Your test post worked fine for me. Took me right to the comment. Don’t try to use the link in the preview pane, though, it won’t be correct. Putting in the space lets you see the text correctly but breaks the link in the pane.
Ok! Yes… It’s working now. Thanks, DeWitt!
Thank you Steve for hyphenating “hygrothermometer”. Makes all the difference.
Much appreciated.
nested comments please.
I have posted this on several pro CO2 AGW sites and it seems no one on any of them will challenge my facts or my logic.
I am now trying to see if the scientist at RC will address this but I am pretty sure that it will not get posted.
#424 Nashif
So where is your tip jar?
# 439
Jan,
“Idunno” 😦 But there’s always room for two more cents… 🙂
I dunno, Jan, but there’s always room for another cent… 😉
# 438
Vernon,
They make the dumb and blind. See how they have not renounced to their spurious Hockey graph?
#438
GCMs don’t depend on the surface temperature record.
RE: 443 richardT,
in this case your wrong. If you had read Hansen et al (2001) . A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change you would know that it does not happen to be about climate change trends. It is about the station off-sets for UHI, Time of observation, meta-data (station moves) for individual stations. You do realize he is taking individual urban stations and comparing them the local rural light=0 stations to find the difference? He is not looking for the trend, but the overall difference?
Hansen went on to specificaly say:
So Hansen says that the data from the ‘weather stations’ needs to be accurate for his methodology to work.
Further, Hansen made additional assumptions:
However, site issues which surfacestations.org are bringing to light show that this is not a valid assumption. Having buildings, asphalt, concrete, and equipment closer than the ‘weather stations’ are allowed will affect the data.
These off-sets are used by GISS in the GCM. If the off-sets are used to modify the station data for the GISS model, so if the off-set is wrong then the output of the model most likely wrong.
No, over on RC they will not post or respond to this since it shows that their dumping on surfacestations.org is wrong since not all stations are used for just the temp delta.
Andrew Revkin has a piece (page A19 of today’s NYT, “Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight”) on the GISS adjustment. Those who have been paying attention may be a bit surprised by the specific elements Revkin chose to report — Hansen’s “Jor-El complex,” “court jesters” and Rush Limbaugh’s mis-statements, among others — as well as the overall tone.
I just saw SteveM’s thread on the Revkin article; please ignore my last post.
#444
You asked which facts you got wrong. I suggested one.
Did you understand Hansen et al. 2001? It is not about GCMs, indeed it hardly mentions them. With rare exceptions, observed climate state is not fed into GCMs.
richardT, are you suggesting that the GCM’s are using data that is not adjusted for UHI, Time of observation, meta-data (station moves)? If that was the case, why not just use the raw data?
Hansen (2001) needs accurate data. That work is not based on trends. It is used to adjust the station data which is used to get temp delta which is used by the GCMs.
What part is wrong?
re 447 richardT,
More accurately, the observed climate state is not an output of the the GCMs. See eg. my earlier post 420. The modellers have come to think of their GCMs as reality. They’re not. They’re divorced from reality. It’s like Nintendo — A little is ok for a child, but when computer games are allowed to take over, it becomes a problem. It’s time to tell these gamesters to go outside and play for a while.
RE 449: So what you mean is that it that Gavin would get more out of his life if he started playing world of warcraft? 😉
DeWitt Payne says:
Hi; on DeWitt Payne’s recomendation, I’m transferring this (in reverse chronology) from the Brazil thread – Steve, or you out there?
I just spent another fruitless hour last night at NSIDC, NOAA & Google looking for “Arctic cloud cover monthly summaries NOAA”, etc. Maybe it’s because I’m a newbie data-miner & don’t know what to look for. I hope there is a single data set for the entire arctic, and I don’t have to stitch together from US, Canada, Russion, Norwary, etc. I’d really be out of my depth on that.
Help from any source would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, am I the only one who’s taken to composing my posts in my mail editor, because trying to write in the comments box is so freakin’ slow?
Oops; deleted the “DeWitt Payne says:” from my previous.
450.
Gavin would more out of life if he read
Click to access kuhn1.pdf
RE 426.
Perhaps the bloomer boy will show up here?
That would be fun.
RE 422
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1882#comment-130571
Ron Cram says:
August 25th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Peilke will be missed. He was an interesting voice.
Comment
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1882#comment-130744
Is too clever
Interesting paper on scaling
Click to access Govindan_Vyushin_PRL_2002.pdf
What do you know. I must be making a pretty big stink since Gavin posted my arguement and attempted to refute it. I am not sure that he will post or answer my response to his so I am going to post it here.
Gavin, thank you for your input and I have addressed your responses in-line. I bolded the original post.
Here are the facts and conclusions:
Hansen (2001) states quite plainly that he depends on the accuracy of the station data for the accuracy of his UHI off-set
[Response: Of course. – gavin]
Verns Response:
Yeah, Gavin agreed with me.
WMO/NOAA/NWS have siting standards
Surfacestations.orgs census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards
[Response: They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset which is already hugely oversampling the regional anomalies. – gavin]
Verns Response:
i) They do show that the stations are not in accordance with NOAA/NWS guidelines. No one knows what this is doing to the station accuracy.
ii) This is a red herring, it does not matter what they are doing, what matters is no one knows what this is doing to accuracy.
iii)Oversampling does not matter, Hansen (2001) is not about trends, it is about adjustments to individual stations for UHI, TOD, and station movement.
There is no way to determine the accuracy of the station data for stations that do not meet standards
[Response: There is also no way to determine the accuracy of the stations that do either. Except for comparing them to other nearby stations and looking for coherence for the past, and actually doing some measurements of temperature now. – gavin]
Verns Response:
Gavin, this is another red herring. Hansen assumed the stations did meet the accuracy requirements, it can be shown this assumption is not supported.
So Hansen says that the data from the surface stations needs to be accurate for his methodology to work.
Further, Hansen made additional assumptions (his definition of rural):
Hansen uses lights=0 in his 2001 study
Due to failure of stations to meet siting standards, lights=0 does not always put the station in an rural environment
[Response: False. You are confusing a correction for urbanisation with micro-site effect. UHI is a real problem, and without that correction the global trends would be biased high. The Hansen urban-only US trend is about 0.3 deg C/century warmer than the rural trend (which is what is used). Therefore the lights=0 technique certainly does reduce urban biases. – gavin]
Verns Response:
Gavin, I am not confusing anything. You have a nice red herring but I did not say that the currently used UHI off-set does not reduce urban biases. I said there is no way to know the accuracy of the UHI off-set. You have not disputed this, and saying your doing something that you cannot prove is right is not much better than doing nothing.
At this time there is no way to determine the accuracy of Hansens UHI off-set
[Response: The effect diminishes with the size of town, it is actually larger than corrections based on population rises, and it gives results that are regionally coherent and you have yet to show that any objective subsampling of the rural stations makes any difference. – gavin]
Verns Response:
Your response has nothing to do with my statement. You then follow up with talking about the census based UHI off-set which Hansen say specifically his methodology is better.
Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced.
[Response: GCMs dont use the surface station data. How many times does that need to be pointed out? – gavin]
Verns Response:
yet another red herring. I never claimed that you used surface station data. You use the trends, which are in part, formed by using Hansen (2001) off-sets based on the surface station data. You know the part that you will not release to the public?
Tell which facts I got wrong!
Oh and if you did not catch this, it means that GISS GCM is pretty worthless till they figure this out.
[Response: GCM physics is independent of the trends in the surface data – no changes to that data will change a single line of GCM code or calculation. If you want to have a continued discussion then address the responses. Simply repeats of the same statements over and again is tiresome and pointless. – gavin]
Verns Response:
yet another red herring. Gavin, you can continue to mischaracterize what I said but it will not change the facts. The facts are that the surface station trends are used by GISS GCM as an input. There is no way with the work that Hansen has currently done in (2001) to know if the trends which use his off-sets are any good. Remember garbage in garbage out?
So your basic response consists of conceding that the surefacestations.org census is showing that a significant number of stations, to date, are not in compliance. You offer nothing to show what the impact of being out of compliance is. You offer nothing to show that if Hansens assumptions are wrong, his results are still right. You offer red-herrings as to why this would affect the GISS GCM.
Basically, you have not addressed either the facts or the logic.
#458
Gavin’s answers are entirely correct. If you think they are red herrings, then you probably haven’t phrased your questions very clearly.
The GCMs use neither the surface data, nor trends extracted from the surface data. This has been stated on numerous occasions, if you believe you can show otherwise, please quote chapter and verse.
re 457, 458: Given that the stated IPCC goal is:
Thus there is no need to match any set of conditions, nor even the variability within any individual set of data — no rescaling, no fractal dimension, just mean and sigma of some global averages.
Maybe we should challenge the goal which is based on 19th century statistics (along with the greenhouse theory) rather the means to the goal.
Re #458, Vernon
Vernon, how clearly can you document the data flow from surface station data to GCM outputs ?
#459 and #458
I think there is a failure of comunication. Even commonly used physics relationships are based on empirical evidence. Let’s use one that on this blog is being questioned, sensitivity of the climate to CO2 doubling. RichardT are you claiming that Gavin and the GCM people just made up the sensitivity factor? They made up how it has a physical effect on water, i.e. the water effect and sensitivity were just made up? For Gavin to be correct, then these CO2 sensitivity, water effect sensitivity, and even “aerosol” sensitivity could not in any way be derived from the historical temperature data. Other wise Vernon is correct, if ANY of the “fudge” factors for GMC were derived from the historical temperature data, the changes may well invalidate or at least question any GMC models that have that parameter changed by the changed temperature data.
from http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/218.htm indicates that VERIFICATION is considered because of the agreement of (between) surface measurements and LBL code.
So they are being used in an indirect way. My question is, are there any parameters that ARE based on the historical temperature record in part or in whole?
Re: 50
Paul GM
How very interesting that the Met Office now blames La Nina for its failures in this summer’s UK weather forecasts.
In the Financial Times article I referenced under #28 above, the very same Met Office is quoted as saying that La Nina had nothing to do whatsoever with the changes in the jet stream which caused the abnormal weather patterns across Europe this spring and summer! Say whatever supports the political AGW message of the moment and bank on the fact that most readers don’t cross reference too often.
Doubling CO2? It wouldn’t change a bit the state of climate. We suppose standards that are not well known. OHSA fixed the atmospheric density of CO2 in 350-600 ppm, while the scientists at the IPCC fixed it in 280 ppm, and other scientists think the standard is 180 ppm. Whats the standard? We will never know if we dont consider the historical densities of CO2; however, many think that the standard density must be the density that has persisted along for more years, i.e. 280 ppm through the last 2000 years. What could we say about other densities higher than the current density that persisted for millions of years? What about those densities of 2050 ppm when our ancestors were still evolving to Homo sapiens sapiens?
#463
And your point is?
#463 Nasif I think you mean concentration not density.
RE 60
Sorry John I was being a bit saracastic.
At some point this TIME CONSTANT issue has to come to the forefront.
Simply. If I buy their math, the time constant is multidecadal.
1. They yank the stick, the passengers cant see the system response for
YEARS. pull up ! pull up! in 8 years we hit the point of no return.
2. they Pull back harder. heating is in the pipeline..
can such a plane be flown?
Well it can be flown, only it will require a change in our modes
of governance and system feedback ( news to the passengers)
Simply put. If you believe in AGW and you understand control
theory, THEN you must agree to a univocal control of the stick.
If the time constant is a year, you give the pilot a year to “right” the plane.
After a year, you judge his piloting and get a new one if he cant fly.
If the time constant is 30 YEARS, How do you judge the pilot’s performance?
#462
The procedure for setting model parameters has been discussed at RealClimate several times. Validation of the models with both palaeo and modern data is important, using the mean state and also variability (e.g does the model have El Nino type variability). This is not the same as using the 20th Century data to tweak the model into giving the right answer. If you can find a paper that uses the same data both for parameter selection and validation, show it.
# 464
Richard,
My point is that we’re guessing.
# 465
Yes, Robert, I meant concentrations.
If I like 280 because that concentration fits in my hypotheses, then I would take that parameter like the standard, but if I am a paleobiologist, I wouldnt like 280 ppm to fix my standard, but 600 ppm, or 5000 ppm, then I would take 600 ppm or 5000 ppm for my calculations because it would fit in any of my explanations about the current state of climate and it would be perfectly normal and benign.
The thesis on doubling CO2 is a farsa (sorry, I dont know the meaning of farsa in English)
no it isn’t! It is the proper way to express climate sensitivity for a logarithmic law.
#31 click on Listen “The investigation” at
The BBC Radio 4 programme back in Jan called “Running the rule over Stern’s numbers” and go about 14min in. There’s a good bit about the Thames Barrier and the Liberal Party’s abuse of stats.
RE 458.
Vern… gavin and others dont splain the whole ball o wax
Gavin and RichardT say.. we dont use that there data in our models.
ahhhh we use the British stuff… CRU.. which uses the same NOAA stuff… which
ahhh welll … LOOK AT THE ICE! SEE THE POLAR BEAR!
1. If Goddard dont “use” the surface record, Then TRASHBIN THE JUNK.
S… can it. Nice bluff… NOT
2. Goddard use the surface record ( land +sea) to make their case. They publish papers
citing it. They make press releases citing it. they post graphics citing it.
Again, if the historical surface record doesnt matter. S… can it. Go on.
***can it….. taps foot. ho dee do… la dee da…
3. They dont “USE” the data to “initialize” their models, but they DO use them to
Tout the accuracy of the models. Our models match the facts, but we dont “use” the
facts in our model. We run the model and check it against the “facts”, but we
don’t “USE” the facts in our model.
Can you spell reach around?
RE 447.
Have you actually read through ModelE? If so, cite the
first EXECUTED line of code that references the last element of an array.
Go ahead… BZZZZZNT. thank you for playing. You read about ModelE in the
dentists office.
When ModelE is calibrated, when it’s ability to hindcast is
evaluated… what data is used? BZZZZZNT Thank you for playing
Have a lollipop on the way out.
Hans Erren August 26th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
And I would add that plotting temperature against ghg concentration on a linear rather than logarithmic scale is also highly misleading. Talking about doubling CO2 concentration is just as valid as using half-life to characterize radioactive decay.
Paul G M August 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm,
If Roy Spencer is right about The Big Heat Pipe In The Sky (he doesn’t use that term) then a lot of rain is just what you would expect if the Earth was cooling. Of course at this point there is no definite cause/effect relationship. However, I think it warrants some serious study.
Nope. Plotting logarithmically is the only way to verify the theory. BTW there is a lot of multidecadal, volcanic, and ENSO noise: so the CO2 signal is difficult to fingerprint.
Oops, misread that, but there isn’t much difference in appearance when plotting CO2 linearly or lorarithmically in the 20th century.
# 475
Hans,
That’s the point, erratic (or chaotic?) data and… that is, we’re guessing!
Hans Erren says: August 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I cannot make a decent plot… On which model I could base it?
Hans,
As I said elsewhere, any continuous function is approximately linear on a short enough scale. However, the Muana Loa chart actually looks exponential to me and that’s just from 1958. I’m talking about charts showing CO2 starting at zero so the first 20 ppm gives a large temperature change which then decays rapidly to a very small change for 20 ppm at 400 ppm CO2 as in Figure 22 here. That’s what I meant by a misleading chart. Not to mention Archibald’s questionable assumption of a linear increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration with time (1.7 ppm/year)rather than the more conventional ~0.5%/year (or higher) and then using an estimate of climate sensitivity at the very bottom end of the range. I’m not rejecting everything Archibald says, but his analysis of the effect of CO2 forcing is less than convincing to me.
For anyone reading this, I know that Muana Loa is an active volcano and so do the people measuring atmospheric CO2 there. I’m also completely uninterested in discussing the merits or demerits of the Idso’s climate sensitivity estimates.
Regarding the Thames Barrier-
According to this guy who, admittedly, is hawking a book about catastrphic London flooding-
http://www.floodlondon.com/floodtb.htm
the current design was only expected to be adequate until 2030 anyway by which time the designers thought improvements would be needed, due to normal sea level rise, sinking Southern England (since the last glaciation), changes to the emabnkments, etc. So the cynic in me finds himself thinking that the government are selling a massive, expensive public works project as essential due to global warming, instead of being just essential because the Barrier was never very generously specified, thus avoiding any argy-bargy about why.
Specifying for 50 years must have seemed quite long-term at the time, but as that 50 years passes it seems rather short-sighted.
# 468
DeWitt Payne,
That’s right, no Idso’s, etc. However, what’s the correct standard concentration of CO2? 180, 280, 350, 600, etc.?
68
Rod…Interesting! I’ve saved that program…
William Connolley had never been to Antarctica (Perhaps
he’s seen “Scott of the Antarctic” or listened to
Vaughan-Williams Antarctica Symphony which partly is based
on RVW:s film music of said film.) I’ve been to the Arctic
in the winter…(northernmost Sweden) Early January 1978
for example, amazing aurora borealis and only medium wave
station heard was AFN Thule(Not even “Luxy”) as it was named by us DX-ers
at the time…Then 1980-81 was probably the warmest winter
in Nunavut and perhaps much of the Arctic basin…The decrease
in sea ice was much bigger then than now of course also due
to the fact there was more to take of, (Andy Revkin that’s
for you too!) And BTW Andy Revkin you’re making self-goals..
not too common in american football CMIIW…”Statistically
insignificant”…In NYT 2005 Feb 11 you wrote quoting James
Hansen, “a weak pattern of El Niño was likely to make 2005 at
least the second warmest and could push it beyond 1998”
So in the past you could like NG-Hansen have “anteactive
measurements” a few hundreths up or down and it was significant
enough to write about…I can almost promise you this is just
the beginning of the beginning…Best regards from Sweden…
BTW WMO said this summer was going to be very hot in Scandinavia
…Apart from a week in early June, more widespread just over
25C days have only occurred a handful of days…So much for
UN capabilities…Or should I write human weather/climate prediction
capabilities…!! The heatwaves have hit the Balkan, Greece, S Italy
S Russia,Ukraine and Turkey…In the western half of the Mediterranean
SST:s are now below normal for example…
DeWitt Payne August 25th, 2007 at 11:11 am:
The loss of Climate Science is a blow; no doubt of it. If you put a “Dr. Pielke” salutation before any question or comment, no matter how inane, quarrelsome, or just plain dumb (which I did once or twice), the question would get a polite, factual reply from Dr Pielke. I can’t imagine how much energy that took . . .
. . . especially keeping that polite, factual tone in the face of the Bloomster’s ceaselessly inane, quarrelsome comments.
But you’ve gotta admit; the Bloomster is entertaining – his presumptuous lecturing of Dr. Pielke and others on their own business; his airy dismissals of the qualifications of other specialists to comment on their own specialties; his second-hand snarkiness – clearly aping Mann & Co – and ad-hom smears; his constant citations and links – apparently likes to play Scientist and feels more “scientific” playing the attribution game, even though his comprehension appears limited.
Best guess: An old-line Sierra Club/John Muir/Rachael Carson/Nature-is-My-Cathedral Environmentalist, hopelessly mired in that peculiar 60s-70s mindset & utterly impervious to reason or evidence.
Should he migrate over here, my best advice is “Don’t feed the trolls!”
>> However, whats the correct standard concentration of CO2? 180, 280, 350, 600, etc.?
data says 335 is avg
After looking at the Muana Loa data (annual fit 1959-2004) in Excel, the best fit was an exponential, but only slightly better than a linear trend, but it really looks like the exponent is increasing with time as both the constant exponent and linear trend lines are low at the ends and high in the middle. I’ll probably end up overfitting so an extrapolation will be nearly meaningless, but what-the-hell. More later.
#72
Isn’t London in fact sinking at a rate greater than twice the seal level rise? It seems I recall reading that somewhere.
Kenneth, you’d expressed interest in whether satellite and surface data show the expected “fingerprint” of AGW. Namely, have the tropical mid and upper troposphere warmed faster than the tropical surface? The answer to that question is complicated by differences in technique and the broad cut of the atmosphere measured by satellite.
It occurs to me, though, that an alternate fingerprint of AGW is that the tropical mid-troposphere is expected to warm more than the extratropical mid-troposphere. Since both are measured by satellite then this becomes an apples-to-apples check for an AGW fingerprint.
If anything, the fact that the extratropical satellite measurement sees more of the stratosphere than it does in the tropics, due to a lowere tropopause height in the extratropics, the tropics should show greater warming just from this stratospheric effect.
I’m currently on the road (surveyed five rather remote USHCN stations this weekend) but when I return home I’ll plot the data. If you have time and the inclination, you might plot those too. It would be the RSS or UAH TMT for the tropics and for the extratropics (north and south).
480: It was “over here” for a long time. Evidently, he was overwhelmed with facts and went back to his ilk. LOL.
478:
Hmmm, and WHY is that?
If John A was around, we would have an Unthreaded # 19 by now.
Yes London is sinking. It’s subsiding by 1-2MM per year – which is quite fast for a geological motion…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6231334.stm
Chicago is also sinking, but slower
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2004-05-20-sinking-chicago_x.htm
# 481
Gunnar,
Yes, it’s 335 ppm but as soon as I introduced the average someone criticized my procedure saying that I was “flawing” the ciphers. 🙂
# 485
Jae,
What’s the parameters and the standard? 😉
Re: 76, 77
Pls note that when you next land at Schiphol/Amsterdam airport, you will [on average] be approx. 12m/40ft below sea level. If you were then to drive south towards The Hague/Rotterdam, you would experience driving on a major 6 lane highway that runs underneath a canal full of inland waterway cargo ships and pleasure craft. In the north of the Netherlands you would even see something as outlandish as a double railway tunnel passing underneath both the canal and the highway. As the motto of the Province of Zeeland reminds us: “luctor et emergo” [freely translated: “fight and ye shall come to the surface”]. The Dutch have shown for some 2000 years that technologies properly applied will deal will seemingly impossible challenges. As a Dutchman, I’ve always found it useful to stick to reality.
re: 458
Vernon,
Technically Gavin is correct. Watts has not yet attempted to show any impact on the temperature record. He is only documenting stations to see if they meet the requirements of the NOAA. However, another study has shown that stations with land use/land cover (LULC) changes have artificial warming in 95% of cases. That certainly does not look like “random error” to me. Take at look at this paper by Hale and co-authors.
The annual Muana Loa data from 1959 through 2006 can be fit with an F statistic of 3400 with a geometric series with a linearly increasing factor (multiply previous year’s concentration by new factor). The factor in 1959 is 1.002871 and the factor increase per year is 0.00005094. As of 2006 the factor is 1.00526. This equation predicts that CO2 will exceed 560 ppm in 2064. CO2 for 2007 predicted 383.57. Probably a complete waste of time, especially if the Bussard fusion reactor actually works.
re: 458
Vernon,
One other point. They are correct that surface temps are not used as inputs in the climate models. However, they do make the claim that the models prove the surface temp record is not explicable without rising CO2. This seems to indicate there is some comparing of model runs to surface temps and possible tuning of the models. At least, that is what I understand is going on. I hope this helps.
Here’s the plot of the CO2 with the fit included:
I didn’t include extrapolations forward and backward or you wouldn’t be able to see any difference at all. The fit extrapolates backward in time to a concentration of 290 ppmv in 1900, which is pretty close to the values I could find on the web. The factor at that point is almost exactly 1.00 so the concentration isn’t changing very fast.
DeWitt, thank you for the analysis. In fact, though, the airborne concentration appears to follow very different path from the one that you have laid out. It represents an exponential decay from whatever airborne concentration level it currently has – the greater the concentration in the air, the more is sequestered. This is usually characterized by an “e-folding” time, the time it takes an initial pulse to decay to 1/e of the original value. There is serious dispute about this value. See Jacobson for a fuller explanation.
In addition, your assumption that the geometric factor increases annually is not true. From about 1970 – 1995 it remained relatively stable at about 0.40.
All the best,
w.
#478 DeWitt Payne
It baffles me how people can be so content with measurements of CO2 made on top of an active volcano, yet temperature measurements are questioned for a whole variety of real, but largely less fundamental reasons. I mean if the external temperatures were being measured from inside an oven, or a refrigerator, then that, to me would be the equivalent to measuring CO2 on top of an active volcano.
My first question would be, why even choose such a location in the first place?
Extreme Views/Thames Flood Barrier
Of course I agree that adopting the behavior of the AGW extreemists is not the best way. It’s just that on the scale of fair and reasonable to extreem with the former at 1 and the later at 10, I feel that Steve is often at -1. Maybe unfair and I will desist as his work is vital even if it is serendipitous and has delivered two killer blows that will tell in the end.
Re the Thames Barrier, at the Insurance Institute of London lecture earlier this year, we had a presentation on flood risk in London – of keen interenst to the insurance industry as you may imagine. I must try and find the slides. We saw the stats on raisings which show a random walk and are of course influenced by technology changes – “better” detection of potential stormsurge conditions. But it has passed into folklore that the barrier is being raised more often.
These were then overlaid with model predictions which unsurprisingly predicted more raisings. Why I need to get the slides is that I am sure that there was an overlap of about five years and of course the model predictions did not reflect reality.
Regards
Paul
Over the last decade, I’ve been reading about how AGW was going to shut down the Gulf stream. This was to be caused by the saltiness of the N. Atlantic being reduced by all of that fres water coming off of melting glaciers.
Last week I read a report that found that the N. Atlantic was actually getting saltier. This was being caused, according to the article, by AGW increasing evaporation from the surface waters.
Whatever the effect, if you can’t find a way to blame it on AGW, you aren’t doing your job properly.
MarkR, thanks for the question about Mauna Loa. I can see Mauna Loa from my back yard, and I can see why Keeling chose to take his measurements up there. It’s not all that bad a choice for a CO2 measuring station. While there is CO2 being emitted by the volcano from time to time, this is generally not the case. The CO2 measurements are taken at night, when the winds are blowing downslope and away from the volcano. On the few occasions when there is local volcanic CO2, the readings are extremely high, and are omitted from the record.
The air at night time is coming downward from high in the atmosphere, and has traveled thousands of miles across empty ocean. As a result, the CO2 content is stable, and is not affected by local conditions. I’ve looked at the daily raw individual flask data, and other than the occasional whiff of CO2 from the volcano, the day-to-day variations in the measurements are quite small. All in all, not a bad spot for collecting CO2 data.
w.
There are about a dozen CO2 monitoring stations around the world. The data they report is almost exactly the same as Mauna Loa (with Antarctica being 2 or 3 PPM lower than the other stations.)
deja vu.
#505 Thanks Willis. I stiil think that the site is open to small unnoticed contamination.
#506 John Lang All the CO2 testing is done with equipment and gas bottles which are calibrated and supplied by the same people. Theyy are not independent tests in my view.
Also the suppliers of the gas bottles have documented many problems with their supply and method. Was on their website, but I think they took the internal reports off.
The only test which would satisfy me would be based on an old fashioned Chemistry test of absorbing CO2, and weighing residues.
#507 Hans, as you say deja vu, however the last question I had previously was about where does the sawtooth variation in CO2 come from.
You pointed to inland European sites, and I think vegetation as being the cause, I referred to mid ocean island sources which still have the sawtooth, and even a central Chinese location which is nowhere near the sea, and from Google Earth, has no apparent vegetation, yet still has the trademark sawtooth CO2 graph. So either the rise and fall is due to vegetation, or sea temperature, or is sourced from many thousands of miles away, but arrives (after this long and turbulent journey) in an unmixed state.
I don’t recall receiving any reply about that
If you can point to a source which definatively answers this question, I would be most grateful.
>> and has traveled thousands of miles across empty ocean. As a result, the CO2 content is stable, and is not affected by local conditions.
Your premise is AGW, ie, that man is the biggest source of C02. With that premise, you say “across empty ocean”, implying that the reading should be good. If, in reality, hot equatorial waters are the main source of C02, then measuring the C02 level downwind from these waters is in fact, measuring local conditions. Other studies have shown that there is no C02 dome over cities, which contradicts this AGW premise, and conforms to what we know about the carbonic cycle.
>> There are about a dozen CO2 monitoring stations around the world. The data they report is almost exactly the same as Mauna Loa
Actually, AFAIK, they are all run by the same Scripps institute. It really strains credibility that they are exactly the same, when the reality is that C02 levels are extremely variable. An independent study in Luxembourg found results that contradicted the Mauna Loa results. Over a 3 year period, there was no increase. The scripps institute should publish all their raw data, so that folks like Steve M can audit the results.
It’s a remarkable statement of fiction to claim that the world C02 level can be determined by measuring it in a dozen spots. What would you think if temperature were only measured in a dozen pacific locations, and if measurements excluded all values below a certain threshold, and then claimed to represent the global average? For 100 years prior to Scripps, C02 levels were accurately measured to have gone up and down. With Scripps, they only go up at a steady pace. Something is different.
>> where does the sawtooth variation in CO2 come from
The Luxembourg study found the opposite of the Scripps story. The C02 level went up in the summer, down in the winter.
bernie,
Air temperatures are a poor proxy for climate.
I have written this up at a little greater length than above at:
Climate Science Needs To Go Underground.
Good luck finding a “short enough” scale with this function.
Continous Function Nowhere Differentiable
This is UNREAL.
The NorthPole Webcam from yesterday shows completely open water at the North Pole.
Later in the day, the ice refroze, and by today it looks a little more like the North Pole at the heighth of the summer melt.
Temp is -1C.
The pictures from the Modis satellites show there is more polar ice than recorded by the NSIDC and the Cryosphere Today but I guess I have to eat my shorts now.
Simon:
You may be right in terms of going forward. However, that we will be interested in trends and rate of change, do you have a better proxy that provides a reasonable historical perspective for climate?
Oh dear, another one who thinks he can break the CO2 hockeystick.
bernie August 27th, 2007 at 8:44 am,
Going forward we currently have a lot of questionable data of unknown utility.
Please tell me a good way to figure out if the earth is heating up based on two air temperature measurements a day of questionable accuracy at unknown times.
It is almost as bad as trying to tell me what my shoe size is based on the size house I live in. That definitely bounds the problem. It doesn’t help you when you get to the shoe store.
Simon
I am not interested in bandwidth at this blog being devoted to discussions of CO2 measurement, as I’ve made clear on many occasions.
Third party readers use such postings as an excuse to deprecate relevant areas of discussion at this blog. So I ask commenters once again to raise their game.
I’ll open a new Unthreaded thread only when I feel comfortable that this request is being observed.
bernie,
The only way to be sure you are averaging correctly is to not average.
Measure.
Re #512, John Lang
Sorry to be thick, but what is that webcam sitting on ?
#512
The reappearance of ice probably represents ice drifting into view rather than refreezing. -1C is too warm for saline water to freeze.
#515
Two cameras were deployed on the ice. They are not working now. The photographs available now are from a camera on a research vessel. See http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html
Since I have an on going discussion with gavin over at RC, I though I would post here and get some input from people at this site also.
Gavin, thanks again for this discussion. I removed both comments when there was no response to my comment.
Surfacestations.orgs census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards
[Response: They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset which is already hugely oversampling the regional anomalies. – gavin]
Verns Response:
i) They do show that the stations are not in accordance with NOAA/NWS guidelines. No one knows what this is doing to the station accuracy.
ii) This is a red herring, it does not matter what they are doing, what matters is no one knows what this is doing to accuracy.
iii)Oversampling does not matter, Hansen (2001) is not about trends, it is about adjustments to individual stations for UHI, TOD, and station movement.
[Response: False. The Hansen study is precisely about calculating regional and global trends. It specifically states that for local studies, looking at the raw data would be better. If you dont know why a study is being done, you are unlikely to be able to work out why some details matter and some do not. – gavin]
Verns 2nd Response:
So you do agree not meeting the site guidelines will inject 0.8 – 5.4 degree C?
You have not presented any facts to show that the injected error will not cause a bias, remember, I am not arguing that there is one, only that it is not possible to tell.
Finally, per CRN, Hansens 250 rural stations are not hugely over sampled since they are putting out 100 to give a 5 degree national coverage. Further, CRN states 300 stations will be needed reduce climate uncertainty to about 95%.
Well, as to whether I understand what Hansen says he is doing, as to the trend vs temperature delta, I could be wrong on this, and if I am, enlighten me, but I understood that Hansen is taking the urban stations, processing them, then the rural stations, processing them for each grid, then on a yearly basis, do the delta between rural and urban for each grid cell per year, then taking those to do the UHI off-set. Then that off-set is done against individual stations as part of GISSTemp processing. (I know I am simplifying this since there is actually urban, semi-urban, and unlighted.) It is not trend vs trend. The only part I really have questions on is which off-set was he doing in what order, or was he doing all variations and then taking the mean?
There is no way to determine the accuracy of the station data for stations that do not meet standards
So Hansen says that the data from the surface stations needs to be accurate for his methodology to work.
[Response: Hansen appropriately acknowledges that if the data are seriously flawed, then the GISS analysis will have included those flaws. But again you are mistaken in what you think has been shown. No-one has demonstrated that are significant problems with enough stations to change the regional picture. For you individual non-compliance=unusable data, but this has not been shown at all for a significant number of single stations, let alone their regional average. – gavin]
Further, Hansen made additional assumptions (his definition of rural):
Verns 2nd response: Well you did not disagree with this one the first time around but do now. Fine, please show me your evidence that all 250 stations meet site guides? If not then I believe that the 0.8 – 5.4 degree C from failure to meeting site standards far exceeds the few hundredths of a degree C over the past 100 years that Hansen assumes. You presented no facts or logic, just made a statement. Please back that up with facts or studies.
Hansen uses lights=0 in his 2001 study
Due to failure of stations to meet siting standards, lights=0 does not always put the station in an rural environment
[Response: False. You are confusing a correction for urbanisation with micro-site effect. UHI is a real problem, and without that correction the global trends would be biased high. The Hansen urban-only US trend is about 0.3 deg C/century warmer than the rural trend (which is what is used). Therefore the lights=0 technique certainly does reduce urban biases. – gavin]
Verns Response:
Gavin, I am not confusing anything. You have a nice red herring but I did not say that the currently used UHI off-set does not reduce urban biases. I said there is no way to know the accuracy of the UHI off-set. You have not disputed this, and saying your doing something that you cannot prove is right is not much better than doing nothing.
[Response: First off, the UHI correction is a trend, not an offset. Secondly, you are confused. Where is there a lights=0′ station that is in an urban environment? An urban environment is a city, not a building or a road. Secondly, you asking for something that is impossible. How can anyone prove that the correction is correct? Science doesnt work like that. Instead, you make assumptions (that rural trends are more representative of the large scale than urban ones), and you calculate the regional trends accordingly. You might dispute that assumption, but at no stage can anyone prove that it is perfectly correct. – gavin]
Verns 2nd response: I addressed the UHI off-set above. I apologize if I did not say it clearly enough but poorly sited rural stations do not give accurate rural data. I did not say light=0 was an urban environment, you just did. I said that light=0 did not give you a good rural environment. CRN says that a good rural site will be: not be subject to local microclimatic interferences such as might be induced by topography, katabatic flows or wind shadowing, poor solar exposure, the presence of large water bodies not representative of the region, agricultural practices such as irrigation, suspected long-term fire environments, human interferences, or nearby buildings or thermal sinks.
Then you drag out a red herring, there is proof that the stations are not meeting site guidelines. Hansen said that his work needs accurate data to be correct. It can be shown that that assumption is not supported by the stations. You still have not addressed this.
At this time there is no way to determine the accuracy of Hansens UHI off-set
Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced.
Tell which facts I got wrong!
Oh and if you did not catch this, it means that GISS GCM is pretty worthless till they figure this out.
[Response: GCM physics is independent of the trends in the surface data – no changes to that data will change a single line of GCM code or calculation. If you want to have a continued discussion then address the responses. Simply repeats of the same statements over and again is tiresome and pointless. – gavin]
Verns Response:
yet another red herring. Gavin, you can continue to mischaracterize what I said but it will not change the facts. The facts are that the surface station trends are used by GISS GCM as an input. There is no way with the work that Hansen has currently done in (2001) to know if the trends which use his off-sets are any good. Remember garbage in garbage out?
So your basic response consists of conceding that the surefacestations.org census is showing that a significant number of stations, to date, are not in compliance. You offer nothing to show what the impact of being out of compliance is. You offer nothing to show that if Hansens assumptions are wrong, his results are still right. You offer red-herrings as to why this would affect the GISS GCM.
[Response: Pay attention here. I said the surface data are not used in the GCM. You insist that they are. Since I think I know whats in the GCM quite well, I am certain that I am not mistaken on this. If you think I am wrong, please point out the lines of code where this data are used. This is a straightforward point of fact, if you cannot concede this, there is absolutely no point continuing this discussion. – gavin]
Verns 2nd response: Gavin, you do use the surface station data, just not directly. In your Present-Day Atmospheric Simulations Using GISS ModelE: Comparison to In Situ,
Satellite, and Reanalysis Data (2006) you use the station data to verify that the model is correct. As in the other diagnostics, the differences among the different models are small compared to the offset with observations. So you are using the surface station data to make your model better. If the surface station data is wrong, then your model also surfers.
Ok, worthless was a bit much, but if you do not know the errors in the stations, you do not know now much error is being injected into your model as you have optimize against a real base-line that may or may not reflect actual climate change.
# 500
DeWitt Payne,
You wrote: “The fit extrapolates backward in time to a concentration of 290 ppmv in 1900”. It’s right; however, the extrapolation for the year 1998 would be 298 ppmv. The graph from Mauna Loa shows 365 ppmv by the same year. Rural areas registered 315 ppmv of CO2 in the same year.
There is a difference of 50 ppmv between ML and RA, of 67 ppmv between ML and extrapolations and only 17 ppmv between RA and extrapolations.
I wonder if 290 ppmv could be a new “standard”? 🙂
The logarithmic extrapolation gives a concentration of 335 ppmv in 1998. Correct me if I’m wrong.
>> fit extrapolates backward in time to a concentration of 290 ppmv in 1900
We’ve been told not to discuss C02, but you folks insist. This is an example of OVER extrapolation. Accurate measurements show that it was 420 in 1940. Plug that into your curve fit. Even the ice core data shows an average of 335. I have read that biologists say that numerous plant species would go extinct at 290.
#517 richardT, thank you
#512 John Lang …Why didn’t you choose the image 11:44:??
4 minutes earlier, THEN it was completely ice-free …As you can
see from these pics 90% ice can disappear in 5 minutes…It’s
quite a spin up there!!
#486 PaddikJ …I got deleted actually my hitherto only CS coontribution
and I actually had some statistic “facts”(about Kathmandu heat records,
perhaps it was “trop amusant”…
#485 Was moved here from “Hansen fiasco Revkin”-thread
BTW Has anybody seen a blog contribution on Pat Michael’s WCR???
After each entry…”sorry no more…” More??? There aren’t any!!?
PS. I like my spelling error above: “coontribution”…LOL…DS.
#518 Vernon…Gavin Schmidt…I’m sorry to say
it but it’s PBS trying to make him admit any flaws
in AGW GCM:s…But you got him once: GS: “an urban environ-
ment is a city, not a building or a road”…Well
if the climate station is upwind a building and/or
road it has a warming bias of course…Is there
nothing between a building and a city…??[I’m aware US
“cities” may have 1 citizen]
RE: #217 and others – there are no cameras currently at the NP. The (defective) ones deployed there in April long ago drifted well toward Canada and would now be in the mid to lower 80s latitude. There are two others, on a Norwegian ice breaker, at some apparently undisclosed location north of Norway (I certainly did not find any coordinates in my brief search). Based on where the ice edge is in the area of the Barents and Northern Atlantic, I’d guess the breaker’s probably been able to force its way into the upper 70s N. Nothing to see here folks, move along …. 😉
Sorry, I meant to write 517.
Yeah, sorry about the above post on the north pole. The website should be more clear about what webcams they are posting.
There’s one little itty bitty place (used to be a gas station) along US 24 just on the other side of Pike’s Peak, through the Ute Pass, that claims “Population: 2”! 🙂
Mark
# 521
Gunnar,
I promise not to talk more on CO2 and yes, its almost impossible to take in 280 ppmv like a “standard” suitable for living beings. Thanks!
M. Simon: those are very good observations! Since thermometers are a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules that happen to strike it, and since that energy is influenced by so many parameters, one would expect temperature to fluctuate wildly, even in a period of minutes.
bernie August 27th, 2007 at 12:37 pm,
I still contend that measuring air temperature twice a day to get the peak high and low (no time registration closer that some time in the 24 hr period) is worthless.
If you want to measure: is the temperature of the earth changing, you have to measure the temperature of the earth. i.e. under the ground and in the ocean.
Air temperature is a poor proxy for climate change.
Well, Gavin now agrees that surfacestations.org is showing that stations have microsite issues due to not meeting site standards. Here is how it is going now, and I am still looking for input.
Gavin, thank your taking the time to answer me, and I am enjoying this discussion. I do have a few questions based on you last.
[Response: First, I am not disputing that microsite effects can offset temperature readings. However they can offset them in both directions, it will be the net effect that matters. Second, the impact of the microsite effect only enters the trend calculation if it changes, not if it is a constant offset (since only anomalies are used). Thirdly, the GISTEMP analysis has a smoothing radius of 1200 km, this means that for the continental US there is nothing close to 200 degrees of freedom in the regional temperature trends the Hansen papers try to estimate. Eyeballing it you would guess something more like 10 or even less. That is why the regional trends are hugely oversampled. Finally, if you look at the GCM comparisons to the CRU data in the paper you cite, you will notice that the comparison is to the regional absolute temperatures and the seasonal cycle and that local errors can be large. The microsite issues are not going to make any difference to that comparison. Trust me on that. – gavin]
Verns Response:
I am glad that we have reached agreement that microsite affects to stations that do not meet site guidelines for local microclimatic interferences such as might be induced by topography, katabatic flows or wind shadowing, poor solar exposure, the presence of large water bodies not representative of the region, agricultural practices such as irrigation, suspected long-term fire environments, human interferences, or nearby buildings or thermal sinks which surfacestations.org is bring to light.
However, your second point is not valid for Hansen (2001). No study I have read indicates that a surface station that does not meet site guides will change. If there was anything that indicated that the changes would be constantly changing in a random manner, then I would agree with you but there is no evidence of that. The effect, I believe, would be consistent until something changed in the environment. It would be wrong, but it would be consistently wrong. This hurts Hansen (2001) since he is doing the temp delta for the grid cell and there are a limited number of lights = 0 (~250). The mere fact it is wrong in a small data pool will have even larger impact.
I also disagree that there is enough information about the stations to make a case for a binomial distribution. Basically, youre saying it has an equal chance of being warm or cold but I have not seen any studies to back up that position. That is why I do not believe that until the evidence is collected the Hansen (2001) UHI off-set is valid until further due diligence is accomplished in light of the failure of several of his assumptions.
Your third point about GISTEMP is not quite valid. Why? Because you have already applied the Hansens UHI off-set to the stations so no matter how big you make the pool at that point, the data is already tainted. Since you do not know how much, or which one, there is no statically valid way to correct for it.
As for you last point, I have to disagree. Why, because Hansens UHI off-set is used. An off-set is applied to individual stations which at this point, there is no way to know if it is valid. Why is Hansens UHI off-set wrong, because of the microsite issues. I see no way of fixing Hansens work with out studying the lights = 0 stations to determine what the microsite issues are. Once they are known, he can redo his work and you should get an accurate UHI off-set.
Additionally, even with over-sampling at the global level, there is nothing that indicates that microsite problems are a local (USA only) issue. Without a study that actually does and assessment of individual sites, as time consuming or as hard as it would be, there is no indicator that the microsite issues do not cause bias.
Do you know of such a study?
It would be interesting to see which microsite violations result in negative offsets.
Mark
Steve McIntyre
I tried to discourage comments on the validity of the CO2 measurements in my original post. Obviously it didn’t work, sorry. My purpose is to contrast the difference between the projections of future CO2 concentration increases used in future scenarios for CO2 concentration that are used to feed to the models with actual current measured trends. So in a sense I’m trying to audit these scenarios. The most common assumption I have seen is a constant 1%/year growth rate. This is much higher than my projection for future growth rate. OTOH, a constant 0.5% growth rate is probably way too low for times longer than 10 years. If you still think this is inappropriate at this time, delete away. My feelings won’t be hurt. If, OTOH, you don’t object, I would like to compare my projection of future CO2 concentration to some of the AR4 scenarios.
Willis Eschenbach
I understand that what is actually happening is much more complex than my empirical model of the net results. I’m ignoring seasonal variation. There are fluxes in and out and some of them are almost certainly concentration dependent and may be temperature dependent. The flux from fossil fuel combustion has been increasing with time. My projection obvjously assumes that all these fluxes will continue to behave with time as they did in the past. This is extremely unlikely to be the case in the long term (100 years or more) at least for fossil fuel combustion. I was very surprised, however, that such a simple, two parameter model gives such an amazingly good fit to the measured data. It is also not much like what seems (to me anyway) to be commonly used for future projections of CO2 concentration (see above).
Nasif Nahle
1998 fit 366.37, measured 366.58 ppmv CO2
Jaye
Okay. Any continuously differentiable function…. Happy now. (smiley face)
vern.
Stuff gallo and hale up his snout.
“The most common assumption I have seen is a constant 1%/year growth rate.”
Nope, that is not a scenario, that is a model sensitivity test input.
504 MarkW on August 27th, 2007 at 5:26 am
MarkW, if youre still frequenting this thread, could you please point me to the recent article about the N. Atlantic getting saltier. I have high interest in the Thermohaline.
WCR has a good collection of articles; the poor beast must have a rough go of it its health seems to oscillate wildly.
Re #541 Paddick try this link .
Also I summarized a paper by Latif et al ( here ) about the workings of the THC, including some conjecture on my part.
# 538
DeWitt Payne,
Then the “standard” concentration of CO2 is not 280 ppmv, but 350 ppmv:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/284/5422/1971
Gunnar,
HERE is the paper you are referring to.
David Smith, ca. 542, August 27th, 2007 at 7:52 pm:
Thanks much. I’d already read the WCR piece, but your other paper is succinct & a nice addition to my THC library. But I’m still wondering about that supposedly recent paper which supposedly claims that increasing salinity in the NA is further evidence of AGW (as originally posted by MarkW, #541). If it’s the one cited by WCR, I read implications for hurricane activity, but not AGW as such, although I do agree that the AGW Crusade has gotten so polymorphic that a bad cell phone connection could be attributed to AGW.
#543
That paper was criticized by two technical comments, and subsequent experimental work has shown that the Betula stomatal frequencies do not correlate with CO2 concentrations.
See
Eide, W. & Birks, H.H. Stomatal frequency of Betula pubescens and Pinus sylvestris shows no proportional relationship with atmospheric CO2 concentration. Nordic Journal of Botany 24: 327-339.
I guess Gavin conceded, so now it is being left to the fanboys to ad hom me and chant that Hansen (2001) problems with UHI do not matter since everyone knows that it is correct anyway.
I was looking at a paper based on Nordklim data and wondered why the Nordklim data set seems to have stopped in 2002. Does anyone have a link to a more recent data set?
Follow up: Why does the CRUT precipitation data set only go through 2000?
bernie: According to this September 2005 poster the NkDS version 2.0 should have been available during the year 2005. Don’t know what happened (maybe you could e-mail the authors?). See also here.
From today’s Wall Street Journal:
Jean S
I sent an email to Eirik Forland one of the authors of the paper I cited. I will post any response. I believe you were looking at this data and commented on the Warwick Hughes site – is that correct? What triggered my interest is the latest piece on Real Climate on Regional Climate change that talked about the precipitation projections for Europe. One was huge in absolute terms and should be significant red flags. I then went looking for precipitation data and was amazed to find how truncated were the data sets.
Hans Erren
As usual, you are correct and I didn’t do my homework. Are the IS92x CO2 scenario’s still the gold standard? Those were all I could find.
#549
Try http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg.htm for some more recent gridded data. NB data files are massive.
bernie, that’s correct.
Finland is supposed to be one of those areas with most increase in precipitation. However, even one of the NordKlim authors (Tuomenvirta; an outspoken AGW scientist) found no trend in precipitation whatsoever in his PhD Thesis.
As a side note: last summer (2006) was DRIEST on record (in Helsinki region; record starts 1845). Apparently, Al Gore was informed about this fact while visiting Helsinki (marketing his movie) last autumn. So in the press conference Al declared that Finland just had the hottest summer for over 160 years since the records began (completely bogus claim). Oh well…
Richard (#554)
That is another useful link, but there is still nothing for the last 5 years!! Am I the only one who thinks that this is slightly odd?
Aren’t precipitation projections another “test” of the vallidity of the models? How come the data is so hard to find?
DeWitt
The SRES Scenarios are also used in the fourth assesment report.
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/519.htm
Here are CO2 emissions
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/521.htm
and resulting concentrations (IMHO to high)
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/531.htm
here is a comparison between observed and projected:
>> Arent precipitation projections another test of the vallidity of the models? How come the data is so hard to find?
I assume this is a rhetorical question?
Jean’s back again!
BTW, I think I’ve found a good avenue with the ICA portion of my method…
Mark
Gunnar:
Kind of, I guess I am puzzled over the lack of uptodate records. They surely exist, but where are they?
# 546
RichardT,
But it was confirmed HERE , HERE and HERE.
Conclusion, the standard concentration of CO2 is 350 ppmv, just as OSHA and ASRAHE determined it.
>> I guess I am puzzled over the lack of uptodate records. They surely exist, but where are they?
Berniw, I was shocked about 5 years ago when I started looking into this whole global warming thing, and found only one source of C02 measurement. They have added a few more since then, but the point is that the proponents are not acting like scientists. If they were, they would be trying to falsify their own hypothesis. I have now accepted and internalized that they only gather what information they need to make a political case.
What’s more, despite the politicized “spectacle, full of sound and fury”, there really isn’t a big effort going on to study climatology by real scientists. If you think about it, there is really no economic reason to do so, on either side.
The bottom line is that since the public or politicians or MSM don’t demand “what about the precipitation data”, there is no reason to look into it.
#556
You could also try the reanalysis data at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/reanalysis.html
or the Global Historical Climatology Network at
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php
#561
There is nothing wrong with stomatal frequency analysis as a proxy for CO2 concentration per se. For some taxa it appears to work well, apparently including the conifers in the third paper you link to. The analysis of the Betula in the second paper uses the relationship that was criticised in the authors earlier paper, and subsequently shown to be spurious by experimental work (similar to that in the third paper).
#564,
Richard,
I currently find the 2nd link that Nasif referenced convincing. The fact that something is criticized, doesn’t make it wrong. I’d be interested in reading the criticism, if you have a link.
# 564
Richard,
HERE is the experiment that confirms it.
#566
Different species, so it has absolutely no bearing on the Betula paper.
#565
The most important criticism is in the Nordic Journal of Botany which unfortunately isn’t available online. The paper is
Eide & Birks 2006 Stomatal frequency of Betula pubescens and Pinus sylvestris shows no proportional relationship with atmospheric CO2 concentration. Nordic Journal of Botany 24: 327-339.
# 567
But yes, it bears with the real standard of 350 ppmv, not with the random 280 ppmv.
#567, we’ll have to see if the Eide & Birks result holds up. But even if right, we don’t fall back to the low constant antartic ice core reconstruction because:
1) it contradicts accurate measurements, and in a battle between direct measurement and proxy, measurement wins every time.
2) Various plants would go extinct at that level
3) It contradicts the plain fact that C02 is highly variable in concentration, and very localized.
4) Other ice cores match the variability that Wagner,Aaby,Visscher show
5) The Wagner,Aaby,Visscher result is the one expected from Henry’s law.
#568
Rubbish. Did you read the paper? It the core covers just the last 60years. It is a proof of concept and makes no reconstruction of pre-Keeling CO2 concentrations.
#569
1)Only high quality data trump high quality proxies.
2)Rubbish. If plants went extinct at 280 they would have been lost in the glacial at 190ppmv.
3)Thats why Antarctic is so good – well mixed atmosphere away from source regions.
4) reference please
5)?
I found the paper at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5446/1815a
Seems rather short and insubstantial. Interestingly enough (Steve M, please perk up at this), their main objection is statistical in nature:
This seems like a weak objection at best. Their second objection is also quite weak, specifically the claim that
Here, they apparently use circular reasoning by using the suspect ice core data to invalidate the SI data. Whereas SI data contradicts the ice core reconstruction, their argument boils down to “that can’t be right, since the ice core data contradicts the SI data”. This proves that people from Bergen aren’t as smart as they think they are, even if their soccer team just managed to defeat the obviously superior Rosenborg team.
In fact, for the period in question, we have actual data showing the expected up and down variability:
1877 348
1880 270
1885 375
1890 290
1898 325
1905 300
1910 310
1920 330
1922 285
1930 340
1940 400
1950 320
1960 310
#571
The length of the paper is determined by the extremely strict word limits Science sets for comments. The Nordic J Bot paper is more substantive.
541 PaddikJ
August 27th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Here is a New Scientist article about the saltier North Atlantic:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12528-saltier-north-atlantic-should-give-currents-a-boost.html
And here is a link to the GRL abstract:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030126.shtml
I am not sure if there is a free version pdf posted anywhere for the full article or not.
Hey RichardT, Gunnar, Nasif, and DeWitt,
Is there any chance y’all will knock off with the CO2 discussions here per Steve M’s request in #517 so that we can get a new Unthreaded post before we reach 1000 comments? It is taking forever to load this thread right now and I think I speak for alot of folks when I ask that y’all respect Steve’s repeated request not to discuss CO2 measurement here anymore.
Thanks and hope to see you soon on Unthreaded #19
>> It is taking forever to load this thread right now
Sounds like a personal problem. 🙂 So, basically, discussion is to be stifled because of the lack of good design in the blog software and your lack of bandwidth? Ahh well, I will make this my last C02 post for now. There really are a lot of statistical issues that can be audited in the C02 side of the AGW idea, without which, the temperature side is irrelevant.
>> 1)Only high quality data trump high quality proxies.
High Quality Data: Nearly all the C02 measurements (90,000 data points) were obtained in rural areas without large industrial contamination. The measurements had a systematic error ranging from 1% to 3%. The Pettenkofer method was developed from eleven principal measuring techniques (including gravimetric, titrimetric, volumetric and manometric). The IPCC has ignored these chemical methods despite being the standard in analytical chemistry for 100 years, rejecting the data as faulty and inaccurate, but providing no scientific support for that view. The Pettenkofer process was used universally as a standard and was accurate enough to develop all the modern knowledge of medicine, biology and physiology (photosynthesis, respiration end energy metabolism).
Low Quality Proxy: Contamination from drilling fluids and more than twenty physical-chemical processes occurring in the ice before, during, and after drilling, make ice cores unsuitable for paleoatmospheric work (Jaworowski et al., 1992 b).
>> 2)Rubbish. If plants went extinct at 280 they would have been lost in the glacial at 190ppmv.
Low atmospheric CO2 levels below approximately 250 ppmv (McKay et al., 1991) would have led to extinction of certain plant species. This has not been recorded by paleobotanists. How do you know that it was 190 in the glacial period? drum roll…. The ice core data, so you like circular logic too. Your logic is double faulty, since even if the ice core data is correct, it’s only the level in antartica. At the poles, the level would be higher, and after the glacial period, the plants would repopulate from the equatorial regions. You claim that the entire globe was at 190, which would certainly starve many plants to extinction.
>> 3)Thats why Antarctic is so good – well mixed atmosphere away from source regions.
But not far at all from Sinks. It’s good that you admit that there are source regions. What might those be?
>> 4) reference please
See figure 3
I may have been incorrect when I said “other”, because I assumed that “Byrd ice core” was different than “vostok”.
I noticed that you didn’t list #5. Hmmm. I’ll add
6. The average spacing of vostok samples is like 1400 years. This means that there is a 96% chance that the C02 peaks were missed.
#574. Yes, policy stands.
No possibility of voting them off the island I guess?
# 577
Bill F,
I’m sorry for my insistence, but I want to work with real numbers. I think you have the right to vote, but its not necessary. Just tell me and Ill be off.
Nasif,
I am kidding about the voting thing…it was a response to Gunnar’s tone. Don’t take me the wrong way…I see some value in what y’all are discussing. But Steve had asked that the topic be taken elsewhere than this blog and said that he wouldn’t post a new Unthreaded until the discussion of CO2 measurement ended. Contrary to Gunnar’s response, I have no problem loading CA…I have a fast connection at work and at home. But when a post gets beyond about 300 comments, it takes a long time for the comments to load each time you go to the page, and I doubt that it is very easy on Steve’s bandwidth either. With this post well beyond 500 comments, it is very sluggish, and the easy way to fix it is to heed Steve’s request and stop talking about CO2 measurement so we can get a new Unthreaded to post on.
I’m with Bill on getting a new unthreaded. I have a cable connection and this thread still loads slowly.