Yesterday, I posted up about “Dr Thompson’s Thermometer” and, thanks to CA readers, some interesting results emerged. A special thanks to Tim Lambert for spotting the provenance of Dr Thompson’s thermometer. The post today will repeat some of yesterday’s material, but will recast it, since we now understand the puzzle much better. In Inconvenient Truth, after a segment discussing glaciers, Gore stands in front of a Hockey Stick graph for the last 1000 years and tells his audience that “Dr Thompson’s thermometer” had shown the inconsequentiality of the Medieval Warm Period and, [in the book Nov 13], that “Thompson’s ice core record [was] one of the most definitive” confirmations of Mann’s Hockey Stick. [The text in the book says:]
Lonnie and his team of experts then examine the tiny bubbles of air trapped in the snow in the year that it fell. They can measure how much CO2 was in the Earth’s atmosphere in the past year by year. They can also measure the exact temperature of the atmosphere each year by calculating the ratio of different isotopes of oxygen which provides an ingenious and highly accurate thermometer. The team can count backward in time year by year – the same way an experienced forester can read tree rings – by simply observing the clear line od demarcation that separates each year from the one preceding it as seen in this unique frozen record. The thermometer to the right measures temperature in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1000 years. The blue is cold and the red is hot. The bottom of the graph marks 1000 years ago and the current era is at the top.
The correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations over the last 1000 years – as measured by Thompson’s team – is striking. Nonetheless the so-called global warming skeptics often say that global warming is really an illusion reflecting nature’s cyclical fluctuations. To support their view, they frequently refer to the Medieval Warm Period. But as Dr Thompson’s thermometer shows, the vaunted Medieval Warm Period (the third little red blip from the left below) was tiny in comparison to the enormous increases in temperature in the last half-century – the red peaks at the far right of the graph. These global-warming skeptics – a group diminishing almost as rapidly as the mountain glaciers – launched a fierce attack against another measurement of the 1000 year correlation between CO2 and temperature known as the “hockey stick”, a graphic image representing the research of climate scientist Michael Mann and his colleagues. But in fact scientists have confirmed the same basic conclusions in multiple ways with Thompson’s ice core record as one of the most definitive. (AIT, The Book)
Figure 1. Scene from AIT, with Gore standing in front of a hockey stick graph.
[added] The transcript here (and I don’t vouch for the transcript) is a little different than the book, but clearly attributes the graphic here to oxygen isotope calculations from Lonnie Thompson:
The ice has a story to tell and it is worldwide. My friend Lonnie Thompson digs cores in the ice. They dig down and they bring the core drills back up and they look at the ice and they study it. When the snow falls it traps little bubbles of atmosphere. They can go in and measure how much CO2 was in the atmosphere the year that snow fell. What’s even more interesting I think is they can measure the different isotopes of oxygen and figure out the very precise thermometer and tell you what the temperature was the year that bubble was trapped in the snow as it fell.
When I was in Antarctica I saw cores like this and the guy looked at it. He said right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act. I couldn’t believe it but you can see the difference with the naked eye. Just a couple of years after that law was passed, it’s very clearly distinguishable.
They can count back year by year the same way a forester reads tree rings. You can see each annual layer from the melting and refreezing. They can go back in a lot of these mountain glaciers a thousand years. They constructed a thermometer of the temperature. The blue is cold and the red is warm. I show this for a couple of reasons. Number one the so called skeptics will sometimes say “Oh, this whole thing is cyclical phenomenon. There was a medieval warming period after all.” Well yeah there was. There it is right there. There are one there and two others. But compared to what is going on now, there is just no comparison. So if you look at a thousand years worth of temperature and compare it to a thousand years of CO2 you can see how closely they fit together. Now, a thousand years of CO2 data in the mountain glacier.
Readers yesterday observed the irony that the caption on Al Gore’s graphic was inverted with negative values at the top (something that was corrected in the book version.) I observed that I had examined Thompson’s ice core results and had been unable to identify any Thompson versions that corresponded to the Thompson graphic. It turns out that the Gore Hockey Stick has not derived from Thompson data at all; what it represents is a splicing of the MBH99 reconstruction (taken to 10-year averages) and a version of the CRU temperature history overlaid directly and merged with the MBH99 reconstruction. Thus the confirmation of MBH99 is ironically MBH99 itself.
Here is a closer view of Dr Thompson’s Thermometer. The Medieval Warm Period (not labeled in this version, but labeled in the book) is identified as occurring from about 1360-1370. In the DVD version, the y-axis is labeled incorrectly (it’s inverted), but the error is corrected in the book.
Figure 2. Dr Thompson’s Thermometer from Inconvenient Truth. The y-axis is labeled incorrectly here, but is corrected in the book.
As noted yesterday, the Gore Hockey Stick appears to originate from a graphic in Thompson (Clim Chg 2003) which plots the CRU temperature history and MBH99 in the same figure, shown below (rotated to match the Gore version).
Thompson et al 2003. Figure 7d. The measured (Jones et al., 1999) and reconstructed (Mann et al., 1999) Northern Hemisphere temperatures are shown in (d) and are plotted as deviations (◦C) from their respective 1961’1990 means.
While this identification is very convincing, there are still some discrepancies when you actually try to replicate the exact Gore figure from MBH99 and CRU data. First here is a plot of MBH99 zeroed on 1961-1990 as stated in Thompson et al 2003 (Gore just says “Northern Hemisphere Temperature (◦C)”. Obviously this needs to be smoothed to match Gore.
In Thompson’s ice core articles, he usually/nearly always uses 10-year averages so this seemed like a logical smoothing strategy. Here’s the result – the shape matches very well, but it looks too “cold”. In the Gore graphic, there is at least something that is slightly above the zero-line, which he sarcastically refers to as the “Medieval Warm Period”, but there isn’t anything here.
The zero-period in MBH99 is 1902-1980, not 1961-1990. Perhaps Thompson only said that the data had been centered on 1961-90, but in fact, it was really left centered on 1902-1980. Here is a plot of MBH99 in 10-year averages centered on 1902-1980 and this looks like what is used. It’s a titch too “cold” – I’m not sure why.
Now let’s try to match the CRU version. I can probably forage around and find a 2000 vintage version that will match a little better, but for now I just used the HadCRU2 version presently online. First I tried it with 1960-1990 centering (as stated in Thompson), which would be somewhat inconsistent with the 1902-1980 centering of MBH99, but we’ve seen that before. My impression was that this is a little “cold”.
So I re-centered the CRU data on 1902-1980 to match MBH99 centering ( an adjustment of 0.156 deg C) and that seemed to work better. So it looks like both series are centered on 1902-1980.
Now to splice the two series. Here’s a plot which is more or less in Gore format: this seems to get most of the details. There are a few features that aren’t matched. The CRU version isn’t exactly right, though it’s very close. I could probably match it exactly with a bit more experimenting. In a case where the CRU temperature is warm, the Gore plot overwrites the MBH99 background and I’d have to experiment a little to replicate that graphic aspect. But you get the idea.
One thing that we can say for certain about the Gore graphic is that it completely merged the proxy and temperature records, making no effort whatever to distinguish them. I observed that Michael Mann had said at realclimate:
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
Climate Audit 
213 Comments
This is off topic (sorry Steve) because I wanted it to be readily accessible at this site.
Had it not been for the Weblog contest, I never would have known about Pharyngula. Now THAT is something to behold. Yesterday, I wasted a couple of hours following one thread (that’s like confessing to watching porn) and I’ve never seen anything quite like it on the web.
PZ Meyers describes himself as “an associate professor at a small liberal arts college” but he comes across as a knuckle dragger. He tolerates no disent, and his idea of repartee is to tell visitors to “f_ck off”. His lobotomized cheering section is even worse.
For a really good look at what warmists are all about, check out this thread, which had more than 700 posts when I last looked. Then, try to post the link on other blogs so that as many rational people as possible can see the really ugly face of the apocalyptic warmist religion.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_palmer.php
If you can’t trust yourself, then who can you trust?
Seriously, Mann’s comment at RC came a year after Thompson’s publication. Three years later we know the fact of a splicing to be true. Although generosity might allow “to our knowledge” enough wiggle room, the claim now is proven NOT to be specious. Since Mann’s denial of it is accompanied by a gratuitous insult, a retraction and apology certainly are in order.
It’s becomes clearer every day that what is published in print or digitally is widely available for forensic examination. Good job by all contributors to the effort.
So, if I understand this correctly, you are not saying there is or isn’t a midevil warm period or that global temperatures are or are not increasing, only that this Gore graph simply can not be relied upon to accurately demonstrate temperature trends. Is that a fair statement?
Steve:
I assume you will do a follow up on the Bona Churchill images?
He is saying that AIT misrepresented this graph as providing independent confirmation of Mann’s hockey stick. In fact, it is just Mann’s work recycled.
#5. correct. #3. I’ve discussed the MBH98 reconstruction extensively and this post does not cover the same ground.
Again, shouldn’t the title be:
?
I was wondering why Gore put the horizontal axis at -0.5 degrees rather than 0 degrees. At first I thought it was just sloppiness. Then, I realized that this distortion was critical to his central point.
Gore says:
If you put the horizontal axis at 0 degrees, the MWP is not “a little red blip.” Rather, it is a serious period of abnormal warmth where temperatures were significantly above the long-run average. By shifting the axis up, Gore makes it appear as if it was only a “little red blip” above average.
Disgusting. I wonder if he realizes the damage he is doing to his cause? His sleaziness is much easier to expose than Mann’s (who hides behind impenetrable mathematics).
The Mann hockey stick just looks pitiful without the instrumental record overlaid on it in big, thick red lines.
Funny how we never see it presented this way in the literature.
Terry, the axis at -0.5 degrees is just a result of the mislabeling of the axis. In the “correct” version, the axis is at 0 degrees.
So we get bristlecones for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bleck.
Gore, Mann, Thompson, IPCC et al are Climate Change Deniers.
They prefer their proxy result for the last 1000 years to the Historical and Archeological record which tells a completely different story. You don’t need proxies for this time period you have human history! people like you and me , where they lived, what they grew, what they caught in the sea, etc. and then they wrote it all down, and drew pictures of it.
Why do they not believe all this scientific evidence? How Strange!
Strangely I now realise I have more in common with all these Climate Change Deniers than I initially thought. But AIT is still all boll*cks.
Technically, the temperature record has not been “grafted” onto the reconstruction. That would be what a botanist might do to create a new cherry tree.
There is a reason I hate the anomaly method.
I don’t know why people cant just post the ‘absolute’ temp in one chart
and then the anomaly in another.
Yes, it’s easy to convert from one anomaly period to another. The problem is this:
you have to remember to do it.
Steve:
Bona Churchill data from Thompson May 16, 2006 presentation:
More to the point, if the anomaly method confuses people who are familiar with data presentation, what does it do to the intended audience of AIT? What’s even more confusing about this presentation is that the line isn’t at zero anomaly. How do you suppose that registers in the brain of the typical AIT viewer?
I think its to Al Gore’s credit that he resorts to recycling. Anything to help the planet.
Re 13 & 15: Are the CRU temperatures that Thompson (and Gore) grafted on to Mann’s anomolies also temperature anomolies or absolute temperatures?
Re #17. It doesn’t look good to pick on Al Gore. He obviously relies upon others to make his presentation. I can’t imagine anyone who would knowingly stand in front of an audience and present obvious errors.
OK. Al isn’t all that bright. He claims to have invented the Internet completely disregarding the fact that it existed in the 60’s and 70’s and was called the “Internet” when ARPANET and NSFnet were interlinked in 1974 using TCP/IP. Even so, picking on Al has the same cachet as showing how much faster you can run than the kid in the wheelchair. Tacky.
I really have to wonder why the AGW proponents need to keep trotting out Mann’s work. Is it really the best evidence for their argument? If it’s really true that Mann was right for all the wrong reasons, why don’t they present the proof instead? Is the levying of ad hominem epithets (e.g., “deniers”) for those pointing out errors and inconsistencies simply a tacit admission of lack of rebuttal argument?
Let’s not sink to the same level with similar ad hominem attacks.
#19 DAV
See my comment here
Nerck:
Excellent. Does anyone see a thermometer?
The other thing I am confused about is the isotope ratio since it seems to vary geographically and by altitude – Bona Churchills in Alaska is very different from Quelccaya in Peru – Thompson reports standardized scores in some places and absolute measures in others. I am sure there has to be a strong justification for the use of the isotope ratio as a temperature proxy. Does anyone know of a citation that covers the justification for the use of the isotope measure?
Re #20, John A says “Its a key totem of a belief system, which is why it appears to be immune to scientific disproof no matter how well founded.”
You have nailed the heart of the matter. No hockey stick means no alarm. No alarm means collapse of the climate control juggernaut.
re #20. Well, maybe John. The Shroud of Turin is a bad example. There really do seem to be valid criticisms of the testing methods. The HS, OTOH, is harder to argue. I’d think it would be hard to ignore having top statisticians tear into your approach and not being able to find one willing to say otherwise. Maybe the AGW people just aren’t that astute when it comes to real argument (even if they are experts of “spin” technology). It would be a very stupid prosecutor who would proffer evidence that allows the defense to have a field day. One can only assume they are presenting with their best foot forward and, by the smell, they stepped in something. They desperately need a new pair of shoes.
DAV, I beg to differ. I was under that impression (assumption?) until I watched AIT and it hit me like a ton of bricks – this is Gore’s own personal work. He did the slides and wrote the words. Normally, for commercial projects, researchers are paid to check facts. Many of the numerous errors in AIT would have been picked up and corrected by a researcher. In AIT we are seeing Gore’s own personal work and dare I say his thought processes as well. No need for a researcher or fact checking, because Al Gore in his own mind is always right. Many errors in the movie seem to have been corrected in the book (which I haven’t read), doubtless because the publisher insisted on a editing/checking process.
Hmm, the Medieval Warm Period was from sometime in the 9th or 10th Century to sometime in the 13th or 14th Century puting “the third little red blip from the left” at the end of the period.
24
Apparently, Hansen was Gore’s scientific adviser for AIT, and so presumably he would have done the scientific fact-checking…..
#24, Maybe you’re right, Philip. It’s been my experience that someone like Gore NEVER writes his own speeches. But it really doesn’t matter. Attacking him personally just doesn’t help anyone except Gore. Far better to point out the errors unexcitedly. Steve pretty much does this already. Quiet determination may seem to take serious setbacks to outrageousness at times but more often wins in the end. (Surely there’s been a statistical study of this! 🙂 )
Al’s going to be sorry he ever invented the internet…
RE#24 and others, when accosted about some of the “facts” of his movie, Gore stood by his statements. Take for example when George Stephanopolous(sp?) pointed out that his sea level scares in the movie were well beyond what the “consensus” said. Gore’s response was “They don’t know…they just don’t know.” That sounds a lot more like him than Hansen or Thompson.
I remember going to the AIT website long ago and seeing some sort of fact list. There wasn’t a single reference among them. It looked a lot more like a 5th grade report than something a scientist would’ve put together.
And then there’s his written debates with Christopher Monckton, where he makes plenty of logical gaffes.
He may have the support of a lot of advisors, but it seems (as with so many politicians) like a lot of the flubs are his own doing.
Am I missing something here? The famous hockey stick graph from the 2001 TAR WG1 SPM is a reconstruction with thermometer data spliced together.
Surely, the appropriate references may be found in Thomson’s papers?
um. i publish plots with “increasing negative” in the “up” direction all the time. it’s not “incorrect”. merely convention. seems to me you’re trying to start a witchhunt.
stick with *actual* issues. of which you have a few. it’ll give you more credibility.
Dumb misuse of the political phrase “The trend justifies the maeans”.
RE 35. You do it? It’s settled then.
Re #32/34
From Thompson et al. (2006):
That graph.
Political misuse of the axiom “The trend justifies the means”.
Is there a good reason why bernie’s #32 was removed? Is dO18 vs temperature OT?
Steve: I was tidying some banter – was inadvertent.
re.#21
Yesterday Steve mentioned:
From Dr. Thompson’s presentation May 16, 2006, Antarctic Peninsula Climate
Variability International Workshop
If I am off topic, my apologies – but I can’t see how we can talk about Thompson’s thermometer without talking about his proxy.
I started reading Thompson stuff. If I read this correctly – and I find it difficult – it looks like the linkage between 018 and temperature is not well-defined.
d18O records from Tibetan ice cores reveal differences in
climatic changes
Tandong YAO, Zexia LI, Lonnie G. THOMPSON, Ellen MOSLEY-THOMPSON,
Youqing WANG, Lide TIAN, Ninglian WANG, Keqin DUAN2
Annals of Glaciology 43 2006
This looks suspiciously like some trees are precipitation proxies and some are temperature proxies. Does anyone read this differently?
From Yao et al (2006), cited in #39:
And from the intro:
Bernie (#32),
Just yesterday I posted on this very subject here:
http://www.abc-7.com/Blogs/clarke.shtml
The fable you link to describes a lot more than Al Gore. If applies to the entire AGW community from top scientists, to heads of state and on to the general public.
While the climate has changed a bit since ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ was published in 1837, human nature, apparently, has not.
Re #1: I followed the link provided and read until I needed to take a bath. I suspected that academia was in trouble, but if this is what passes for scholarship and critical thinking these days, we are headed for some very dark times!
On the other hand, the fact that Climate Audit and Bad Astronomy won for ‘Best Science Site on the Internet’ indicates that rationality is still alive and well in the general public. I guess there is hope afterall!
Bender:
I don’t think their strong conclusion strictly follows from the extended quote. I would certainly like to have seen a formal statement of these relationships in an equation with the data to support it. Doesn’t Thompson have a statistician on his team?.
i.e. The science was not settled in 1996.
This is starting to sound a little like that “dulan juniper” “tree in the desert” story a while back. Did the dendro truth squad ever come to a conclusion on that one?
Provide one example where a POSITIVE change in temperature is represented as “increasing negative.” It’s not a convention, it’s a mistake. As noted on these threads, it was CORRECTED in the book version. If Gore et al used it knowing it were merely an acceptable convention done all the time, why did they feed the need to correct it?
Is it a major issue? No, just a laughable error. But there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out. The focus with these threads has been the misattribution of the graph.
Looking at Al Gore’s graph and taking it a face value, I can only say, Thank God we dodged that ice age that was coming at us like a freight train.
#35 As I understand it, an inverted axis is conventional for the oxygen isotope values, but not for temperature values. The graph at issue here combines inverted oxygen isotope values and instrumental temperature values to demonstrate that ice-core data confirm the “hockey stick”, which presents temperature values. I understood that Steve pointed out that the axis was correctly printed in the book, but not shown correctly in the film.
For the general public, this may not be important. However, a British judge thought that the number of inaccuracies and controversial points in the film did not justify its use in the classroom without teacher guidance. I doubt if the court was aware of this specific misrepresentation of the data.
I do hope that whoever writes the guidebook for UK teachers includes an explanation of how this graph was constructed.
In the previous post, I noted that IPCC AR4 cited several studies, including a couple by Vuille, stating that dO18 in tropical ice cores was precipitation related. There is one HUGE problem for the interpretation of tropical dO18 as a temperature proxy that makes the tree rings look good: the most negative dO18 in tropical ice cores is in summer time (negative= “cold”). So an annual basis, tropical dO18 is negatively related to temperature.
Thompson’s schtick has been that what is true on an annual basis is not true long-term i.e. there has been a long-term upward trend in dO18 that is caused by global warming. At AGU I get the impression that younger geologists take this with a grain of salt, but there’s not much that they can do about it.
bender, I looked at the statistics of this correlation a couple of years ago here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=374
The IPCC AR4 stated in respect to dO18 from tropical ice cores:
Even Thompson himself (in Thompson et al (Science 2000) stated that the Dasuopu core was a proxy for monsoon intensity:
more junk science
Steve (Al Gore and Dr Thompson’s Thermometer #2) wrote,
But Gore is not a researcher, just a popularizer, so this AIT graph, however misrepresented, does not contradict Mann on this point.
Thompson overlaid both graphs in his article, but identified them as two separate graphs, without grafting them together as Team Gore did, so he doesn’t contradict Mann either.
Jason L’s reference to the 2001 TAR WG1 graph (#31) is far more pertinent, since presumably the team of scientists who wrote it included “researchers”.
Steve: the version in 2001 TAR is familiar to all readers here and this is not a new point. Mann’s position is that this (And similar spaghetti graphs) do not constitute a “splice” or a “graft” because the series are not merged. You’re coming a bit into the middle of a dialogue here – it’s the merging that’s amusing here. I also discussed an interesting splice in connection with Crowley and Lowery http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=438 http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=437
snip
A “graft” or “splice” is not merely an issue of graphical representation. It is a matter of inferential logic. If you compare (whether subjectively, in your mind, or through a formal statistical test) an old paleo record to a new instrumental record as though they are equal, you may as well be grafting or splicing. To make a fair comparison, the two series need to be brought to a common basis. Which means having a legitimate estimate of the uncertainty around your two measures. CA has shown that the uncertainty estimates on the tree-ring based proxies are bogus. The uncertainty is far larger than what IPCC presumes. Now what about these ice cores? Where are the confidence intervals on Thompson’s data? (Where are his data?)
Researchers that knowingly “graft” evidence A onto evidence B to make an inference – that’s the real issue. And when the researcher habitually ignores the uncertainty around evidence A, B, this borders on fradulent. You’re not allowed to do this in science. Ask Wegman.
RC has often discussed Gore’s film – mostly with praise. I don’t recall them mentioning this discovery. Perhaps someone should tell them. It seems unfair if Mann et al do not get their fair share of recognition in a Nobel prize-winning work.
Look closely at Steve’s “Scene from AIT” image. The screen-shot shows a well-presented, smoothed flow of visual information leading from the left towards the right. It appears stable, cool, and without any noticeable blip to challenge or contradict the central message it is being used to convey. Our eye follows it to the right of the screen where it merges into a much more prominent, superimposed element containing erratic information which is neat-looking, but on closer inspection it has muddled up values.
And that’s before we even begin to look at the graph.
Grafting data: When you overlay a paleo reconstruction with borehole or recent instrumental, it is not merely the confidence intervals that are missing. The proper 0 point for computing anomalies in the two series is never shown to be correct and is often funny business (they just align them so they “match” in the overlap period). Second, one is often going from very smoothed data to annual data. Guess what? The annual data will have more highs!
A point which I’ve made before, but is worth repeating and underlining. Smoothing is ok for graphical representation, but not in conjunction with unadjusted statistical analysis.
If I were to pose this question to Mann; “Mike. You say tree ring width in the trees you
study are proportional to temperature in some way, right? Could you please provide
the formula that describes the absolute temperature of each ring please? Thanks.”…what
would be his answer? Then I would ask him about the ‘divergence’ problem. I mean,
somethings going on ’round here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, if ya know
what I mean.
RE 60.
[audio src="http://nature-downloads.naturesounds.ca/audio/gentle_rain_crickets_preview_naturesounds-ca.mp3" /]
Re #60 I can tell you more or less how a dendro would reply. Dodge and weave, but using nice words that didn’t offend.
The relationship is not exact (concession)
The relationship is estimated statistically using the most modern techniques available (exaggeration)
The calibrations you seek are available in the literature (appeal to authority, dodge)
The exact equations vary among species and among sites (obfuscation)
The overall conclusions are insensitive to small perturbations resulting from any improvement in our knowledge (presumption)
The science is always improving (dodge)
Your criticisms have some validity, but are unhelpful (shift blame)
“Divergence” (as you call it (ad hom)) is a problem, but we will likely have an answer soon (speculation) …
… but that answer is unlikely to overturn our conclusions about current warming trend (speculation)
Thanks for your enquiry, these are good questions, and we hope to have some answers real soon (ultimate kiss-off)
Something like that, anyways.
#60 For context:
Tree growth at tree line is probably somewhat related to temperature. The problem is that:
(1) temp is not the only limiting factor
(2) temp operates synergistically with other limiting factors (soil moisutre, precip, NOx, NH4, CO2)
(3) the responses are not linear
These are proven facts by the dendros themselves. Consequently linear univariate correlation models may not work all that well. No one knows for sure because experimental approaches to response function calibration are sorely lacking.
You (and Boris) should read the blog once over if you want more detail than that. These things have been hashed out a hundred times before at CA. (These topics are “avoided” (i.e. suppressed) at RC.)
According to the CRU, the coldest year in the last 100 years in the Northern Hemisphere was:
1907 -0.528
Then it reached:
1944 0.148
Then it cooled off some, and then the warmest year was:
2005 0.622
So … in the first 37 years of the last 100 the temperature rose:
.676C
In the next 60 years it rose:
.528C
So, why so they lie and say the warming mostly occurred in the last 50 years, when in fact more of it occurred from 1907 to 1944?
#64 Bruce:
Please, please, please stop with the single-year single-hemisphere comparisons. If you really feel you must play that game, you should include one more data point in your CRU NH cherry-pickings:
1907: -0.528
1944: +0.148
1976: -0.284
D’oh! My last post got chopped because of the “less-than” symbol. I’ll try again…
#64 Bruce:
Please, please, please stop with the single-year single-hemisphere comparisons. If you really feel you must play that game, you should include one more data point in your CRU NH cherry-pickings:
1907: -0.528
1944: +0.148
1976: -0.284 (this is the one you missed)
2005: +0.622
To summarize:
– from 1907 to 1944: +0.676C
– from 1944 to 1976: -0.432C
– from 1976 to 2005: +0.906C
To be clear, I’m not advocating the use of single-year comparisons. But if you are going to use them, at least avoid skipping over lows that don’t fit your agenda. Preferably, move past elementary school arithmetic (subtraction) and try least-squares regression.
cherry-picking breakpoints is a definite no-no.
JohnV
Which is the anomaly … 1944 or 1976?
I’ll argue 1976.
My argument is simple … the rise in temperatures from 1907 was caused by the huge increase in solar energy.
The dip to the low in 1976 was cause by air pollution in the post war era that lowered the amount of solar energy reaching the earth. The cleaning up of the air caused the rise in temperatures that started in 1907 to resume.
It had nothing to do with CO2.
More than half the rise in temperature from 1907 occurred in the 1907-1944 timeframe.
#68 Bruce:
I think we agree on a couple of things. First, warming in the early part of the century was primarily due to increasing solar output. Second, cooling in the middle part of the century was likely due to aerosols.
We differ in the latter part of the century. Since solar output seems to be relatively constant since about 1950, I do not see how the “cleaning up of the air” could cause temperatures to rise beyond those seen in the late 1940s.
SteveMc, it would be great if you could start that solar measurements and proxies thread. Thanks.
UK John was kind enough to post this url:
Click to access UK_climate_trends.pdf
Wow. 20% more sunshine in the winter because of anti-pollution measures coupled with the most solar energy hitting the earth in 11,000 years …. and some people want to blame CO2!!!!
#70 Bruce. Very interesting. I remember walking to school in th 50’s in Romford, a NE Suburb of London. We regularly had to walk in “Pea Soupers”, smog so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I’m sure that the appearance of the Smog in Industrial Times, and it’s disappearance as a result of the Clean Air Act would have had a marked impact on the surface temperature record in the UK. Also, I guess the same applies to all industrialised, or coal burning areas, also large scale forest clearance by means of fire.
It would mean that the Urban effect would be more complex. Extra energy given off, and stored, as a result of energy used, and landscape changes, but extra energy from the Sun reflected by the smog.
1998 was the year of the big smog in SE Asia due to forest burning in Sumatra/Borneo.
I got a problem with all this aerosol staff.
First, blocking sunlight reaching surface by dark particles from fuel combustion means heating of air:
Black carboncontained in soot from the combustion of biomass and fossil fuelsmay be responsible for around 16% of the gross warming the planet is currently experiencing and may be the second-most significant global warming pollutant after carbon dioxide and ahead of methane, according to testimony provided by five scientists before the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in October.
Second, why sulfur aerosols are supposed to cool? Their reflection of sunlight is secondary effect. Primary effect is promotion of cloud formation.
But here is the rub: only high altitude clouds have cooling effect (as confirmed by major volcano eruptions, bursting huge amount of sulfur in stratosphere); low altitude clouds have overall warming effect on as measured near-surface air temperature (as I am aware of). Antfopogenic sulfur emissions are hanging pretty low in atmosphere. So why they are supposed to cool climate from 1940 to 1975?
Where I am wrong? NASA and alike web sites talk only about aerosols reflect sunlight and aerosols increase clouds without any detail.
Team Gore has developed a new concept in graphing technology — the Chimera Graph, whose body and tail belong to one series, while its head is a garbled composite of two series.
The Area Graph is a fine way to dramatize a single series. The Spaghetti Graph is sometimes hard to read, but at least is an honest way to try to present several concurring (or divergent …) series at once. The Area Band graph is a good way to show a confidence interval for a single series, or even the consensus of several series, by shading in the area between the highest and lowest values.
But AIT’s Chimera Graph is just a meaningless monstrosity.
? I thought “The Hypothesis” had it the other way around: high clouds increase warming and low clouds cause cooling. They “hold heat in” at night, but they reflect and block solar radiation in the daytime. I thought the net effect was negative. Maybe I have it backwards. Anyway, I think they all cause cooling, by reflecting sunlight and by absorbing IR from the sunlight (everyone seems to keep forgeting that about 44% of sunlight energy is in the IR region).
JohnV
Tsk tsk. We’ve been over this. The amount of solar energy reaching the earth has increased since 1990.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5723/847
JohnV
Since solar output seems to be relatively constant since about 1950
Tsk tsk. Weve been over this. The amount of solar energy reaching the earth has increased since 1990.
A decline in solar radiation at land surfaces has become apparent in many observational records up to 1990, a phenomenon known as global dimming. Newly available surface observations from 1990 to the present, primarily from the Northern Hemisphere, show that the dimming did not persist into the 1990s. Instead, a widespread brightening has been observed since the late 1980s.
you can both be correct, Solar TSI has been relatively stable since 1950, but it should be remembered that the last 50 years have been part of the strongest solar grand maxima in centuries. The science mag article seems to be talking about recieved solar radiation, a function of planetary albedo
SteveMc, it would be great if you could start that solar measurements and proxies thread. Thanks.
Steve McIntyre and JohnV
I emailed Dr Leif Svalgard who is a respected astrophysicist and member of the NASA solar panel and ask him if he would be willing to write a post about the current theories and papers concerning solar output, influence on climate etc. He told me he would be glad to after he attends the the AGU meetind Dec 10-14 in San Francisco.
Steve M…I don’t know how to put Dr Svalgard in touch with you as the email you have listed here does not work.
#76 Bruce:
Argh. Yes, we have been over this. Let me explain again.
Solar output (TSI) is different than the solar energy reaching the earth’s surface (“global dimming”). TSI obviously affects the amount of solar energy reaching the earth’s surface, but the recent increase is due to the abatement of global dimming due to cleaner air.
For your reference, here’s the last paragraph from the Wild et al article you linked from Science:
To summarize, the paper you enjoy linking to shows that global dimming was able to mask AGW until recently. As global dimming reverses, the AGW temperature trend becomes more evident. That’s my position as well.
I don’t know about this. What about China and India? You think there’s not a lot of dimming there? Why aren’t temperatures soaring in various big cities (besides the UHI effect)?
#80 jae:
I’m just quoting the paper linked by Bruce. You should read it. It states that dimming is ongoing in China and India (as you said).
81, then it’s not global, is it?
JohnV,
I suggest that any paper about climate that wants to get published has to have some nod towards global warming caused by man or it may have trouble getting published. Plus getting grants would be more difficult if it didn’t.
I think its an interesting argument to suggest that global warming caused by more sunshine reaching the earth is the only reason we can notice that CO2 causes the warming.
Kind of ass-backwards don’t you think?
I think my theory is more plausible. The warming from 1907 to 1944 was cause by an 11,000 year high in solar energy.
The cooling post 1944 was cause by the post-WWII industrialization/pollution. The warming caused by record amounts of sunshine resumed when the industrialized nations passed clean air legislation.
The paper from Met makes that clear in the text and tables and graphs even if they don’t want to admit it in the conclusions.
The sunnier winters in UK certainly explains why the maximums in the summer have not risen much, while the minimums in the winter have risen.
Everything’s local….
If the graph is wrong, then I’d expect it to be corrected if it’s just a mistake, and for obfuscation or the ignoring of it if it was done on purpose.
As far as what Gore said about the Internet, he never said he created it, but that he took initiative in creating it (a clumsy phrase, and incorrect, more like political initiative in helping to popularize it and fund it etc). ( more here http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp )
Here’s the question he was answering and the answer:
The first time anyone said he did was in a Wired story in 1999 that said “It’s a time-honored tradition for presidential hopefuls to claim credit for other people’s successes. … After Gore took credit for the Internet, …” http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/03/18390 and the same writer “…the vice president offered up a whopper of a tall tale in which he claimed to have invented the Internet.” His excuse, once everyone started talking about it, and parsing what he said to mean “invented”? Damage control as how it was being parsed. “I was pretty tired when I made that comment because I had been up very late the night before inventing the camcorder,” http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/03/18655
He was talking about something like this no doubt when he said inititate in creating:
Tonight at the Te Papa museum in Wellington New Zealand a man named Randall Pearce is making a presentation based on AIT. Mr Pearce was hand picked by Al Gore to make these presentations throughout New Zealand and Australia.
He claims that some alterations have been made to the presentation following the court case in the UK but I doubt he will be up with play in regard to this thread. Question: I would like to try and get a question relating to this issue to someone who can ask it following this presentation. Could someone word such a question please based on what we now know about this graph.
#83 Bruce:
Perhaps I don’t understand your theory. Maybe you can help:
We agree that TSI increased through the early part of the century (until ~1940) and that increase was responsible for much of the warming in that time frame. We agree that dimming caused by aerosols stopped the warming trend until the late 1970s.
From what I can tell, TSI stopped increasing by the 1960s. It has not increased significantly since then. Aerosol dimming has been reduced in recent years. So, in the absence of a non-solar forcing we should expect current temperatures to be no warmer than mid-century temperatures. (Same TSI plus similar “dimming” means similar temperature).
However, you seem to be saying that a given level of dimming now will lead to higher temperatures than the same level of dimming mid-century. How is that possible without a non-solar forcing?
=====
windansea:
I haven’t been able to find a reference for this. Could you provide one? Thanks.
PS: Mr Pearce also claims that the Southern Hemisphere is about to warm up.
I guess what he is saying is that unlike the North it hasn’t as yet!
83. hansen says global dimming is worth about 1C.
interesting 9/11 story
Click to access jetcontrailsrecentresearch.pdf
Re #79:
Bruce, the article from Wild e.a. shows an increase of insolation in China and a decrease in India. The latter seems right as the emissions of aerosols increased. But China? With an enormous increase in industrial activity and correlated emissions?
Moreover: global dimming was really global, including Australia and the South Pole. But the SH has much less aerosol emissions (10%) than the NH (90%) and the ITCZ forms a though barrier for aerosol exchange between the NH and SH. Thus aerosols as cause of global dimming is rather questionable. Cloud cover is a more interesting cause: most stations show more insolation increase in average (cloudy and clear) skies than for clear skies alone. That points to changes in cloud cover…
The following comment on aerosols may be of interest too:
Re #73:
Andrey, sulfate aerosols at any altitude in first instance reflect sunlight, thus have a cooling effect. That is the primary effect. That lasted about three years for the Pinatubo eruption (less water vapour, slowly growing drops before fallout from the stratosphere). But human emissions have a much shorter lifetime (average 4 days) before raining out. If you look at the effect Pinatubo emissions (about 0.6°C in the peak year), then the effect of human SO2 emissions is far less than 0.1°C. That means that the influence of cooling (sulfate) aerosols is largely overestimated in current models. The secondary effect is alike for sulfate and other (brown and black) aerosols as seeds for cloud formation and prolonged lifetime (tertiary effect) but these effects are far from sure: There is no difference in cloud cover trends between NH and SH near the tip of India, while the aerosols are mainly in the NH part.
All together, even the sign of the effect of all aerosols together is far from sure:
– NH ocean heat content is increasing faster in the NH than in the SH (if corrected for area), while aerosols are for 90% emitted in the NH (and most stay there).
– A 60% reduction in European SO2 emissions shows little difference in temperature trend when “clean” areas are compared to downwind emissions areas.
– China and India are now the largest emitters of SO2, but at least in India the temperature increase is partly by aerosols.
Thus where is the cooling effect?
If aerosols in general have less (or no) cooling effect, then the sensitivity for CO2 must be reduced in climate programs to follow the temperature trend of the past century…
Re #86:
JohnV: see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/abs/nature02995.html
While solar activity peaked around 1945, reduced a little and peaked again, you may not forget that the oceans need more time (about 30 years) to respond to any higher level of forcing, even if there is no increase in forcing…
RE: Areosols – Don’t forget they also land on ice and lower its albedo.
88, three days. That has to be a joke, right? Right???
#90 Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Thanks for the link. The abstract is interesting — I wish I could get at the whole paper for a little less money. I am aware that the time constant for the oceans is quite large.
John V
Try looking here for an earlier or later version.
JohnV
It isn’t a “given level of dimming”.
The UK says 20% more sunshine since 1929 in the winter in some regions.
20% is not a trivial amount.
And since the UK temperature minimums have risen more than temperature maximums, I am surmising that means warmer winters and not significantly warmer summers. That fits with the much more sunny winters in the UK.
Does the theory of CO2 caused warming include only asymmetical warming? Why aren’t the summers and winters warming a symmetrical amount?
Is there any explanation why the warming tracks so nicely with increased sunshine?
John V.
Found the full paper at Usoskin’s website:
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Indeed it is a shame that Science and Nature ask that much money for one article (GRL is a little better)… After a few years that should be for free…
Btw, my comment #89 was a reply for you, not for Bruce…
#95 Bruce:
Obviously, increased sunshine means higher temperatures.
Obviously, NE England is not the world. (All of England is about 0.048% of the world’s surface area).
Globally, according to your linked article above, most of the dimming observed from ~1950 to ~1990 has now abated. Hence, the level of dimming today (global average) is similar the level pre-1950.
Of course, if the whole world was getting 20% more sunshine that would explain everything. It’s too bad that’s not the case.
The correlation between NH dimming and recent brightening since 1990 may help explain why the NH and SH seem to have diverging trends, ie most of the warming in recent years has been concentrated in the NH extratropics. This could be seen in color back in September when the Arctic hit a record low for sea ice extent, while the Antarctic hit a record high.
But back to the Hockey Stick- the diffenence between the MWP and LIA (if you can even find them) is so small (about 0.2-0.3 º), and yet we know from the historical record that there were radical changes in seasonal climate in Europe. This quater-degree of change was, according to Mann et. al., the difference between Vikings in Greenland with vinyards in Britain, and the Thames freezing over every year. If such a small change in global or hemispheric temperature can produce such dramatic swings, then the full degree of warming that the graph shows occurring over the last century should be producing even more radical changes, like palm trees in Norway or something…
Maybe we are near a 100,000 year high in solar activity.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/06/020607073439.htm
How about:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1468-4004.2003.44520.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=aag
JohnV
Great. You have the data somewhere. Could you post it?
Of course others suggest we are at a 100,000 year high. Some say the duration of the high is exceptional.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/nature02995.html#B1
Re #97:
John V.
There is/was a negative trend in cloud cover over the period 1985-2000, in the (sub)tropics, which induces about 2 W/m2 more sunlight hitting the surface. This is a natural trend, not caused by GHGs. See: Wielicki ea.and
Chen ea.
This amount of extra energy input on about 50% of the earth’s surface in less than two decades is comparable to the current theoretical 1.2 W/m2 from more CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution…
Climate programs dont catch the change in cloud cover in the (sub)tropics: not the 1985-2000 trend, not the change during the solar cycle, nor the change in cloud cover during huge events like the 1992 Pinatubo or the 1998 El Niño. See: Allan and Slingo 2002
RE 92. Larry. Moe here. I kid you not.
In fact Nova has a series highlight this particular Find.
So, during the 3 Days of No flights during 9/11 the researcher looked at temps over the US
( he had to look at DTR to find the effect) anyway The effect was 1C.
So, for 3 days we get no contrails and the Effect is 1C.
Simple. Stop air travel.
Easy as Pie.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/contrail.html
Except the models and the data are having a fight.
The flount of all knowledge
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html
Read the transcript. Very interesting things here and there
103,
Crack, meet pot.
You would think that it would occur to them to do a double-blind test. It’s not that hard to find many 3-day periods when the planes are flying. This isn’t rocket statistics, folks. It’s just plane statistics.
I’d say thats because winter minimums are more affected by increased sunshine. Generally daily minimums occur after dawn, and in winter at high latitudes, a considerable time after dawn.
A change in the observed time of the minimum to earlier would confirm this. Unfortunately I can’t find any data on the time of day of the minimum temperature.
#103
Wow. It appears Hansen et al on NOVA totally missed the fact that the level of solar energy coming from the sun is at unprecedented levels and has been for an unprecedented length of time.
I think the dimming is in their IQ.
Re 103
I wonder whether a significant amount of the temperature data came from airports. I’ve thought that possibly the ASOS data from the days after 911 would show temperature drops since there isn’t any jet exhausts blowing superheated air. If it’s an airport heat island effect then the study has a bias.
Re 105
As opposed to plane geometry?
John V. says:
November 12th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
quote Of course, if the whole world was getting 20% more sunshine that would explain everything. Its too bad thats not the case. unquote
Actually, I’m glad it’s not the case: the proposed anthropogenic CO2 forcing is about 2 watts/metre^2. What would 20% more sunshine give us — 40 watts or so?
There’s an interesting snippet at Eos, Vol. 87, No. 4, 24 January 2006. Further reading of Palle’s work — with its huge albedo swings, startling changes in sunlight and confusing picture of the effects of high and low level clouds — will make any open-minded student wonder why there is all this fuss about 2 watts/metre^2 from CO2.
Re#75, Jae:
Yes, I messed-up: lower level clouds have cooling effect, and cirrus clouds have slight warming effect.
Re#89, Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Yff! I spent couple of hours reading commentary of Idsos on about 40 articles concerning aerosol effects on climate:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/a/subject_a.jsp
In a nutshell:
And so on. The only thing all articles agreed upon is that aerosol effects have very substantial error margin, and some suggest that it is not clear whether aerosols are cooling near-surface atmosphere or warming it. One article is quite revealing:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N44/C1.jsp
So, definitive claim that aerosols cooled atmosphere between 1950 and 1975 (John V, etc.) is shaky at best.
#103 Mosh. Contrails cool the day and warm the night. Is this in the GCM’s?
An inconvenient mistake?
The Thompson PowerPoint document that Steve links to above is a PowerPoint show a (pps) not a typical presentation file (ppt). Because it uses transitions extensively it could have represented the source of the almost inconceivable error of using the hockeystick once again to defend the hockeystick.
On Nov. 9th Hu McCulloch (#144)said:
This May 2006 presentation by Dr. Thompson came in a timeframe when the Mann hockey stick was under considerable scrutiny (e.g. Barton hearing in July 2006.) It is surprising that Dr. Thompson was still using this temperature reconstruction as late as May 2006, although the Wegman analysis had not yet been presented. The search for independent supportive evidence of warming, based on other proxies in nature, was obviously important to proponents. A possibility exists that this particular PowerPoint slideshow contributed to the impression that the hockeystick image had been recreated by Dr. Thompson with his own data.
Since the PowerPoint slideshow transitions, on slide 62, held the Mann and Jones citations for the chart (they are introduced through a fast bottom-up wipe overlay) if one were to copy the chart through cut and paste, it would be very easy to lose the references.
Here is the actual chart as it looks if one right-clicks and copies it out of the PowerPoint file without catching the overlay:
Looking at the striking similarities between the shape of the ice-core data and the hockeystick, it is possible to understand how an impetuous GW proponent might have been naive enough to believe the data represented a follow-up analysis by Dr. Thompson. It sounds inconceivable but how believable is it that this iconic graphic could have been mistakenly used again in such a public manner?
re111. i’ll see. hansen tested it as noted above
#107 Bruce:
“Unprecedented” is a little strong. Here’s a quote from the article you linked in #101 to support your case (emphasis added):
“According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades“
=====
#110 Andrey Levin:
I see that I did forget to prefix the claim with the word “likely” or “probable” on at least one occasion. I did not intend to be so definitive. However, even the article you quoted indicates that the *surface* in Asia is cooling due to brown clouds.
It’s clear that the image used in AIT was the wrong one. That got me wondering the effect on this scene had Gore actually used “Thompson’s thermometer”. Here’s a quick mock-up:
Hockey stick? Yep.
Much warmer today than MWP? Yep.
Substantial difference to the movie? Nope.
I spent a considerable amount of time trying to replicate Gore’s graphic from Thompson’s data and failed. IF he says that he used Thompson data, he should have used it. And Thompson, as Gore’s scientific adviser, should have been alert enough to detect the problem. The lack of care in a public document surprises me.
I knew that Thompson had made a Hockey Stick and this was one reason why I didn’t pay particular attention previously to the provenance of Gore’s presentation. Would the THompson HS have the same visual punch as the Mann HS? I don’t think so, especially for the CoO2 correlation argument. While the Thompson HS also shows the same modern-medieval relationship, the upswing commences much earlier than in the Mann HS. In the Mann case, there is a long-term decline up to the 20th century and then an upturn correlating to CO2 increases. In the Gore case, the increase commences earlier – after the Maunder Minimum. Gore’s text refers to correlation to CO2 – and an increase commencing earlier does not pack as much punch for the point.
Substantively, don’t forget that there are issues with whether the Thompson dO18 data in the tropics is a temperature proxy (IPCC AR4 describes it as precipitation proxy relying on papers by Vuille and others). Also don’t forget that Thompson has left out relevant ice cores e,g, Bona Churchill discussed recently, but also see discussion here showing other ice core images:
Also the Greenland ice core image shown in the NAS report.
Can anyone imagine the eruptions of fury if any critic/skeptic did something comparable in anything that had such (global) hype and acclaim as “An Inconvenient Truth”?? Where are all the climate scientists to correct Gore’s film and book, distributed to millions??
The double standards are breath-taking, as in the manufactured controversy about Durkin’s “Swindle” broadcast:
Steve McIntyre:
Fair enough.
What would Thompsons chart from the 2006 presentation look like if we added other ice core measures to the Andean and Tibetan representations of the data? If Thompson can simply aggregate Peruvian and Tibetan ice cores why not add Alaska? If everything is normalized to
the local prevailing levels of d18O, what is the difference in the mechanism between tropical and extra-tropical generation of d18O that warrants not combining them, especially since Thompson already acknowledges that the Tibetan and Peruvian mechanisms are somewhat different?
I want to repeat a comment I made over a year ago. It takes very few data points to make a “hockey stick”. Hockey stick shapes contain almost no information (sensu Shannon-Weaver) in them, and very few degrees of freedom for pattern matching. Spurious correlations are extremely likely in these cases. In other words, 1000 data points does not yield a lot of statistical power for pattern matching. There’s only one wiggle to match in the “wiggle-matching” process. This is why keys are bumpy. The more unlikely the wiggle-match, the more uniquely a key is matched to its lock. Have you ever seen a key shaped like a hockey stick? There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why one should be wary about hockey-stick shaped matches between CO2 and various “proxies”: the likelihood of a false positive is very, very high.
Which is why suppressed out-of-sample data for Bona Churchill is so critical. Divergence is damning.
#114
JohnV … you missed highlighting the important point:
“almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode”
The “unprecedented” part is the length of time the solar activity has been this high.
As I recall, was not the HS shape of Mann’s reconstruction what piqued Steve M’s interest (based on his experience analyzing mining reports) in looking at it in more detail?
Since the HS shape is close to an ideal for a temperature reconstruction showing a significant A in AGW, would the suspicions of spurious correlation derive from the known and perhaps innocent human tendency to cherry pick both data and methods to produce a desired fit — given an ignorance of the statistical effects of over fitting and data snooping or at least a notion that these selections can be explained away after the fact with no loss of statistical significance? And further would the easy acceptance of the HS indicate scientific and media communitys desires to use it to further confirm what they already judged to be a fairly certain truth?
I think these apparent cases of overdone results and conclusions are what gives me the greatest pause in attempting to put uncertainty limits on my assessments of AGW and makes me most sensitive to searching them out. I see no evidence of conspiracies but in a number of cases I do see the tendency to oversell.
#121 Bruce:
You used the word “unprecedented”, meaning “without precedent”. The statement that “almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode” means that at least one period was longer. There is therefore a precedent.
Anyways, that’s just semantics.
Coincidentally, Rabett just did a little write-up on this same topic. He points to a quote from IPCC AR4 WG1 (page 190, right-column, in link below):
“Prior to direct telescopic measurements of sunspots, which
commenced around 1610, knowledge of solar activity is inferred
indirectly from the 14C and 10Be cosmogenic isotope records
in tree rings and ice cores, respectively, which exhibit solarrelated
cycles near 90, 200 and 2,300 years. Some studies of
cosmogenic isotopes (Jirikowic and Damon, 1994) and spectral
analysis of the sunspot record (Rigozo et al., 2001) suggest that
solar activity during the 12th-century Medieval Solar Maximum
was comparable to the present Modern Solar Maximum. Recent
work attempts to account for the chain of physical processes in
which solar magnetic fields modulate the heliosphere, in turn
altering the penetration of the galactic cosmic rays, the flux of
which produces the cosmogenic isotopes that are subsequently
deposited in the terrestrial system following additional transport
and chemical processes. An initial effort reported exceptionally
high levels of solar activity in the past 70 years, relative to the
preceding 8,000 years (Solanki et al., 2004). In contrast, when
differences among isotopes records are taken into account
and the 14C record corrected for fossil fuel burning, current
levels of solar activity are found to be historically high, but not
exceptionally so (Muscheler et al., 2007).”
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch02.pdf (7+ MB)
I don’t have a link for the Muscheler paper yet.
#123. Solanki and Muscheler disagree. Solanki replied to Muscheler. Don’t assume that Muscheler is right. I;ve done some posts on this – these would be a better location for this discussion than Al Gore.
It’s also worth looking at the graphics in the Fraser Institute’s Independent Summary for Policy makers which shows clearly how Solanki and Muscheler compare on a common scale.
#124 Steve McIntyre:
I tried to search on your Muscheler posts but the links on the results page don’t work. As far as I could tell, you only commented on Muscheler 2005, not 2007 (correct me if I’m wrong).
Thanks for the Fraser Institute link, although I see it is also Muscheler 2005.
Given the disagreement between Solanki and Muscheler, I am surprised you didn’t point out the disagreement previously (when the Solanki paper was being touted as fact).
John V, you stated:
On what basis did you assert this? In summer 2005, I stated:
That looks to me like an accurate report of the disagreement.
Earlier this year, I stated:
As to not commenting on the 2007 article, I can’t do everything in the world. It takes time to analyze thigns the way that I analyze them. Jeez, someone at Bad Astronomy blamed me for not verifying all climate publications. I can’t do everything.
BTW you were asking for a post on Solar Proxies. I did one earlier this year (I’d actually forgotten that I’d done it.)
There’s a discussion at Open Mind about the quote that opens this article. It does not seem to be from the movie version of An Inconvenient Truth. Is it from the book?
Here’s a complete transcript of the movie (section in question is titled “The 10 Hottest Years”):
http://forumpolitics.com/blogs/2007/03/17/an-inconvient-truth-transcript/
Hohn V:
As I see it, multiple articles investigate separately different effects of different man-made air pollutants on different bodies at different locations. It contributes a lot to the confusion.
It could be concluded that combined effects of sulfur aerosols + particulates+ ground-level ozone is:
– reduced TSI to the surface;
– increased IR backradiation to the surface;
– decreased albedo of the surface;
– increased heating by suspended particles of lower atmosphere.
Combined effects of man-made air pollution (mostly combustion of coal and diesel/distillates plus organic matter burning) on as measured on the elevation of 1.5 m over the surface air is slight cooling over the oceans, and slight warming in the Arctic. Particulates are primarily heating, sulfate aerosols are primarily cooling.
So, I would say that even approximate combined effect of man-made air pollution on “global climate” is not known.
#126 Steve McIntyre:
I was speaking of the Solanki quotes in this thread. You were quick to jump in when Muscheler was mentioned, but had no problem with Solanki quotes.
I was not asking you to comment on Muscheler 2007. I was only asking if you had already. I did attempt to search your previous posts, but the links on the results page never work for me.
Thanks for the solar proxies thread. Bruce — would you like to get us started over there?
JohnV
“means that at least one period was longer”
Ok … unprecedented in the last 8,000 years.
I found a link for Muscheler et al 2007. I’ll post it in the Solar Proxies thread:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1076#comment-160486
This hardly contradicts: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/nature02995.html#B1
Its the duration combined with the higher activity that is rare.
Steve McIntyre:
Bump: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2335#comment-160472
Can you please identify the source of the quote that opens this article? Reading your article, it seems like it’s from the movie, but it’s not in the movie. Is it from the book?
133. It’s from the book, page 65 or so.
John V 133
Amazon search shows the quoted segment on page 65 of the paperback edition but comes up empty in the hardback — which is a little strange.
Al Gore Will Join Silicon Valley Firm
(WSJ)
#135 James Erlandson:
Thanks. I tried the Amazon search, but it won’t let me because my account is with Amazon Canada. WTF?
John V 137
It appears that Amazon Canada (Viking Children’s Books, 192 pages) sells a different version than Amazon US (Rodale Books, 328 pages).
JohnV – some further discussion and confirmation of the content of the quote from within the book is available here.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/gore.html
In the transcript to which you refer the relevent segment is actually contained in “Ice Cores: The 650,000 Record”. Go to the sentence “They constructed a thermometer of the temperature”.
Steve has been slightly misleading in that there is no reference to Michael Mann and collegues in the DVD narrative itself. The transcript you reference is essentially accurate but the graphics that go with the transcript are not representative of the DVD. Note it is possible the quoted comment was edited out of the film/DVD. There is supplementary material from the lecture on the DVD and the main film is not the full Al Gore lecture.
The film fails to correctly identify the graphic and therefore in my opinion Steve’s main issue around the contents of the quote is reaonable.
Steve: As noted by others, the above quote is transcribed directly from AIT, the Book (page 65) (as referenced in the body of the quote.)
re #139
What?
1. Steve specifically stated he took the quote from the book. He also stated that the graphic was in the movie, and the book, albeit with a corrected y axis in the book. That’s all at the top of this page. Did Steve not reproduce the quote correctly from the book, was the graphic not in the movie and the book as Steve depicted?
2. After you clarify how Steve was slightly misleading, then please explain how you characterize AIT’s use of the graphic.
Why are we suddenly talking about if Mann et al are referenced in the AIT DVD narrative. Who brought that up?
The issue here is it’s supposedly from Thompson, but it’s from Mann. Now if you want to parse that as referencing Mann through Thompson, nobody knew that.
Well except those many here would call “The Warmers”, it appears.
A transcript here says (And I don’t vouch for the transcript)
This commentary categorically identifies the AIT graph as being derived from O18 isotopes, when it isn’t. In the book version, there is no graphic of 1000 year CO2 levels, but I presume that it must be in his slide show.
Does anyone have that reading level tool handy to apply to that transcript in 142? It just sounds so “Mr. Rogers” to me. “They constructed very accurate thermometers” and so on.
And Steve, I can’t completely confirm that, but I do remember the bit about the clean air act. I’ll resist the temptation to go off-topic and into a rant on how many things are wrong with that statement.
Unlikely, the ice cores are taken on the interior ice fields where the surface temperature never goes above zero. Gore almost certainly invented the melting aspect.
That was one of about a dozen things I was trying not to say.
John V (#115) writes,
So it should be easy enough for Thompson to say “Whoops, wrong graph!” and issue a correction. A correction, nonetheless.
But what’s on your unlabeled vertical axis? Temperatures? Or z-scores of dO18? It does have a hockey stick shape, so if you correlated it with the MBH99 original, you would roughly get degrees. But then you’re calibrating the ice cores with the stripbark tree rings, rather than with the instrumental readings. Calibration with the latter might still be positive, but it would have much less precision because of the much shorter period.
1) The US produces only a small part of the world’s pollution.
2) The US is in the NH, Antarctica quite clearly isn’t.
3) The air quality records in the US show that it took decades for significant changes in air quality to be noticeable in the US.
Which leads to one of two conclusions.
The scientist is totally incompetant, or snip
MarkW
There are atmospheric teleconnections that bring russian pollution into the canadian arctic and rocky mountains. The same thing may happen with other parts of the globe. The reason cold places are prime recipients of the pollution is the process of “cold condensation”: Accumulation of persistent organochlorine compounds in mountains of western Canada
Canada and the Rockies are essentially “downwind” of Russia. It’s a lot more difficult for pollution to travel from the NH to the SH.
142:
What a crock. It took YEARS after passage of the CAA for EPA to even write the rules, let alone implement them. Who writes this stuff for him, anyway?
Aww, I meant promulgate the rules, not write them.
I don’t doubt that. But it’s a question of how much more difficult. You are making a strong assertion and it would be nice to see some citations to back it up.
153, what bothers me about that article is that it said that CCs are found. It didn’t say in what concentration. A lot of these alarming stories about snotgrossium chloride being found in polar bears are simply due to the fact that we can, since the ’80s or so, analyze down to ppb, and in some cases ppt. The truth is, you’ve got many molecules of just about every chemical compound on earth in your body, and so do I. Unless we can actually talk numbers, it doesn’t mean much.
Gore’s quote about seeing the effect of the Clean Air Act in Antarctic ice cores is almost certainly wrong. Real Climate wrote about this last year (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/#more-299):
“At one point Gore claims that you can see the aerosol concentrations in Antarctic ice cores change “in just two years”, due to the U.S. Clean Air Act. You can’t see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores not with the naked eye and I’m skeptical you can definitively point to the influence of the Clean Air Act.”
However, something does show up in Greenland ice cores:
“It is true that the effect of reduced leaded gasoline use in the U.S. does clearly show up in Greenland ice cores”
Maybe he mixed up the ice cores.
Larry, I am certain the concentrations are measured in this work. I don’t have time to locate every single paper for every single question, however.
Gore may be wrong in the details (and – don’t get me wrong – details matter), but for a politician it is impressive that he even knows about things like long-range transport of air pollutants and cold condensation. I don’t think you’re going to gain any ground criticizing a politician for being wrong about scientific details.
The problem here is (1) Lonnie Thompson’s unarchived data, and (2) the fact that there is still no independent verification of the Mann HS. There is only one stick, and that one stick has been broken.
When he makes a movie that purports to be factual? I don’t buy that. He chose to place himself in the role of expert. He can’t expect slack because he isn’t one. He can’t have that both ways. And to boot, not only did he get the details wrong, his scientific advisers either didn’t catch the flaws, or were overruled. That’s not reasonable to exempt him from criticism just because he’s not trained in the field that he professes. If anything, it should make him more subject to criticism.
Or is it fine for me to do an “almost right” documentary on evolution?
While it is true that differences do “show up”, I would be very surprised to find out they can be “seen”. There is the problem with them showing up only a couple of years after the Clean Air Act was passed as well.
RE 155.
I fail to see why anyone spends any energy on defending Gore. He is a man. He made mistakes.
Admit them and move on. The mistakes have nothing whatsoever to do with the science. That is,
his errors have nothing to do with the truth of the matter.
The issue is that the man and the film have been raised ABOVE other forms of discourse and
given some kind of primacy typically only reserved for saints and canonical texts.
This is merely an observation. If Gore were a scientist writing a scientific paper the mistake
would be acknowledged, corrected, and people would move on.
155
More likely, he just mixed up stories. Polar bears, penguins, all the same…
“Dr. Thompson’s Octodecaoxymometer” might be a good title for John V’s proposed revision of the AIT graphic at #115, assuming that the vertical axis is dO18 z-scores. See also my #147.
re 157
Steve McIntyre indicated in an earlier comment that Gore’s statement was quite specific. According to Gore, and to Mann’s hockey stick, there is a direct correlation between global temperature and CO2 concentration. This is why Mann is so adamant about the MWP being only a local anomaly. Somehow, according to Mann, supposed local anomalies such as the MWP are balanced by anomalies in the opposite direction elsewhere. Thompson’s ice core data does not show this. It shoes temperature rising gradually from the LIA long before any rise in CO2. Thompson’s data does not support Gore’s description of it. It does not support Mann’s hypothesis of a global temperature directly correlated to CO2 concentration. Indeed it supports the opposite conclusion.
bender
Its a lot more difficult for pollution to travel from the NH to the SH.
I dont doubt that. But its a question of how much more difficult. You are making a strong assertion and it would be nice to see some citations to back it up.
For quite a while now, I have been trying to get information as to the transference of a certain proscribed gas (sorry Steve) from the NH to the SH, but as yet have come up empty. It seems that there is an assumption that everything just goes back and forth like water in a rocking tub, but this just doesn’t feel correct. In years gone by, when fallout was a worry (think four minute warning), it was assumed that the SH would have been a good place to be since there was supposed, then, to be no mixing.
If you want to win the PR war and if you want the public to know the truth about AIT then details do matter. Here in NZ like a number of other countries it is likely that AIT will be shown in schools and other education facilities as being the “definitive truth” about AGW. Thats like teaching that 2+2 =4.001 and saying well it’s about right.
just two short points:
1. 18-O ratio seems to be an accepted temperature indicator.
2. Thompson shows this in his paper, looking 25000 years back: (page 143)
Click to access Thompsonetal-climatic-change-2003.pdf
3. the 18-O graph looks like a hockey stick.
4. a comparison is made on page 151 to the Mann hockey stick. similarities are obvious.
5. this is exactly what page 64/65 of the AIT book is speaking about. (though the text might be mistaken)
Steve: IPCC AR4 does not confirm that Thompson’s tropical dO18 can be interpreted as a temperature proxy. They say:
Also if they wish to use dO18 values then they need to show dO18 values for Mount Logan (where they go down and interpreted as regional variability) or Law Dome (the same.)
sorry, no more time for point 2…
What is interesting in these AIT threads is the number of errors that close scrutiny throws up. A few errors would say perhaps sloppiness and a cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy. The sheer number of errors says something more profound, the AGW arguement is fundamentally not about the evidence.
Steve: I don’t think the latter observation is justified.
re 167
Please see 163 and an earlier contribution by SM which says it much better
#166
sod, the shrinking glacier claims in Thompsons paper (as evidence of recent global warming) look utterly ridiculous in light of the record level/duration of solar energy hitting the earth in the same time frames.
Sunshine melts snow and ice under the right conditions.
Looking at Thompsons article page 141, the graph shows a huge increase in dust spikes since 8000 years ago, and an equally huge increase in average dust levels in the last 1000 years.
Unless the dust was white, wouldn’t this change the albedo of the glaciers, and therefore wouldn’t it change the amount of melting when the sun shines?
Re: Bender vs. MarkW on transport between NH and SH –
Here’s a paper by a colleague of mine:
Bowman, Kenneth P. and Tatiana Erukhimova, 2004. Comparison of global-scale Lagrangian transport properties of the NCEP Reanalysis and CCM3, J. Climate, 17, 1135-1146.
Excerpt from abstract:
…From a transport point of view, the atmosphere can be divided into three regions: the Southern Hemisphere extratropics, the Tropics, and the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. Particle dispersion within each region is relatively rapid, while exchange between the regions is slower. There are partial barriers to transport between the Tropics and extratropics… Interhemispheric transport rates computed from the Green’s functions are compared with measurements of long-lived trace species from the Atmospheric Lifetime Experiment/Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (ALE/GAGE) network. The ALE/GAGE station data for the northern and southern extratropics give an interhemispheric time lag of ∼1.8 yr for long-lived tracers such as CFCs. Fitting the transport data to a three-box model gives interhemispheric time lags of ∼1.8 and ∼2 yr, respectively, for NCEP and CCM3.
John Norris – I wrote my comment after observing some discussion at Tamino’s where the usual suspects were speculating about the source of the quote concerning Michael Mann and collegues. None of them seemed very informed about the topic but some had seen the movie and they did not recall the quote so started to query whether the quote was an invention. This lead to JohnV asking twice here.
Note my comment said “Steve has been slightly misleading” where slightly was intended to convey my view that it was a trivial nit pick and not a substantive issue.
The quote is from the book and the context where it appears in the book has not invalidated the issues Steve has been raising. I did say that I believed the issues raised by Steve were reasonable.
Steve – I note you have been improving the text in this thread to clarify the source of the quote which is fine by me. However the text in the prior thread on the topic merits a similar improvement so that my observation is no longer justified!
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2328
John V —
You never told us what the units are on the vertical axis of your graph at #115.
Are these degrees C, degrees F, or degrees on the Z scale? We all know how to convert C into F and vice-versa, but what is the formula for converting Z into C or F? Is this a universal formula that works equally for say low latitudes, Bona Churchill, or Vostok, or does it depend on the series in question?
See also my #147.
For anyone who didn’t see the Barton Committee, it is interesting to note that the most upset the Democrats got was when it was suggested that the Mann Hockey Stick graph was usen in Gore’s book, AIT. The Democrats said at the hearing that it definately wasn’t Manns Graphs, cos that was what they’d been told.
Is it the case that Manns Hockey stick blade was grafted onto the Thomson shaft in the book version of the graphic from AIT?
Steve: It’s MAnn’s stick (plus Jones instrumental) entirely – shaft and blade.
New study showing Holocene Optimum and MWP were both significantly warmer than CWP exactly on TIBET. http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N46/C2.jsp.
Conclusion:
Thompson’s cores do not look impressive. IPCC is right, probably they are not temperature proxy.
ups, link doesn’t work. I’ll try again
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N46/C2.jsp
So the MWP was warmer than now, was not merely local, but occurred in addition in China at least, and had nothing to do with COO level.
178# says
Yes, and also in Europe, Greenland, South Africa, New Zeland, Quebeck, Polar Ural, California, Sargasso Sea, Indian Ocean Warm Pull…
funny, but i read that differently:
if you take even a short look at the papers mentioned (i m still rather busy..), you ll see that they take a more careful approach:
http://bsi.montana.edu/web/amqua/node/41
Vuille seems to think that it is a good ENSO indicator. (no connection between it and temperature? ever?)
here is a nice PPT about short term reconstruction, using the O and a H ratio:
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/events/antarctic06/presentations/schlosser.ppt
(Slide 25)
the connection, as with CO2 and temperature is a physical one. it may be dominated by some other effects under certain conditions. that doesn t destroy the link, just needs more work.
Re #181: Brian, I think that you will find that investment banks, at least those that are going to survive and prosper, place emphasis on undertaking careful due diligence to ensure that claims made are robust. As part of that, they will review audited accounts, thus confirmed as likely correct.
It should be quite an interesting experience for Al, providing that he gets into the detail from time to time!
MarkR at #175 says,
Very interesting. Can you find an illustrative quote from the transcript for us? With proper citation? Thanks!
Okay, who’s the “Anonymous Coward” in the comments?
Well done!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/ocean_currents_melt_planet/
Well, it’s not sod (Seed of Doubt – Iraq), since the text was properly capitalized.
Then again, maybe that is the clever disguise he uses to provide isolation (cover).
Tony Edwards says:
November 14th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
bender
The idea that there is “no mixing” between the Northen Hemispere and Southern Hemisphere is a total fallacy and myth. In fact, there are innumerable publications which testify to how air circulation distributes aerosols around the world and all of its hemispheres. Publications about various volcanic eruptions describe how material is carried into the troposphere and stratosphere, circulated along broadening latitudinal flows, and become redirected into the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere. In one case, emissions from a volcano in Mexico traveled to the other major continents within 1 to 2 weeks and circumnavigated the world in 3 weeks. Some ten to twenty percent of the emissions were transported into the Southern Hemisphere in a period of weeks to months. Lighter particles of the volcanic emissions remain suspended in the stratoosphere for as much as one to two years as they circulate all around the world.
The novel, “On the Beach, popularized the concept that a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere could leave the Southern Hemisphere free of radioactive fallout for awhile longer after such a war, but even that work of fiction recognized that the atmospheric circulation would inevitably transport emissions from the Northen Hemisphere ot even the most remote locations in the Southern Hemisphere.
A person only needs to browse the scientific literature to see examples of interhemispheric transports of emissions. Biomass burning in South America and Africa is circulated across the South Atlantic to the other continent in only a few days and into North America and Europe within a week. Biomass burning and industrial emissions from Indonesia are being reported in the ice cores of the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains of India and Tibet. British and French atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons have produced radioactive fallout reported from locations all around the world. Suffice it to say, there is inevitable mixing of atmospheric air masses between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and the fact is witnessed in a wide variety of scientific and anecdotal reports.
Mt St Helens:
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Tephra/msh_may18_ashfall.html
Patterson,
As usual, you are chasing a strawman. Nobody claimed that there was no diffusion between the NH and the SH.
The only claim was that it would take more time. (IE, it was more difficult.)
RE: #96 Ferdinand Engelbeen, John V., and others
I have seen comments here about the cost of obtaining published articles in peer-reviewed journals by people who do not have access to university libraries and their electronic journal databases. As you have discovered, some authors will make PDF files available at their websites. However, many local public libraries provide portals to academic journal databases where you can access full articles for free by simply having a library card number as a log-in.
To test this out, I went to my county library website and accessed the EBSCO Host Academic Premier database, which contains over 4500 journals. While there I copied a number of articles and now have even more work to do! Be aware that some of the top journals in these databases, including Nature and Science, do embargo the copying in full of articles from the more recent issues (usually one calendar year). Since the article you were looking for was published in 2004, it should be available. Happy searching.
Thanks, Anna, that’s good to know. It’s often easier to go to the local library than the nearest university library.
#182 Hu McCulloch asked about the Democrats, and Gore denial of Mann graph in his book. Following is from Congressional transcript of Barton Committee Hearings. What the Dems were really worried about was protecting Al Gore from the allegation that he had used the discredited, as they admitted, Mann Hockey Stick. And the Dems vehemently denied it, said they had it confirmed by Gore’s Staff etc.
Link
hm. this looks as if your hero Wegman did not recognise the hockey stick?
will you critise him for this?
Steve: AIT said that the graphic was based on Thompson’s ice core. Wegman was wrongfooted by presuming that they were not misrepresenting the situation (as I was as well.) The fault lies entirely with the misrepresentation by Gore and his staff.
#188 Anna Lang:
Thanks.
Sorry sod. I can see now I was too kind. It was Gore himself who wrongly confirmed that it wasn’t Mann Hockeystick:
So Mann et al are all wrong, admitted by the Dems at Barton, and Gore doesn’t even know where the Graph comes from. [snip]
RE: #192 John V.: You are welcome.
RE: #189 Pat Keating: These are online databases, so you don’t need to physically go to a library to use them. In my experience, they are accessed through the library’s website. Since a library pays a fee for their access to these databases, it is usually required that you be an authorized user of their library. Check your local public library’s website, or give them a call, to determine their particular electronic journal database resources and the rules for patrons.
John V (#115) —
Your revised (and unreferenced) “Thompson’s Thermometer”, which shows a warming of almost 2 degrees Z since the founding of the US Congress in the late 18th century, sheds an entirely new light on Global Warming — It’s caused by an excess of Hot Air!
187 MarkW says:
November 15th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
MarkW, you wrote, Nobody claimed that there was no diffusion between the NH and the SH. Given the fact that I responded to and directly quoted the remark, ”assumed…to be no mixing, “your accusation Nobody claimed is just plainly false and baseless. Consequently, your remark about chasing a strawman is equally false, because Tony Edwards correctly remarked that there have been many members of the public who have made comments about there being no mixing between those hemispheres.
I won’t speculate on your motive for being so accusatory. If you did so because you assumed my comments in some way were prompted by your previous posts, you would be entirely wrong in such an event. I was responding only to the post I quoted, and I had not even seen your posts farther up the thread.
Tony Edwards wanted to know about sources for evidence of mixing between the hemispheres. He noted, and was quite correct in doing so, that there have been other people in the past who talked about there being no mixing between the northern and southern hemispheres. Over the years I too have heard many people, and some who should know better, who have repeated this myth while believing it was likely a credible claim. I responded to Tony Edwards comment about the myth of no mixing for the sole purpose of dispelling the myth before it circulates any further among unsuspecting readers. It is unfortunate that you have chosen to improperly characterize my comments about the myth as some kind of strawman argument.
You also remarked, The only claim was that it would take more time. (IE, it was more difficult.) If you will refer to my post, you can see I too remarked on the varying lengths of time required for the emissions to circulate between the continents and hemispheres of the world. If you believe that my remarks about the actual times required for such circulation is somehow not a direct recognition of the fact it is more difficult and time consuming for such emissions to be transported between the northern and southern hemispheres, it defies the imagination to see how I could make it any plainer to a reader.
In further regard to Tony Edward’s request for sources remarking about the difficulties involved with the transport of pollution or other atmospheric emissions between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere, I did not offer specific sources because there are so many available online and offline publications concerning everything from volcanic eruptions to nuclear fallout to biomass cooking fires. I encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to browse such sources. Inter-hemispheric transport of atmospheric aerosols is an ordinary event in the daily global weather. While it is relatively more difficult for such transports to take place between the antipodes and with heavier materials, such transports between those hemispheres do occur in significant measures on an ordinary basis and with increasing frequency towards the equatorial regions.
In a previous post some time ago in another thread, I provided a link to a Website which depicted how cooking fires in Southern Africa were entrained into the upper atmosphere, transported clockwise within less than a day across the Atlantic Ocean to South America, passed off to another anti-clockwise cyclonic system which directed the smoke stream across the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico, and then redirected into another clockwise direction by another cyclonic system to dissipate across the American West, Canadian Rockies, and the Canadian Pacific Coast. Suffice it to say, there are sources for such information online. Nuff said.
#196 I didn’t want to waste bandwidth thanking #172 et al. for the references, but perhaps this is a good time to do so. Skepticism is one thing. Bold assertions that fly in the face of data … Mark W may want to consider stepping up his game just a notch.
Patterson,
You are quite clearly seeing things that aren’t there. Here are the two direct quotes.
and
Mark W,
You went further than that. I won’t look up quotes, but you were implying that it would be highly unlikely for pollution from US to register in an ice-core in Antarctica and for the emission date to match the registration date. It might take a few years for the pollution to get there, but small dating differences wouldn’t refute Gore’s suggestion that there could be a connection between US pollution laws and patterns in Antarctic ice cores.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but so far the weight of the evidence does not support the force of your argument.
199, what you’re leaving out of the picture is the fact that once a new law is passed, it takes years to bring everyone into compliance. You don’t just pull that kind of equipment out of your backside.
And I see no reason to believe that the only place on the planet that was producing pollution was the USA. Ever been to Romania or China? Americans don’t know what pollution is. And no, tons of coal burned doesn’t translate into tons of junk put in the air.
That comment of Gore’s was so ignorant on so many levels, it’s breathtaking.
That point has been made already and I did not miss it the first time. I am asking for evidence. Bold assertions require evidence.
201, no. The bold assertion was made by Gore. He asserted that the effect on Antarctica of the passage of clean air act in the US was instant and dramatic. Implicit in that assertion is that pollution on earth was far more from the US than the ROW. I don’t have to prove a negative, he has to prove a positive.
198 MarkW says:
November 16th, 2007 at 10:03 am
I cannot imagine why you persist in trying to misrepresent what I had to say. My remarks concerned the post made by Tony Edwards in #164 November 14th, 2007 at 12:46 pm. I had not read your previous posts. I did not write my response to Tony Edwards with the purpose of addressing anything whatsoever you previously had to say. Whatever you had to say before Tony Edward’s post was of no interest to me. Now, how much more explicit can I be? You and your remarks had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the response I made to Tony Edwards. If you believe anything I had to say to Tony Edwards somehow relates to something you had to say previously, you are certainly as free as anyone else here to make a choice between agreeing or disagreeing. In any case, I did not comment upon anything you wrote before my response to Tony Edwards, and I certainly have no incentive to begin to do so now. If you want to comment upon what I had to say about Tony Edward’s post, that’s one thing. If you want to comment upon what I never had to say about your previous posts, you would be wasting my time and yours. Grok it.
To accuse a Nobel & Oscar prize winner of incompetence or gullibility or dishonesty is fairly bold, I would say. Sure, everyone is doing it these days. But I still think it is bold, and should therefore be backed up with data. But this is only my opinion, and I’m willing to let it go at that.
204, don’t take this as an insult (it’s not intended as one), but you remind me of a lawyer I know. Exact same snarkastic way with words.
bender,
Thompsons paper shows a huge increase in dust over the last 1000 years in the ice cores he used. Would you not agree that unless the dust was white, the albedo of the glaciers would have changed?
Combine darker glaciers that would absorb more sunlight with more solar energy would probably cause some of those glaciers to melt more than if there was no increase in dust.
So, when Thompson tries to blame evidence of glacier melting on AGW, rather than a change in albedo + more sunlight, wouldn’t it be fair to suggest his paper is not worth much?
194 Anna
Even better! Double thanks.
RE: #207 Pat Keating: You are welcome. Now, if all the money saved on article purchases went into the tip jar, Steve M. would be a happy camper!
A bit OT but it’s Saturday…
In a resent episode of South Park, the walls to “imaginary land” are mistakenly torn down. Inside the imaginary land, “manbearpig” resides (along with Santa and Luke Skywalker). Later in that episode Al Gore shows up with his brand new Nobel peace price around his neck, screaming and shouting – “I told you so, I told you so”.
The episode refers to an earlier episode a year or so back which was dedicated to Al Gore and his hunt for the “manbearpig” (a creature which is half man, half bear and half pig) he just knows exist. The boys feel petty for Al Gore and helps him track down the “manbearpig” as anybody else does.
Don’t you watch South Park?
John V (#115) wrote,
At #147, 162, 174 and 195, I asked him to tell us what the missing units on his vertical scale were. On searching back through the first “Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer thread” ((www.climateaudit.org/?p=2328), I found that Steve had actually posted this graph in comment #16. Indeed, the vertical axis, which is unlabeled in JohnV’s mock-up, has as its units z-scores of isotope enrichment, not temperature at all. Has Thompson attempted to calibrate it to instrumental temperature anywhere? (as opposed to calibrating it to MBH99) If not, this is just Dr. Thompson’s Z-mometer, and not a “thermometer” at all.
Re #188
Anna Lang,
Thanks for the info! I used the University library of Antwerp several times, they have Science and Nature (in different buildings…), and a possibility for on-line research, not for outsiders, but you may ask for it and the librarian will do the search for you (but of course that is vey limited). Anyway I will try it via our local library and see if they can provide access via the Internet…
Just back from a few days at Champagne/France (yes, tried a glass, that is about my maximum of alcohol intake per month), I have read the several attempts to look at the aerosols… As that is one of my favorite topics, a few remarks:
There is a huge difference between tropospheric/human made aerosols which are reaching at most up to the inversion layer (a few thousand meter) and volcanic aerosols which are injected into the stratosphere (10 km and higher):
– The lifetime of tropospheric aerosols is average 4 days, most is raining out or drops out even as dry deposit. The lifetime of stratospheric aerosols is months (for fine ash) to years (for SO2), before dropping out. That means that most of the human-made aerosols are found at a few thousand km in the main wind direction from the sources (like US aerosols in Greenland and UK “acid rain” in Scandinavia).
– There is a strong barrier between the tropospheric NH and SH: the ITCZ. Even for non-condensing gases (like CO2), there is a lag of 6 months to 1 year between the NH and SH to pass the barrier. That means that CO2 levels at the South Pole are near the same as in Barrow (as yearly averages), but with a lag of about a year. For aerosols, where about 90% is emitted in the NH, most is rained out before even reaching the SH… Some indication (to be taken with a grain of salt) can be found at the IPCC (2001) report: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig6-7.htm
Thus it is very unlikely that you will find much US pollution in Antarctic ice cores…
“They can also measure the exact temperature of the atmosphere each year by calculating the ratio of different isotopes of oxygen which provides an ingenious and highly accurate thermometer” As a practicising engineer who designs precision measurement equipment I find this statement particularly annoying. The ‘exact’ temperature? Gore has obviously never heard of measurement uncertainty.
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[…] As it happens, the graph that Gore presented really was the MBH HS, spliced together with an instrumental record as if they were a single series, and has nothing to do with Thompson’s ice core research. See “Al Gore and ‘Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer’”. […]
[…] of this was worked out in November 2007 on Climate Audit but for some reason “Faye Flam” can’t get a clue. What do you expect from […]
[…] together with the recent instrumental record so as to make them appear to be a single series. See Al Gore and “Dr thompson’s Thermometer” #2 (CA 11/10/07). During the question period after an OSU seminar on Jan 11, 2008, Thompson, who had […]