Climate Audit

Mark T

Wow. I’m stunned. This guy’s a PhD? In what, disinformation?

Mark

• bender
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 8:13 AM | Permalink

  Re: Mark T (#3),
  What’s to shock? This is exactly what “advocacy” means. Non-neutrality.

Steve McIntyre

Let’s not discuss the Schneider 1989 quote which has been discussed endlessly.

Let me draw reader’s attention to Schneider’s use of the term “due diligence” – a term that I’ve used frequently. Is anyone aware of use of this term by climate scientists prior to Climate Audit? (Just asking.)

• Ron Cram
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 9:06 AM | Permalink

  Re: Steve McIntyre (#5),

  Great question. “Due diligence” is a common term in business and especially in mergers and acquisitions. If climate scientists used the term prior to you, I’ve not seen it. Soon after I got interested in global warming, I found this site- but I have done a lot of reading since then (of material written earlier) and do not ever recall seeing the term elsewhere. Perhaps more troubling is I do not think I have ever seen a synonym of the term used either.

  Off-topic: I just commented on the Skeptical Science blog regarding John Cook’s post on Sea Level Rise. I think this is a very interesting topic, especially when the alarmists are ratcheting up the rhetoric (thank you for your comment Jim Edwards) at a time when the evidence is going against them.

  • Steve McIntyre
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 9:50 AM | Permalink

    Re: Ron Cram (#7),

    Here’s a surprising use of the term “audit” by frequent blogosphere commenter Ike Solem as supposedly being part of the mandate of the university research community:

    That will get the universities back to their real jobs, which include producing skilled people (who then go to work in private industry), serving as an independent auditor of scientific claims (like cold fusion, etc.), doing research into basic science (which may or may not be of any real use), and so on.

    • tetris
      Posted May 12, 2009 at 10:55 AM | Permalink

      Re: Steve McIntyre (#9),
      Steve,

      My experience in working with university scientists in transferring their science/technology out of the lab into a venture capital financed company tells me that as a rule they have absolute no clue as to the meaning of “due diligence” as you and I would understand it. In fact, many of them are profoundly shocked and offended when the hard questions keep on coming [a bit like Phil Jones, perhaps?].

      Ironically, this attitude to due diligence runs counter to one of the basic tenets of the scientific method, which does not require you to come up with a better/different explanation for you to argue that XYZ is wrong.

Navy bob

re jae #792
Notice in the Telegraph article how the reporter adds his own commentary and conclusion to assure the reader that climate change is really, truly happening, with absolutely no attribution to the scientists mentioned in the story or to any other authority: “The summers 9,500 years ago were warmer than today, though there has been a rapid recent rise as a result of climate change that means modern climate is rapidly catching up.” It’s a gross violation of proper journalistic practice, but as folks often say here, “Hey, it’s, etc.” Oddly enough though, he also relies on his own opinion that the new find of old spruce means it was warmer 9500 years ago today, again with absolutely no attribution to any expert source. Journalism’s political advocacy is still light years ahead of climate science’s.

Hank

This use of the term “due diligence” is amusing. It’s a very peculiar use AND he presumes to speak for the editors of Discover Magazine in his answer. I think this is definitely a case of “monkey see monkey do” on the part of Schneider.

• jim edwards
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 10:32 AM | Permalink

  Re: Hank (#10),

  The fact that people who don’t agree with the entire official narrative can’t get published is proof, somehow, that the journals are doing their “due diligence”.

  He seems to be stuck on this idea that you don’t get to try to prove somebody else’s reconstruction is wrong unless you have a replacement to offer that you can show to be better.

  “I don’t know what’s happening, but I recognize that as B.S.” is not acceptable for publication. You have to come up with a competing model with > than 50% [a preponderance] probability to be worthy of publication, apparently.

Steve McIntyre

Don’t forget that Schneider was the editor for Wahl and Ammann 2007 – the tortured history of which has been discussed in detail both here and at Bishop Hill.

I’ve posted up my correspondence with Schneider which, to me, demonstrates a little (unintended) irony in his use of the term “due diligence”.

Patrick M.

Naysayers are fundamental to the success of Science. A true scientist will welcome skeptics.

Steve McIntyre

Folks, go lightly with policy discussions. As readers well know, I don’t want such discussions at the blog, unless there is an explicit waiver (which is not the case here) for reasons provided elsewhere.

• Andrew
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 12:04 PM | Permalink

  Re: Steve McIntyre (#20), Agreed. The group talked a lot about policy, but its better if we focus on the science they discussed. Their comments in that regard should be more than enough ice for our shasta.

Mark T

I’m more concerned with his “statistical” justification for calling it a match. Utter nonsense is a better term for it. Assuming you know nothing, every one of his “50 percent” numbers is, in reality, “I don’t know, and therefore cannot assign a value to it.” He SHOULD know this, but obviously does not. Of course, these guys also think that Mann’s works have statistical merit, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

A similar example, btw, is Drake’s equation. Even if accurate, it is impossible to assign probabilities to any of the terms, and hence, the “answer” is anywhere from zero to everywhere (life exists). Same situation here. Not knowing anything does not mean you can arbitrarily assign 50% to a probability.

If this is his justification, do his colleagues agree? Why?

Mark

• Andrew
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 1:22 PM | Permalink

  Re: Mark T (#22), He went to the Walter Wagner school of probability:
  http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/05/jon-stewart-john-ellis-lhc.html

PhilH

“When we entered into the computer all the various things that forced the climate to change, we were able to faithfully reproduce the temperature record of the past 100 years globally.”

Is this true?

• Curt
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:23 PM | Permalink

  Re: PhilH (#27), For a model’s forecasts to have a chance of being taken seriously, it must be shown to be able to “hindcast” well. This a “necessary but not sufficient” condition, according to at least one prominent IPCC scientist (Trenberth, I believe).

  So all of the prominent computer models have been “optimized” to be able to hindcast the conditions (at least the Global Mean Atmospheric Temperature) well. They do this with many radically differing parameters, but all assign a prominent role to CO2 infrared absorption. The big question is whether this optimization was accomplished through fundamentally getting the physics correct, or just by “overtuning”.

  Of course, with the fit established in a model with a strong CO2 effect, removing that effect would destroy the fit. Of course, this would be true regardless of whether the fit were valid in the first place.

  These claims remind many of von Neumann’s famous quip about parametric models:

  “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk!”

  • bender
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:35 PM | Permalink

    Re: Curt (#29),

    The big question is whether this optimization was accomplished through fundamentally getting the physics correct, or just by “overtuning”.

    This question was answered by Kiehl (2007) who showed that many parameterizations are possible (equally likely?), all of them capable of reproducing the surface anomaly record. IOW the physics do not constrain the model parameters all that much. Overuning is definitely the way they get these models to fit the data. IOW there is no question. It has been answered.

    • bender
      Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:36 PM | Permalink

      Re: bender (#32),
      And remember: these models do not even get the GMT correct. All are biased, some badly. Therefore the physics CAN’T be correct.

    • Craig Loehle
      Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:42 PM | Permalink

      Re: bender (#33), To elaborate, what they point you to is the “trend” over time in temperature that “matches” (cough cough) the actual temperature (which is itself sparsely measured and corrupted by UHI), but the GMT they really compute can be off by many degrees–though when that happens the longwave radiation computations MUST be wrong since that is a 4th power function of temperature!

    • Andrew
      Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:40 PM | Permalink

      Re: bender (#32), In other words, as I have long said-and many others, the “attribution studies” are a weak hypothesis test at best-basically meaningless. For an interesting alternative “fit” you guys might be interested in this-my little curve fitting exercise with a low sensitivity EBM called “Grumpy”.

• Andrew
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:26 PM | Permalink

  Re: PhilH (#27), Change it to “all the various things that we assume forced the climate to change” and the statement becomes accurate. The inputs are SWAG’s. But even so, it is not so true:

  “Impressive”, no?

• Craig Loehle
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 2:28 PM | Permalink

  Re: PhilH (#27), It is only “true” when you allow the modelers to also choose their input aerosols, and clouds, and they each make different choices on these (no consensus there…). It is also easy to show that alternate models can also reproduce the 20th century temp history (see Spencer latest work and also Klyashtorin, L.B. and A.A. Lyubushin (2003), On the coherence between dynamics of the world fuel consumption and global temperature anomaly, Energ. Environ., 14, 773 782).

Craig Loehle

There are two logical disconnects in Schneider’s Discover interview:
1) When he calculates his odds of all these things happening, this merely shows that yes, it is warming, with absolutely nothing to say about causation (human vs natural).
2) If all the scientists in the world answer the question “are humans influencing climate” with a “yes” this does not mean either a) that the future impacts will be alarming or b) that we can prevent it without going back to the stone age.
It used to be that scholars getting a classical education studied logic and rhetoric, but not any more. (no I’m not that old myself, but I studied these things for “fun”).

Hans Erren

Here is Ferdinand Engelbeens alternative low fit using the Oxford EBM
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html

Oxford EBM model with reduced sensitivities:
1.5 °C for 2xCO2, 0.25 x aerosols, 0.5 x volcanic, 1 x solar.
Results: correlation = 0.884, R2 = 0.792

• Andrew
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:22 PM | Permalink

  Re: Hans Erren (#37), I don’t want to sound dismissive, but something is clearly wrong with the volcano response-that and I am puzzled as to how he varied the sensitivities-The model doesn’t recover from Pinatubo until the middle of the 1998 El Nino. I think my analysis is at least pretty replicable, but I have no clue what he did.

  • Andrew
    Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:23 PM | Permalink

    Re: Andrew (#38), Also, Leif might object to the presence of solar forcings which doubtless assume large increases before 1950, for which there doesn’t seem to be any basis.

• Ron Cram
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 3:51 PM | Permalink

  Re: Hans Erren (#37),

  Hans, interesting. I cannot remember the number Petr Chylek came up with for aerosol forcing. I only remember that his number was much lower than the IPCC numbers. With a lower aerosol forcing, you can have a lower CO2 sensitivity.

  Re: MJW (#36),
  Great quote! I always enjoy reading Pielke’s work.

Ivan

It looks like Roy Spencer joined the crowd of deniers of human cause of CO2 rise. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/05/global-warming-causing-carbon-dioxide-increases-a-simple-model/ or

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

• DeWitt Payne
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 6:44 PM | Permalink

  Re: Ivan (#41),

  You might want to read Ferdinand Englebeen’s response to Dr. Spencer’s article as well.

Mark T

Spencer’s long been painted with that title.

Mark

lucia

Andrew–
Grumpy looks similar to “Lumpy” Discussed here.

• Andrew
  Posted May 12, 2009 at 9:28 PM | Permalink

  Re: lucia (#44), Yes, very similar-the name was inspired by Lumpy!

kim

There is blockbuster news out of Washington, today. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has sent a memo to the EPA alleging that the Precautionary Principle has been stretched beyond the science, that EPA’s ruling that CO2 endangers public health has been insufficiently documented, and that EPA regulations of CO2 would cause serious damage to the economy. Probably as a result of the memo, EPA’s director, Lisa Jackson, told Congress today that the endangerment finding won’t necessarily lead to regulation.
========================================

Manfred

how low is the probability, that DISCOVER publishes schneider’s embarrasing statistics and not publishing a compelling account of the other side – given they would do due diligence ?

• jim edwards
  Posted May 13, 2009 at 3:01 PM | Permalink

  Re: Manfred (#63),

  Duh !

  25 percent

• Andrew
  Posted May 13, 2009 at 5:06 PM | Permalink

  Re: Manfred (#63), Re: jim edwards (#64), Apart from the hilarity of the continuing Wagner style probability analysis (which I will repeat over and over until it catches on dang it!) The key to the question is “given they would do due diligence”-which means, extending the Walter Wagneresque math, you need to multiply by 50% again. So 12.5%

  More seriously, but still somewhat facetiously, 5%-oh wait, it’c climate science, so 10% (ha ha, CI joke).

Luboš Motl

Dear Steve, you can almost certainly be credited for teaching the climate scientists and journalists how to say “due diligence”. However, so far, you haven’t taught them to do it. 😉

• Steve McIntyre
  Posted May 14, 2009 at 6:09 AM | Permalink

  Re: Luboš Motl (#68),
  Luboš, in the review of our submission to IJC on Santer – which we just received and the response to which I’m mulling over. We did not get the actual reviews – only the editor’s paraphrase as the reviewers refused to permit the editor to provide us with the actual reviews, leaving the editor with the task of paraphrasing the reviews. In places, he seems to have cut-and-pasted anyway and the term “due diligence” appears as follows. (We had referred to a Statistical Appendix in a CCSP report as being to Chapter 5; the reviewer observed (correctly) that the Statistical Appendix was to the report as a whole. AS to back-up, we attached turnkey source code generating all statistics and figures used in the submission, so there was no problem in verifying or referencing results. Nonetheless, the reviewer (as paraphrased by the editor) proceeds:

  6…It is also stated that Chapter 5 had an appendix; there was no such appendix. The whole report had an appendix. This is but one glaring example of referencing on the fly with at best half truths and leaves the knowledgeable reader with the impression that the author has referenced the material without actually reading it first. This may be a mis-impression. In which case the author needs to work very hard on greater clarity in their referencing style.

  7. The RSS dataset version is different and is why the analysis of that series differs. The readme file on the RSS site documents this and is easily available. This and a lack of referencing conspire to rightly or wrongly give an impression of lack of due diligence in understanding the data before its use.

  • Craig Loehle
    Posted May 14, 2009 at 6:36 AM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#69), This is the first time I have seen a slight mis-referencing (of the appendix here) being called a big deal. Wow. And the reviewers refused to allow their reviews to be passed on?

  • Pat Frank
    Posted May 14, 2009 at 11:18 AM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#69), “as the reviewers refused to permit the editor to provide us with the actual reviews,…”

    In nearly 30 years of publishing in refereed journals, I have never, ever heard of such a thing. I don’t see how a referee can even make such a demand, much less why an editor would feel compelled to honor such.

    As soon as one agrees to review a manuscript, one has accepted the terms of journal protocol. That means submitting a timely review which is passed along to the communicating author. No ifs, ands, or buts.

    Imagine the level of justice in a court, in which the judge allows that the defense gets only a paraphrase of the evidence against the accused, while the prosecution gets the detailed defense brief. The stink of a star chamber rises.

    Climate science clearly inhabits a world of its own, where such corrupted processes are accepted without official qualm or widespread protest.

    • Steve McIntyre
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 1:29 PM | Permalink

      Re: Pat Frank (#71),

      The editor explained that reviewers for IJC have the option of choosing “confidential comments to the editor” or “comments to the author” and in our case, they chose the former.

    • RomanM
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Permalink

      Re: Steve McIntyre (#72),

      The arrogance of so many in the climate science community never fails to amaze me. My suspicion is that the reviewers must have chosen to dismiss the situation out of hand on an antagonistic ad hominem basis. This suspicion is supported by the wording in statements such as

      This is but one glaring example of referencing on the fly with at best half truths and leaves the knowledgeable reader with the impression that the author has referenced the material without actually reading it first.

      …

      This and a lack of referencing conspire to rightly or wrongly give an impression of lack of due diligence in understanding the data before its use.

      Not submitting comments to the author has the advantage that the “knowledgeable reader” need not address the issues under consideration.

      It amazes me, but does not surprise me.

    • Peter D. Tillman
      Posted Jul 1, 2009 at 10:55 AM | Permalink

      Re: RomanM (#74),

      “My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have…” — Freeman Dyson, http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151
      June 4, 2009 interview by Yale’s “Environment 360”, and a reply to the NYT article below.

      Dyson blames Jim Hansen and Al Gore for the pair’s “lousy science”, which is “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.” — http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman&pagewanted=all
      NY Times, “The Civil Heretic”, long profile of Dyson

      Happy reading–
      Pete Tillman

    • UC
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 2:08 PM | Permalink

      Re: Steve McIntyre (#72),

      In some countries authors can request to see all referee comments under Data Protection Act 1998..

    • Pat Frank
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 4:53 PM | Permalink

      Re: Steve McIntyre (#72), Typically, the way it works is that the confidential comments to the editor are in addition to the review itself. For example, in one paper I reviewed, the authors chose to use such large data points that their poor fit was obscured. I added a confidential comment to the editor that this sort of thing should be forbidden by policy. But the entire review itself went to the authors.

      Other than something extraordinary like that, I never use the confidential comment option. Reviews always go full-fledged to the author.

      So, this policy of the IJC, of confidential comments to the editor, as opposed to comments to the author, appears to have been misused. It typically is not meant to hide the critical review from the author. It is only meant to allow additional private comments to the editor. These comments may be critical, but are not central to the critical review of the author’s work.

      Hiding a review from the authors flies right into the face of the point of a review. Reviews are supposed, not only to illuminate flaws in analysis, but also to help researchers in their thinking. Reviews are supposed to be constructive. Hiding a review frustrates the very intent of the review itself.

      How can one revise a paper, or rebut a point, if the exact nature of the review is willfully hidden? It’s star chamber injustice migrated into science.

    • Andrew
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 6:00 PM | Permalink

      Re: Pat Frank (#78),

      in one paper I reviewed, the authors chose to use such large data points that their poor fit was obscured.

      This might be an interesting and informative story. Can you elaborate?

    • Pat Frank
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 6:24 PM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#79), Hi Andrew, that’s about all there is to say. The work had other flaws that were worse and I ended up recommending rejection after 3 full go-rounds with the authors. But more than that, I really mustn’t say. The review process is confidential, after all. 🙂

    • Andrew
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 9:15 PM | Permalink

      Re: Pat Frank (#80), I figured :blush: after I typed that I thought “Hm, that’s probably confidential”. Oh well. Still, its interesting as a vague anecdote. Bogus work is not merely restricted to climate I guess (although free passes from journal editors may be).

    • bender
      Posted May 14, 2009 at 10:18 PM | Permalink

      Re: Steve McIntyre (#72),
      Having this option is not at all unusual. What is highly unusual is a reviewer choosing to supply 100% of their commentary in the form of confidential comments to the editor. I’ve never heard of that.

  • Jeff Id
    Posted May 14, 2009 at 2:21 PM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#69),

    Wow, You need a club membership or a hockey stick to get past the door guards.

    The previous paper’s methods are already published, this may turn into one of the best examples of maintaining the appearance of consensus through back door politics. IJC better be careful.

    Which undergrad student in climatology doesn’t understand RSS?

  • Dave Andrews
    Posted May 15, 2009 at 1:45 PM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#69),

    Seems to me the use of “due diligence” is an intended slight.

    But I thought we were now supposedly in an age of greater transparency. If, as others have said, it is unheard of for 100% of reviews to be witheld why has the editor of IJC gone along with it? Why has the editor not protested vigorously about this to the reviewer and if necessary approached someone else to review if the former is adamant?

    What is the point of having reviewers for papers if the original authors cannot see and respond to the review?

Mark T

I reviewed a paper for the Franklin Institute this past summer and I seem to recall having an option to let the author see my full comments. As I recall, I said yes, though nothing I said was really critical other than one major point. I don’t know why anyone would refuse, particularly if they are anonymous anyway. I guarantee the author of the paper I reviewed has never heard of me anyway since he was from a foreign country and publishing in an entirely different field from my own (using a technique I’m familiar with, however).

Mark

David Stockwell

“This is but one glaring example of referencing on the fly with at best half truths and leaves the knowledgeable reader…”

This is actually a really important issue because it is a means of enforcing the orthodox ‘interpretation’ of a paper. So even if you accuately reference a work, a reviewer can reject it. This has happened to me where a paper reported that the range of species was responding to climate change, and therefore showing risk to species from global warming. I referenced the work saying that their own data showed a range of responses, range expansion and no change at all, and therefore increase in risk to species was uncertain. I was told in no uncertain terms that such an interpretation of the data was ‘preposterous’, and everyone knows global warming increases species risk.

You can’t win on interpretations. I would be interested to hear what they said about the concrete fact that Santer truncated a series that would otherwise have not been statistically significant.

• Steve McIntyre
  Posted May 15, 2009 at 7:42 AM | Permalink

  Re: David Stockwell (#84),

  nowhere (in the material paraphrased by the editor) did either reviewer acknowledge or note in passing that we had demonstrated that Santer’s truncation of the data affected the validity of any of their claims.

  • David Stockwell
    Posted May 15, 2009 at 6:37 PM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#87), “nowhere (in the material paraphrased by the editor) did either reviewer acknowledge or note in passing that we had demonstrated that Santer’s truncation of the data affected the validity of any of their claims.”

    Which is why in this situation I think one has more chances by sticking to the unassailable facts and pruning out any points that might be used as diversions, however valid they seem. Thats been my approach of late.

    • Steve McIntyre
      Posted May 15, 2009 at 6:48 PM | Permalink

      Re: David Stockwell (#95), I’m still trying to decide what to do with this project. I think that I’d prefer not to discuss the review comments at this time, but will revisit this in the not too distant future.

• bender
  Posted May 15, 2009 at 9:49 AM | Permalink

  Re: David Stockwell (#84),

  I was told in no uncertain terms that … and everyone knows global warming increases species risk.

  I would be interested to see the actual quote.

Gerald Browning

Mark T (#90),

You assume the Editor is competent and unbiased. If that were the case the Editor would not have chosen such incompetent reviewers or if the Editor made an innocent mistake in choosing the
reviewers (unlikely), the Editor would have thrown out the politically motivated reviews.

Jerry

• Mark T
  Posted May 15, 2009 at 2:54 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gerald Browning (#92),

  You assume the Editor is competent and unbiased.

  Not at all. I only assume that legitimate criticisms would have been lodged by reviewers had they actually existed (or the reviewers were capable of noticing them). Regardless of the editor’s competence and/or bias, trivial review points will always get through. The editor’s bias only becomes a factor if he chooses to reject based on the minutiae, which was really an aside to my original point.

  Mark

Andrew

CNN Money interviews John Christy:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/14/magazines/fortune/globalwarming.fortune/?postversion=2009051412

Gerald Browning

Mark T. (#94),

It is too often that an Editor avoids his responsibility to properly judge the quality of the reviewers comments and just counts the votes. This is a sign of a weak or incompetent Editor.
As I have pointed out before, a secretary can count the votes. The Editor is suppose to pick competent, unbiased reviewers (not the case here and the question arises as to why that was the case) and to throw out politically motivated reviews (again not the case here). So we have another example of the peer review process gone very wrong.

Here is a simple example of the problem. My coauthor and I submitted a manuscript to a journal.
One of the reviewers wrote a one line hysterical statement (because he had published an ad hoc method that was shown to be in question in our manuscript). The Editor rejected the manuscript
based entirely on that review. I was later informed by the Editor (who now wanted to work with us) that the reviewer was in the same organization as the Editor and the Editor was afraid that he might lose his support if he allowed our manuscript to be published. Conflict of interest anybody?

Here is the other side of the coin. My mentor and his students submitted a manuscript on turbulence that produced a minimal scale estimate produced by the incompressible NS equations for a fixed viscosity coefficient. This manuscript caused an uproar in the turbulenc modeling community because it clearly pointed out deficiencies in ad hoc treatments of turbulence. The reviews were quite negative, and my mentor mentioned to the Editor that if any of the reviewers could find an error in the mathematics, he would withdraw the manuscript. My mentor also suggested some alternative highly competent, well known, and unbiased reviewers. The manuscript was accepted. This is a case where the Editor was self confident enough (and highly respected) to arrive at the correct outcome.

Jerry

• Mark T
  Posted May 17, 2009 at 1:57 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gerald Browning (#99), I don’t disagree, but this isn’t my point. Steve’s realistically on good ground w.r.t. his paper because there clearly aren’t legitimate criticism (not worth rejection in the real world). Since there are (apparently) only BS criticisms, they should be easy enough to address in a manner that leaves the editor no choice.

  Mark

Craig Loehle

Sometimes, the claim that software is proprietary can cover up glaring glitches:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html
looks like Steve isn’t the only auditor in the world, but more still needed…

• Ron Cram
  Posted May 18, 2009 at 1:41 PM | Permalink

  Re: Craig Loehle (#100),

  Your paper on ocean cooling is being discussed at SkepticalScience blog. I thought you might want to comment.

  • Andrew
    Posted May 18, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Permalink

    Re: Ron Cram (#104), Love the discussion framing headline. 🙄

    • Ron Cram
      Posted May 18, 2009 at 2:12 PM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#105),

      I hope you join the discussion!

    • Andrew
      Posted May 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM | Permalink

      Re: Ron Cram (#106), Maybe at some point, but I’m kinda busy with some stuff right now. Still, it would be interesting!

Andrew

What can records tell us about trends? Not much.

The red curve is the HadCrut annual global temperature anomaly (note all values have been shifted upward by a constant to get a more symmetrical window). The top black curve shows the highest value to data at each point in the data. The bottom black curve shows the lowest values the period from the date in question to the present. As you can see, an absence of records getting set does not necessarily imply a lack of trend. But they can coincide.

And now I go back to running various analyses of the data until I find another interesting result.

barry

Regarding Watts’ surface stations project and his recent publication on siting problems, I asked him if there would be an open analysis of the data, as there was here at climataudit earlier in the project (which was, for some reason, discontinued). He hasn’t answered. I will repeat my request here, for obvious reasons, hoping to gain some support.

Will we be able to observe the progress of data analysis as we did at climateaudit through 2007 for good stations? I’d like to stress again how important it is to do this openly and publicly rather than present the results as a fait a complis. Not just because it was fascinating to watch the stats and conversation unfold, but primarily to demonstrate transparency in the scientific process (particularly when we castigate others for keeping data and methods secret). You may elect to publish the results all at once, with data and methodology included, but it can only give confidence to the work if the world can see it being done step by step.

I can’t think of a good reason not to do it that way, as exemplified in the climateaudit analysis – surely one of the most focussed thread evolutions on just about any subject – no snark, just honest analysis and effective exchanges dedicated to revealing the truth. This shows the best of us.

I was a lurker to that excellent discussion and feel quite strongly about my request. This is an important contribution and shouldn’t be marred by the kind of secretiveness shrouding the work of Team et al. Rather, we should (again) set an example – particularly on this signal effort.

Stephen McIntyre, 70% of USHCN sites have been surveyed. Will you resurrect the public analysis of data? (Or is that already underway?)

My thanks and congratulations on this fascinating site.

• Gunnar
  Posted May 20, 2009 at 9:21 AM | Permalink

  Re: barry (#109), To what end?

  The surface network siting issues may be interesting to some, but it’s not really relevant to climate study. Since 1979, the satellite data is comprehensive. From a climate POV, the surface data only serves to calibrate the satellite data, and that takes only a few good stations. Of course, the surface network data prior to ’79 needs to be good.

  Otherwise, the surface network serves the purpose for which is it was designed. Namely, to tell people the weather where they live, which includes cities, around AC units, etc.

  • Jeff Alberts
    Posted May 20, 2009 at 11:28 AM | Permalink

    Re: Gunnar (#115),

    snip – too petty.

  • Gerald Machnee
    Posted May 22, 2009 at 3:07 PM | Permalink

    Re: Gunnar (#115),

    Re: barry (#109), To what end?

    The surface network siting issues may be interesting to some, but it’s not really relevant to climate study. Since 1979, the satellite data is comprehensive. From a climate POV, the surface data only serves to calibrate the satellite data, and that takes only a few good stations. Of course, the surface network data prior to ’79 needs to be good.

    I disagree. The surface data is still being used to show how we are “warming”. Calibration is not the sole activity. Satellite data may be comprehensive but there are still problems with it. The siting problems being noted by Watts and his crew are being noticed by higher levels. The question is what are they going to do with it. Surface data is important – there is a reason the Steve McIntyre is being refused access to the information.

    • Gunnar
      Posted May 23, 2009 at 11:23 AM | Permalink

      Re: Gerald Machnee (#126), Gerald, you and I have covered this ground before. We agree that it’s being used for a political purpose, not scientific.

      A careful, objective look at all methods would show that all are problematic. For example, we don’t actually measure daytime highs in the sun. The reason is that with thermometers, it’s almost impossible to do so. Thermometers are so affected by direct sunlight, that’s it’s not used that way.

      We have a standard that says that we always measure it in the shade, but air is such a poor conductor of heat, that it’s significantly cooler in the shade. What one would need is an IR instrument in the shade meauring air in the sun. Wait, that’s what the satellite instruments do.

    • Gerald Machnee
      Posted May 24, 2009 at 7:03 PM | Permalink

      Re: Gunnar (#130),

      What one would need is an IR instrument in the shade meauring air in the sun. Wait, that’s what the satellite instruments do.

      And you are telling us that we have accurate surface temperatures around the globe measured by satellite(s)?

    • Gunnar
      Posted May 24, 2009 at 7:29 PM | Permalink

      Re: Gerald Machnee (#133), since you and I have been over this ground before, I would be pretty bored rehashing it. In short, LT != surface and like I said, “A careful, objective look at all methods would show that all are problematic.”

• bender
  Posted May 20, 2009 at 9:47 AM | Permalink

  Re: barry (#109),
  How can anyone say beforehand whether there will be an open public analysis? It’s not like there is a committee at CA or WUWT that conspires to do things that way. The analysis will be a public process only to the extent that analysts choose to participate and make their logic and results public in real time. If you want to encourage that, you have to offer up some quatloos. Bake up some brownies. Bait the analysts with something tempting. That’s what Ken Fritsch does. It works.

• Steve McIntyre
  Posted May 20, 2009 at 11:04 AM | Permalink

  Re: barry (#109),

  I think that there has been extensive analysis and discussion of the results. At the time of the bulk of this discussion, about 30-35% of the survey was done – this was enough for me to form views on the matter and I’d be amazed if the additional information changed these views:

  1) the survey showed that there is a significantly higher trend in CRN5 (let alone Phoenix Airport and such CRN5+ stations) and CRN1-2 stations.

  2) there was a reasonably decent population of CRN1-2 stations in the United States

  3) there is a very large difference between the CRU/NOAA trends in the U.S. and the GISS trend in the US (as I recall, almost 0.5 deg difference since the 1920s), with CRU/NOAA making no attempt at UHI adjustment (applying the Jones et al 1990 theory that UHI was no more than 0.1 deg/century or so).

  4) the GISS adjustment for UHI in the US was very different from the GISS adjustment in the ROW. In the US, the USHCN network, despite its warts, provided a large enough sub-network of rural sites and the GISS nightlights adjustment, despite its warts and despite the warts of the USHCN network, worked well enough that the GISS history for the US was pretty close to a properly QCed history from the CRN1-2 stations.

  I think that the study provides strong evidence against the Jones et al 1990 claim that UHI cannot be more than 0.1 deg C/century or so. It gives an objective reason to discount the CRU and NOAA temperature histories in the US. The latter is perhaps timely in that the recent EPA finding relies on the NOAA history, without mentioning the GISS version.

  People have argued that this vindicates worldwide GISS methodology. It doesn’t. The GISS adjustment elsewhere in the world is not based on a defined rural network but on inaccurate population statistics and ends up being nothing more than a random permutation. GISS trends in the US are a lot lower than CRU and NOAA, but in the ROW are the same or higher. My own druthers would have been to get corresponding information on ROW sites.

  For my purposes, I’m content with the above level of understanding of the situation. At some point, I’ll update things, but it takes me a while to refresh my understanding of a file.

  • Mark T
    Posted May 20, 2009 at 11:21 AM | Permalink

    Re: Steve McIntyre (#117),

    this was enough for me to form views on the matter and I’d be amazed if the additional information changed these views

    I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.

    Re: bender (#116),

    How can anyone say beforehand whether there will be an open public analysis?

    Indeed. Some of the more interesting (to me) topics here have only a few dozen posts, often consisting mostly of posts from UC, Jean S, or one of a handful of others providing updates to the work they’re doing. Such topics can likely be dissected via email exchanges or otherwise personal correspondence, rather than through open public analysis.

    Mark

Andrew

Interest and useful site for sea level stuff:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml

Andrew

I just noticed that I don’t think anyone has pointed out (correct me if I’m wrong) that a pre-print of Steve and Ross’s recent critique of Santer et al. 2008 is available of arxiv:

Click to access 0905.0445.pdf

Andrew

Pat Michaels one Temperature record biases:

Click to access v31n3-2.pdf

Curtis

Steve: snip – the purpose of this site is to critically examine matters. Serious people worried about climate change present serious arguments and are entitled to be taken seriously. It’s not about policy. I really don’t want to get into publicizing “skeptical” opinion pieces that do not rise above being opinion pieces. Sorry about that.

Michael Smith

In 125, Steve wrote:

Serious people worried about climate change present serious arguments and are entitled to be taken seriously.

Why does a scientist or researcher who presents only his conclusions — who refuses to release the data or the methodology or the computer codes used to reach those conclusions — and who stonewalls your every attempt to examine his data, methodology or computer codes — why does such a person qualify as a “serious” person who deserves to be “taken seriously”?

And what, exactly, does “taken seriously” mean in such a situation? Does it mean that the burden of supporting his claims disappears — and instead becomes your burden to refute his claims — refute them without access to the information necessary to analyze the validity of those claims?

• Steve McIntyre
  Posted May 24, 2009 at 6:24 AM | Permalink

  Re: Michael Smith (#131),

  I haven’t studied every article in the world; it’s impossible. I have my areas of specialty. There are lots of people writing in such areas that are worried about AGW and I’m in no position to say that they’re wrong without being familiar with their work.

  Even in areas where I am familiar, on a policy level, I place blame primarily on the funding agencies, journals and IPCC for lack of coherent data and methodology requirements, as much as the individual prima donnas. In their shoes, I would feel embarrassed by the prima donnas creating controversy on unwinnable and irrelevant stonewalling and do everything in my power to limit the possibility of such behavior raising doubts of the sort that you express here.

  Personally, I agree that the only way for IPCC to discipline such authors is to refuse to cite their work, but it doesnt mean that work done prior to the adoption of such a policy is worthless either.

  I don’t have time to debate this BTW.

Gene Nemetz

Hello Steve M,

The Waxman-Markey Bill passed 33-25. It seems odd to me that no one is talking about this. But then maybe no one knows about it. It requires goals that are unrealistic but are being called “science-based targets”. “This legislation would cut global warming pollution by 17% compared to 2005 levels in 2020, by 42% in 2030, and by 83% in 2050.”

Bob Koss

Roger Pielke Sr. responds to the Stephen Schneider interview on global warming debates.

More importantly, I am disappointed that Steve Schneider personally attacked the websites that are listed. I have quite a bit of respect for Dr. Schneider’s past work [e.g. his book Genesis Strategy is an excellent example of why we need a resource-based, bottom-up assessment of vulnerability, as has been discussed in our peer reviewed papers (e.g. see) and books (e.g. see)].

However, his casual denigration of each of the websites, Watt’s Up With That, Climate Skeptic, Climate Audit and Climate Science (each of whose contributions to the discussion of climate science are informative and very valuable) represents a failure to engage in constructive scientific debate.

This cavalier dismissal of these websites illustrates that instead of evaluating the soundness of their scientific evidence, the authors of these websites, who provide a much needed broader viewpoint on climate science, are insulted. This is not the proper way to discuss scientific issues.

I would be glad to debate Dr. Schneider (or any of the other individuals who are listed).

It would be nice to have a debate. But I suspect Schneider will find a way to avoid it. It’s easier for him to present only his view and simply denigrate those with a different perspective.

Gene Nemetz

The Waxman-Markey Bill, “This bill, when enacted into law this year…”. 932 page PDF :

Click to access hr2454.pdf

Carbon Capture and Sequestration…
Electric vehicle infrastructure…
Building retrofit program…
PART A—GLOBAL WARMING POLLUTION REDUCTION GOALS AND TARGETS…
Greenhouse gas registry…
International offset credits…
Requirements for international deforestation reduction program…
Climate change rebates…
CLIMATE CHANGE WORKER ADJUSTMENT ASSISTANCE…
INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION PROGRAM…

Geoff Sherrington

About a year ago I mentioned Alice Springs Australia in the middle of the desert. A CA reader said that would make a good test bed because the desrt limited relative humidity which fed back to air temperature and limited it.

If you are the person, might you please put up your hand because i have some more thoughts and data.

Gerald Machnee

Re the variation in CO2. Those graphs tell us that the science is NOT in. We still have a lot to learn. It may suggest that there is more rapid absorption and release than is thought by some, whether from the water, vegetation, or other sources. This will also question the estimates by some scientists that CO2 (man-made or otherwise) stays in the atmosphere for several hundred years.

David Cauthen

Oops.
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/CO2_Increase_Sep2002-Jul2008/

See - owe to Rich

On the CO2 dip question, my suggestion is that globally temperatures, and especially sea temperatures, reduce in the boreal summer because the Earth is at aphelion in early July. A natural lag of these temperatures from that date, and rapid absorption of CO2 by cooler oceans, explains most of the data. But perhaps not all.

Rich.

curious

Sorry Phil – is that right? 2/0.000385=5200 is the ratio of the contents to 1atm? = 5200*14psi = 72800psi? So pinching a coke bottle/can before I open it with my 1sqin thumb I’m putting out 36tons? I’ve missed something here – not least spinach!

• Phil.
  Posted May 26, 2009 at 6:59 PM | Permalink

  Re: curious (#159),

  Partial pressure of CO2 above the liquid in the bottle = 2 atm
  Partial pressure of CO2 when exposed to air = 385ppm ≃ 0.000385 atm.

curious

Thanks – seems more reasonable!

Alex Harvey

We could have reflective ships and… and football fields that change colour… and kaleidoscopic forests and… and…

• Gunnar
  Posted May 27, 2009 at 8:21 AM | Permalink

  Re: Alex Harvey (#167), Right, I’ll do my part for the environment by wearing a reflective hat.

  Once we take care of AGW, the problem of Man’s ego will be harder to solve.

cba

It does bring up the question of urban heat island impacts. What if the concentrated urban albedo increase were to cause a reduction in cloud cover overall? Clouds move so if cloud formation/existence were negatively impacted in those areas, the overall effect could be much greater than just the completely insginificant urban areas. Nothing like the joys of unintended consequences. Maybe they could spray paint the clouds with higher reflectivity paint – or better yet paint the oceans, I’ll donate the first paint brush.

D. Patterson

Makes you wonder which scientific bodies and reports Dr. Chu, the white knight, will say he relied upon to support this white paint measure. Think of the environmental impacts.

Third world usage of white lead paints.

Increased demand on already stressed potable water supplies to keep the white roofing white

versus the benefits ??? think percentages of the Earth’s surface

Jeff Alberts

Wouldn’t the reflected energy from those high albedo roofs still be retained in the atmosphere? I don’t see how this would change anything.

Bishop Hill

Tom Crowley has an article in the Guardian.

Steve McIntyre

I just got the following block message at realclimate:

• Ryan O
  Posted May 28, 2009 at 3:13 PM | Permalink

  Re: Steve McIntyre (#189), Me, too. Wonder if they temporarily took the site down for maintenance, or if they just don’t like us anymore. 🙂

  • Steve McIntyre
    Posted May 28, 2009 at 3:18 PM | Permalink

    Re: Ryan O (#190),

    If it’s you as well, it must be a server malfunction. They’ve blocked me from websites in the past ( Mann, Rutherford, Hughes) but not from realclimate, so it’s probably just malfunction.

  • stephen richards
    Posted Jun 1, 2009 at 12:48 PM | Permalink

    Re: Ryan O (#190),

    Steve you are missing out on a lot. Gavin is teaching PC’s and the Hockey stick in his latest novel ‘Dummy’s Guide to the Hockey Stick Controversy’.
    I think it’s more about the Antartic problem than the HS. It’s a shame, you could have learned so much 🙂

• Jeff Alberts
  Posted May 28, 2009 at 6:23 PM | Permalink

  Re: Steve McIntyre (#189),

  I get it too.

Steve McIntyre

I’m going to a 40th year reunion party tonight for my college (Trinity College) at the University of Toronto. Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, was a classmate and sent his regrets.

oms

Was there ever a postmortem about that NPR debate a few years back which featured Lindzen and Michael Crichton on one side and Gavin Schmidt and Richard Somerville on the other?

• Orson
  Posted Jun 1, 2009 at 8:39 AM | Permalink

  Re: oms (#203),

  YES there was.

  “In this debate, the proposition was: ‘Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.’ In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.”
  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151

  To my knowledge, no AGW-alarmist has won a debate with a critic. (Obviously, THIS cannot last forever – and assessments of debate outcomes are rarely so authoritative as this one.)

  This summer, I am launching a new web site that aggregates all formal debates on global warming. This is a hole that needs filing.

thefordprefect

Japanese satellite GOSAT first results at CO2 Measurements:
http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/gosat/topics_e.html

Andrew

Are Arctic Temperature changes connected to the AMO? There is a new paper:

Chylek Petr, Chris K. Folland, Glen Lesins, Manvendra K. Dubeys, and Muyin Wang: 2009: “Arctic air temperature change amplification and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation”. Geophysical Research Letters (in press).

I will make no comment (least I say something which is wrong due to my profound ignorance of such things) and let you guys dissect it. Cheers.

H/T Roger Pielke Sr.

Dishman

Warmers of my acquaintance strongly question the value and credibility of everything that has been done so far by CA, WUWT, the two Jeffs, RyanO, Lucia etc. concerning Steig’s paper — the primary objection being that none of the people participating in this exercise have any recognized climate science credentials.

The question of whether or not Steve McIntyre is a ham sandwich is irrelevant. Either his analysis is sound, or it isn’t.

If Steve were offering original data, that would be a different matter, but he’s not. He’s asking questions, and offering analysis (which can be independently verified).

If the “warmers” only rebuttal is that the source of questions or analysis to question the credibility of the source, that speaks volumes about the “warmers”. If they’re not prepared to face questions or conflicting analysis, are they actually confident in the quality of their workmanship?

• BarryW
  Posted Jun 3, 2009 at 8:55 PM | Permalink

  Re: Dishman (#214),

  And they aren’t even questioning actual ‘climate’ science, but the statistical methods they are using which is not even their field.

  I was always told if it can’t be replicated it ain’t science.

Eric

Re: Scott Brim (#7)

Scott is stating a fact not offering an opinion. Warmers discount, dismiss and even mock all of the very good & important work done by those mentioned because they are not part of the climate science cognoscenti.

This is a very dangerous state of affairs IMO given that climate science is such a relatively new and fundamentally multi-disciplinary area of study. Climate scientists should welcome input for critical adjacent areas. They need it and in the long run it only helps their credibility and the science.

If this keeps up I will not be surprised if they soon begin to seek out expert statistician reviewers prior to publication. This will be a good thing.

Andrew

Climate Science has “short circuited” the scientific method:
http://climatesci.org/2009/06/04/short-circuiting-the-scientific-process-a-serious-problem-in-the-climate-science-community/

Derek Walton

In the most recent issue of Geoscientist (the magazine (not journal)) of the Geological Society of London (link) there is a report of recent research published in the Journal of Environmental Quality (abstract) concerning the amount of methane released by landfill sites and which is released into the atmosphere.

According to the article, the IPCC currently assumes that between 0 and 10% of the methane produced in landfill sites oxidized before is released into the atmosphere. The new research finds that this figure is far too low, and that in a range of samples, the mean values ranged from 22% oxidation in clayey soil to 55% in sandy soil. The standard error was 6%.

The upshot of this, of course, is that landfill sites may not contribute such a high percentage of their methane emissions into the atmosphere. The methane threat, as the author in Geoscientist writes, may be overblown.

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 5, 2009 at 7:40 AM | Permalink

  Re: Derek Walton (#225), Well, it does help explain the slow down in the rise of Methane Concentrations…

Andrew

Climate Progress boldly goes where no blog has gone before:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/04/noaa-puts-out-el-nino-watch/

Into the arena of dangerously specific predictions. What a buffoon!

See also:
http://climatesci.org/2009/06/05/comment-on-joe-romms-weblog-on-el-nino-and-global-warming/

Andrew

Can climate models be “evidence” in a court of law? It’s an interesting legal question and an interesting science question. Roy Spencer has “nope (but they probably will be anyway)”

FWIW, I pretty sure in the case of California’s mileage standards, this idea was tested-Christy argued, with models, that the effects of the policy would be negligible, and Hansen argued for catastrophe, and we all know the origin of that…Both were admissible according to that judge, so go figure.

Andrew

Pielke Sr versus Mike McCracken:

http://climatesci.org/2009/06/08/comments-on-my-george-c-marshall-institute-talk-%e2%80%9dconsidering-the-human-influence-on-climate%e2%80%9d-by-mike-mccracken/

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 8, 2009 at 8:35 PM | Permalink

  Re: Andrew (#233), Pielke Sr has alerted me to an over-looked climate metric-Northern Hemisphere snow cover. There are a lot of interesting graphs on this site:
  http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/

  For instance:

  A decline is evident, but mainly in a short period in the mid to late eighties. A seasonal analysis is also interesting.

  Winter:

  Spring

  Summer

  Fall

  A decline in Summer is obvious, and there is some decline in spring to, although it is different in some ways. Winter has no trend and Fall I would say is the same. So the cold months nothing, the warm months less snow. Interesting.

  • bernie
    Posted Jun 9, 2009 at 5:23 AM | Permalink

    Re: Andrew (#239),
    The spring snow cover data is interesting. Though somewhat OT, I was exploring the outbreak of Mountain Pine Beetles here and was looking at temperature data in two western states, Wyoming and Montana, primarily to explore the reasonableness of the assertion that AGW was a major contributor to the infestation. The GISS data suggests that there is no warming trend and this is buttressed by the data from the more extensive COOP stations.
    I came across a very interesting UWYO climate site and another very good visual summary of the same data here that suggest that there is a distinct relative warming in March that is in line with the snow cover data though obviously more limited geographically. Assuming that there is no systematic flaw in the way the temperature data is collected/recorded and we are not looking at some very odd 20 year or so cycle, the data clearly indicates that there was no change in Annual Mean temperature when the decade of the 60s is compared to the decade of the 90s.
    I have no idea why March trended warmer in the 90s (or even if it is still doing so in Wyoming) but it may be a more viable contributor to the current MPB infestation than a non-observed global warming in Wyoming. I am less clear as to the potential impact of the clearly off-setting cooler October and November.

    Since this discussion occurred at a clearly very pro-environment that believes in strong AGW, it is also noteworthy how little interest there appears to be in looking at the actual temperature data – even though the assumed warming figures strongly in their explanations of the phenomena at issue – in this case MPB.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 9, 2009 at 9:58 AM | Permalink

      Re: bernie (#242), I wish people in the media who cover such stories would do fact checking like this. Checking for an actual warming trend in the local data would seem to me to be a first step before you jump to the conclusion that global warming is to blame. And yet no one seem to do this-there is no desire to either. Thank you.

    • bernie
      Posted Jun 9, 2009 at 11:20 AM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#243), I agree, but in this instance we are looking at a fairly sophisticated environmental pressure group with access to scientists. Indeed Dr Logan is one of the foremost authorities on Mountain Pine Beetles and has done a number of micro-climate studies on the little pests. So I think there is more going on here than simply a lack of diligence.
      By the way, I think I saw some snow coverage data or snow accumulation data at the UWYO site.
      What did you think of the map graphics?

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 9, 2009 at 11:40 AM | Permalink

      Re: bernie (#244), Interesting stuff.

Stu Miller

All of you who despair of the problems of climate “science” today take heart. It seems the field of aeronautics in its earlier years faced a similar problem and survived. The first book on airplane design, written in 1915, was reviewed by the editor of the periodical “The Aerorplane” as follows:
“It seems well to make clear why these two writers should be taken seriously by trained and experienced engineers, especially in these days when aeronautical science is in its infancy, and when much harm has been done both to the development of aeroplanes and to the good repute of genuine aeroplane designers by people who pose as aeronautical experts” on the strength of being able to turn out strings of incomprehensible calculations resulting from empirical formulae based on debatable figures acquired from inconclusive experiments carried out by persons of doubtful reliability on instruments of problematic accuracy.”
Sound familiar?

See - owe to Rich

Hello,

Please can anyone tell me where the UAH satellite data are these days? They used to be at http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 but not any more. http://www.atmos.uah.edu gives a very cryptic message.

TIA,
Rich.

• John Baltutis
  Posted Jun 8, 2009 at 2:05 PM | Permalink

  Re: See – owe to Rich (#236),

  Daily Monitoring of Global Average Temperatures has a link to the UAH monthly updated data.

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 8, 2009 at 3:45 PM | Permalink

  Re: See – owe to Rich (#236),

  http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

  Re: John Baltutis (#237),

  Be cautious with that, Roy has some caveats:

  This web page should be used as only a rough guide, because there are some data adjustments made before we officially post the UAH monthly updated data. (I post a plot of those data here.) The biggest adjustment is the fact that we don’t even use NOAA-15 right now…we are using the AMSU data from NASA’s Aqua satellite in the final UAH product.

  http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/daily-monitoring-of-global-average-temperatures/

Paul Penrose

Jack,
Please explain to me why it would make any difference where the data originated for a time series when applying statistical analysis to it. For example, explain how adjusting for serial autocorrelation is different for temperature data than stock market data. Or how endpoint selection in a smoothing filter is any different for tree ring data than malarial infection rates in humans, for example. By the way, both of these (serial autocorrelation and filter endpoint selection) are real issues found in climate study papers.

Scott Brim

Bernie: However, it is unclear as to the actual factors that promote the outbreaks, hence my thoughts about milder springs. There are other issues as well. Apparently a lack of moisture makes the tree vulnerable since they cannot generate the sap needed to push the blighters out.

Yes, that’s right, I forgot to mention that drought conditions are also considered a factor. I’ve sometimes wondered how often these kinds of infestations came and went in the days before humans began actively managing the forest and before we began actively suppressing fires.

Gunnar

Steve, heard this morning on the radio that Winds have been decreasing steadily since 1973, caused by (you guessed it), global warming. As a sailor, I haven’t noticed this, and reports of professional sail boat races haven’t mentioned it either. The current volvo ocean race would presumably notice something like this.

Maybe someone could do a statistical analysis of this? A google search found this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12612965/.

But the radio report seemed more recent than May 2006, and specifically mentioned 1973.

Andrew

A new paper rebuts arguments that the Medieval Warm Period was heterogeneous and therefore irrelevant? You decide:
http://co2science.org/articles/V12/N23/EDIT.php

By means of various mathematical procedures and statistical tests, Esper and Frank were able to demonstrate that the records reproduced in the AR4 “do not exhibit systematic changes in coherence, and thus cannot be used as evidence for long-term homogeneity changes.” And even if they could be thus used, they say “there is no increased spread of values during the MWP,” and that the standard error of the component data sets “is actually largest during recent decades.” Consequently, the researchers concluded that their “quantification of proxy data coherence suggests that it was erroneous [for the IPCC] to conclude that the records displayed in AR4 are indicative of a heterogeneous climate during the MWP.“

Ivan

There is a strange inconsistency between official UAH data for May 2009 and data published on Roy Spencer’s personal website. I just sent him following letter:

Dear Dr Spencer,

I noticed that version of latest UAH data for May 2009 published on your website is very different from official data published on http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

On your website overall trend is 0.043, official trend 0.05. On your website NH anomaly is 0.43, official anomaly 0.05. Tropics at your website -0.168, official -0.15, South Hemisphere on your website, just like NH and overall trend, – 0.043, official data 0.05.

What version of data is correct, official or published on your website?

Any idea what’s going on?

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 10, 2009 at 4:39 PM | Permalink

  Re: Ivan (#260), I’ve noticed some differences before and usually I chocked them up to rounding. The official data only reports 2 decimal places, he always reports three. However it is not only odd to round up when you are not even half way there yet, the tropical anomaly is even in the wrong direction. Hm…Someone has made an error.

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 16, 2009 at 11:03 AM | Permalink

  Re: Ivan (#261), The data seem to match those here:
  http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

  It seems that the “official” file has some funky rounding.

EddieO

Can anyone tell me if the UK met office has a “Climate Model”? I sat in a meeting recently with a chap who claimed that they do and that it is particularly accurate at predicting the future which would make it somewhat unique for a climate model.

• Jeff Alberts
  Posted Jun 11, 2009 at 9:35 AM | Permalink

  Re: EddieO (#266),

  And would likely mean they’ve not been using it, considering how inaccurate they’ve been over recent years.

Andrew

Is stationarity dead? RP Jr. writes about it:

Click to access resource-2725-2009.11.pdf

I’m on the side of those who say “Stationarity wasn’t killed by AGW, it was always dumb” But It is interesting to see a frank discussion of the subject even if not in entirely AGW context.

Mark T

Oh, and btw, my ultimate complaint with using PCA/RegEM/ is, and has always been, that these methods are meant to be applied to signals with stationary statistics (wide-sense stationarity in particular, i.e., stationary in the mean and variance). There are methods (online, block) for dealing with signals that are not stationary, but to date, nobody has used these methods (that I’ve read).

Mark

JS

Assuming this is the appropriate place for otherwise OT discussion, I was wondering if anyone happens to read the Journal of Economic Perspectives? In their latest issue they have a survey on the economic effects of climate change by Richard S.J. Tol. (Working paper version for those who are not AEA members here).

Of particular interest Figure 1 but some quotes:
“A first area of agreement between these studies is that the welfare effect of a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas emissions on the current economy is relatively small – a few percentage points of GDP.”

“A second finding is that some estimates… point to initial benefits of a modest increase in temperature, followed by losses as temperatures increase further.”

“Projections of future emissions and future climate change have become less severe over time – even though the public discourse has become shriller. The earlier studies focused on the negative effects of climate change, whereas later studies considered the balance of positives and negatives.”

“The emissions of greenhouse gases are predominantly from high-income countries while the negative effects of climate change are predominantly in low-income countries.”

Discuss.

Ivan

See this http://globalwarmingnot.blogtownhall.com/2009/02/03/greenhouse_theory_disproved_a_century_ago.thtml

Look specially in the second part of article. Can someone provide Bohr’s paper that allegedly proved CO2 is not a greenhouse gas?

cba

DeWitt,

Hopefully, between the two comments it will make at least some sense to most readers. Sometimes, knowing the material really well can be a disadvantage when conveying the information to others who are not familiar with it. Considering the overall subject involves multidisciplines and even experts in some areas are completely ignorant in other areas, there’s virtually no such thing as over clarifying an explanation.

curious

Report by the IPCC on Alternative Metrics here:

Click to access expert-meeting-metrics-oslo.pdf

Exec. summary discusses uncertainties. Sorry if it has already been discussed/mentioned and I’ve missed it.

cba

Ferdinand Engelbeen: (287)

Crudely estimated, current land ice amounts to coverage of about 10.4% of all land. It contributes about only 6 Watts/m^2 in albedo (total of around 105 W/m^2). Sea ice contributes another 2W/m^2. That’s a total of 8W/m^2 and it is probably somewhat of an overestimate. This compares to a co2 doubling of around 3.5 W/m^2. If you take the amount needed for a doubling from 1750 levels, that’s around 2.5 W/m^2. Add these up and you get about 10.5 W/m^2 for no ice and CO2 at 2x the 1750 content.

The nominal Earth albedo we experience now is about 0.30. Of that, 0.08 is from the surface and 0.22 is from the atmosphere, mostly clouds which cover around 60-64% of the surface at any one time.

In 1998 it appears that the albedo dropped by 10% for a while and it has yet to fully recover. The drop was in cloud cover and due to internal oscillations of the overall system – ENSO – El Nino Southern Oscillation. A 10% drop in albedo corresponds to 10.5 W/m^2.

Glaciation has significantly more effect than what we experience now – but only when cloud cover permits. Assuming cloud cover can create a strong negative feedback, the presence of large ice sheets will short circuit that feedback as it doesn’t matter much whether there’s daytime clouds or not. It would be expected that there isn’t that much cloud cover either.

Albedo is the most important factor in Earth’s temperature. Ice sheets might become the most important factor in albedo some of the time – but not all the time.

• Ferdinand Engelbeen
  Posted Jun 15, 2009 at 7:07 AM | Permalink

  Re: cba (#289),

  Thanks cba…

  Cloud cover indeed is probably the most important unknown over any period of earth’s climate, including the most recent one. Models still have a lot of trouble in the tropics, but also in the Arctic to reflect reality: from http://www.cicero.uio.no/fulltext/index_e.aspx?id=3277 :

  There is a significant deviation between the models when it comes to cloud cover, and even though the average between the models closely resembles the observed average on an annual basis, the seasonal variation is inaccurate: the models overestimate the cloud cover in the winter and underestimate it in the summer.

  Thus the cooling in winter is stronger and summer melting is less than modelled, thanks to clouds…

  Ice core d18O in N2O more or less reflects (global) ice sheet volumes of the glacial/interglacial periods and variability within these periods (D.O.-events), but for albedo one need area (and the latitude spread…). Any idea how to translate that?

• Ferdinand Engelbeen
  Posted Jun 15, 2009 at 7:19 AM | Permalink

  Re: cba (#289),

  cba,

  Second thought: with a strong negative cloud feedback, the cooling of the interglacial-glacial transition would be limited, as the decrease in albedo would increase insolation mainly towards the tropics, preventing further ice sheet formation. The opposite also is limiting, as once the bulk of the ice sheets disappeared, increased temperatures over a larger area gives more clouds, reducing the albedo…

cba

Ferdinand Engelbeen: (291)

increased insolation could only provide increased clouds where moisture is available for evaporation. It’s also not the only required factor as there’s the topic of how clouds can form.

note that a decrease in albedo only can increase the insolation in the area of the decrease. Decreasing albedo at higher latitudes can only increase the insolation at the higher latitudes. If the low latitudes that receive the bulk of the insolation are primarily ocean, then there should be plenty of action. During the melt of the glaciers, there should be melt pools and evaporation and presence of water higher up in latitude, much more so than now. Once melt pools occur, surface albedo plummets as those pools have far less albedo than snow and ice.

Mouli Cohen

Ohh man. It’s so weird to see the new rise of Keynesian economics. We studied him quite a bit in college and the general takeaway was that he was a crazy, foul-mouthed eccentric. Strangely enough, his ideas seem to be working.

Steve: I presume that you’ve not read Keynes in the original. He was extremely accomplished in both theoretical and practical areas and had an excellent writing style. The conclusion at your college says more about your college than about Keynes. The economies were very different at the time. Kenyes has been used to justify many things that may or may not be consistent with his writings; people can disagree as to what Keynes would have prescribed in present circumstances.

• bernie
  Posted Jun 17, 2009 at 10:47 AM | Permalink

  Re: Mouli Cohen (#5),
  Steve is absolutely correct. Besides Keynes’ accomplishments as a mathematician, he saw clearly that much depended upon the psychology of individuals and crowds – particularly the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs and the expectations of consumers. One might argue that much of his work focused on what could be done to modify the effective demand curve to off-set a loss of optimism and risk-taking on the part of consumers and investors.
  He was also prescient in his analysis of the Versailles Treaty and a re-animated and vengeful Germany.
  If you want to see a fuller assessment I suggest Skidelsky’s very thorough biography.

  • Steve McIntyre
    Posted Jun 17, 2009 at 11:04 AM | Permalink

    Re: bernie (#8),

    Keynes wrote sharply about the perils of spurious correlation – even coauthoring when he was young with Yule who is still cited on this topic, including, not infrequently, at CA. A point that I’ve mentioned in the past and why I placed the Keynes article online some time ago.

JS

I find the concept, specifically with respect to Keynes (but also in the wider sphere of, say, climate science), that one individual is the holder of the truth and it is the job of devotees to understand the inviolate truth of the master to be amusing and sad. Keynes had some briliant ideas, but he was not infallible. Einstein was also briliant, but not infallible (“God does not play dice” being the quintessential example). Thus, whether or not any individual was right or wrong on any particular topic really shouldn’t be at issue when discussing other topics. What matters is what is right.

Perhaps it the history of ideological battles in economics, but for whatever reason, there is a greater emphasis on “due dilligence” and empirical verification in economics than I see in many other academic areas. A pure science, that has always had access to copious quantities of good experimental data, wouldn’t have developed such procedures, because they were assumed unnecessary. A more pure social science wouldn’t have developed such procedures because they would still be mired in arguments about, say, phonics versus whole language. But a discipline that has made a transition from social science to more empirical science might just be able to teach the pure sciences something on that front. It is the history of economists’ and econometricians’ mistakes that make them well placed to make methodological comments on climate science.

And, thus, I quote a small part from the Nobel citation for Samuelson. It matters not whether he was a Keynsian, a Neo-classicist or a Neo-Keynsian (he was all three) but that: “More than any other contemporary economist, Samuelson has helped to raise the general analytical and methodological level in economic science.”

I look forward to that also occurring in another area we all know and love.

Mark T

Of course, I’ve never thought to check his Wikipedia entry, either, which may explain my ignorance regarding his economic history. I’ve not really read much of what he has written, either, just the odd occasion when he gets quoted somewhere on the blogosphere.

Mark

BarryW

It was as an undergrad:

http://www.answers.com/topic/thomas-sowell

Willis Eschenbach

Well … as the local guy who writes about TOPEX satellite sea level, I guess now’s the time to compare and contrast this claim quoted above that sea level rise from melting ice will overwhelm us in our beds and sweep us out to sea …

Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say (Update2)

By Alex Morales

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.

Global sea levels will climb a meter (39 inches) by 2100, 69 percent more than the most dire forecast made in 2007 by the UN’s climate panel, according to the study released today in Brussels. The forecast was based on new findings, including that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 179 billion tons of ice a year.

“We have to act immediately and we have to act strongly,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters in the Belgian capital. “Time is clearly running out.” …

with the reality:

Note the change in the 5-year trend (black line, right scale). Since 2003, the five year trailing trend has fallen from ~ 0.4 m/century (16 inches/century) to ~ 0.2 m/century (8inches/century).
.
Be afraid … be very afraid …
.
w.

Gary Strand

Instead of guessing how SLC is computed, why not go to the documentation and read?

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 12:11 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gary Strand (#31), I suspect peopl were looking for more than that. Here at CA we like to know all the minutia you see.

• Eric J D
  Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 12:14 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gary Strand (#31)

  Interesting read. The impression I get from it is that after they’ve done half a dozen ‘corrections’, sprinkled in a few ‘averages’ then mixed well with some ‘smoothing’ they get a change measured in millimeters of something which depth is measured in miles.

  If one were to take away the tides, ocean heat content changes, ice melts/freezes, outpourings of rivers, seismological events and a myriad of other things and produce a perfectly flat surface over a period of decades you’d still have difficulty measuring changes to the millimeter in the ocean height. Add all these realities to the equation and what you have is nothing more than a best guess.

  • Gary Strand
    Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 12:54 PM | Permalink

    Re: Eric J D (#33),

    Interesting read. The impression I get from it is that after they’ve done half a dozen ‘corrections’, sprinkled in a few ‘averages’ then mixed well with some ‘smoothing’ they get a change measured in millimeters of something which depth is measured in miles.

    Given that with GPS we can measure distance in centimeters to/from objects thousands of kilometers away, dismissing SLC measurements because of the range of magnitudes doesn’t seem right to me.

    • scott lurndal
      Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 4:47 PM | Permalink

      Re: Gary Strand (#34),
      Civilian GPS has quite poor resolution in the Z axis, which is being measured here.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 5:32 PM | Permalink

      Re: scott lurndal (#331), This ain’t civilian!

    • Mark T
      Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 9:49 AM | Permalink

      Re: Gary Strand (#326), Being able to accurately calculate the position of a fixed object and extrapolating that to measuring the average height of a non-uniform, constantly flowing mass that covers 70% of the earth is not an analogy any reasonable person would make.

      Re: scott lurndal (#331), Not really. There are ways around this, but they are difficult to deal with. Likely any government sponsored scientific endeavor could utilize receivers that can decrypt the P-code, but it still takes a significant amount of processing time and even then, “measuring the distance in centimeters” is a stretch at best. The processing time, btw, isn’t the amount of time that it takes to process the data, it is the amount of integration of the incoming code that is required to get a high enough SINR for the desired accuracy. One source I’m reading says 10-50 cm of accuracy requires 5 minutes of integration, which is hardly useful as a comparison to measurements involving constantly moving objects.

      Mark

• Geoff Sherrington
  Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 8:07 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gary Strand (#323),

  After you read the documentation and find it creates more questions than answers, you can do what I did and seek someone who has had a high-level career in the topic. Like learning brain surgery from “Readers Digest” then going to a top surgeon.

  I don’t require advice along the lines of ‘read another “Readers Digest”‘ thank you.

  CA is very good at attracting real scientists with actual experience. These people are often generous of their time to answer questions that are suppressed or generalised by others.

  Gary, if you know which primary datum point(s) is used for measuring sea level, you are free to tell me. In the final analysis, all observations should be able to be reconciled to one point and all used methods should be in agreement.

  • Andrew
    Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 9:10 PM | Permalink

    Re: Geoff Sherrington (#341), Okay, this is a little grammar nazi of me but:
    “which primary datum point(s)” is horrifying morass of mixing plural and singular. True, English is deficient in the capacity to convey certain statements of this kind, but you start with the plural which proceed to singular datum and then take point and make it maybe/maybe not plural.

    I’m a pedant. Please pick a number and stick with it.

    • Geoff Sherrington
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 6:01 AM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#342),

      Some papers pivot on a datum point singularity(s) (like the geoid centre) while others refer to selected, scattered stations that are chosen to agree with each other to within pre-ordained bounds. Still others refer to multiple surface locations of approximately but adequately known locational position(s) where satellite reflections are quantified.

      Mate, I’m confused too. If you select a multiplicity of terrestial statistically-adjusted reference locations on the basis of approximate or hypothetical consanguinuity, then you are estimating a precision rather than an accuracy. (Simple example: an island perimeter, like Honolulu, as the landmass elevates vertically uniformly, temporally from the contiguous adjacent msl, however defined). If you use satellite ranging, then you get into circular or elliptical arguments because the satellites sometimes use ground data to confirm position and consequently time. Remember that an atomic clock in a satellite might be extraordinarily precise, but the diurnal angular velocity of the (near-tropical in particular) earth surface varies hugely in comparison with the ability of an atomic clock. It’s like some Arab countries used to define time zones by stating that midday was when the sun was overhead. Try that one out on your GPS. Then try a stick in the sand.

      While all this is going on, the plasticity of the Earth and its deformation through tidal and orbital effects substantially and rather seriously conceptually compromises the efficacy of establishment of a datum point or several datum points.

      Finally, the Maldives are not drowning.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 6:10 AM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#354),

      an island perimeter, like Honolulu, as the landmass elevates vertically uniformly, temporally from the contiguous adjacent msl, however defined

      Small point-the perimeter of an island is unknowable in principle:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

    • oms
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 2:36 PM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#358),
      “Small point-the perimeter of an island is unknowable in principle”

      I thought he was referring to the location of the perimeter (the zero-height contour with respect to some MSL) rather than its length.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 3:22 PM | Permalink

      Re: oms (#362), I’ve never heard of perimeter used that way, but I guess I got confused!

    • Geoff Sherrington
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 7:48 PM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#363),

      OK, I posted deliberate verbal obfuscation piece. Apologies. Climate science articles are trending this way, so I thought you might understand it more readily.

      Simply put, more work is needed to find a datum point for sea levels. The science is not settled.

      Re: Andrew (#358),

      When others were smoking pot in the 60s I was reading fractals. I treasure a 1993 calendar from IBM with stunning images of fractal origin, with references to Benoit B Mandelbrot who wrote on coastline length (actually after Richardson). The calendar is a constant reminder that massive increases in computing power do not need to correlate with the beauty of man-made images, or with the skills of their makers.

      Or with the accuracy of global warming models – how’s this for prescience from IBM 1993:

      A genetic algorithm developed by Karl Sims was used to generate this image on a massively parallel supercomputer. In the genetic algorithm, expressions which generate surface textures from the LISP programming language are randomly generated and “mutated” by the computer, and “selected” and cross-bred by the user. This powerful random process rapidly creates striking images which are entirely procedural in nature; that is, they represent the unmodified output of the computer program. … The coloring, the pattern and the sandy surface texture all arose spontaneously in the process of “aesthetic selection”.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 8:34 PM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#364), I wasn’t even alive in the sixties, but I also really appreciate the beautiful art and math of fractals. Interesting to hear what they were up to with big computers in those days…

    • Phil.
      Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 11:37 PM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#364),

      When others were smoking pot in the 60s I was reading fractals. I treasure a 1993 calendar from IBM with stunning images of fractal origin, with references to Benoit B Mandelbrot who wrote on coastline length (actually after Richardson).

      Interesting, apparently you beat Mandelbrot to it, his first paper on fractals was published in 1974.

    • John Baltutis
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 1:39 AM | Permalink

      Re: Phil. (#369),

      From Fractal

      Roots of mathematical interest on fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century, the term however was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975

      See, especially the History section. Based on that I conclude that in the ’60s one could be reading about them, whether they had that name or not.

      Now, is there anything of substance you wish to post?

    • Mike B
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 11:52 AM | Permalink

      Re: John Baltutis (#370),

      Cut him some slack…a lot of people confuse the 60’s and the 70’s, especially those that were smoking pot.

      Oh wait a minute, he said he didn’t smoke any.

      Nevermind. 😉

    • John Baltutis
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 3:49 PM | Permalink

      Re: Mike B (#373),
      Cut who some slack? I was chastising Phil, who didn’t say anything WRT the wacky weed, but claims one couldn’t ponder fractals before Mandelbrot coined the term, but not the mathematics. 🙂

    • Geoff Sherrington
      Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 12:10 AM | Permalink

      Re: John Baltutis (#370),

      Thank you, John and again at #375. Though I cannot claim to have been a deep student, I am familiar with the broad history as another describes below. My interest was in the way that multiplying cells fit into certain 3D patterns.

      The first significant work on “Julia Sets” was done by Gaston Julia in 1917 while he was in a hospital recovering from injuries received during the first world war. Much of the initial work on the properties of these sets was done by Julia and Pierre Fatou, a contemporary and rival of Julia, in the 1920s. One of their major achievements was to show that there are two quite different types of Julia sets.
      In the 1970s, an applied mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, working at the IBM Research Laboratory, did some computer simulations for these sets on the reasonable assumption that, if you wanted to prove something, it might be helpful to know the answer ahead of time. Mandelbrot had been one of Julia’s students in 1945, and he was familiar with the papers of both Julia and Fatou.

      Ok, let’s make it 1970s, Phil. I made an error. Maybe. I seem to recall related reading while in a certain job that fixes it in the late 60s. The exact term “fractal” was probably coined in the 70s.

      If you like to combine maths with beauty (and not pay so much attention to the date) try
      Prusinkiewicz, P. and Lindenmayer, A. (1990). The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, Springer-Verlag, New York.

    • Phil.
      Posted Jun 25, 2009 at 4:18 PM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#377),

      Ok, let’s make it 1970s, Phil. I made an error. Maybe. I seem to recall related reading while in a certain job that fixes it in the late 60s. The exact term “fractal” was probably coined in the 70s.
      If you like to combine maths with beauty (and not pay so much attention to the date) try
      Prusinkiewicz, P. and Lindenmayer, A. (1990). The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, Springer-Verlag, New York.

      Mandelbrot claimed to have originated the term in a ’74 paper. I agree with you about the beauty of some of the fractal images, I first met Mandelbrot in the mid 80s IIRC, and my first paper on the subject of the application of fractals was published in the late 80s.

    • Geoff Sherrington
      Posted Jun 28, 2009 at 12:23 AM | Permalink

      Re: Phil. (#385),

      You were indeed lucky to have met the Mandelbrot. I hope you were able to spend interesting time with him. I have not checked, but I suspect that “Scientific American” in its recreational mathematics section might have mentioned some of his work before it was formalised as the “fractal”. Not sure. I gave away my library a decade ago.

      BTW, did you notice that unlike some others of whom we read, I was able to concede that I could be wrong and you were able to accept that. Thank you for the courtesy and the example.

    • Mark T
      Posted Jun 28, 2009 at 11:15 AM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#390),

      BTW, did you notice that unlike some others of whom we read, I was able to concede that I could be wrong and you were able to accept that.

      He can’t.

      Mark

    • Phil.
      Posted Jun 28, 2009 at 3:47 PM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#390),

      You were indeed lucky to have met the Mandelbrot. I hope you were able to spend interesting time with him. I have not checked, but I suspect that “Scientific American” in its recreational mathematics section might have mentioned some of his work before it was formalised as the “fractal”. Not sure. I gave away my library a decade ago.

      Yes, he’s an interesting guy. I’d been inspired by a meeting with Sreenivasen to try to apply fractal geometry to a problem I was working on and made a point of seeking out Mandelbrot. He was interested in the application and even used some of my slides. Certainly Scientific American has had a few articles on him I recall one in ’85 and a cover in 78, there well may have been others.

      BTW, did you notice that unlike some others of whom we read, I was able to concede that I could be wrong and you were able to accept that. Thank you for the courtesy and the example.

      You’re welcome.

Gary Strand

The Leuliette et.al. paper seems to me, on quick perusal, to cover the minutiae.

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 1:16 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gary Strand (#35), Much better. But we’ll see, about everyone. Else a tough crowd 😉

  • Andrew
    Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 1:16 PM | Permalink

    Re: Andrew (#36), should be “everyone else. It’s a tough crowd”

• Harry Eagar
  Posted Jun 19, 2009 at 3:37 PM | Permalink

  Re: Gary Strand (#35),

  On the other hand, your link shows this concerning the Jason measurements: ‘This bias has a global average value of 131.8 mm and a standard deviation of 12.7 mm.’

  Wow!

  For the island I live on, that’s around 4 centuries worth of sea level change, as we understand it locally. (My island is sinking.)

BarryW

I thought part of the resolution with GPS depended on how many satellites you could see. what would that be for another satellite?

David Smith

OT – Nice photo of the recent Sarychev volcano column, and its SOx, headed for the lower stratosphere. The photo was taken from the International Space Station. The circular hole in the clouds is the consequent downdraft of air around the column. Links here ,

Harry Eagar

While reading Meyer’s report at climate-skeptic, I noticed this statement in the report:

‘we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system.’

Maybe not. I’d like to see the peer-reviewed evidence for that. Edward Lorenz, who developed the mathematical theory of chaos to deal with weather, said he did not know whether climate was chaotic or not. (In the Danz Lectures.)

It isn’t. It’s antichaotic. That is, if mathematical chaos means that small changes to inputs can have unpredictably large outputs, then Earth climate demonstrates over several billion years that even large changes in inputs have predictably small changes in outputs.

• Michael Jankowski
  Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 1:09 PM | Permalink

  Re: Harry Eagar (#11), maybe he’s referring to the models, which can get quite chaotic. For a lot of folks, the models represent reality even better than reality itself.

• Mark T
  Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 1:51 PM | Permalink

  Re: Harry Eagar (#338), Good point.

  Mark

• DeWitt Payne
  Posted Jun 20, 2009 at 9:45 PM | Permalink

  Re: Harry Eagar (#338),

  A chaotic system can still be bounded. If Milankovitch cycles do indeed trigger the transitions from glacial to interglacial over the last two million years, then there is clear proof that small changes in input do indeed produce large changes. Unfortunately, mathematical proof of chaotic behavior, a positive Lyupanov coefficient, can only be determined if all the differential equations that describe the system are available. Good luck with that.

David Cauthen

From what I’ve learned about Topex/Poseidon, it uses radar altimetry to determine sea level. The altitude of the satellite is determined by gps to an accuracy of +/- 2cm, which gives you a 40mm spread for its sea level output. But you’re right Gary, given enough time gps can be very accurate.

charlesH

I is my understanding that co2 forced warming is strongest in cold dry areas (less water vapor masking). Thus co2 forcing will lessen the temp difference between the arctic and the tropics. Now storm intensity is driven by temp differences. The greater the difference the more intense the storm.

Co2 induced warming will lessen storm intensity not increase it.

Why is the basic supposition that more co2 will cause more extreme weather challenged? It seems completely false.

What am I missing? Anyone?

• Andrew
  Posted Jun 21, 2009 at 3:17 PM | Permalink

  Re: charlesH (#71), My understanding from standard meterological texts is that this is true in the extratropics, but in the tropics the situation is much more complicated (thus the hurricane debates).

  One other note: the reason for reduced temp gradient has nothing to do with CO2 itself. I think it is mostly the effect of the ice-albedo feedback-which applies to any effect.

  • Hemst 101
    Posted Jun 21, 2009 at 4:04 PM | Permalink

    Re: Andrew (#72),

    My geography of the US may be a little shaky, but what part of the US is in the tropics? Hawaii? So Charles has a point. Also, this is a “hidden” point of my #19. USA warming, causes cooling which causes more severe storms which proves warming and around and around we go. This is science? By the way Steve, I did write Lucia an e-mail. Thanks for the idea.

    • Andrew
      Posted Jun 21, 2009 at 4:33 PM | Permalink

      Re: Hemst 101 (#73), Sorry, I forgot that the context was US (however we do get hit with hurricanes) not the world. So the point is basically there.

• DeWitt Payne
  Posted Jun 21, 2009 at 7:57 PM | Permalink

  Re: charlesH (#347),

  I think I’m going to have to bookmark a link or something to make replies easier since this seems to come up so often.

  I is my understanding that co2 forced warming is strongest in cold dry areas (less water vapor masking). Thus co2 forcing will lessen the temp difference between the arctic and the tropics.

  I have it from Gavin himself that this is wrong. Radiative forcing from doubling CO2 is lowest at the poles and highest in the tropics. The reason is that the atmosphere is warmer and less dense in the tropics so the altitude at which the optical density of the center of the CO2 band at 15 micrometers becomes less than one is higher and colder which turns out to be much more important than overlap with water vapor. See this graph from Hansen et.al., 2005 for example. If you want to see for yourself, try doubling CO2 in the Archer MODTRAN calculator for Tropical and then again for Sub-Arctic Winter to see the difference in forcing and the temperature change required to restore the outgoing LW radiation intensity after CO2 doubling.

  “Conventional wisdom on polar amplification is that it is due to feedbacks, not forcing.”
  Gavin Schmidt, personal communication, 2008.

  • oms
    Posted Jun 22, 2009 at 10:22 PM | Permalink

    Re: DeWitt Payne (#351), Re: DeWitt Payne (#351),

    Re: charlesH (#347),
    I is my understanding that co2 forced warming is strongest in cold dry areas (less water vapor masking). Thus co2 forcing will lessen the temp difference between the arctic and the tropics.

    I have it from Gavin himself that this is wrong. Radiative forcing from doubling CO2 is lowest at the poles and highest in the tropics.

    “Conventional wisdom on polar amplification is that it is due to feedbacks, not forcing.”
    Gavin Schmidt, personal communication, 2008.

    It seems what Gavin said is consistent with what charlesH said. The CO2-forced warming is largest at the poles but due to resultant effects (in this case, circulation changes) not due to radiative forcing directly to the poles.

    • DeWitt Payne
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 8:02 AM | Permalink

      Re: oms (#368),

      It seems what Gavin said is consistent with what charlesH said.

      The poles warm and cool faster than the tropics (polar amplification) no matter the source of the warming. Tropical temperatures at the LGM were about 4 C lower than present. Central Greenland temperature from the GISP2 ice core was about 20 C lower and Antarctic temperature measured by the Vostok core was about 8 C lower. CharlesH’s statement about less water vapor masking can only be read as meaning direct radiative forcing from CO2 is stronger at the poles. That is incorrect.

      Whether increased average temperature will result in more severe weather is still somewhat controversial, but I am quite sure that those who propose that it does are well aware of polar amplification. They do this for a living, after all.

    • oms
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 12:48 PM | Permalink

      Re: DeWitt Payne (#371),

      CharlesH’s statement about less water vapor masking can only be read as meaning direct radiative forcing from CO2 is stronger at the poles. That is incorrect.

      I must have misunderstood his statement. By “water vapor masking” he is referring to IR absorption?

    • DeWitt Payne
      Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 7:14 PM | Permalink

      Re: oms (#374),

      he is referring to IR absorption?

      That’s the way I read it. It’s a common error even by people who should really know better like Prof. Judith Curry. See for example here. The absolute forcing from CO2 is lower at high latitudes compared to the tropics and the rate of change of forcing with CO2 concentration is lower as well. That’s rate of change of forcing as usually calculated, i.e. before the troposphere equilibrates. Increasing temperature at high latitudes will increase radiative forcing at constant CO2, assuming that the specific humidity increases with temperature (water vapor feedback), a pretty good bet at high latitudes.

    • DeWitt Payne
      Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 3:26 PM | Permalink

      Re: DeWitt Payne (#371),

      Why is there polar amplification? I still think it’s related to the difference in specific humidity in the tropics compared to the poles, but I’ve come up with a better way of stating the hypothesis (I think): The climate system acts to maintain a constant difference in enthalpy between the tropics and the poles, not a constant difference in temperature. The rate of change of enthalpy with temperature is much higher in the tropics than the poles so a change in temperature in the tropics produces a larger change in temperature at the poles. Since the closing of the Isthmus of Panama ~2 Myr BP, ocean currents act to transfer heat from the south to the north explaining why Arctic temperatures change more than Antarctic temperatures.

Wrapupwarm

An over simplification maybe, but there are a number of ways in life to win an argument (or support a scientific hypothesis):-

1 Use facts and information without distortion and present accordingly.

2 Use facts and information with distortion and present accordingly.

3 Make up facts and information and present accordingly.

4 A combination of all three above.

Items 2,3 and 4 above will eventually lead to exposure. For Item 1 there is still no guarantee the argument will be supported.

In the debate about global warming an argument which is always used is that most organisations,governments etc support the view that it is man made and that the science is settled.

In the uk the statistics, prior to the war in Iraq, was that over 60% of the population were in favour of the war due to the prescence of wmd. If this question was asked now it drops to, say 10%.

Conversely at present the overwhelming “evidence” in the UK (and elsewhere) is that Climate Change (nee Global Warming) is a certainty, no doubts; almost all politicians, media and august bodies.
However at least 40 to 60% (it varies) of the population consider global warming to be naturally occurring.

Maybe it’s a question of we won’t get fooled again.

Jeff Alberts

The issue is human nature. We believe what suits our point of view and facts/logic won’t necessarily dissuade us and we often just refuse to read things we instinctively oppose. For some people CO2 thermageddon is as dangerous a threat as WMD’s in the hands of unstable people. Holdren is one of these people. Thus it suits those worriers, to (quoting that MI5 memo) “fit the facts around the policy”. They truly believe this is for the greater good. It also suits the mainstream media to play up those fears and play down the facts. Will we ever learn? No! The evidence is that we keep falling for the same lies over and over again.

The concept of “saving the planet” sways a lot of people who would otherwise not give a damn one way or the other. Not that anyone is actually saving the planet.

David Attenborough on the other hand seems to have become an AGW advocate on the back of propaganda from Hadley scientists but deep down it now appears he was predisposed to believe it because he is apparently a population control nut

Which is kind of strange, since Attenborough has relied on the masses watching and enjoying his films and documentaries.

Geoff Sherrington

Permission is sought to revisit an old topic, Time of Observation Adjustment, TOBS. An explanation was given on a 2004 web page by John Daly

http://www.john-daly.com/tob/TOBSUMC.HTM

I will assume that you have read what is written. The only point that I seek to make is that the explanation appears to omit a crucial piece of logic, namely, that the thermometers are reset when read. Thus, in the short example given in the URL, readings taken at 9 am would be correct and require no adjustment.

I’m not on 100% certain ground because columns are not labelled well, so I’d appreciate a view of this or another data set where a TOBS was indeed required. Remember that a recording max/min thermometer is designed record the correct max and the correct min in a nominated, repeated 24 hour period.

The urge to correct readings to a globally uniform midnight reference seems to be the drive behind the adjustment logic.

If the original records were unadjusted, there might be an occasional event when a high or low was recorded on the wrong day, but the means of a year of Tmax and Tmin should be correct with maybe a very small error, possibly more correct than the adjusted version.

Please shoot me down.

• Mike B
  Posted Jun 23, 2009 at 11:42 AM | Permalink

  Re: Geoff Sherrington (#367),

  Goeff, I just bumped an old thread on TOBS, you might want to have a look at it.

  Time of observation bias in min/max thermometers is a real phenomenon. It results when the observation time is close to the typically daily high temperature (late afternoon), which tends to double-count high temperatures, or the daily low temperature (early morning), which tends to double-count low temperatures.

  The problem is that to get a good adjustment for the bias, you need good station meta-data, primarily, the time of day the station is read. This particular meta data is not very reliable, and as a result, NOAA actually infills (both in time and in space) the time of observation.

  • Geoff Sherrington
    Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 12:12 AM | Permalink

    Re: Mike B (#372),

    Mike, Agreed, but I’m thinking that the effect has more influence on the time axis than the temperature axis and that it’s a small effect. I’m about to read Karl again to ensure that his examples use reset thermometers. Any worked examples welcomed. Refs?

    • Mike B
      Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 10:54 AM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#378),

      I worked up a bunch of examples from airport thermometers that give hourly readings. You can simulate what you’d get from a reset thermometer by using 25 consecutive readings (not 24).

      The significant effects I found were (from largest to smallest):

      Time-of-day effect: Biggest effect is reading it near the daily high ~5pm biases the reading high.
      Time-of-year (seasonal effect): Effects are largest when the differences between afternoon highs and morning lows are largest; typically January and June.
      Latitude effect: Time of observation bias is small near the equator, because there is often little difference between high and low.

      I have the stuff in an excel file somewhere. I can send it to you if you like. Poster JerryB provided a link to the hourly airport temperatures. You might try searching CA for “JerryB Airport Temperatures”.

      But here’s the real trick: If the time of observation of all stations has remained consistent for all time, there would be no reason for a TOBS correction! The NOAA tobs correction that accounts for nearly half of the warming since WWII is based on what appears to be the assumption that there was a massive, gradual shift from afternoon to morning readings following WWII. As I stated earlier, I seriously doubt the metadata supports that dramatic of an adjustment.

• D. Patterson
  Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 2:12 AM | Permalink

  Re: Geoff Sherrington (#367),

  The only point that I seek to make is that the explanation appears to omit a crucial piece of logic, namely, that the thermometers are reset when read.

  Please note, a substantial number of temperature observations do not use mercury thermometers requiring a reset when read. Instead, the temperature observations are often made using thermographs, for one example.

  • Geoff Sherrington
    Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 5:26 AM | Permalink

    Re: D. Patterson (#567),

    The discussion back then was more or less about max-min mercury thermometers. In some examples I have seen, the logic of TOBS does not refer to the step of resetting the pegs at reading time. This makes the logic hard to follow. Presently, I tend to think that TOBS adjustments introduce more unreality than they solve. This is because the actual record on many days is adjusted because of “suspect” days nearby.

    Yes, I’m well aware of drum recording devices and have used them. It puzzles me that there is little evidence of sudden changes in the station records on the dates when thermometers stopped and more continuous recording started. Why go from one design to another unless you expect a change, an improvement? At many sites there is indirect evidence of mathematical splicing of records to taper the change and avoid a step change. It is becoming more difficult to get actual, unadjusted records to see if this is the case.

    • D. Patterson
      Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 1:49 PM | Permalink

      Re: Geoff Sherrington (#569),

      Agreed. This is why it is disturbing to see so much discussion about the properties and limitations of mercury thermometers and associated observation methods as if the other thermal instruments and their associated procedures simply did not exist. Although mercury thermometers may have been more prevalent in HCN observations than airways observations, it can only be inaccurate and misrepresentative in the results to neglect the other instrumentation when discussing TOBS and other issues with observational accuracies. The adjustments to the records where changes in instrumentation has taken place warrants very close scrutiny for misapplications of adjustments to the original observations.

oms

DeWitt Payne, have you seen this publication which may be of some interest to you?

Schneider, T., P. A. O’Gorman, and X. J. Levine, 2009: Water vapor and the dynamics of climate changes.

• DeWitt Payne
  Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 5:52 PM | Permalink

  Re: oms (#382),

  Interesting article. I need to read it more carefully, but I was intrigued by the following quote:

  Contrary to what is sometimes surmised, there is no universal principle that constrains free tropospheric relative humidity changes to be negligible or even to be of the same sign as near surface relative humidity changes.

  So does that mean that upper tropospheric lapse rates don’t have to decrease with increasing temperature, or decrease as fast, and the big red spot goes away?

  • oms
    Posted Jun 24, 2009 at 11:46 PM | Permalink

    Re: DeWitt Payne (#383)

    So does that mean that upper tropospheric lapse rates don’t have to decrease with increasing temperature, or decrease as fast, and the big red spot goes away?

    The tropospheric lapse rate (i.e., the static stability) seems to go up for both much colder and warmer climates (Fig. 11) for different reasons (meridional temperature gradient vs. greater latent heat flux in the drier and wetter regimes, respectively). At least in the simulations, it does not suddenly change sign after you reach a certain amount of “excess” heating.

Al Gored

There is an updated version of mi, in R.

Su Y.-S., Gelman A., Hill J., Yajima M.,
“Multiple imputation with diagnostics (mi) in R“,
Journal of Statistical Software,
to appear.

Our mi package in R has several features that allow the user to get inside the imputation process and evaluate the reasonableness of the resulting models and imputations. These features include: flexible choice of predictors, models, and transformations for chained imputation models; binned residual plots for checking the fit of the conditional distributions used for imputation; and plots for comparing the distributions of observed and imputed data in one and two dimensions. In addition, we use Bayesian models and weakly informative prior distributions to construct more stable estimates of imputation models. Our goal is to have a demonstration package that (a) avoids many of the practical problems that arise with existing multivariate imputation programs, and (b) demonstrates state-of-the-art diagnostics that can be applied more generally and can be incorporated into the software of others.

(To get the R package, open your R window, click on Packages, Install packages, and grab mi.)

scp

Haven’t watched it yet, but this video might be interesting to CA readers
“How Do We Know? Physics, Forcings, and Fingerprints”
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=28217&fID=345

• scp
  Posted Jun 28, 2009 at 11:26 AM | Permalink

  Re: scp (#389), watching the video now. Michael Mann, the Hockey Stick and Kim Cobb all make appearances. In a 12/2008 video, temperature graphs end before Y2K.

  • Andrew
    Posted Jun 28, 2009 at 2:02 PM | Permalink

    Re: scp (#393), When the science was settled, so no new data is needed (end snark)

Geoff Sherrington

Now and then I post a new topic from left field, with apologies to ongoing discussions that I might interrupt.

Tonight’s is from
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1755-1315/6/57/572002/ees9_6_572002.pdf?request-id=74f7206c-1c2e-44d0-8cf8-096e4323b604

which is a paper from a forthcoming conference in December. This particular paper from a group of Scandinavians examines some effects of Global Warming talk on children aged 9-13.

There are other papers previewed at http://climatecongress.ku.dk/abstractbook/
that also give me shivers down the spine.

It was my hope that this type of work ended in 1945.

Bob Koss

The puzzle of Punta Arenas.

I set the base period to 2008-2008 to compare the land stations existing in 1889 with those still in existence in 2008. This allows direct comparison between the two years without having to consider missing months or stations moving in or out during a multi-year base period. Here are the anomaly maps generated by Giss from this page.
250 km smoothing radius.

1200 km smoothing radius.

The anomaly at 250 km is -0.32C and 1200 km is -0.48C. An amazingly large difference.
Further investigation led to looking at Punta Arenas, located -53S -70.85W at the tip of S. America. In 1889 it was the most southern station in the Giss inventory. No other station within 1200 km in any direction.

The anomaly for Punta Arenas is -0.2750. The station is 10 km due east of the center of grid-cell -53S -71W. I expected the station anomalies in the 250 km map to be arranged in a 3×3 grid, with -53S -71W as the center cell containing the value -0.2750 and the surrounding eight cells having declining values with distance. Here is what I found in the gridded data file that is created with each map.

250 km smoothing. All the plotted anomalies.
Lon. Lat. Anomaly
-71.00 -55.00 -0.2760
-69.00 -55.00 -0.2760
-67.00 -55.00 -0.2760

-71.00 -53.00 -0.1344 station location
-69.00 -53.00 -0.1344
-67.00 -53.00 -0.1344

-71.00 -51.00 -0.0280
-69.00 -51.00 -0.0280
-67.00 -51.00 -0.0280
____________________________

1200 km smoothing. Only the plotted anomalies at station latitude.
Lon. Lat. Anomaly
-89.00 -53.00 -0.2750
-87.00 -53.00 -0.2750
-85.00 -53.00 -0.1902
-83.00 -53.00 -0.1620
-81.00 -53.00 -0.2003
-79.00 -53.00 -0.2386
-77.00 -53.00 -0.2555
-75.00 -53.00 -0.3062
-73.00 -53.00 -0.3062
-71.00 -53.00 -0.3449 station location
-69.00 -53.00 -0.3449
-67.00 -53.00 -0.3969
-65.00 -53.00 -0.4142
-63.00 -53.00 -0.4619
-61.00 -53.00 -0.5097
-59.00 -53.00 -0.5611
-57.00 -53.00 -0.7156
-55.00 -53.00 -0.7156

How can any grid-cell anomalies exceed the station anomaly of -0.2750? Why is the actual station anomaly shifted out of the station grid-cell?

At 1200 km smoothing, the Punta Arenas cells have about 50% of the weight of the US 48 states. Same goes for Chatham Island at -43.95s -176.57w.
Am I missing something here? To my mind, the way this is done is very unphysical.

• Geoff Sherrington
  Posted Jun 30, 2009 at 5:43 AM | Permalink

  Re: Bob Koss (#400),

  Bob,

  If reasonable extrapolation principles are followed, both Punta Arenas and Chatham Island should be discarded from the data set before analysis.

  By comparison with grade interpolation in mineral deposits, if a sampling point is so isolated that it cannot be shown to have connectivity with the main data, it is rejected as an outlier. (Maybe, as a separate project, it will be investigated further if it is indicative of the possibility of a separate new occurrence of ore. But, it will not be included in the anlaysis of points that define the ore deposit.)

  • Bob Koss
    Posted Jun 30, 2009 at 6:21 PM | Permalink

    Re: Geoff Sherrington (#401), I understand your point, but also understand they are trying to cover as much of the globe as possible with temperature data. So I don’t really object to them doing it. I don’t care for the idea of isolated data points being weighted the same as clusters of points. They have an out-sized influence on the early record, where more of them would be found. You can see the influence in the global anomaly maps above. The 1200 km anomaly is 150% of the 250 km anomaly.

    What I don’t understand is their method of smoothing. It creates such unphysical grid-cell values. They present a mishmash of up/down anomalies with no physical relationship to the originally measured location. It makes no sense to me.

    You and I look at the same thermometer. We agree it shows a 7C temperature. I then announce the temperature 1200 km west of our location is 7C. 600 km west is 8C. Where we are standing is 6C. 600 km east is 5C. 1200 km east is 4C. Are you going to believe me? I think not. This seems to be similar to what they are doing with their smoothing.

    The best I could say is that my confidence in the temperature being 7C decreases with distance from our location. If I wanted to attempt to plot that confidence as anomalies from average temperature, the anomalies would have to move toward zero with increasing distance from the thermometer location and eventually become unknowable.

    • Geoff Sherrington
      Posted Jun 30, 2009 at 11:26 PM | Permalink

      Re: Bob Koss (#403),

      I did not discuss the invented data around Punta Arenas because (a) I do not know how it was derived and (b) I do not know how it COULD be derived. The inconsistency was noted then put aside as yet another example of amateurish approaches that would benefit from professional mathematical input.

Andrew

Roger Pielke Senior calls a Realclimate post “Misinformation”:
http://climatesci.org/2009/06/30/real-climates-misinformation/

DaveJR

Currently headlining in New Scientist “Sea level rise: It’s worse than we thought” ;).

• Geoff Sherrington
  Posted Jul 1, 2009 at 10:59 PM | Permalink

  Re: DaveJR (#408),

  Try reading

  Click to access os-5-193-2009.pdf

  “A new assessment of the error budget of global mean sea level rate
  estimated by satellite altimetry over 1993–2008”

  The conclusion is that mean sea level is unchanged in the last few years. It’s quite a careful paper. I did not know before that corrections to satellite altimetry rely on climate models to provide real time estimates of factors like humidity variation with altitude. Circles within circles within circles.

  So, someone is right and someone is wrong about mean sea level change.

  Philosophically, we seem to be entering a pre-Copenhagen phase where the papers have been written, the case put together and no changes can be accommodated. The book is closed.

  It’s darned inconvenient when an author presents a new view. The preferred option is to bury it, jusdging from some other examples.

  • Dan Hughes
    Posted Jul 2, 2009 at 8:40 AM | Permalink

    Re: Geoff Sherrington (#409),

    Geoff, check this comment over at RC:

    Hank Roberts Says:
    30 June 2009 at 13:58
    See also:

    http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/february18/aaas-field-global-warming-ipcc-021809.html

    “Working Group 2 Report” for the IPCC fifth assessment, which will be published in 2014.

    “In the fourth assessment, we looked at a very conservative range of climate outcomes,” Field said. “The fifth assessment should include futures with a lot more warming.”[bold by me]

    It looks like you are correct. The conclusions of a yet-to-be-conducted literature review have been obtained prior to the literature even being published.

    Must be Climate Science.

Dan Hughes

hot air = small sheep

Andrew

A surprisingly good interview with Gavin by Popular Mechanics-whom he advises (GASP!)-Here:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529953,00.html

Sure, he still manages to get some stuff wrong (Actually Gavin, that melting isn’t “steady” anymore!) But one almost sees a little lukewarmer in him. I really liked this: “But, he says, many news stories prematurely attribute local or regional phenomena to climate change. This can lead to the dissemination of vague, out-of-context or flat-wrong information to the public.” Although, well, what do you call Picturing the Science, then?

Allan M R MacRae

Allan M R MacRae (18:24:23) : Your comment is awaiting moderation

ON HOW CLIMATE MODELS OVERSTATE GLOBAL WARMING

Edited from a previous post on wattsup:

Allan M R MacRae (12:54:27) :
“There are actual measurements by Hoyt and others that show NO trends in atmospheric aerosols, but volcanic events are clearly evident.”
But increased atmospheric CO2 is NOT a significant driver of global warming – that much is obvious by now.

What has that to do with aerosols?

**************************

The Sensitivity of global temperature to increased atmospheric CO2 is so small as to be inconsequential – much less than 1 degree C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.

Climate models assume a much higher Sensitivity, by assuming that CO2 feedbacks are positive, when in fact there is strong evidence that these feedbacks are negative.

Climate model hindcasting fails unless false aerosol data is used to “cook” the model results.

Connecting the dots:

The false aerosol data allows climate model hindcasting to appear credible while assuming a false high Sensitivity of global temperature to atmospheric CO2.

The false high Sensitivity is then used to forecast catastrophic humanmade global warming (the results of the “cooked” climate models).

What happens if the false aerosol data is not used?

No false aerosol data > no credible model hindcasting > no false high climate Sensitivity to CO2 > no model forecasting of catastrophic humanmade global warming.

Regards, Allan

Supporting P.S.:

Earth is cooling, not warming. Pass it on…

• See - owe to Rich
  Posted Jul 7, 2009 at 3:00 PM | Permalink

  Re: Allan M R MacRae (#426), I agree with you about the mythical aerosols to help the hindcasting. But I don’t agree that that implies sensitivity less than 1C. In my CO2-solar model I don’t use aerosols but get a sensitivity around 1.4C, which I consider to be just low enough not to be alarming.

  Rich.

Poptech

I am I really reading excuses for not having backup data and software quality control? The whole situation is worse then I thought. Counters, matching past climate is an advanced exercise in curve fitting nothing more and it does not prove or validate a model’s accuracy. You complain about the word “knobs” but that is used to explain it to laymen. Either the models have variables that are adjusted based on the discretion (no matter the alleged scientific reasoning) of the scientist performing (or requesting) the model run or not. Please don’t try to claim that close enough matches to other models makes everything ok. So if you have multiple people who are all wrong yet they all agree on the wrong answer that makes them all right? Really and you are scientist?

“These codes are what they are – the result of 30 years and more effort by dozens of different scientists (note, not professional software engineers), around a dozen different software platforms and a transition from punch-cards of Fortran 66, to Fortran 95 on massively parallel systems.” – Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate.org

Counters you will stop hearing complaints (maybe) when 100% of all climate model code, scripts (all of it) is fully released, independently audited and software quality control procedures are applied. Even that is not going to settle the parametrization problems or the myriad of things models don’t come close (close is not good enough) to getting right.

The only thing that seems “controlled” is getting the model ready to provide the IPCC’s conclusions.
[ed: author renamed to Poptech]

• Andrew
  Posted Jul 7, 2009 at 10:15 AM | Permalink

  Re: Andrew (#427), Stop pretending to be me. You are NOT me.

  Andrew (#424), Is me. You aren’t.

Chris Schoneveld

Why this focus on software as if better software would resolve the greenhouse conundrum? Reading Pielke, Lindzen and other climate scientists on the other side of the fence, the issue of global warming is not just the inadequate software but the more fundamental question of whether positive or negative feed backs are dominating the climate system? The best software in the world cannot change the rubbish in/rubbish out principle.

James Lane

Australian weather mystery explained:

http://www.euroa-gazette.com.au/articles.aspx?d=13712

Ausie Dan

re 435 – read chaotic – sorry Dan

Nylo

OT, but I have been looking (quite unsuccesfully) for a post from Steve McIntyre which I am sure I have read in the past in this site, relating to the Bristlecone Pine Trees, where he was showing some correspondence he had with dendrochronology experts discussing whether it was right or not to use these trees as temperature proxies. Can anybody help me to find that post, please?

Thanks a lot.

Steve: There are many references to bristecones here. I suggest that you look at the references in MM2005 (EE), our submission to the NAS panel, the comment in the NAS report. Aside from bristlecones themselves, there is an entirely separate issue with Graybill’s bristlecone chronologies – see discussion of Ababneh and Almagre. As to private correspondence (as opposed to things in the public record), I can’t recall anything relevant.

Paul Cummings

Guys if I can interrupt this thread for a minute, does anyone have a link to carbon emissions year by year going back country by country? Its just this 80% of 1990 figure I can’t find. I mean, when was this?, last year, next decade, 1911?
Please don’t put yourselves out, its just something thats been bugging me for a while.
TIA

• Andrew
  Posted Jul 9, 2009 at 6:18 PM | Permalink

  Re: Paul Cummings (#443), The best I can find is:
  http://www.eia.doe.gov/environment.html

  However, I read somewhere that that would be the equivalent, in the US, of what we emitted in 1867 or something.

  (and again, just so we are clear, this is the real me-that’s for everyone not you Paul)

• John M
  Posted Jul 9, 2009 at 6:37 PM | Permalink

  Re: Paul Cummings (#443),

  I’m not sure what you want to do with the data, but you might want to check out this RJP Jr post from last year.

  And to add to Andrew’s link, same site (E.1 is what you want)

  http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/wecbtu.html

• Ferdinand Engelbeen
  Posted Jul 13, 2009 at 7:03 AM | Permalink

  Re: Paul Cummings (#443),

  Paul, CO2 (as CO2, not as carbon) emissions per country can be found at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/carbon.html for the period 1980-2006.

  There are older (global) lists, starting in 1850, but I don’t remember the URL…

  Ferdinand

David Jay

Oops, link is here:

cba

Rich (#442)

There’s nothing published on it that I’m aware of. I took the albedo recreation from Palle & Goode (2007?), reading their chart to get the albedo values or delta values. I believe it was the RSS MSU sat. data that I used to get the delta value for T over the same time frame. I then spent a few minutes trying to get an optimum correlation between them. I believe I did a simple running average of around 6 mos. and a lag for T of around a year. The result was a correlation of 0.7 and an average sensitivity of around 0.2 K per W/m^2 A simple stefan’s law result for sensitivity is around 0.3 K / W/m^2 indicating that the net result in the atmosphere is less than a straight and simple radiative solution which means there is negative feedback reducing the necessity for an increase in T as compared to a no feedback situation. Since the T data is daily or monthly and the albedo is annual, there is a little bit of smoothing done to the T data but none to the albedo data. If I had more time (and better expertise) I think the value would still come out about the same but with much lower std dev which is a bit high based mostly (I’m sure) upon the crudeness of the effort. Other details mentioned in the previous post are described in Khiel & Trenberth (1997?). Between those sources, the raw details should be present.

martha durham

David Stockwell – It is so great to see you here. So, I would like to ask a question. If CO2 is being continually pumped, in ever increasing amounts, into the atmosphere, why would we see a decrease in temperature in CO2 if it was a leading variable? My second question, are variables such as Cosmic Rays, the suns magnetism, cloud cover, hydrological issues or even the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas dealt with in these models? If not, why not? If major climate processes listed above were excluded, why were they excluded.

Thanks.

B

• David Stockwell
  Posted Jul 9, 2009 at 10:09 PM | Permalink

  Re: martha durham (#13), A bit OT but if I can paraphrase your questions:
  1. Do I think CO2 increases temperature? I don’t know, but probably less than the IPCC lower limit would suggest.
  2. Does including more factors increase accuracy? No, largely because of inaccuracy in knowledge of the effects of other factors.

Gene Nemetz

Waxman-Markey on mothballs :

After two days of hearings, Democratic leaders agreed to mothball the measure until September.

NickB

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I recently stumbled upon this site:

http://clearclimatecode.org/

If you download and read the PDF presentation (at final bullet under 3.1), it would appear to me (very much as a layman), that running GISTEMP using Python produces a markedly different (lower) temperature plot to that produced under Fortran.

Pardon me for being a bit dim on this subject, but how so? Which is more trustworthy?

Laws of Nature

Dear Steve and all of you,

I just posted this comment on an article at Realclimate, which most likely will never be released . . could you give me your comment on this idea? (I hope unthreaded is the right place for this post)

Artikle:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/

Hi there,
If Swanson’s hypotised 1997/8 step change is true, figure 1 shows, that the model trend’s are way off (they only fit the measured temperature in the short interval around the jump)
The “non-cherry picking trend” is about about half the 2K/century.
Ironically the flat red line might also be wrong, since it seems we are getting another El Nino-jump this year.
That would mean 2 out of 3 wrong, where the one correcct is the measurement and the two others are the predictions . .
All the best regards,
LoN

Dan Hughes

Interesting. Mathematics applied to the Validation problem. Verification has already, for the most part, been cast as a math problem; with great success.

Fighting the Curse of Dimensionality: A method for model validation
and uncertainty propagation for complex simulation models

• Dan Hughes
  Posted Jul 22, 2009 at 9:01 AM | Permalink

  Re: Dan Hughes (#466),

  Here’s the abstract:

  Fighting the Curse of Dimensionality: A method for model validation and
  uncertainty propagation for complex simulation models

  Abstract

  This dissertation develops a method for analyzing a parameterized simulation model
  in conjunction with experimental data obtained from the physical system the model
  is thought to describe. Two questions are considered: Is the model compatible with
  the data so as to indicate its validity? Given the experimental data, what does the
  model predict about a given system property of interest when the uncertainty in the
  data is propagated through the model?

  The each of these questions is formulated as a constrained optimization problem.
  Experimental data and their associated uncertainties are used to develop inequality
  constraints on the parameter vector of the model. Similarly, prior information on
  plausible values of the model parameters is incorporated as additional constraints.
  Using constraints to describe the data readily enables the integration of diverse, heterogeneous data which may have arisen from multiple sources by the combination of
  constraints that describe each piece of data. This aspect has led us to adopt the name
  Data Collaboration for the collection of ideas described in this dissertation.

  The optimization framework implicitly considers the ensemble of parameter values
  that are compatible with the given data. This enables the implications of the model
  to be explored without explicit consideration of parameter values. In particular, an
  intermediate step of parameter estimation is not required.

  The chief difficulty in the proposed approach is that constrained optimization
  problems are highly difficult to solve in the general case. Hence a technique is developed
  to over- and under-estimate the optimal value of an optimization. To develop
  these estimates, the objective and constraint functions are approximated. Consequently
  some rigor is sacrificed.

  The investigation of three real-world examples shows the approach is potentially
  applicable to complex simulation models featuring a high-dimensional parameter
  space. In the first example a methane combustion model with more than 100 uncertain
  parameters is invalidated. The procedure identifies two major data outliers,
  which were corrected upon reexamination of the raw experimental data. The model
  passes the validation test with these corrected data. Models for two cellular signaling
  phenomena are also studied. These respectively involve 9 and 27 uncertain
  parameters.

See - owe to Rich

HadCRUT3 for June is out, and above 0.5C anomaly for the first time since early 2007. Global warming is returning with ENSO apparently…or it could be a random blip. The average for the year is now over 0.4C, so could the Met Office prediction of 0.44C for the year turn out to be close?

Rich.

Craig Loehle

This story has it all: cherry-picked dates for analysis, FOI that is ignored, data eventually published that does not match the press release, agenda-driven “science”: http://reason.com/news/show/134481.html

enjoy!

VG

Woaa boy !
from solar cycle 24:
“A small new sunspot is trying to form in the middle of the solar disk. It belongs to Cycle 23. Just when you think that Cycle is over, another sunspot appears”. D Archibald = 100% correct

• See - owe to Rich
  Posted Jul 25, 2009 at 2:50 PM | Permalink

  Re: VG (#472), solar cycles always overlap, with periods near minimum when spots from both cycles can appear (even simultaneously, though obviously in different latitudes owing to the “butterfly diagram”). Therefore this Cycle 23 phenomenon doesn’t prove “Archibald right” – it is still possible that we are now past solar minimum (and possible that we are not).

  Incidentally, NOAA didn’t give that nascent spot a Sunspot Number, and it faded quickly.

  Rich.

Andrew

A potential bombshell paper by Lindzen and Choi in GRL:

New paper from Lindzen demonstrates low climate sensitivity with observational data

Ron Cram

I just read something that really surprised me. Perhaps it should not have surprised me, but it did. I was reading an article by Rasmussen Reports on voters thinking about global warming. Here is a quote:

Republicans by nearly three-to-one say global warming is caused by planetary trends, while Democrats believe human activity is to blame by the same margin. Voters not affiliated with either party are almost evenly divided on the question.

Scientific conclusions are not made by voting. How is it scientific questions become so partisan? What is it about our society (our educational system or institutions?) that is so defective that a scientific question becomes politicized? Perhaps I am tired this morning, but reading the above paragraph was really depressing to me.

• jc-at-play
  Posted Jul 27, 2009 at 6:28 PM | Permalink

  Re: Ron Cram (#476),

  How is it scientific questions become so partisan? What is it about our society […] that is so defective that a scientific question becomes politicized?

  To me, this poll suggests that American voters perceive climate science itself to be heavily politicized. It’s an open question whether that exhibits good or bad judgment on their part.

David Smith

Interesting Accuweather article on the cool US Summer:
3,000 Low Temperature Records Set in US in July

Don

From THE AGE newspaper (and yes – weather is not climate)
… the first reconstruction of [Australian] weather patterns for the four years to 1791, published today in the The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal … Contemporary reports are backed up by an analysis of the meticulous weather journal kept by Lieutenant William Dawes, a scientist who sailed on the First Fleet. … That journal was rediscovered in the archives of the Royal Society in London in 1977. It, along with First Fleet logbooks and diaries, has been used by Professor Karoly, Joelle Gergis and Rob Allan to plot the daily temperatures and barometric pressure between September 1788 and December 1791. … The data was then compared with modern measurements taken from Sydney’s Observatory Hill weather station — located just 500 metres from the site where Dawes worked. “He gets the right seasonal variations, the right sort of maximum and minimum temperatures and very accurate pressure variations,” Professor Karoly said. … He said studying Australia’s climate variability before the 20th century was vital work, as it allowed present changes to climate trends to be viewed in a broader historical context.

Andrew

Apropos my earlier question of the way a change in OHC is related to surface temperature change, I see RP Sr is on this issue:
http://climatesci.org/2009/07/27/what-does-a-global-average-2-degrees-c-increase-mean-with-respect-to-upper-ocean-heat-content-change-part-i/

Can’t wait for part 2.

michel

Well, ford, I have been banned from tamino. Who does not even have the courtesy to say he has banned one. I take it as a compliment, and wear it with pride! Go and do thou likewise.

tty

Re 195

The Celsius thermometer scale was invented by the Swedish physicist Anders Celsius in 1741 and his original thermometer was used for the observations in Uppsala from that date (it is still preserved at the Meteorological institution at Uppsala University).
Celsius who was originally an astronomer was very conscious about the need for careful calibration of instruments and wrote a paper “Observationer om twänne beständiga grader på en thermometer” (Observations on two persistent degrees on a thermometer) in the Proceedings of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1742. In this paper he showed that the melting-point and boiling-point of water were extremely stable but varied with barometric pressure which must therefore be corrected for when calibrating a thermometer.

Hu McCulloch

Re #490, 491, thanks, Hakon and tty!

VG

BTW Warmistas should be jumping with glee as the AMSU temps have jumped dramatically during July 2009. Just you watch as all of a sudden AMSU will become “really very reliable” as distinct to criticizing J Christy and R Spencer and Co. LOL

• Phil.
  Posted Aug 1, 2009 at 6:07 AM | Permalink

  Re: VG (#498),
  No, since unlike you I don’t hang my hat on any convenient data that supports a favored position.
  The UAH problem with the change over of the satellite has not been resolved and until it is the monthly
  anomalies don’t tell us much. In any case if the pattern in UAH data since 2003 is to continue an increase in anomaly for July would be expected following the annual minimum in May/June.

  • Andrew
    Posted Aug 1, 2009 at 11:08 AM | Permalink

    Re: Phil. (#500), Okay, what gives Steve? I responded to this comment, saying that it is funny that Phil is calling himself a “warmista” and that he is confusing the daily AMSU product, which comes from NOAA-15 right now, while the UAH monthly product comes from AQUA.

    I assume you have no issue with my trying to set the record straight. Would I be correct, then, in surmising that you have not intentionally deleted those comments and the issue is technical? Thanks.

    • Phil.
      Posted Aug 1, 2009 at 11:32 AM | Permalink

      Re: Andrew (#501),

      I didn’t call myself a ‘warmista’, I responded to that post because I was one of those who have been critical of the UAH product. I was not confusing the two products but don’t regard the AMSU data (uncorrected for drift) as reliable because of drift, the fact that it’s ‘up’ in July as opposed to ‘down’ in June has no bearing on that decision. The monthly product I don’t regard as reliable for the reason stated, I’m not responsible for the terminology that VG uses.

    • Andrew
      Posted Aug 1, 2009 at 1:56 PM | Permalink

      Re: Phil. (#502), Let me rephrase-you implicitly accepted the label of “Warmista” by responding to “Warmistas should be jumping with glee…” with “No, since unlike you I don’t hang my hat…” (emphasis added). I found that amusing, frankly! 😉

      Now, as for the Monthly UAH product-it’s an interesting issue which may be resolved soon-but as “one of those” critical of UAH, I hope you are at least aware that the effect has almost zero influence on the trend (contrary to all the hand wringing that the “discovery” lead to).

      And again, You confused a reference to the daily AMSU data (which, yes, requires corrections, what else is knew) with the monthly UAH product-it is not VG who has the terminological problem, it’s you who tried to switch the topic from the daily data to the monthly UAH data. Why? I don’t know, to make a point about your “objectivity”? Apparently.

Gunnar

You guys seem to be getting a little tense, so I just wanted to point out that ACD Science is Unquestionable!

The continents rest on massive tectonic plates. Until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century, these plates were fixed in place and immobile. However, drilling for oil and mining for minerals has cut these plates loose from their primordial moorings and left them to drift aimlessly. “The potential for damage is truly catastrophic,” said Hans Brinker, a spokesman for the International Panel on Continental Drift (IPCD). “The continents are adrift due to the ruthless capitalist exploitation of the environment for profit. Unless immediate steps are taken to halt all oil and mineral extraction, we can expect a massive surge in earthquakes and volcanos by next Tuesday.” The representative seemed close to tears during his announcement, a clear indicator of the severity of the threat.

If we all* become poor, tectonic plate movement will stop immediately. Socialism is the only way to preserve the earth and humanity!

*”All” only applies to North America and Europe as usual.

http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=1668

This theory is more coherent than the one you are discussing, so you ‘Continental Drift Deniers’ need to shut up, or you won’t get any good health care!

Hu McCulloch

I just sent the following to WUWT Tips & Comments. CA readers may want to read the article as well.

Anthony —
The New York Times Science Times section has an article this AM, “Nobel Halo Fades Fast for Panel on Climate,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/earth/04clima.html.

It’s mainly about the IPCC’s strategy for AR5 to regain the momentum that seems to have been lost since 2007.

However, there are some interesting quotes by John Christy and Gavin Schmidt. Christy: “It just feels like the IPCC has gone from being a broker of science to a gatekeeper.” Schmidt warns that computer models are still in early stages of development and that higher resolution won’t magically increase their accuracy.

Christopher Field, the chairman of one section of AR5, says that an important thrust will be “psychological and sociological research on how people act in the face of uncertain but substantial threats.” Does this mean that people who question the IPCC’s spokesmanship for science must be certifiably crazy?

Whooda thunk Gavin doesn’t have full confidence in climate models?

• James Lane
  Posted Aug 4, 2009 at 7:09 AM | Permalink

  Re: Hu McCulloch (#507),

  Gavin was talking about regional forecasts. Doesn’t mean others don’t wont to invoke them, e.g.

  http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25877361-11949,00.html

  I particularly like:

  One Japanese model predicts 149.7mm more rain by 2099 across Australia and one German model predicts 128.1mm less per year. Australia’s long-term, nationwide rainfall average is about 450mm a year.

  • Mark T
    Posted Aug 4, 2009 at 8:59 PM | Permalink

    Re: James Lane (#508), 149.7 mm and 128.1 mm? There’s a point at which you begin to look foolish with such precision included in your estimates. Not that I would buy 150 mm and 130 mm, but Gavin wouldn’t look nearly as foolish with two significant digits rather than four.

    Mark

• Jeff Alberts
  Posted Aug 4, 2009 at 11:10 AM | Permalink

  Re: Hu McCulloch (#507),

  Christopher “psychological and sociological research on how people act in the face of uncertain but substantial threats.”

  Here’s what it SHOULD say: “psychological and sociological research on how people act in the face of uncertain but substantial imaginary threats hyped by media and political entities to the point where they are believed as fact.”

  So does that mean this whole AGW thing is a social engineering experiment?

• Follow the Money
  Posted Aug 4, 2009 at 6:09 PM | Permalink

  Re: Hu McCulloch (#507),

  Hu, near the end of the Times article,

  Christopher Field, a participant and chairman of one section of the forthcoming assessment, said that an important focus was psychological and sociological research on how people act in the face of uncertain but substantial threats.

  “We’ve identified the nature of the problem, and social science shows it’s of the toughest category,” said Dr. Field, who directs the Carnegie Institution department of global ecology at Stanford.

  Imagine that. Possibly a whole chapter dedicated to understanding “deniers.” When one cannot pin resistance to the oil industry (now fully in the carbon trading camp), psychologize the resistance as mental defects or irrational.

  • Follow the Money
    Posted Aug 5, 2009 at 4:25 PM | Permalink

    Re: Follow the Money (#515),
    Update to my #515

    http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE57462A20090805

    Psychological barriers hobble climate action

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Psychological barriers like uncertainty, mistrust and denial keep most Americans from acting to fight climate change, a task force of the American Psychological Association said on Wednesday.

    Policymakers, scientists and marketers should look at these factors to figure out what might prod people take action, the task force reported at the association’s annual convention in Toronto.

    Numerous psychological barriers are to blame, the task force found, including: uncertainty over climate change, mistrust of the messages about risk from scientists or government officials, denial that climate change is occurring or that it is related to human activity. /cut

    and the money quote,

    It identified other areas where psychology can help limit the effects of climate change, such as developing environmental regulations, economic incentives, better energy-efficient technology and communication methods.

    Send us psychologists more money!!

Ron Cram

On Roger Pielke’s blog
Nicola Scafetta Comments on “Solar Trends And Global Warming” by Benestad and Schmidt. I highly recommend this comment. It is amusing to me to see Gavin Schmidt try to become Steven McIntyre. Too bad Schmidt is not nearly as good at it. McIntyre would have contacted Scafetta to inquire about his methods first before publishing. There is no evidence from this comment that Schmidt ever did that. Perhaps Schmidt is trying to live by his own words of “doing your own work.” To me, this is a comedy of errors. And Scafetta is well within his rights to rip Benestad and Schmidt for doing sloppy work and making unrealistic and contradictory claims.

TAG

from Peilke Sr’s blog

Because of the severe and naïve error in applying the wavelet decomposition, Benestad and Schmidt’s calculations are “robustly” flawed. I cannot but encourage Benestad and Schmidt to carefully study some book about wavelet decomposition such as the excellent work by Percival and Walden [2000] before attempting to use a complex and powerful algorithm such as the Maximum Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) by just loading a pre-compiled computer R package.

There are several other gratuitous claims and errors in Benestad and Schmidt’s paper. However, the above is sufficient for this fast reply. I just wonder why the referees of that paper did not check Benestad and Schmidt’s numerous misleading statements and errors. It would be sad if the reason is because somebody is mistaking a scientific theory such as the “anthropogenic global warming theory” for an ideology that should be defended at all costs.

Nicola Scafetta, Physics Department, Duke University

http://climatesci.org/category/guest-editor-weblogs/

Rob Spooner

I’ve been asked to move a comment to this thread (or unthread), so here it is. I have run into a small problem with some NASA methodology. Looking at http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/ and just eyeballing the graph on the right, Sea Level Change 1993-present, I find that the data corresponds very closely with a straight line that they helpfully provide. The straight line begins at 1993.0 and end around 2009.5. It rises from about -23 mm to + 20, or 43 mm during a period of 16.5 years.

The caption reads “3.4 mm/year (estimate).” Now my methodology for getting the average would be to divided the rise of 43 mm by the 16.5 years, but that gets 2.6 mm/year. NASA would seem to be using some other methodology. Not division? I guess it’s something so important I wouldn’t understand.

• DeWitt Payne
  Posted Aug 20, 2009 at 2:24 PM | Permalink

  Re: Rob Spooner (#522),

  You get about 3.4 if you only look at the data through the end of 2005 or 13 years. Apparently they didn’t bother to look at the slope of the line through the data extending to 6/09. Btw, it’s 22 in 6/09 not 20, but that only increases the rate to 2.7 mm/year.

Dennis Corrigan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b009y1st

Not quite the engineering quality study on doubling CO2 that we await, but pretty much one-note on the subject.

Biased-BBC says:

IN THE HUDSON…

The Hudson and Pepperdine, to be precise. I was alerted by an intrepid B-BBC reader to this “comedy” on R4 this afternoon. It’s all about global warming and is full on propaganda mode. Laugh? I nearly paid my license fee. I couldn’t get past the first 8 minutes. I dare you to listen.

http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-hudson.html

Nathan Kurz

An epic story on the process of submitting a scientific comment:

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2009/08/how_to_publish_a_scientific_co.php

Perhaps some here might appreciate the parallels to Steve’s travails.

Charlie

Copenhagen Synthesis Report Updated. Again.

Perhaps others have already noted this, but yet another version of Copenhagen Synthesis report has been issued.

The revision date in the metadata the latest Adobe pdf file at Copenhagen University is August 11th.

I don’t know that all of the changes are this time around, but it is clear that the Fossil Fuel Emission graph (page 9/36. Above Figure 5) has changed.

It continues to amaze me that an important document like the Copenhagen Synthesis Report doesn’t have simple revision tracking and revision notes.

I have again contacted Australian National Univ to tell them that their copy is out-of-date, and have requested that they again issue a press release telling everyone that a revised version is available. I don’t think any other organization, including the host, Copenhagen Univ have bothered to mentioned the updates.

henry

Found on Reuters

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (Reuters) – African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world’s poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.

The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.

And they’ll do what with this money? Buy an AC for every hut?

Instead of allowing the “rich” nations to use the money to cut their own CO2 levels, Africa says “keep it up, just send us money.”

And since the world’s two largest contributors to CO2 levels are called “developing nations”, they won’t have to pitch in to this impact fund.

On a side note, I did recieve a letter from a Nigerian prince asking me to help move 5 million dollars out of the country. I told him to keep it, sounds like their country needs it more…

srp

Given the many, many complaints about how the climate science community handles its software, you might be interested in this general survey of natural scientists’ software practices. As I’ve tried to explain on some earlier comment threads, science and engineering cultures differ significantly and this survey perhaps illustrates these differences a bit more clearly.

Basically, most scientists are “power users” rather than software professionals and most of their software is intended to be used only by themselves. The social and professional context for a piece of software used to help in one’s own research is completely different from that for software used to control, say, nuclear power plants. The problem is that we need more of the latter standard for doing public policy but the climate science community is still in single-researcher mode.

• Andrew
  Posted Aug 25, 2009 at 5:42 PM | Permalink

  Re: srp (#532), You’ll forgive us engineers thinking that scientists should get their asses in gear on that issue.

  Now, for everybody. I think you will find a certain line in this amusing, in light of the secrecy of the CRUTemp data:
  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-trial25-2009aug25,0,901567.story

  The chamber proposal “brings to mind for me the Salem witch trials, based on myth,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. “In this case, it would be ignoring decades of publicly accessible evidence.”

  How can I take these people seriously? Publicly accessible? REALLY???

  • srp
    Posted Aug 26, 2009 at 7:46 PM | Permalink

    Re: Andrew (#533),

    I don’t disagree, although as far as the temperature data are concerned I think that the research scientists are not the solution–Steve M’s proposal that it be handled the way Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data are is the best idea.

    The problem with trying to turn climate models into nuclear-power-plant-quality software systems is that we have a very good scientificunderstanding of how nuclear power plants work, while we are nowhere near that (and may never be) for the Earth’s climate system. One aspect of the whole geoengineering debate that some people are missing is that we might get improved insight about how the climate works by doing experiments, similar to how engineered systems like emergency core cooling systems have been tested.

    In one study of a biotech instrumentation firm, we observed scientists complaining that the engineers wanted to turn their technology into a process while the scientists were still trying to figure out what it could do and how to scale it up. The engineers complained that the scientists wouldn’t release their data and refused to answer questions about why they believed certain things about the technology–things the engineers wanted to see hard data on. Sound familiar?

Punch My Ticket

19 minutes well spent, the first 16 entertaining to all, the last 3 poignant for CA regulars.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen

• KevinUK
  Posted Aug 27, 2009 at 8:47 AM | Permalink

  Re: Punch My Ticket (#536),

  PMT, thanks for the link to the Hans Rosling video. Puts Steve’s R generate charts to shame ;-). I’m of to gapminder.org just now to see what they are all about. I agree with you. It was a most enjoyable 19 mins and the message at the end to ‘free the data’ so that we can all analyse it (even using R Steve!) is definitely poignant to CA. I think the title is wrong though. It should say ‘Hans Rosling shows the best animated data you’ve ever seen’.

  KevinUK

• BarryW
  Posted Sep 2, 2009 at 7:41 PM | Permalink

  Re: Punch My Ticket (#536),
  Re: KevinUK (#537),

  Wow, that was awesome. So data “misering” isn’t just with climate data. I wonder what a gapminder chart of temps vs urbanization would look like animated by country.

• Dennis Corrigan
  Posted Sep 4, 2009 at 9:06 AM | Permalink

  Re: Punch My Ticket (#536),

  Similar – at least to my mind – is the excellent:

OldUnixHead

FWIW (and by my assailable counting math ), when someone creates the next installment of Unthreaded, [i.e., n+3], it’ll be #40.

hengav

I found these long stations fromthe CA archive
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1989

and
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2658

and
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4914

I can’t find anything larger than 0.23 +- 0.09 degrees per decade in the 50 year reconstruction

Andrew

Maybe somebody could help me here. I’m in the middle of being puzzled as to why GISS warms so much in October. See, I was curious per my comment above where I noted that 1978-2008 was very similar to 1911 to 1941, and I wondered about the seasonality of the trends. In the Global mean over 1978-2008, GISS has October having the largest trend. In case anyone is wondering if this is an effect of latitude, the most rapid warmings at high northern latitudes occur between mid September and mid December. There is also another Arctic rapid warming in March-April which is accompanied by a mirror minimum in trends in the high southern latitudes, but no similar effect in the September-December trends in the Southern latitudes-in fact, those are some of the few months which show warming at the lowest latitudes.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/seas_cycle.html

Compared to 1911-1941 the situation is odd, as that period is more symmetric through the year but there is of course no data for Antarctica. The Deep Arctic also warms strongly from Nov-Feb and the warming is more latitudinally uniform, apart from the sharp trends in the Deep Arctic in Boreal Winter, whereas there is strong warming throughout the NH down to 30 latitude in the later warming. The Northern latitudes also experience more summer warming.

All very interesting. Are these differences attributable to something? AGW? Hansen screwing around? (I note that the overall warmings over these periods is basically equal in HadCrut, and the later warming is considerably greater in GISS). Interesting. Does anyone produce similar zonal/seasonal maps with non GISS data?

Gerald Browning

Climate Model Sensitivity

Gee, it appears that a climate model could be sensitive to a parameterization:

CGD SEMINAR
DATE: Tuesday, 15 September 2009
TIME: 3:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Mesa Lab, Main Seminar Room
NCAR, 1850 Table Mesa Drive
SPEAKER: Erich Fischer, CGD, NCAR
TITLE: Quantifying uncertainties in projections
of climate extremes – a perturbed land
surface parameter experiment
ABSTRACT:
Socio-economic and ecological impacts of changes in frequency and
intensity of climate extremes reach far beyond effects of mean
climate change.
Changes in climate extremes in response to a doubling of CO2 and
corresponding uncertainties are explored using a perturbed physics
ensemble. Based on CCSM 3.5 with a mixed-layer ocean, a 108
member ensemble experiment is performed by perturbing five poorly
constrained CLM land surface parameters individually and in all
possible combinations.
While the ensemble range of climate sensitivity is found to be
substantially smaller than in corresponding atmospheric ensembles,
temperature variability changes are highly sensitive to land surface
parameter changes. These variability changes have strong
implications for the tails of the distribution, the extreme events.
Consequently uncertainties of cold and heat extremes induced by
poorly constrained land surface parameters are very large.
Furthermore, simple land surface parameter perturbations are
revealed to regionally alter the sign of the precipitation response to
increased greenhouse gas concentrations. Projections of droughts
and heavy rainfall events are thus highly sensitive to land surface
parameters.
For more information, contact Gaylynn Potemkin, email potemkin@ucar.edu, tele. 303-497-1618

Jerry

Calvin Ball

Thixotropy is pronounced such that it rhymes with “picks a copy”.

• John M
  Posted Sep 12, 2009 at 10:24 AM | Permalink

  Re: Calvin Ball (#86),

  Close, but that puts the emph-a-h-h-h-sus on the wrong syl-a-h-h-h-ble.

  Thix a-h-h truh pee

  But, poetic license is aloud in limericks.

  (Got a feeling we’ll again be given an opportunity to pronounce “Zamboni”, soon)

  • Calvin Ball
    Posted Sep 12, 2009 at 10:41 AM | Permalink

    Re: John M (#87), I’ve always heard it with no discernible stress at all. But in any event, the ‘O’ is short.

Tim Curtin

re Severian at #33: Yes indeed – and the behaviour of Hansen (GISS) in refusing even to include Mauna Loa in his data sets, or of NOAA to ensure complete records since 1992 exemplifies your point, and in spades, vis a vis the IPCC. What doctor confronted by a patient complaining of fever takes not his/her temperature but cites someone else’s temperature 5 years ago 5000 miles away as proof thet said patient does not have a fever. Until the IPCC addresses the temperature records at Mauna Loa, Cape Grim and Pt Barrow et al, none of which show any trend against rising [CO2], its AR5 will be even worse if possible than its TAR, based on the hockey stick, and AR4, not much better.

• Geoff Sherrington
  Posted Sep 13, 2009 at 5:36 AM | Permalink

  Re: Tim Curtin (#34),

  Tim,
  Cape Grim daily from about 1860 to yesterday is at
  http://www.australianweathernews.com/data/archive/91/2009_07.HTM

  But I suppose that you know this. Geoff.

Tim Curtin

Geoff (#35), thanks but I could not go back beyond July 2009 from that link. I gather from Bill Kininmonth I have to pay to get that kind of data from BoM, but if you have the actuals, to save me a bob, do please send to me at
tcurtin@bigblue.net.au

• Geoff Sherrington
  Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 5:16 AM | Permalink

  Re: Tim Curtin (#566),

  IIRC, the AWN used to be daily, but maybe not. They are monthly now. I do not have daily up to the present. If “as it happens” is important to you, maybe there is some help from Laurier Williams [feedback@australianweathernews.com]

  Sorry for my mistake Geoff.

John M

How often have we heard that peer review is the “gold standard” and blogs don’t count?

The episode has highlighted the way that blogging can immediately bring together expert opinion on a given topic, or, as Braddock puts it: ‘Poorly reviewed papers claiming novelty can be expected to be rapidly dissected in the blogosphere.’

link

I guess climate science is different.

• Calvin Ball
  Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 8:18 PM | Permalink

  Re: John M (#571), actually, poorly reviewed papers are rapidly dissected in the blogosphere. But the Team doesn’t care. They just ignore it. There’s hard science, and there’s herd science.

  • John M
    Posted Sep 14, 2009 at 8:42 PM | Permalink

    Re: Calvin Ball (#572),

    Indeed. I was pointing out the irony (always a risk on a blog) of all the climate science defenders who are so quick to dismiss the value of blogs (except for RC of course).

    You’d think these computer savvy folks would be more comfortable with the way things are done in the 21st century.

    Other fields are beginning to realize it, but with climate science…

    What was that old joke about the jackass and the two-by-four?

Hu McCulloch

This sounds relevant to the Barton-Chu exchange discussed on CA threads #5880 and 5902. Comments appear to be closed there, so I’m posting it here:

NOVA
PRESENTS
Arctic Dinosaurs
Tuesday, September 15 at 8pm ET/PT on PBS
How did dinosaurs survive and even thrive in the gloom of the dark
and frigid polar regions? Arctic Dinosaurs explores this intriguing
but little-known enigma in contemporary paleontology. The program
follows a unique field expedition, covered exclusively by NOVA, as
it sets out for Alaska’s North Slope to defrost a jackpot of new
fossil clues. Researchers combine extreme engineering and perilous
fossil hunting–including blasting a deep tunnel into the permafrost
to collect fossils trapped beneath the icy soil–revealing
provocative new clues as to how the polar dinosaurs lived and to
their final extinction. Read about the perils of filming in this
remote Alaskan wilderness from producer Chris Schmidt on the
program’s companion website.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/arcticdino

DeWitt Payne

I was looking at the global sea ice area anomaly at Cryosphere Today and noticed something that is probably coincidental. It will be decades before we could possibly know.

This is purely eyeball. I probably have enough data to do a better estimate but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The global sea ice anomaly looks to be nearly flat to about 2000 then there may be a negative trend to 2007 at least. GMST was increasing until about 2000 and has been remarkably flat since. Ocean heat content has also been remarkably flat for the last five years or so. Ice acts as an insulator between the ocean and the atmosphere so more ice area means colder surface temperature and less radiation to space. So does sea ice act as a thermostat, opening if the temperature gets too high? There are all sorts of complications for doing any sort of quantitative model. For one, ice albedo is higher than water so more sunlight is reflected. It is falsifiable though. We can reject the hypothesis if global sea ice area continues to decline and GMST starts increasing again.

• BarryW
  Posted Sep 17, 2009 at 6:14 PM | Permalink

  Re: DeWitt Payne (#582),

  Bob Tisdale had a blog entry on the effect of the el niño showing a graph of the temps propagating to the polar regions , with about the same time line you’re contemplating.

  • bender
    Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 3:10 AM | Permalink

    Re: BarryW (#583),
    Interesting. You guys are onto something.

• bender
  Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 3:14 AM | Permalink

  Re: DeWitt Payne (#582),

  So does sea ice act as a thermostat, opening if the temperature gets too high?

  A polar iris. Why not?

• bender
  Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 3:18 AM | Permalink

  Re: DeWitt Payne (#582),

  We can reject the hypothesis if global sea ice area continues to decline and GMST starts increasing again.

  Although there could be a lag of several years between the two processes due to thermal inertia of the oceans.

  • BarryW
    Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 7:40 AM | Permalink

    Re: bender (#587), T
    Notice the graph is asymmetric in arctic/antarctic heating, yet the initial temp rise is at least visually centered. Currents/winds? The lack of sea ice reduction in the antarctic it would also seem to support the hypothesis.

    • bender
      Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 7:50 AM | Permalink

      Re: BarryW (#591),
      Yes, I saw that. Just difference in ocean basin geometry would be my guess. Faster heat diffusion to the SH than NH. Makes sense to this non-climatologist.

    • BarryW
      Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 1:22 PM | Permalink

      Re: bender (#592),

      Thinking about it after reading your comment that makes sense in terms of heat vs temp. The heat would be transferring to a smaller body of water in the northern hemisphere while diffusing in the southern, right? So you would expect a difference in temp but maybe not in total heat transfer.

      I wonder what the effect would be on the winds? Could that be a driver for the ice being pushed out of the arctic basin?

nevket240

Don’t worry about the bloody sea-ice, this is serious. Already AGW is causing shortages.
regards,

African Condom Shortage Said to Worsen Climate Impact (Update2)

Share | Email | Print | A A A

By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) — Unwanted pregnancies in poor countries have led to higher demand for land and water, resources already taxed by climate change, according to research to be published by the World Health Organization.

Runaway population growth in countries such as Ethiopia and Rwanda where contraceptives are in short supply is exacerbating drought and straining fresh water supplies, said Leo Bryant, lead author of the study. Of 40 nations reviewed, 37 said rapid population growth worsened environmental damage.

Climate change has been blamed by scientists for increasing droughts, pushing up sea levels and causing floods from heavy rainfall in countries across the globe. The impact can be worse in developing nations where food and water already are in short supply and there is little funding to help communities adapt.

“It’s time to start looking at the environmental relevance of family planning,” Bryant, an advocacy manager for the London-based reproductive health-care provider Marie Stopes International, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Reproductive health services ought to be integrated into the climate adaptation strategy.”

Bryant analyzed national plans to adapt to climate change submitted to the United Nations by 40 poorer countries. Most said demographic trends were “interacting” with climate change to speed the degradation of natural resources and raise the risk of extreme weather events. He said the findings are set to be published in November by the Geneva-based World Health Organization, which coordinates UN health policy.

Rwanda Family Planning

Population growth rates “have significant impacts on the state of the environment, aggravating vulnerability and adaptation needs,” the Pacific island nation of Kiribati said in a report to the UN. “In this respect, population policy is an important consideration of adaptation strategies.”

The 33-island archipelago risks being submerged in coming years because of higher seas and may purchase land elsewhere to relocate its people, President Anote Tong said in February.

In Rwanda, where only 10 percent of adults have access to reproductive health-care services and protection such as condoms, demographic pressures are forcing a migration to less- populated areas already prone to drought and desertification, Bryant said. In Bangladesh, a higher sea level is shrinking fresh water supplies even as a growing population demands more water.

East African Drought

Climate change and poor management of water resources is causing a “severe” drought in eastern Africa, according to The Netherlands-based Wetlands International, which promotes the restoration of wetlands. Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, normally a 30- hectare (74,000-acre) site, is in danger of vanishing, the group said.

“Unsustainable water use and pollution has driven the local farmers and fishermen into a situation where they can no longer live off the basic support and benefits of the wetlands,” an article on the group’s Web site said today.

Only six of the 37 countries that said population growth compounds water scarcity or threatens biodiversity proposed solutions through climate-adaptation plans, Bryant said. The world’s population is projected to grow from 6.8 billion people at present to 9.2 billion by 2050.

“We’re not in any way proposing that government should start telling people how many children to have,” Bryant said. “Children should be by choice. The problem is that a majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have that right because they don’t have access to contraception.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 17, 2009 09:28 EDT

OMG!!!!

• henry
  Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 3:21 AM | Permalink

  Re: nevket240 (#584),Story is believable, except that China’s had the one child per family rules for quite a while now.

  Hasn’t slowed them down much.

bender

The arcs in BarryW’s graph suggests that lag could be several years. 3? 4? A wavelet analysis should resolve that parameter. Lucia?

• See - owe to Rich
  Posted Sep 18, 2009 at 11:22 AM | Permalink

  Re: bender (#589), to my eye it looks more like 2.5ish years than 4. If we use 2.5 to predict then the La Nina of early 2008 would peak in Arctic coolth in summer 2010. This suddenly makes me more sanguine about a further recovery of ice next year. But in 2011 it could be heading back down again.

  We need to be careful about this (first with better statistical analysis) because the period of data is PDO- and AMO-positive. There could be interactions with those things.

  Rich.

  • bender
    Posted Sep 19, 2009 at 1:56 PM | Permalink

    Re: See – owe to Rich (#593),
    Yes, I took a closer look after my commenting and was going to revise my number. I agree with your number.

Gerald Browning

All,

But the climatologists claim to know everything about the sun:

Sun Surprisingly Active During Low Point in Cycle
By Rachael Rettner
SPACE.com Staff
posted: 17 September 2009
09:03 am ET

Just looking at the number of sunspots doesn’t provide a full picture of how the sun’s solar energy impacts Earth, a new study suggests. The findings contradict previous thinking about how the sun behaves during low points in its solar cycle.

“What we’re realizing is that the sunspots do not tell the whole story,” said Sarah Gibson, a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

Sunspots are areas of concentrated magnetic activity that appear as dark dots on the sun’s surface. The number of spots periodically rises and falls in what has become known as the solar cycle. This cycle lasts about 11 years, taking roughly 5.5 years to go from “solar minimum,” or a period of time when there are few sunspots, to the cycle peak, or “solar maximum,” during which there are many sunspots.

During cycle peaks — the next one is expected in 2013 — there are frequent solar flares and geomagnetic storms, events that send out radiation that can bombard the Earth’s atmosphere, damaging satellites and disrupting power grids. Scientists say that a really bad solar storm, akin to one that started fires along telegraph lines in 1859, could bring modern society to its knees.

Conversely, cycle minimums were thought to be very quiet times, periods when the Earth would not experience as many blasts of solar energy. But Gibson’s study shows that this is not necessarily the case.

Full force in 2008

Gibson and her colleagues compared measurements from two different cycle minimums — one from 1996 and one from 2008. They analyzed a type of solar energy called the solar wind — streams of charged particles that accelerate out from the sun’s extremely hot atmosphere. The solar wind, unlike short-lived solar storms, streams from the sun pretty much constantly but with varying intensity.

They found that, while the solar winds intersecting the Earth largely disappeared in 1996, they continued to hit the Earth at full force in 2008.

These results show that “what we thought was a typical solar minimum wasn’t, and what we’re seeing now is a different animal,” Gibson said.

Scientists previously thought that during solar minimums, solar winds would simply blow out the top and the bottom of the sun, and not come out near the equator. Since the Earth is close to the same latitude as the sun’s equator, it shouldn’t experience much solar wind during a low point in the solar cycle.

“If you imagine holding a hose and you hold it straight up, you would spray up, and if you had a friend standing nearby, they might get a little wet, but not soaked,” Gibson said. But during the current solar minimum in 2008, the fire hose was still pointing at the Earth.

“The last two solar minimum, this didn’t happen. When the sun spots went away, these fire hoses went away too,” she said.

In fact, the solar wind’s effect on the Earth’s radiation belt — a ring of charged particles around the planet — was three times greater in 2008 than in 1996. While the effects of solar winds aren’t as drastic as those of a solar flare, they can still interfere with satellite orbits and radio communications.

Changing as you read this

This year, the solar winds are starting to taper off. However, Gibson was surprised that the reduction of winds lagged so far behind the decrease in sunspots.

What could account for this difference in minimums? Gibson thinks it may have something to do with the fact that this cycle’s minimum has been historically wimpy — there were fewer sunspots during this minimum than during any minimum in the last 75 years.

“In a minimum when you have a really strong polar field, it can clamp down everything else at lower latitudes down towards the equator, and really the only action is what’s coming out the poles, and you get what we thought was a classic solar minimum picture, and you don’t get any wind escaping,” Gibson said. “But because we have such a weak magnetic field this cycle compared to last cycle minimum … the polar field is not as strong, it can’t clamp down, and stuff kind of escapes, you get these streams that squirt out at lower latitudes near the equator instead of just at the poles,” she said.

Scientists are trying to learn more about the solar cycle to understand why it occurs and what accounts for cycle differences.

The solar cycle is “something that’s become very important to understand in the space age because we have all these satellites, we have astronauts out there, and you have to know what space whether they’re likely to face,” Gibson said.

The study was led by Gibson, and the research team included scientists from NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory, the University of Michigan, NOAA and NASA. The results will appear this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

* Gallery: Solar Storms
* Video: How Space Storms Wreak Havoc on Earth
* The Great Solar Storm of 1859

Comments (19)

Note that I wrote a manuscript with Tom Holzer (NCAR HAO) and was shocked at what I discovered about the
assumptions that had been made.

Jerry

Gerald Browning

Robert Spooner (#599),

NCAR publishes favorable news releases on its web site all of the time. Anyone that has performed scientific
research knows that it can take years before a particular theory is validated or invalidated. So the news media should be ashamed of themselves for publishing results that are so fresh and NCAR knows better, but wants the publicity.

Jerry

DeWitt Payne

The Archer MODTRAN page wasn’t working when I tried it just now. I’m hoping it’s a temporary glitch. I’m assuming that if he died or something, it would show up on a Google search and there’s nothing new there.

Dan Hughes

Pat Roache has published a new book on Verification and Validation of computer software. Additional information here.

The price of his earlier V&V book and his classic on CFD have been reduced by 1/2.

Micky C

To have any chance of the uptick in ring width = temp increase for some special trees to be correct, you would need to show that all other measurable parameters associated with a tree are characterised in some way and are independent of temperature to the best that you can say. Also that you have adequately demonstrated a cause for why the majority of other trees sampled in what you believe or can demonstrate is the same method do not show such a correlation.
However cherry picking tree ring widths that go up with temperature with no other reason than we believe tree ring widths are being influenced by temperature, is interesting but untenable without proper characterisation.
Reason and logic would initially conclude that on the balance of things the trees with the uptick are the anomalous ones.
So sorry lads, no short cuts. More work needed.

Francis Atchison

Numerical/theoretical/hand-waving arguments should carry little or no weight in decisions regarding CO2 emission control because of the serious consequences of
1. Implementing them if they are wrong or
2. Not implementing them if the CO2 lobby is right.

The urgent requirement is for definitive measurements that show the role of CO2 in the spectrum escaping the earth system;
that is, a competent team needs to be built to put a series of satellites equipped with infra-red spectrometers into orbit that
will give the answer to this one question.
Despite my first statement: The strong argument against CO2 in the atmosphere being the main cause of temperature
rise is that this implies a positive feedback system (CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean have to be in chemical
equilibrium and the ocean is the dominant source of CO2; the density in the ocean is proportional to the logarithm of
the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, Henry’s relation, see John J. Carroll and Alan E. Mather, “The System
Carbon Dioxide-Water and the Krichevsky-Kasarnovsky Equation,” Journal of Solution Chemistry, vol. 21,
pp. 607-621, 1992), which cannot be true for a system that has already survived a few thousand million years.
The Mauna Loa, Hawaii, CO2 measurements seem to be presented by IPCC and the UN as representative. Some
simple arithmetic may be used to examine their implication. The sea temperature in th region of Hawaii shows an
annual variation of about 3°C (22/24 to 24/27°C) [http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/cwtg/hawaii.html]. Using Henry’s
relation suggests that this would cause a fluctuation of the CO2 concentration between ±7 and ±10 ppmV during the year.
The fluctuations themselves correspond to an emission/removal rate of about 1.5 × 1014 kg CO2/year and the general
rise rate to about 1.7 × 1013 kg CO2 extra remaining in the in the atmosphere every year.
The year 2004 value for the CO2 emission corresponds to 2.2 × 1013 kg CO2/year: Are the values really representative?

• Ferdinand Engelbeen
  Posted Sep 28, 2009 at 2:47 PM | Permalink

  Re: Francis Atchison (#77),

  Francis, a few remarks: seawater and fresh water are completely different things for CO2: there is much more CO2 dissolved in seawater than CO2 can be absorbed by fresh water at the same temperature and (partial) pressure. That is a matter of pH and the presence of calcium (as bicarbonate).

  The oceans are not the dominant source of CO2, the oceans are a net sink of CO2 (about 2 GtC per year), together with vegetation (about 1.4 GtC/year) of the about 8 GtC/year humans emit. Local seawater temperatures play a role in local release/absorption of the oceans, but the release/uptake is relative slow and can’t cope with the speed of the emissions, neither with the speed of vegetation growth/decay. That is the reason one sees a seasonal variation in the CO2 data.

  For the ocean uptake and release, see the work of Feely e.a. at: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml

  • Francis Atchison
    Posted Sep 29, 2009 at 6:04 AM | Permalink

    Re: Ferdinand Engelbeen (#81),
    Thanks for the comments Ferdinand; I should have said ‘resevoir’ rather than ‘source’ for the ocean; at high atmospheric CO2 concentrations it will act as a sink, at low concentrations it will act as a source. However, the balance of CO2 between ocean and atmosphere is maintained by a large number of processes with large variations in time constant; it is not obvious if this set of processes will result in an overall under- or over-damped system so that the effective time constant at short times is difficult to predict (one estimate I saw said atmosphere-ocean equilibrium has a 5 to 10 year time constant). I used Henry’s constant values implied by measurements made on south Atlantic surface sea water. I am still somewhat amazed by the Hawaii results; it is somewhat remote from large sources of trees/soil, however, the implied emission rate corresponds to the estimated total emission from the world’s vegitation (or 1/3 of the emission of vegetation plus soil); these two taken together are more than balanced by removal from photosynthesis and the processes take place in the same areas ………