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Climate Audit 
480 Comments
This is Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. I’ll be offline for a couple of days.
Enjoy! Even though my grandfather was Canadian (as a child his grandfather lost a political argument in parliament – MP for the London area – and like many others on the losing side his dad led the family out), I don’t know the traditions. What makes Canadian Thanksgiving Canadian?
Re: MikeP (#2),
bad football
Re: bender (#3), wicked!
Re: MikeP (#2),
Origin of Canadian Thanksgiving
Google supplies this answer:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2536850/History-and-Origin-of-Canadian-Thanksgiving
The major difference is the date…
In Canada:
The Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of the month (the reason for the earlier date in October is their earlier harvest occurring farther to the north).
The Canadian holiday comes from different traditions than the US holiday although it is now meant to convey thanks for their harvest.
2007 – Monday, October 8th
2008 – Monday, October 13th
2009 – Monday, October 12th
2010 – Monday, October 11th
2011 – Monday, October 10th
In the United States:
The US Thanksgiving is observed on the every fourth Thursday of November. The holiday is celebrated in remembrance of the pilgrims and in order to give thanks.
2007 – Thursday, November 22nd
2008 – Thursday, November 27th
2009 – Thursday, November 26th
2010 – Thursday, November 25th
2011 – Thursday, November 24th
“What makes Canadian Thanksgiving Canadian?”
Winter.
My drive to the wife’s family site will see us drive through up to 15cm of snow and hit temps of -15C.
I’ve just dug out the tire chains and put them and the Winter driving emergency kit in the trunk. That’s how we do Thanksgiving in the Great White North, we adjust to Winter.
ChrisJ, where’s your statistical Chart for those dates? LOL! Steve, I take it you have “huge” dinners also. If you do, don’t eat to much. When you get up there in age, its harder to take off…Have the greatest of weekends, Sir. Enjoy the Grandchildren,Family.
I think the difference is that at Thanksgiving Canadian give thanks for not being American.
While Americans give thanks for not being British!
Re: alec kitson (#9),
The Brits don’t have thanksgiving. Instead we have Christmas, where we thank Christ for Massachusets being a long time ago. 🙂
Alec Kitson #9
“While Americans give thanks for not being British!”
http://www.britannia.com/celtic/scotland/scot18.html
“Before 1971, Canadians of Scottish descent were listed as a separate category from British. ”
Steve needn’t worry about being labelled British!
The British, in this modern age, have nothing to give thanks for.
Re: GP (#11),
Seems like the British have hit bottom and bounced, but I don’t know whether it’s a live cat, dead cat, or Schrodinger’s cat bounce.
Thanksgiving greetings to Steve and others in Canada from down here in Australia. Can I get some help from anyone over the Yamal tree-ring affair. I could follow the gist of it except for one thing. The Russian source was doing something called ‘corridor standardisation.’ I can’t find anything useful on this. Can someone explain what it is and why it was done?
Re: david elder (#12), a growth corridor, Shivatov (1987)?
http://books.google.com/books?id=zr8Ucld6FYcC&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120#v=onepage&q=&f=false
An excellent debate (re)posted here between Dr. Bill Gray, of Colorado State University, and Dr. Kevin Trenberth, of the University of Colorado:
Bill Gray and Kevin Trenberth debate global warming.
My opinion: the old man gives him a beating.
Re: Tom Stark (#13),
Kevin Trenberth has attacked Pielke Jr, while refusing to respond and explain his issues. Calls Roger “shameful.” That’s what Roger gets for playing nice with climate scientists.
Re: Tom Stark (#13),
I particularily like Trenberth’s comment “I have found that the only scientists who disagree with the IPCC report are those who have not read it and are poorly informed.” Notice that he didn’t say “or” but rather “and.”
This come after his criticism of Gray as not citing any references for his objections to the IPCC report and claiming that Gray is merely stating his opinion.
Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you Steve and friends, for all your efforts.
Donation sent.
A. Lurker.
The BBC have run a surprisingly even-handed article on GW Link.
Heresy!
Re: DaveJR (#19), yes, an excellent article, taken up by Drudge, and followed by the usual slam-down in the next BBC “tea break’s over” climate article
Re: DaveJR (#19),
Guardian’s still in full panic mode, though.
Trenberth seems to be back-tracking now after comparing models with obs:
From: “Trenberth, K. E., and J. T. Fasullo, 2009: Global warming due to increasing absorbed solar radiation. Geophys. Res. Lttrs., 36, L07706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037527.”
“Global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) are examined for the top-of-atmosphere radiation changes as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases build up from 1950 to 2100. There is an increase in net radiation absorbed, but not in ways commonly assumed. While there is a large increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing greenhouse gases and water vapor (as a feedback), this is offset to a large degree by a decreasing greenhouse effect from reducing cloud cover and increasing radiative emissions from higher temperatures. Instead the main warming from an energy budget standpoint comes from increases in absorbed solar radiation that stem directly from the decreasing cloud amounts. These findings underscore the need to ascertain the credibility of the model changes, especially insofar as changes in clouds are concerned.”
So apparently clouds have negative feedbacks that the models had overlooked up to now. In agreement with the long-term Dick Lindzen position and with Roy Spencers postulations it would seem. I’m sure he won’t admit that though – somehow it must be different and new 🙂
Of course the “one thing masked by another” ruse is well-tested, if rather transparent. So much easier to say you’ve discovered something new than admitting that your critics were correct. But if suddenly we are trusting the obs rather than adjusting them to match the models it is a welcome development. Skeptics need to encourage it or he’ll do a 180 like Ramanathan did with his aerosol speculations (first massive warming then massive cooling).
Re: JamesG (#22), This sounds very much like what David Douglass found in his recent paper (sorry, away from the office, don’t have ref)
Re: JamesG (#22),
Climate models don’t do clouds well at all. For example, here is a quote from a recent presentation by Graeme Stephens linked to by Pielke, Sr.:
If I read that abstract correctly, Trenberth and Fasullo are only analyzing model runs. They are not comparing models to observations.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#23),
The full paper is here:
Click to access 2009GL037527.pdf
Obs are by reference to other papers. He even references Lindzen.
There have been some interesting manoeuvrings at BBC online. The Blog of Bloom went through an interesting period where it posted articles that at least questioned the `consensus’ and there was a great deal of noise in the comments. Then it suddenly went quiet and there have been no new postings for two or three months. Now there’s this new blog asking similar questions.
Does it mean something? Who knows? I feel a bit like a Kremlinologist trying to understand what is happening.
Re: Bishop Hill (#26),
I believe you are talking about this article. Did you see this about it? BBC’s…most popular item on its website
Re: Gene Nemetz (#62),
Comment 353 at RC has a group suggestion that people write to the BBC online editor to complain about the recent piece “What happened to global warming?”
The BBC Climate correspondent has his own blog that might be interesting to watch.
A little Steig Antarctic update.
Very interesting paper:
Trends in Observed Cloudiness and Earth’s Radiation Budget
Click to access 02_Norris%20and%20Slingo.pdf
There has been observed a decrease in high-level clouds (and thus increase of outgoing LW radiation – net “greenhouse” cooling effect) and decrease of global cloud cover (net warming effect) during the last decades. So the high tropospheric humidity and LW radiation behave exactly opposite to GCM models. Based on relatively short observations and need for satellite data adjustments, it is difficult to recognize any long-term trends on the background of natural variability.
I have been thinking, if clouds cover 60% of the surface and effectively block all outgoing LW and also limit convection, how much effective is the influence of “greenhouse gases” on the rest of the surface on total radiative budget? Unlike clouds, they absorb only here and there and still one half of radiation goes upwards.
Check this out:
This measurement shows practically no diurnal variability in down-welling IR radiation for a clear sky:
http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/surf_check?ptype=gif&site=desr&date=5-jun-2008&p1=dpsp&p5=dpir&p6=upir
Down-welling LW radiation does not react on amount of up-welling radiation – it means that clear sky poses either almost no barrier for it, or the clear sky radiates LW downwards on its own, not depending how much IR hits it from the bottom.
However, when we get clouds into the game, down-welling IR radiation immediately reacts, since cloud is a real barrier for it.
http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/surf_check?ptype=gif&site=desr&date=17-sep-2008&p1=dpsp&p5=dpir&p6=upir
So, what is the practical effect of those few parts of protruding spectral lines, hiding behind water absorption bands?
I really want AGW to be a hoax, so could somebody please explain how it is possible that global temps have been rather high for the last month or two, whereas the PDO is said to have flipped and the sunspot count hasn’t been this low for I don’t know how many years. Is this due to the very hesitant El Niño? What happens when sunspots pick up and a moderately strong El Niño comes along?
I don’t want to do a WUWTesque local weather report, but last Wednesday I drove through all of Germany and all the way temps ranged from 24 to 27.5 degrees Celsius. The record for October was broken somewhere with a temperature of 30.8 degrees.
Re: Neven (#30), What you want is irrelevant. AGW could well be “true” to a greater or lesser extent. Now, how could a thing you so described happen? That is, low solar activity, cool PDO weak El Nino, etc.? That’s an easy one: “mysterious” natural variability of unknown cause or nature causes fluctuations separate from all those things. And of course it would be reasonable to also add to that an AGW trend. But evidently that would cause you to go catatonic, whether it implied a “problem” or not, because it would mean AGW isn’t a “hoax”.
Sigh, why is it that everyone’s views seem to be either “we’re all going to die” or “there’s no such thing as global warming”?
Re: Andrew (#32),
Welcome to my fence.
Re: Andrew (#32),
My emphasis.
Surely the point at issue is that if these natural fluctuations were in their positive phase during the rapid late C20th warming, then they need to be subtracted from the AGW trend, not added to it.
It may well be that AGW is true, but insignificant.
Re: tallbloke (#45),
do you realize your comment actually agrees with what Andrew said? It looks like you misread his “add TO THAT an AGW trend” getting “add THAT TO an AGW trend” which is quite the opposite. He is talking about natural variability causing fluctuation and on top of it a bit of AGW reinforcing it.
Re: ChrisZ (#46),
Yep. What I was getting at was that the AGW trend estimators assumed these natural temperature increases in the positive phase of the PDO, AMO etc were part of the AGW trend, so they need subtracting from it before we add them in as natural variables.
Re: thefordprefect (#47),
Hi Mike, no, I post under the same name on WUWT, but Stephen and I have conversed and found our views complimentary. He has a good understanding as a qualitative oceanographic thinker. I have been doing sums, verified by Leif Svalgaard concerning steric sea level and the heat which must be mixed down into the ocean to account for it. I have asked various oceanographer how heat mixes downwards to great depths, and recieved as many different answers as there are oceanpgraphers to ask. But however it happens, it happens, unless the satellite altimetry and ARGO measurement is up the spout. (Always possible I suppose)
As far as the lag/lead issue with your AMO air temp graphs go, I think there is something going on with resonant harmonics here. I plotted Atmospheric angular momentum against changes in length of day and got some very wierd but interesting interference pattern type results. More on those another time.
Given that the satellite altimetry and ARGO scientists know their stuff, a few observations of a general nature can be made:
Although a sample of water from say 700m down will be cooler than near surface water, the deeper ocean contains a huge amount of energy. There is a mass of other factors including salinity, surface currents, equatorial-arctic flows, vertical columnar flows etc to consider, but trying to keep it simple, there are a few useful general logical deductions which can be made from simple observations.
1) The brute facts of steric sea level rise and direct temperature measurement tell us that the ocean has gained and stored a lot of solar injected heat energy since ocean heat content measurement began in the ’50’s. the long term heat gain can’t be explained with short term seasonal changes in sea temperature or the variation in OHC would be far wilder from basin to basin and between hemispheres.
2) This heat energy is mixed downwards, as can be demonstrated by the observation of the fairly linear fall of temperature from surface to thermocline.
3) There have been times in the past when there has been major ice accretion at the poles. The fact of current steric sea level rise concomitant with ice loss at the poles indicates that there has been steric sea level falls in the past. – The oceans don’t just get hotter and hotter, or they would have boiled away long ago.
4) Therefore, the heat mixed downwards during times of ocean heat accumulation can escape again. Since the heat can’t transfer through the seabed to the hotter mantle, it must rise up and be radiated from the surface.
5) Logically, there must be an equilibrium level of solar input and oceanic heat energy output at which the oceans neither gain nor lose heat energy content.
6) By constructing a simple model, I have determined that this equilibrium level is at a Total solar insolation level equivalent to around 40sunspots/month.
7) The average sunspot number from 1980 – 2003 was well above this value, so the oceans gained heat energy and steric sea level rose.
8) The sunspot level fell below 40 at the beginning of 2004 and hasn’t recovered since. There has been some rejigging of ARGO data, but after the first rejig, ARGO cheif data analyst Josh Willis said in 2008 that since 2003 there had been a “slight cooling” in ocean heat content. Later in an official NASA publication, he backpedalled and said it was about level. Independent researcher Craig Loehle plots a definite fall.
9) Total sea level rise has markedly slowed down in the last 3 years.
10) The latest sea surface temperatures are up, the latest ocean heat content data (preliminary) is showing a steep drop in all basins, especially the north atlantic, which had anomalously high temperatures at the surface during the positive phase ot the AMO.
11) I deduce from the above, that heat energy is rising from the depths and is being radiated into the atmosphere and out into space.
12) Conclusion. It’s going to get colder unless solar cycle 24 pulls it’s socks up and starts producing more than 40 sunspots a month. However, surface temperatures are currently mitigated by the current weak modoki el nino taking place globally and this will mask the situation for the next 12-18 months. After that, surface temperatures will be lower than jan 2007 and we will be heading further downwards in a succession of decreasing amplitude waves of oceanic heat release if the sun stays quiet.
13) The co2 theorists will laugh at me if it gets warmer instead.(unlucky for some) 🙂
I am ready to have my analysis picked apart and criticised, have at it.
Re: tallbloke (#57),
Remember that the ocean has more than one dimension. There is substantial heat flow from the tropics to the poles carried by ocean currents (Gulf Stream, Japan current in the NH) where it can be efficiently radiated to space. The cold water then sinks to the deeps. There is also downward heat flow from the surface (eddy diffusion), but that is almost exactly balanced by upwelling from the deeps, which occurs everywhere. We know this because the ocean temperature profile, particularly the location of the thermocline (on an annual average), is stable over many decades. So ocean heat content changes mainly (~90% or greater) in the upper 700 m of the ocean. About 80% of recent (2003-2008) sea level increase has been from fresh water addition from the melting of land based ice (Antarctica, Greenland and other glacial ice) and only about 20% from thermal expansion ( Cazenave, et.al., 2009 }.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#61),
Thanks for the feedback. Could this upwelling from the deep be what pushes the accumulated ocean heat I am positing towards the surface? Unless the process is being overcome by the downward eddying of heat during high parts of solar cycles?
Maybe this helps my ocean energy absorption/emission phase – solar activity hypothesis along a bit.
Re: tallbloke (#77), “an upwelling from the deeps” would replace a nominal 17C water with 4C water. How can this “accumulated heat” be transfered to the atmosphere at a nominal 17C.
At depth no one seems to dispute that the watrer is cold ~4C. Changing this to 5C would add a vast amount of energy to the ocean. but you then have to retreive this heat when “required”. Conversion of 4C water to vapour would be one way (but not very quick)or waiting a few hundred years for the ocean conveyors to transport heat from the tropics to the pole where 4C is warmer than the Air temp. But then the conveyors are driven by water sinking at the poles (not rising)
Re: thefordprefect (#78),
I know, puzzling isn’t it?
So what’s your view? That the satellite altimetry assessment of steric sea level rise is wrong? Or that were just imagining the cold and it really is getting hotter year on year?
This is the thing. I’m appraoching the issue from the other end on. I’m looking at the large scale phenomena and deducing what must be the case if the measurement is correct. Then I’m looking for clues as to the mechanisms from the oceanographers.
As a way of verifying whether the satellite altimetry is correct I worked out the amount of heat-energy which must have been added to the ocean 1993-2003 to account for the estimated steric rise. Then I worked out what the average increase in temp would be for the top 700m and from that the rise in SST given a reasonably linear falloff from surface to thermocline. It all fits.
So the heat-energy retention must happen somehow, and release must happen somehow, or the oceans would have boiled away long ago. But how?
Re: tallbloke (#80), Look up work by Nir Shaviv who did something similar (last year maybe). Also David Douglass (yes 2 s’s) did a global energy balance you could use (very recent).
Re: Craig Loehle (#84),
Hi Craig, I’ve read Nir Shaviv’s paper on ‘using the oceans as a calorimeter’ if that’s what you are referring to. He demonstrates that there is an amplification of the solar signal (probably by clouds) over the solar cycle. My investigation shows that the occurrence of el nino at minimum and la nina at maximum leads to a masking of the true solar forcing on the climate, and hence an underestimate of the effect of the sun’s longer term variability.
I’ll check the Douglass paper, thanks.
Re: thefordprefect (#78),
And I’d like a side dish of radiation budget explanation if I may.
The ocean surface is at a nominal 17C. The Stefan Bolzman law says it should be kicking around 400W at this temp. But there’s only 170W of solar going in, and the longwave backwash from the atmosphere doesn’t penetrate the ocean. So where’s the missing shilling?
Re: tallbloke (#81),
wiki:
Over the course of a year the average solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 1,366 watts per square meter[1][2] (see solar constant). The radiant power is distributed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, although most of the power is in the visible light portion of the spectrum. The Sun’s rays are attenuated as they pass though the atmosphere, thus reducing the insolation at the Earth’s surface to approximately 1,000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun’s rays at sea level on a clear day
Click to access fulltext.pdf
ADEOS flew over this area around 01
UT, when the OCTS image capturing phytoplankton
blooming was taken. It is almost cloud-free over the sea
except for the southern parts. The corresponding insolation
image shows that the insolation of 800-850 W/m e covers most
of the sea area off the Sanriku coast.
[…]
The image of daily-mean insolation for 26 April, 1997
is made by integrating the hourly insolation, and is shown in
Fig. 5. The daily mean values have 250-300 W/m 2 in a wide
area of the studied ocean. The zonal feature of insolation
decreasing with latitudes is again the reflection of the dailymean
solar zenith angle because of the clear day.
the nominal 17C is for some nominal place on the ocean. The plot from the reference
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/temp.html&edu=high
has this text This temperature-depth profile is what you might expect to find in low to middle latitudes.
Obviously the SST will be higer in the tropics, but so will the insolation. I would suggest that long term average the radiation out (LW)+conduction out+latent heat etc will equal radiation in (SW + surface LW)+ conduction in etc. otherwise you will get your boiling.
Some surface warm water will migrate wit the wind to cooler places where heat will be conducted away. Evaporation will plays a part as of course will night time!
Then I worked out what the average increase in temp would be for the top 700m and from that the rise in SST given a reasonably linear falloff from surface to thermocline. It all fits.
Did you allow for 200m of “surface ocean” before the thermocline starts?
What I have problems with is that you are suggesting heat is locked into the oceans and then released 5 or more years later. All I can see is a continual exchange of energy in and out. If “in” is greater than “out” then ocean temps will rise until in=out.
Re: thefordprefect (#87),
Well yes, that’s the whole point, ocean temp rises over long timescales when you get a run of high solar cycles as in the late C20th. If my blue line on the graph above is correct, the sea surface temperature rose through most of the last century, because the average sunspot count was over 40. This is why I’m asking if you trust the satellite altimetry. After subtracting the ice meltoff, accounting for isostatic bounce etc, you are left with the steric component.
It would seem this has risen for quite a while, and is backed up by ocean heat content measurement since the ’50s, satellite altimetry since the ’90’s, and my cumulative sunspot count revision of SST’s. The thing is, I think when SSTS’s rise, for example in an el nino event, and heat is released, the humidity climbs, the energy radiated from the sea is more absorbed in the atmosphere by water vapour, and air temps rise.
This then acts as a brake on ocean energy emission via thermals and convection. So you since the energy can’t escape upwards at the rate it’s still coming in from the sun, it get’s mixed downwards and stored for the longer term. Then when the sun goes quiet, it get a chance for escape, because the oceans radiates and convects at a higher rate into cooler air, the cooled water at polewards sinks and pushes up the warmer water stored above the thermocline. maybe this then causes a momentum buildup in the release of heat again, it all happens in waves.
I know it’s all half baked, but I see the glimmerings here. Just need your help to put it in better order, if I can get you to see that heat must be stored in the longer term to account for the steric component of sea level rise.
Re: thefordprefect (#78),
Rather than the stored energy “rising from the depths and being radiated at the surface” I think it is more a case of the energy state of the deeper, slowly mixed and warmed waters affecting the rate at which further heat can be mixed downwards from the surface. I think this forces a greater rate of energy emission against the atmosphere’s tendency to damp it through raised air temperature and humidity decreasing the rate at which energy can be emitted from the ocean by convection and evaporation.
Then when the sun goes really quiet, very cold water sinks at the poleward regions and pushes the whole lot upwards. That’s when you gat modoki el nino like at present. And heat leaves the oceans everywhere.
Re: tallbloke (#45),
You have to follow the twists and turns of the story to see why you are confused about long term trends and AGW:
Act 1. Hadley modelers say they know how to model natural variation and it’s been steadily declining lately. From this they can hence deduce that 20th century warming was mostly man-made. The early part of the 20th century cannot however be assumed to be unnatural because a) sunspots were steadily increasing up to 1960 and b) we were recovering from the little ice age. Using these models temperatures are predicted to start shooting up.
Act 2. Predicted warming doesn’t happen. Instead it flattens out. Skeptics reasonably say those models predicting ever rising temperatures are quite obviously crap. Modelers cunningly invent the 30 year limit for trend analysis. Skeptics point out it was only warming from 80 to 98, ie 18 years so their reasoning is as crap as their models. The strict 30 year limit for trend calculations relaxes to 18 years.
Act 3. Hadley finds that natural variation isn’t so miniscule after all – in fact it’s what’s “masking” the warming. Most AGWers adopt this contradictory new excuse but some hardliners prefer a mysterious “weather noise” as it is even less easy to pin down. Skeptics reasonably point out that if this cooling is natural variation then so was a goodly part of that late 20th century warming.
Act 4. To avoid this logical flaw the AGWers now retreat en masse to the rising 20th century trend, conveniently ignoring that they still can’t separate it out from natural variation but ascribing that steady rise to humans just the same. Some skeptics can’t keep up with all this sleight of hand and confusion reigns.
Act 5. Modelers take advantage of the confusion they engendered by saying why they had predicted random flat spots all along and in fact the numerical instability and randomness they see in their model output is clearly, by eye, a dead ringer for actual climate instability and randomness. They delay thermageddon till 2009, then 2015, then 2030.
Re: Neven (#29),
Saturday a 109 year old low-temperature record was shattered in Denver, Colorado. The previous record low for the date was 25 degrees F but Denver recorded 17 degrees F.
This too is just weather.
Re: Neven (#29),
The SST’s maps indicate that a lot of heat is being released from the North Atlantic. The action isn’t always only in the Pacific. I believe this is due to the long solar minimum. When the sunspot count is above 40 or so, the oceans are net gainers of solar heat energy. When the sun is quiet for a while, that energy makes it’s way back to the surface and is released. The last five solar minima have been followed within 12 months by an el nino.
Counterintuitively, solar maximum is often accompanied by la nina and some cold winters. I believe this indicates that the oceans are long term modulators of solar energy. A long run of high amplitude cycles will raise ocean heat content. This is bourne out by the increase in steric sea level observed. The lag in the system means the oceans don’t start releasing the built up energy until a while after the sun goes quiet, and the fact that the ocean has so much more heat capacity than the atmosphere means that it takes quite a while for the heat to dissipate, because when the escaping oceanic heat warms the atmosphere as at present, the increase in humidity traps more heat for longer and suppresses the oceanic output again. This is why we get ‘waves’ of ‘modoki’el nino as the ocean cools. It’s more a diffuse global phenomenon than the big burps of el nino heat release which occur when the pacific warm pool shifts.
These observations form part of a hypothesis I’m developing, which is backed up by some calculations on OHC and steric sea level rise which Leif Svalgaard verified for me. I hope unthreaded is a suitable place where I can get feedback and criticism from well informed people, and that Steve M will allow that.
Re: tallbloke (#41), Thanks, tallbloke, but regardless of the mechanism, if a larger El Niño would be developing or the sunspots would reappear as expected then the hottest year on record would most probably be measured this year or the next. That would be bad advertising for the Global Cooling theory and I believe Pat Michaels has said as much at the last Heartland Conference.
Re: Neven (#43),
Fair enough. I’m more interested in the science than PR.
I think we’ll see the effect of the loss of ocean heat more in a few years time. If that’s too late to stave off legislation or whatever so be it. You can’t hurry mother earth, she’s a big fat lady and will sing when she’s good and ready.
Re: tallbloke (#41),
Are you also posting as Stephen Wilde on the wuwt blog? You seem to be pushing the same ideas!.
SW radiation penetrates sea water further than LW radiation. However, this does not mean that SW radiation penetrates 20m of water suddenly transferring all its energy at that depth. It is progressively absorbed on the way down until at depth there is no more SW radiation left. So IR heats the surface only, UV heats the surface mainly. Air in contact with this sea surface is rapidly heated by the water and the water cools fractionally ONLY if the air temp is less than the water temp. If the water temp is less than the air temp (as it is during the daylight hours – usually) then the air will be cooled and the water warmed very fractionally.
The water temperature varies on a yearly basis round the UK (I assume it does round the rest of the globe?) There is no year long lag in temperature fluctuation as seasons change (perhaps only a month??)
My question to you is the same as it has been to Mr. Wilde – how is the ocean going to store this heat over many years as you suggest and then release it to the atmosphere?
Deep water more than 900m is at 4C 700 m averages 12C and at the surface 22C at an air temp of ????
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/temp.html&edu=high
If the heat is stored in the upper layers then it is continuously losing the “heat” to COOLER air
If it is in layers below 900m then how is 4C water going to up-well to release heat stored at 4C to air at 5C(for example)
Assuming it were possible to get heat energy stored at 4C to transfer the energy to the air at 12C how do you prevent these heat storage layer mixing as the sea slops around for 5 to 10 years?.
I would agree that the oceans act as a big temperature smoothing “capacitor” Reducing the yearly variations. Much more than this I need a better physical explanation for, please.
A further point AMO is often implicated in controlling air temperatures. This was posted on wuwt:
Comparing AMO with Hadcrut3V and Hadcrut3NH there is a wonderful correlation not so good with CET:
Apart from the increased trend caused by ?something? All the slow humps and dips appear in the right places and even the rapid changes appear aligned (to the eye!)
So if we zoom in and look at the signals through a much longer moving average the dips again align.
The dips in HADCRUT seem to occur a few months ahead of AMO and the peaks are a bit off. Not sure what CET has little correlation but hey, there must be a connection.
If Air Temp is driving AMO then one would expect the air temp changes to occur before AMO
and
Vice Versa.
So now lets look at the same date range through shorter moving averages.
Now it becomes interesting. sometimes the air temp leads amo and sometimes amo leads air temp.
If amo drives temp then there is no way that amo can lag air temperature.
and
vice versa
To me this says that there is a external driver, or the data is faulty.
Any thoughts?
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#47), Thanks for this Ford. Interesting graphs.
“If amo drives temp then there is no way that amo can lag air temperature.
and
vice versa”
Similar argument to the paleo reconstructions of CO2 and temperature.
Ed
Re: thefordprefect (#47),
Thanks, fordprefect, great charts.
Is there by any chance something similar done for the PDO, or could you point me to where and how I might do them myself. The correlation between these and temps seems awfully close. I wonder could the leading and lagging be attributed to the strength of the sunspot cycle at the various times, i.e. strong SS cycle = leading, weak = lagging?
Re: thefordprefect (#47),
Fogive me if i’m wrong but long wave penetrates water further than short wave, I think. It’s one of the reasons that sonar is audible and that radio comms with submarines was at the very long wavelengths.
Re: stephen richards (#51),
Some interseting stuff but not too useful:
Click to access 26010052.pdf
http://science.jrank.org/pages/4836/Ocean-Zones-Water-depth-vs-light-penetration.html
Click to access 2003_Vasilkov_et_al_UV_radiation_SPIE.pdf
This is the one:
Click to access 29060257.pdf
IR whacks the water molecules into motion UV less so – check the absoption bands of water vapour.
Re: stephen richards (#51),
Stephen, here is a graph with the absorption coefficients for the UV to IR range, which shows that IR is completely absorbed in the upper fraction of a mm in (pure) water. Seawater may be slightly different but I suppose not for the IR part:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter06/Images/Fig6-17.htm
Water vapor is a huge absorber of IR light too…
Radio/sonar waves are of much longer length and therefore may behave different again…
There was a short discussion of this topic at CA in 2005: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=213 but several of the links don’t work anymore.
Re: thefordprefect (#47), Detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies correlate with temperatures in the North Atlantic region? No WAI!
Re: ChrisZ (#46), Bingo, you win a prize! My gratitude.
Re: bender (#42), Thanks.
Re: Andrew (#53), you are correct they do not correlate – cf central england temperature
Re: thefordprefect (#47),
You have obviously never measured relative humidity with a wet bulb thermometer. I have seen a wet bulb thermometer come close to freezing in the summer in Pasadena, CA when the relative humidity was on the order of 5% and the air temperature was 100 F. Low humidity hot air will cool water. That’s the principle behind the swamp cooler.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#59),
Glad you saved me the effort of making essentially the same point to TFP. There’s also the point that IR radiation is absorbed so close to the surface that it does a much better job of evaporation than the heat absorbed by SW radiation, which typically is in the mixed layer of the sea surface and thus will present a much lower temperature to the sea surface.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#59) & Dave Dardinger (#60)
On some other thread you will find I have referenced this effect.
But as you rightly say it is a surface effect and will not transfer heat from 700metres down to the surface
Re: PaulM (#58) This wasmy intended point. There are similarities in temperatures and AMO BUT they are not the same. If sst was driving air temp (AT) then AT would lag SST but imperceptively. If AT was driving SST then there would be a significant lag. The plots show phase differences of about +-1year
I have replotted with CRUTEM3V (no sea temps) and TSI. Notice that TSI is not synchronous and again CRUT is not in phase with AMO.
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#47),
This penetration of *seawater* seems to assume it is just water, when in reality the matter is literally somewhat murky.
Are there any real figures for various conditions etc.?
Given suspended matter what is the path length?
This will be further confused by the incident angle and by surface roughness.
A snippet? Why are visible light, preferably green light supermarket barcode scanners used?
Answer: because longer wavelength penetrates through the top layer of some labels. The whole subject of what gets through what is highly complex. Generally longer wavelength penetrates more so water allowing through UV is unusual.
Re: Tim Channon (#66),
Question: what is the wavelength of lasers used in surgery so as not to boil the blood (water)?
🙂
Neven, we had warm and dry September in Central Europe as well, although we had warmer Septembers in 30ties and 40ties. It was just persistent flow of warm and dry air from the south-west. Forecast for the rest of October is well bellow normal – persistent influx of Arctic air: http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
Similar blip in temperatures has happened often in the past – for example http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1870/to:1890
PDO want temporarily back to positive anomaly, AMO as well and on top we have had weak El Nino. However, check that cold water tongue along the Peruvian coast:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
When the equatorial Pacific will be all blue, check the temps again.
87F in Germany for Oktoberfest?
Holy wienerschnitzel!
Re: buppity (#31),
All of Germany? Really?
Cold as hell here north of Seattle… It’s just weather.
Thank you very much Anonymoose #16 for assisting with my request #12 for information on corridor standardisation, which had bobbed up in the Briffa Yamal story. The book cited by Anonymoose #16 has a section on this method which is available on the net.
Caveat: I’m not a statistician. What follows may be poppycock. But the book cited by Anonymoose #16 seems to be saying that corridor variations are assumed to be biological not climatic (p.122). Did I read this correctly? Is this method indeed indifferent to climate? If so, what kind of information is the method good for?
Andrew #32
Everyone..? Don’t you know people who don’t know and choose not to guess?
Re: Tony Hansen (#36), According to:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/everyone
And as far as me knowing people, evidently my last remark about people I or others associate with was a little too clever by half for the proprietor of this fine establishment.
What’s the betting that skeptic slayer Tom P is actually a representative from Tamino’s Open Mind (TOM) with the P standing for who knows what?
Juraj V.,
Thank you very much for the link to Joel Norris’ most recent work on clouds. I look forward to reading it in detail. Many of the readers here may be familiar with Dr. Norris’ work on the effect of cloud cover on global surface temperatures. If you are, you know that Joel Norris represents the best of climate research; that is, he asks relevant scientific questions and pursues the uncovering of reality through the use of scientific method. If you are not, please watch the following lecture available on YouTube:
This is how science should be done.
or vice versa.
@Jeff Alberts
I’m living in Germany and it certainly isn’t 87°F.
It’s not even 77, 67 or 57. Right now it’s closer to 47°F.
And it isn’t about to warm up either.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
Ford et al, could it not be the case that Hadcrut3 and AMO correlate because they both use the same data, namely SST?!
Interesting video of a man questioning Al Gore regarding errors in his book and movie and the journalists running the show cut the mic to stop any followup questions. Pretty funny stuff.
Tallbloke,
During El Nino, heat is released from the ocean. During La Nina, heat is gained. Would you agree with that?
Based on the recent Levitus 2009 update reported at Bob Tisdale’s blog, it would appear an enormous amount of heat has been released and that is what we’re seeing in the satellite (and near surface for that matter) measures. Accordingly, if El Nino is still building there should be yet more heat pumping into the atmosphere and in time, whatever that lag is, an equal or stronger negative response in surface/LT temperatures will materialize or so it seems. There doesn’t appear to be such a large drop in OHC during the 1997/1998 El Nino and yet 1999 air temps dropped like a rock, so one can only speculate what this round will bring.
The Arctic region OHC has been steadily falling most of the year and if current weather conditions are any indication, we in the U.S. are in for one wild winter.
In any event, to me what all this means is a setup for one huge La Nina coming our way. Your thoughts?
BTW, I don’t recall any climate models predicting this.
Re: DG (#66),
There are several things going on here. Broadly, yes, but the situation now is very different to the ’98 el nino. Now, we have heat escaping from the ocean at places all over the globe simultaneously. This is what the Japanese call ‘modoki’ el nino. Loosely translated the word means shadow or imitation. In ’98 there was a huge burp of energy released from the pacific warm pool. It spread out higher SST’s following this big upwelling. The PWP is a subsurface region of warm water which grows and warms under the influence of a strong sun and the circulation of the wind and currents. The key point is that it doesn’t show up in surface measurements properly in terms of the energy gain. So the heat release from the PWP, because it is a geographically limited area compared to the vast world ocean, didn’t affect the overall OHC graphs much.
Another thing to remember is that the minimum between solar cycle 22 and 23 was short. The El nino follows minimum as I explained earlier, because the oceans go into heat upwelling and release mode when the sunspot count drops below about 40. But there is a lag while the process gets going, and by the time the ’98 el nino occurred, solar cycle 23 was already ramping up rapidly to a high amplitude. This forced the oceans back into heat absorption mode relatively quickly, which is why the ’98 el nino subsides quickly and has a big trough in surface temps following.
But at the moment the sun is dormant, and although the upwelling of heat energy from the ocean hasn’t ramped up to ’98 levels, SST’s are remaining at highish levels as the energy from below surfaces. There is no ramp up of solar cycle 24 to reverse the energy flow and suppress the heat release, so I predict the low level ‘modoki’ el nino will continue for quite a while, mitigating surface temps in maritime climates this winter. It might get pretty cold futher inland though. The layering of energy in the ocean means that the current wave of energy release will subside, and with a quiet sun not replacing the overall energy lost from the ocean, surface temps will fall to below jan 2007 levels within the next 14-17 months if my hypothesis is anywhere near right.
I realise my ideas are at odds with previous understanding of ocean heat retention, and it’s hard to get taken seriously. Maybe if my prediction is proved correct, people will come back to this stuff and work on it with me.
Just to pique a bit more interest, I’d like to post a graph I’ve produced which reproduces the history of global temperature from sunspot number and variation in length of day, which I use here as a proxy for geomagnetic activity. The sunspot number component is a cumulative series which successively adds and subtracts the differences between the monthly sunspot number and the 40SSN value I have determined as being the equilibrium value for the oceans.
I think the obvious discrepancy around 1940 is due to the methods failure to capture el nino events properly, and the engine cooling intake sensor issues covered here at CA.
Re DG #66
Can’t see it. The Nino3.4 index has been positive in recent months and looks more like an El Nino pattern to me:
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/climate/indicator_enso.jsp?c=nino34&p=monthly
Re: Jimmy (#68), Maybe DG meant El Nino since that’s what’s been in the press. However, “huge” doesn’t seem to be on the horizon in either case.
Mark
Re: Mark T (#71),
I was referring to after this current El Nino (which doesn’t appear to be reaching 2007 levels) fades. With OHC dropping as it were, how can there be any response to that but surface temperatures dropping once the heat is moved out into space? Hence, a “huge” La Nina if not a general unrelated cooling.
Based on historical UAH LT data, it is very rare to see LT temperatures rise more than 3-4 months before diving back downward. With the oceans dumping so much heat into the air, that may not be the rule this time around. Last winter there was an off-the-chart SSW (sudden stratospheric warming) that was followed by 3-4 consecutive month drops in global temps as a result. I’m wondering if that is what we’re seeing now only on a more global OHC scale.
Just my thoughts.
Re: Jimmy (#69), That’s not even a one sigma event. Plus, look at the SOI:
Barely Negative (-SOI corresponds to +ENSO)
Re: mitchell porter (#82), The problem is that Milankovitch effects involve changes in received radiation at particular latitudes not a global average TOA forcing like CO2. This inhomogeneity is very important.
I recommend:
Click to access 171nocephf.pdf
Re: Jimmy (#69),
Jimmy, also look at SOI. It is not indicating a strengthening El Nino.
Lord Monckton is appealing to Ofcom for “fairness complaint” over BBC documentary.
Re: Gene Nemetz (#70),
sorry for the year old news, yes, my face is red
Mr. McIntyre, let me announce it here first. You have been awarded the First Annual Sanity in Global Warming award, by unanimous vote of SF Environmental Policy examiners. You will have to wait 10 years before any possible remuneration, but if Joe Romm loses his bet on temperatures over the next decade and pays up, you will receive $1,000. Of course, inflation will almost certainly take its toll over this period, so even if you get the check it may only buy you a hot fudge sundae and a cup of coffee. You certainly deserve more.
I knew about the absorption of IR in H²O but as you say it is a thin film effect and can therefore be reradiated very quickly, no lag.
Hello Climate Audit. Is there any consensus here as to why the difference in temperature between a glacial and an interglacial is so large? People who believe in a climate sensitivity of 3 degrees can say it’s due to the variation in CO2. But if you don’t think CO2 makes that much of a difference, how do you explain it? Because by my readings the variation in insolation due to the Milankovitch cycles is completely inadequate to produce the change directly.
Re: mitchell porter (#74),
That’s fascinating. Just because your calculations (which we must believe are accurate) says that solar variation due to Milankovic cycles is inadequate THEREFORE it must be CO2.
Yet high resolution studies on CO2 in icecores always shows that CO2 rise and fall always happens centuries AFTER the temperature rises and falls. So how can CO2 cause something that already happened 800-1000 years later? Answer that one without involving time travel and you’re well on your way to a Nobel Prize.
And no, rising CO2 does not make the warming happen faster. That doesn’t happen either.
Everyone keeps saying that CO2 follows temp rise by a few hundred years. Here are a few plots that show that rising temperatures occur at a very similar time to rising CO2. There is no great delay:
The plots are from EPICA data, mainly, not VOSTOK
The time scales are reversed (years before present)
The plots show temperature rise pretty much co-incident with CO2 rise. (samples are often too widly separated to safely say which came first!
CO2 in most cases rises at the “same time” as temperature. CH4 seems to terminate the warm period in many cases. Data is from EPICA core as this is more detailed than vostok. BUT core dates can still be spaced at over 2k years per sample in some periods. N2O and O3 have not been plotted.
Where is the data that shows temperature rise precedes CO2?
0 to 40,000 years. GISP2 and EPICA temperatures plotted on this graph. Co2 steady rise is simultaneous with temperature @17500ybp
note that only greenland gisp2 temperature shows a definite younger dryas – the antarctic EPICA data shows a flattening only.The EPICA CH4 data shows a misplaced drop around the younger dryas. Note the dust levels during the low temperature portion.
40k to 100k years Note the dust levels are non zero during this period and high during the low temperature portion.
100k to 200k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @136kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
180k to 260k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @252kybp. the 220kybp is less defined. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 and CO2 termination of warm periods
280k to 360k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @341kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm periods
360k to 460k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @432kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
460k to 560k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @532kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
560k to 650k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @629.5kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2,CH4 termination of warm period
650k to 760k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @740.5kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2,CH4 termination of warm period @694kybp. Note dip at 722kybp has no CH4/Co2 driving. It is possible that dust level rises at this time but granularity of dust data is not sufficiently small to line up.
750k to 800k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @796kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2 termination of warm period
Methane data is from:
Loulergue, L., et al.. 2008.
EPICA Dome C Ice Core 800KYr Methane Data.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology
Data Contribution Series # 2008-054.
NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Age scale is gas age
CO2 data is from
0-22 kyr BP: Dome C (Monnin et al. 2001) measured at University of Bern
22-393 kyr BP: Vostok (Petit et al. 1999; Pepin et al. 2001; Raynaud et al. 2005) measured at LGGE in Grenoble
393-416 kyr BP: Dome C (Siegenthaler et al. 2005) measured at LGGE in Grenoble
416-664 kyr BP: Dome C (Siegenthaler et al. 2005) measured at University of Bern
664-800 kyr BP: Dome C (Luethi et al. (sub)) measured at University of Bern
Age scale is gas age
I assume the gas age takes into account the delay in trapping?
The age used is EDC3 and a comparison between dome fuji and vostok is here
The EDC3 chronology for the EPICA Dome C ice core
Click to access cp-3-485-2007.pdf
gas to ice age 0-41k
Click to access cp-3-527-2007.pdf
“Although the exact causes of the 1arge
overestimate remain unknown, our work implies that the suggested
lag of CO2 on Antarctic temperature at the start of the
last deglaciation has probably been overestimated.”
Pielke Snr has a few interesting items up currently.
“Major Issues With The Realism Of The IPCC Models Reported By Graeme Stephens Of Colorado State University”
“This presentation by Greame Stephens highlights the inability of the IPCC models to make skillful preditions of climate decades into the future on the global scale, much less the regional spatial scales.
Regional assessments based on the IPCC model results in such reports as the CCSP series (as well as the set of talks moderated by Tom Karl, Director of the National Climate Data Center and current President of the American Meteorological Society (e.g. see) are flawed, scientifically unsuported reports and are misleading policymakers.”
And..
“Is 2 US$ Billion Dollars Worth Spending On Improved Multi-Decadal Global Model Predictions?”
Get on that gravy train!
John A (#75): the idea is that orbital forcing produces an initial warming, which produces an outgassing of ocean CO2, which itself produces further warming, and you have positive feedback until geographic limits are reached – in this case, to the melting of glacial-era ice sheets. (Or it goes in the other direction, with cooling, uptake of CO2, and glaciation.)
But there aren’t any calculations of mine here. You can find a statement of the changes in insolation produced by the Milankovitch cycles on page 17 of the PhD thesis of K.H. Nisancioglu:
Click to access Nisancioglu.2004.pdf
And I see on page 8 of Hansen’s 2008 Bjerknes lecture, an exercise in curvefitting meant to quantify the global warming induced by CO2 and NH3, on the basis of the ice-core records:
Click to access AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
I think in both cases they are just citing someone else’s calculations. It would be better to find the primary sources. But these are propositions that should interest AGW skeptics, because the data is solid (the ice cores), and the calculations can’t be that hard (insolation, curvefitting), and yet this is apparently where the 3-degrees climate sensitivity value comes from.
Re: mitchell porter (#82),
Nope. The ice cores show unambiguously that temperature rises strongly and then eight hundred to a thousand years later CO2 begins to rise. The temperatures do not rise faster because of rising CO2 and temperatures then level and fall while CO2 is still rising. There are no exceptions. No forcing effect from CO2, just centuries delayed response.
Anything else other than assertions?
Re: John A (#110), I’ll post this in parts as otherwise it will get binned as spam:
The plots are from EPICA data, mainly not VOSTOK
The time scales are reversed (years before present)
The plots show temperature rise pretty much co-incident with CO2 rise. (samples are often too widly separated to safely say which came first!
————————
Does temperature precede GHG change?
Some plots
CO2 in most cases rises at the same time as temperature. CH4 seems to terminate the warm period in many cases. Data is from EPICA core as this is more detailed than vostok. BUT core dates can still be spaced at over 2k years per sample in some periods. N2O and O3 have not been plotted.
Where is the data that shows temperature rise precedes CO2?
0 to 40,000 years. GISP2 and EPICA temperatures plotted on this graph. Co2 steady rise is simultaneous with temperature @17500ybp
note that only greenland gisp2 temperature shows a definite younger dryas – the antarctic EPICA data shows a flattening only.The EPICA CH4 data shows a misplaced drop around the younger dryas. Note the dust levels during the low temperature portion.
40k to 100k years Note the dust levels are non zero during this period and high during the low temperature portion.
more:
Duh, I mean CH4, not NH3.
I know that it’s just weather, but it’s been cold in Canada. We had frost warnings in Toronto over the weekend. There was snow in Winnipeg and parts of the Prairies. Most people have been complaining that we didn’t have a summer. People are amazed to read that it was supposedly one of the warmest summers in the instrumental record overall.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#90),
The wife of my co-workers here in the midwest US works for a large electric utility, and their peak cooling day this year was in late June, the earliest it has been in 70 years. Many parts of the eastern US had the coolest July on record (100+ years). Fall started mild, but has turned very wet and cold, and we’ve already had frost twice here in St. Louis.
It was a totally different story in the west and southwest. Seems like the jet stream pretty much bisected the continent all summer.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#90),
It was very cool in Illinois this summer. We didn’t run our AC more than a few days.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#90), “People are amazed to read that it was supposedly one of the warmest summers in the instrumental record overall.”
Could this be because nights have been warmer?
A few days I wrote my idiosyncratic weather report here about records being broken in Germany. I don’t know for the rest of the country but here in Bavaria it’s effing cold! In a few days time my car thermometer went down from 28C to 4C. And it’s been snowing in the Alps too. Could this be due to the relative high temps in the Arctic?
Same here. We’ve already had snow several times, including the last day of summer. This past weekend was one of the strangest “frosts” you’ve ever seen (which included a little snow). I’m sure MrPete had it even worse on the very north side of town.
Mark
Weather has been good in the UK. I think you are getting the tail end of Typhoon Melor over there.
Re: tallbloke (#92),
It obviously depends on where you are! Not been that good in North Wales this ‘summer’. So how valid can GISS, HADCRU, NOAA be in measuring world temperature?
Is the latter even possible?
Re: Dave Andrews (#105),
See Mosh’s link at #102 and WUWT post by D’Aleo today
The folks in central Texas would not be at all surprised that the summer was warm. In Austin in July, the high temperature was over 100 degrees for 29 of 31 days. August wasn’t much better. OTOH, here in TN, the weather was mild with lots of rain. I had to do some serious dandelion killing this fall. I don’t remember having to do that in past years.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#94),
My wife and I used to live in Texas, and still have lots of friends there. It was funny corresponding with them this summer. It was like talking about two different planets just 700 miles apart.
Lowest Maxes for the 12th
Total Number of Records for October 12, 2009
(out of 5,301 stations with at least 30 years of data)
New: 466 + Tied: 91 = Total: 557
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=lomx&month=10&day=12&year=2009&sts%5B%5D=US&submitted=Get+Records#recs
Lowest mins for 12th
Total Number of Records for October 12, 2009
(out of 5,307 stations with at least 30 years of data)
New: 101 + Tied: 42 = Total: 143
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=mint&month=10&day=12&year=2009&sts%5B%5D=US&submitted=Get+Records#recs
Texas has joined the records as well.
I think the word is out!!! At last we are beginning to wake up, even here in Australia!!!
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/wise_australia_starting_to_reject_this_dodgy_disaster/
I thought this was relevant to the discussions on peer review. If your buddies are the ones reviewing what you’ve done it may be a “peer” review but worthless from a scientific standpoint: From ARS Technica
Hockey stick spotting at the Beeb
I don’t want to claim responsibility, but I complained to the BBC news website last week that they were still using the hockey stick graphic all over the place, citing the way it has been discredited (in no small measure by the tireless work of our host), and since then a load of them – though not all – seem to have been replaced with a rather nice earth graphic. Am I just dreaming?
Re: Austin (#100),
Interesting. Specific links to examples?
Dear all
I’m seeking some reliable data on the amount of CO2 being released by human activity relative to natural sources. A recent article at http://climaterealists.com/?id=4059 by Norm Kalmanovitch used the IPCC TAR to infer that human sources account for around 4% of sources.
Can anyone point me to a reliable source of information on the relative contribution of fossil fuel burning to the total of CO2 being released? I don’t count the IPCC as a reliable source.
Ed
Re: EddieO (#101),
Oh, please! This is one of those lines of pseudo-argument which just makes rational AGW skeptics look bad. Of course the amount of CO2 released each year is small compared to the amound cycling through the biosphere. But humans don’t re-absorb the CO2 they release unlike natural biota. So about half of it gets left in the atmosphere each year (while the rest helps green the earth.) Yes, the AGW alarmists ignore things which raise doubts about their theories, but this isn’t one of them.
Re: Dave Dardinger (#112),
Dave, what is kalmanovitch trying to say in his article? I think he is trying to claim that the annual increase in total quantity of CO2 being released from fossil fuels is only 4% of the total increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.
However I suspect he is confusing his “increases in emissions” with “total emissions”
I have since found a useful link at where the author claims that
Re: EddieO (#133),
Where in your link does the 4% get implied. I see values stated (7 gtc/y released and 4 gtc/y retained), not percentages.
Re: rpink (#134),
The link was in my first post number 101 above. http://climaterealists.com/?id=4059
I pressed the submit button by accident on the second post (133) before I completed the post, oops sorry. The second link is to a much clearer document which gives the 7 gtc/y and 4 gtc/y figures. http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html
Ed
A good read
Some kudo’s and maybe some financial rewards for Steve . . .
“First annual award for global warming sanity”
http://tinyurl.com/yhfmby5
Can someone please tell me, or point me in the right direction, the actual process of how CO2 is supposed to warm the climate (according to the IPCC)? How much heat energy is it supposed to retain in the atmosphere? And for how long? It is lost at night? How can it warm the oceans? I’ve seen so many different models of this process. What percent of any “greenhouse effect” is CO2 supposed to contribute? I’ve seen many different figures on this, as well.
Why isn’t there runaway greenhouse effect? If H2O vapor is a “greenhouse gas”, how does the system know what percent of heating is coming from it, as opposed to CO2? Wouldn’t a slight increase in humidity cause much more “greenhouse effect” that even a large increase in CO2?
What percent of atmospheric heating is caused by: the sun’s infrared energy, the ground’s/ocean’s infrared radiation, contact with the ground/oceans?
Thanks!!
Re: Gene B (#106),
Several scientists presented some information that I think answers your questions. Other sessions there are also worth a look: http://www.naturalclimatechange.info/
Re: Gene B (#106),
Look at sessions 2 and 6 at the link I’ve provided above to answer your questions. As I said the other sessions are worth a look for a number of reasons.
Re: scientific method (#109),
Thanks — I’ll take a look.
have you seen this document?
Click to access 0707.1161v4.pdf
Re: Gene B (#111),
Yes I’ve seen this before. I can’t make a comment as I don’t fully understand the physics. Perhaps one day I will spend the time to digest it.
Ran across this, in which the “he”, as a synedoche, pretty well describes the Team: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” – Andrew Lang 1844-1912
cont:
100k to 200k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @136kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
180k to 260k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @252kybp. the 220kybp is less defined. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 and CO2 termination of warm periods
280k to 360k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @341kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm periods
360k to 460k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @432kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
cont:
460k to 560k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @532kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CH4 termination of warm period
560k to 650k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @629.5kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2,CH4 termination of warm period
650k to 760k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @740.5kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2,CH4 termination of warm period @694kybp. Note dip at 722kybp has no CH4/Co2 driving. It is possible that dust level rises at this time but granularity of dust data is not sufficiently small to line up.
750k to 800k years Co2 rises simulaneously with temperature @796kybp. Note the dust levels are high during the low temperature portion. CO2 termination of warm period
Methane data is from:
Loulergue, L., et al.. 2008.
EPICA Dome C Ice Core 800KYr Methane Data.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology
Data Contribution Series # 2008-054.
NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Age scale is gas age
CO2 data is from
0-22 kyr BP: Dome C (Monnin et al. 2001) measured at University of Bern
22-393 kyr BP: Vostok (Petit et al. 1999; Pepin et al. 2001; Raynaud et al. 2005) measured at LGGE in Grenoble
393-416 kyr BP: Dome C (Siegenthaler et al. 2005) measured at LGGE in Grenoble
416-664 kyr BP: Dome C (Siegenthaler et al. 2005) measured at University of Bern
664-800 kyr BP: Dome C (Luethi et al. (sub)) measured at University of Bern
Age scale is gas age
I assume the gas age takes into account the delay in trapping?
The age used is EDC3 and a comparison between dome fuji and vostok is here
The EDC3 chronology for the EPICA Dome C ice core
Click to access cp-3-485-2007.pdf
gas to ice age 0-41k
Click to access cp-3-527-2007.pdf
“Although the exact causes of the 1arge
overestimate remain unknown, our work implies that the suggested
lag of CO2 on Antarctic temperature at the start of the
last deglaciation has probably been overestimated.”
—————————–
In nearly all cases rise in co2 is “simultaneous with rise in temp – I see no century long delays.
Fall in temp seems to be more to do with CH4 falling
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#120),
Is CO2 leading or following T today as both can be measured simultaneously?
Mr McIntyre – any reason for deleting my posts in reply to John A (#110). The were referenced plots of CO2 vs temp etc for epica and vostok cores showing simultaneous co2 and temp rise?
Mike
Steve: Nothing was deleted. A few were cleared from the filter.
Re: thefordprefect (#121),
I suspect that Akismet may have delayed your posts because of the large number of links. They are back now.
As to the assertion that CO2 and temperature were “simulataneous” I have already stated that the delay between CO2 and temperature is around 800-1000 years. All of your graphs are too low time resolution to show this, especially on carbon dioxide.
Here is one that does have the right resolution:
Ref: “Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination”, Monnin et al. (Science, vol.291, p.112, 5 Jan 2001)
Re: John A (#125), expanding the same data gives this plot:
My data shows near simultaneous rise for epica and 1800 year diff erence between co2 rise (1st) and gisp temp rise – where do they get their data from?
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#126),
A linear plot of CO2 gives a false impression of simultaneity between CO2 and temp. Forcing is a function of the logarithm of the ratio of CO2(t) to CO2(initial). Plotting the log ratio makes the lag in the Dome C data more obvious. Show me a mechanism other than a temperature increase that would cause CO2 to increase. I haven’t been able to find one. Absent such a mechanism, CO2 must lag temperature. But the argument that CO2 lagging temperature invalidates CO2 forcing is fallacious.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#128), yes, but likewise, despite scrupulous searching, I’ve found absolutely no evidence of CO2 forcing (from the ice records) either. I’ve found RC and others claiming that CO2 forcing kicks in. But nobody gives any evidence. By all means, prove me wrong. I’m open to evidence.
Re: Lucy Skywalker (#129),
I think it’s reasonable to conclude that CO2 amplifies the temperature swing because the atmospheric radiative transfer physics are very compelling. However, I don’t think it’s possible to determine from the ice core data alone by how much. I’ve been doing some research on the topic of glacial/interglacial transitions and the subject seems to me to still be very much unsettled. For example, what caused the Antarctic Cold Reversal? Did the Antarctic Cold Reversal trigger Younger Dryas and if so, how? How exactly do the Milankovitch cycles trigger a glacial/interglacial transition? What is the contribution from ice/albedo feedback? Any model must answer those questions during its construction and whether the model builders choose correctly or not is still undetermined. So any determination of CO2 amplification and by inference climate sensitivity from model calculations has very large error bars. But the error bars do not include zero effect.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#138),
You are speaking metaphorically, I assume? You don’t have a specific calculation and graphic in mind, do you?
Re: bender (#140),
Yes. Sorry about that. Revise ‘has’ to ‘should have’, ‘do not include’ to ‘would not include’ and add ‘in my opinion’.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#141),
No problem. Just want to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#138),
By CO2 amplifying temperature swing I assume you mean that in a period of rising temperatures, which generally corrolates with sea surface temperatures, there’s a natural release of CO2, primarliy from the ocean, which in turn, because of its properties as a greenhouse gas should cause some (unknown amount of)additional warming, and the converse is also true that in a period of falling termperatures there’s a natural sequestration of CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and accelerating the cooling. But in the case of burning fossil fuels, the release of CO2 into the atmosphere may keep increasing regardless, causing it to be warmer (again, by some unknown amount) than it otherwise would have been, wouldn’t it? If that’s true, wouldn’t increasing anthropogenic CO2 amplify only warming and mitigate cooling?
Re: DeWitt Payne (#128), my response was to John A (#110),
I was pointing out that from the data to hand co2 and temperature appear to rise “simultaneously”. And do so at each exit from iceage. I would suggest nothing about forcing or cause and effect from these simple plots. There is certainly reason to doubt John A’s definitave statement however!
One interesting observation from 0-40k and 10k to 20k plots is the misalignment of the CH4 dip during the younger dryas.
The YD temperature fall causes a sudden drop in CH4 but delayed by 600years the rise is delayed by 400years. If this were a natural phenomena then shouldn’t the reduction in co2 be a negative slope triggered by the start of the temp fall and the start of a temp rise should trigger a climb back to normal CH4 levels. The displaced sharp drop looks more like a misalignment of dates than an actual delayed response.
Re: thefordprefect (#130),
Has the lag never been formally quantified? Be sure in your reply.
Re: thefordprefect (#130),
Aha, DWP in #128 has outed you already, I see. “Thanks for playing” – as the alarmists like to trumpet.
Re: thefordprefect (#130),
ford, you’ve done a 180 reversal here. When you thought there was no lag you were prepared to accept the idea that the degree of lag was indicative of strength of causality (co2->gmt). Now that you are told there is a lag, you do not accept it as in indicator of causality. Double-standards and flaky reversals such as this are characteristic of a propagandist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but is willing to make it up in order to win an argument or advance an opinion. It’s shameful.
Re: bender (#139),
Re: thefordprefect (#130),
thefordprefect (#117), does not mention CO2 doing anything all I was trying to do was to correct the statements in John A (#110) where he says CO2 Rise follows temp rise by a few hundred years. My post thefordprefect (#126) again is just a clarification to John A (#125) as he still claimed CO2 lagging temp.
In post thefordprefect (#130) I make this statement:
I stand by the statements I made above.
I do not understand you snark (teenage angst perhaps?)
I wouild also like to point out that the Gisp2 data is NH and the Vostok/epica is SH in case your youth caused you to miss this fact. Comparing CH4 CO2 and temperatures from 2 poles that seem to have different thermal responses is not very sensible.
Apart from the 500 year shift to present of the CH4 data there is also the YD to consider. The SH temperatures only mildly reflect this event whereas the Gisp cores show a drop of 10C.
Your attitude to others on this blog is shameful.
Re: thefordprefect (#149),
You can stand by your statements if you like. It’s not your statements that I dispute. It’s your assumptions – which are obvious to anyone who reads what you’ve written – that I’m pointing at.
Re: thefordprefect (#149),
In #126 you say:
In #128 DWP says:
Do you “stand by this statement” of yours? Or would you like to amend it?
Re: bender (#154), Does DWP stand by his statement? Logging a variable does not stop it increasing at the same point as if linear. It makes it less noticable that is all.
The plot in John A (#125) does not use log CO2 to show lag, why should I use log CO2 to prove no lag?
Re: thefordprefect (#158),
Well, this is precisely why I ask for a statistic and reject graphical eyeballing. I assume DWP has one to offer … do you?
Re: thefordprefect (#158),
Is the goal here to understand whether or not there is a lag, or to refute John A?
Re: bender (#160), Bender, All I was doing was proving John A was wrong. As far as any intelligent being can see the CO2 rises at around the same time as temperature.
It is all very silly –
What proof is there that CO2 concentration is representative after 17000 years encased in ice.
The cores for CO2 are from the Antactic. This does not respond the same as the arctic (YD is not consistent)
CH4 seems to be incorrectly dated in my view (it is only a view)
I cannot prove CO2 rise precedes temp rise and you cannot prove that Temp rise precedes CO2.
John A made a definitive statement that he cannot prove your selective eyeball choses to ignore his statement of fact(error).
Bender since your seeming bid for ownership of this blog it has become a place of polarised aguments instead of a place for exchange of information. Sad really.
Re: thefordprefect (#163),
I’m leaving soon.
Re: thefordprefect (#164),
What in the world are you talking about, TFP? There are always arguments going on here; at least when there isn’t much actual science being discussed. Using an adjective like “polarised” is superfluous. Arguments by definition polarize between people who agree with one side or another. What has actually happened is a bunch of old and new AGW zealots have shown up as soon as Steve was able to show how poor the Briffa data was. The purpose of such people (yourself included) is not to exchange information but to attempt to deflect exchange and to spread falsehoods. Bender is primarily trying to force people to follow the rules.
Re: thefordprefect (#159),
From my post on The Air Vent:
Graph of deltaD and ln(CO2(t)/CO2(0)
I prefer to link images rather than post them because that uses much less bandwidth.
deltaD is the change from the natural ratio in the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the ice which is a proxy for temperature. Note that the initial rate of change of the log ratio is very small so there is in fact a lag before there is enough of an increase to cause a significant effect on temperature as the effect on temperature is assumed to be a linear function of the log ratio for small changes in the log ratio rather than the concentration.
This graph includes a line for CO2 calculated from deltaD using an exponential time lag using the following equations.
Equation 1
CO2(t)=CO2(t-1)+(CO2e(t)-CO2(t-1))*(1-exp(-(delta t)/tau)
delta t is the difference between t and t-1 in years (the sampling interval isn’t constant and some data had to be linearly interpolated so the sampling times matched.
Equation 2
CO2e(t) = m*deltaD(t)+k
and
m = 1.98225
k = 1062.88
tau = 2496.272
Tau is in years and CO2 is in ppmv rather than the log ratio.
When the calculated CO2 is regressed against the measured CO2, R2 is 0.98 and the F statistic is 4037. The 95% confidence intervals of the slope and intercept included 1 and 0 respectively. At least in the Dome C ice core data, I therefore cannot reject the hypothesis that CO2 concentration is a function of temperature and that there is a significant lag between the increase in temperature and the increase in CO2 concentration. The mechanism I suggest is that CO2 uptake by the SH ocean (the major CO2 sink on the millenial scale) is slower at higher temperature while outgassing remains more or less constant.
There’s a lot more in the linked post on why CO2 could affect temperature without an obvious change in the shape of the temperature curve (other than an increase in magnitude and a delay in time).
The glacial/interglacial temperature range in the SH is less than in the NH for the same reason the seasonal temperature range in the SH is smaller than the NH, because the ratio of land to ocean is smaller in the SH.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#173),
Thank you DWP. You made my morning.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#173),
leaves in their fall dance
scientific clarity
a change in the air?
Re: DeWitt Payne (#173), OK, good.
Can you explain why the CO2 effect is logarithmic please
Re: thefordprefect (#180),
Logging does not alter the existence or direction of a lag.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#173), Bender whend did you say you were leaving? Perhaps, since you are unfortunately still here, you could answer my simple question?
Re: thefordprefect (#182),
Right now. Click.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#128),
DeWitt Payne
“But the argument that CO2 lagging temperature invalidates CO2 forcing is fallacious.”
That’s a misrepresentation of the objection … the question is by how much does CO2 atmospheric increases add to temperature increases over and above other forcing mechanisms ?
Critical question … I’ve never seen an answer that didn’t contain arm waving
Re: John A (#125),
Just because CO2 and methane concentrations are functions of temperature doesn’t mean that they can’t act to amplify temperature swings. You can’t detect the change in rate by observation either without knowing the exact underlying forcing and knowing the temperature and concentration profiles to much higher precision than is available. See here.
On Topic: Today is International Skeptics Day!
This past summer has been the pits in Quebec, lots of rain and quite cold and as the rest of the country we are experiencing unusually cold weather this fall. Our provincial government has recently given $300,000 of tax payers money and office to space to All Gore, Suzuki and their cronies here in Montreal to spread some pre Copenhagen propaganda around. They are really well organized going into Universities spreading their alarmism and mobilizing to (hehe)”educate” us. I am amazed and worried about the lack of a balanced representation by our medias, people are simply not aware, we have so much green organizations recently sprouting around here that it’s more about politics and getting a foot in the government door than a honest educative debate on speculative climate. As a province we aspire for international exposure and feel that jumping on the “Good guys” AGW bandwagon is a solution for some international recognition by making sure Quebec sides up with the “believers” at Copenhagen and shows that at least “We” are here to save the Canadian reputation. Our provincial government’s irresponsible crusade against AGW is going to bleed us for nothing as they turn us into lab rats for something we have no control over. Even our opposition is far more pro AGW and wants larger cuts in emissions… Goes to show you how buddy buddy politics are, if Gore was a Republican we would have a hell of a lot more skeptics and debate in our government.
Hmmm. It seems to me that WHATEVER the forcing from CO2, it is clearly being overwhelmed by something else for the past few years. What IS that something else?
Re: jae (#143),
You are referring to the GMT flatline 2001-2008?
Re: bender (#144),
Yes.
Re: jae (#155),
You don’t think that ocean heat might have worked its way from the tropics in ~1998 up to the Arctic by ~2006?
Whereupon Chris Dudley distorts the facts and speculates wildly. If he would be so kind and brave as to comment here, I would be pleased to set him straight.
Re: bender (#145),
Or shall I copy and paste and refute line by line?
Re: bender (#146),
380. Chris Dudley, Maryland
October 14th, 2009 11:09 am
So McIntyre’s “fraud” is proven?
It is an indisputable fact that the global and regional multiproxy temperature reconstructions can not be simply recalculated and published until you have both the proxy data and the methods that were used to do the calibration and reconstruciton. Release the data. Release the code. And then publicaiton will come. Simple enough? Who will do this analysis? Esper?
Who doubts what Tiljander has said?
Most scientsists I know loathe public communication. It has little upside benefit and lots of downside risk. And it’s not as fun as collecting and processing samples and working up the data and writing about it for their specialist peers. Publish or perish. That is what puts bread and butter on the academic dinner table. Not airing dirty laundry in public.
Let’s expose the data and code first. Let the chips fall where they may as we work hard to get the science right. The personality wars are a distraction.
So McIntyre’s fabricating again, is he? I’m sensing an inculcative “meme”.
Perhaps read what Hu McCulloch has written on the usage and portrayal of uncertainty in dendroclimatological reconstructions. Then the reductio ad absurdum will become obvious: McIntyre has never said or even implied that “we can know nothing of past climate”. We can know something. It is that our knowledge is imperfect. It is imprecise. This is a fact, and one that should not be swept under the carpet.
In the blogosphere everyone is given enough rope to hang themselves. We’ll see who’s left standing by the end of this comment.
This is slightly true but only trivially so. There is enough cherry-picking done that it is unclear how much we can trust the reconstructions to date. Most of what passes as “new” is a recycling or reconstitution of old material.
The substantive issue is whether current temperatures are “unprecedented” in 2000 years, as is often claimed. If your case for action does not hinge critically on the paleoclimate data, then simply stop invoking it. If you want to base your case on model predictions, then do so. The consensus in the dendro community is that dendroclimatic reconstructions are just one line of evidence that do not stand alone. Thus one is forced to consider the validity of other proxy types. We were in the process of learning about varvology when Briffa interrupted – and the case does not look good at all.
.
If you advocate the precautionary principle, then what are you doing discussing the science? If you think the facts don’t matter and you don’t really care about getting them right, then you’re not helping your cause. You’re never going to convince a hardline skeptic with nonsense and fabrications and ad hominem attacks. You’re harming your cause.
Benjamin:
[Response: The original commenter appears to be referring to: Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Reply to McIntyre and McKitrick: Proxy-based temperature reconstructions are robust, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 106, E11, 2009. – mike]
You may want to look at the reply to this “reply” before leaping to any conclusions. I note that Chris Dudley did not point you there. I wonder why. (No I don’t.)
327. Mike Roddy, Yucca Valley, Ca. October 11th, 2009 1:50 pm
That’s not what Schmidt showed, as Hu points out.
They have not been “wasting their time”. (1) They have been failing to disclose key pieces of information about sample sizes and sampling procedures; (2) they have failed to share data with each other, and (3) they have failed to accurately portray the amount of uncertainty on their reconstructions.
.
The reason Mcintyre has “mastered the jargon”, Mike Roddy, is because he’s mastered the techniques. His claim is very far from “bizarre”, when you understand what he’s claiming. And it is quite logical.
.
Your devils lie elsewhere. Go find them.
Re: bender (#151), from your ref,
Surely this is the mother of all twisted circular arguments:
Steve fabricates
Therefore he must not be allowed on this blog
Therefore he cannot explain he does not fabricate
Therefore since he will not defend himself,
his silence proves he fabricates,
and his reputation is in tatters…
Re: Lucy Skywalker (#161),
I understand their madness … I think. They need a demon. And since they can’t find one, they must fabricate one. They refuse to believe that their demonizing of Steve M is misplaced. (I thought that was what Marilyn Manson was created for: people who need a demon to hate.)
Is it just me or have the level and rate of attacks on Steve McIntyre been escalating heavily recently? After years of following this debate, I find it remarkable how transparent it all is.
Bender, unlike Mike, I appreciate your high standards for intellectual honesty and logical discourse. Please stay.
And Mike, on CO2 pre/post temperature change, I thought that it was well accepted by all sides to the debate (except maybe Jaworowski) that the rise in CO2 precedes a rise in temps. Did I miss something somewhere?
Re: DaleC (#169),
Go to DotEarth, look at Revkin’s post, sort the responses by reader recommendation. As you’d expect, the quality of the writing degrades as the number of recommendations goes down. But there’s another trend I see as well.
Re: DaleC (#169),
Not by me it isn’t.
Shome mishtake shurely?
Re: DaleC (#169),
I think you have it backwards. AFAIK, CO2 lags temperature by 200-1000 years, at least as shown in Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time and discussed in CO2 lags temperature—what does it mean?
Re: John Baltutis (#174),
Ooopps. Trying again. Second link should be:
CO2 lags temperature—what does it mean?
Re: John Baltutis (#174), You are right of course – I slipped up – lag is what I meant – and I recall many attempts to invoke a feedback cycle to save the appearances – CO2 goes up (for unknown reasons) then that makes things warmer so the oceans release more CO2, etc from RC and elsewhere, so I have generally taken it as agreed by all – hence my surprise at TFP’s comment.
Re: DaleC (#176), I’m having a bad day – still wrong – I mean it gets warmer for whatever reason, which causes CO2 to go up, which then reinforces the cycle. I have got it right?
I look forward to the day when everyone will be discussing what we are going to do when the climate cools by 2 C over the next 10-20 years as proposed by this presenter at http://www.naturalclimatechange.info/?q=node/8 as it appears just as plausible if not more so than it warming by 3 C in 50 years according to Al Gore. Time will tell. However, if it turns out reality is somewhere in between as I suspect most are thinking, then what is all the fuss about? So what if global temperatures increase or decrease by less than 0.5 C. That’s just noise in the big scheme of things. get over it. I’m more frightened of some asteroid hitting us as it’s a dead certainty one day one will.
Click what?
that was Bender turning of the tube…
OK, fine by me!
From what I have seen the logarithmic effect is usually explained by the absoption bands getting full – ie. no more radiation can be absorbed. Radiation is then absorbed by smaller absorptions bands and and by the under used width of the CO2 bands.
And the CO2 GH effect is vastly lessened by many of the bands falling within the H20 bands.
I was rather hoping for a genuine response as it never seems to be explained in the aricles I googled.
1. The CO2 levels are 100ppm less than today. Does this make temperature more responsive to CO2.
2. One feature of The ice ages is that water vapour in the atmosphere would have been greatly reduced. C.f. Antarctica today.
If you remove water vapour are you not then exposing all those hidden spectral bands formally occupied by water vapour.
So PERHAPS during ice ages CO2 is linear?
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#186),
Temperature as a linear function of the log ratio of CO2 is actually an empirical fit to observation rather than a calculation ab initio.
For further understanding, I can only suggest what I usually do, buy a college advanced undergraduate or early graduate level textbook on atmospheric radiation transfer. I can specifically recommend A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, 2nd Edition, Grant W. Petty, 2006.. Buy it direct from Sundog Publishing for the best price (I wish I had).
To calculate atmospheric emission spectra at different levels of CO2 and altitude, there’s Archer MODTRAN. The data can be accessed by using the save text for later retrieval option. You can change the surface temperature offset to see how that affects the outgoing LW radiation as well. I always do clear sky calculations for outgoing radiation. Clouds have most effect on radiation observed looking up from the surface.
I never found a free source on the web that provided sufficient detail and accuracy either.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#187), DeWitt – it is a good text but I didn’t find where it references a worked example of the W/m2 forcing associated with increasing CO2 concentration. To my mind this is a fundamental building block of the CO2 as climate driver theory which is absent.
From the digging I have done I agree with this:
I’ve not had time to study every page of Petty cover to cover, so I may have missed it. Is it in there? Do you have a page reference? Also do you agree this empirical fit is similar to seeking a climate signal in proxies without a proper causal model? Thanks for any info.
Re: curious (#192),
You get global temperature proportional to the log ratio of CO2 concentration in two steps. The first step is to show that forcing, the change in emitted LW radiation to space is proportional to the log ratio of CO2. If you calculate forcing using MODTRAN over a wide range of CO2, and do a plot of forcing as a function of the log of CO2, you get a curve. It’s not much of a curve above 100 pppmv CO2, though. Why you get a curve has to do with band transmission models (Chapter 10.2 in Petty). But you can always approximate a curve over a narrow range with a straight line. So you calculate the slope at some level of CO2 (current or pre-industrial are the usual choices) and you have a linear relationship between log ratio CO2 and forcing. Now you assume that climate sensitivity, the change in GMST with forcing, is also a constant (a big assumption) and voila, GMST is proportional to the log ratio of CO2 concentration.
That’s the simple version. If you change CO2 concentration in MODTRAN and adjust the surface temperature offset to bring the LW emission to space back to the original value you can get data for a plot of temperature change vs CO2 directly. But now you have to decide whether to use constant relative humidity or constant water vapor pressure. At constant RH, you get a lot of curvature of the temperature offset vs log CO2 because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and its concentration is strongly dependent on temperature, but you can still calculate the slope at the current temperature and use that.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#187),
DWP, I’m interested in these arguments that extend way back in time – to when the continents were arranged quite differently. As the continents are re-arranged, ocean convection must change. Does the re-configuration of ocean convection affect parameters such as the depth of mixing and therefore the time constant of mixing? And might the atmospheric moist convection (i.e. negative feedbacks from high cloud formation vs. positive feedbacks from water vapor) also be affected? Would this not affect one’s estimate of climate sensitivity? How are these issues accounted for, or are they just ignored? (This is not a literature I read.) If they are ignored, then at what cost?
Re: bender (#193), I’m sure you are aware of the paleo map project – but if not
http://www.scotese.com/paleocli.htm
The movement of continents is one reason all this talk of “7000ppm a few hundred million years ago didn’t cause any problems so whats with 400ppm” is not “sensible”
Mike
Re: thefordprefect (#195),
Note how the oceans are now highly fragmented, but were not in the past (yes, of course spatial resolution must degrade as one moves back in time). This would lead to much weaker ocean convection now versus then, hence a much longer time constant now than then. The question is: how is such an effect included in paleoclimatic sensitivity estimations? Or do they not even try to go that far back in time?
Re: bender (#193),
Raymo and Ruddiman argue that the drop in temperature from the Eocene peak was caused by the elevation of the Tibetan plateau resulting from the collision of the Indian plate with the Asian plate. Their mechanism is a loss of CO2 from increased weathering because of the fresh rock surface exposed. Blaming everything on CO2, though, brings to mind the adage that if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Others have argued that the recent cycle of glaciation was the result of the closure of the Isthmus of Panama and the separation of the Pacific from the Atlantic. That sounds reasonable too, but short of the invention of a time machine to collect better data from the past, I don’t think we’ll ever know with any confidence.
IIRC, Koutsoyannis has shown that ice core temperatures have a high Hurst coefficient so the process must be chaotic or have long term persistence or whatever. That seems to be a seriously under-explored area too. Based on what little I know about chaos theory, it would go a long way towards explaining the shift from a ~40,000 year glacial/interglacial cycle to a ~100,000 year cycle.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#196),
Right. I’m aware of Ruddiman, from Hansen. I’m way more interested in Koutsoyiannis/Wunsch and the role of ocean convection in dissipating heat quickly. I want to know if the time constant for mixing is now an order of magnitude longer than in the past.
Re: bender (#198),
Good question. If you treat the deep ocean as a continuous flow stirred reactor, the time constant is the volume divided by the flow rate. My guess would be that flows would be lower now than at the Eocene peak when the temperature differential between the poles and the equator was much lower. Does that imply that the heat leak that dropped temperatures to current levels over 55Myr is in or near the tropics? I’m thinking of the possibility of the Indian Monsoon, say, rather than a loss of CO2 as the primary cause.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#199),
I believe the main determinent of temperatures in the ocean depths now is the role of ice in the arctic basin and nearby. When cold water freezes it produces a dense, cold layer which can sink. This body of water will be near the freezing temperature of water. Over time this will make the deep water of a similar temperature. When there is no ice near either pole, this turnover is eliminated and the deep waters can slowly become warmed via mixing and possibly some warm currents which have become dense via evaporation. I don’t think CO2 concentrations have much to do with it.
Re: Dave Dardinger (#201),
Yes, but 55 Myr ago, there was no ice. The deep ocean was at least 10 C warmer than now. So how did we get from there to here? The separation of Antarctica from South America ~30 Myr ago doubtless played a role, but temperature was falling before then.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#202),
Well, that’s fairly simple. Once a continent moves to a polar area it can form glaciers in mountain areas and ice sheets in bays. Then this ice can cool surface currents and especially since the underlying water is warm, it will sink easily. Of course if there’s not a large area where this is happening, it will take a long time to cool the lower ocean, but at a certain point the down-welling water will be greater than the mixing downward elsewhere and bottom temperatures will decrease quickly. And this will allow ice ages to occur if there’s a situation like we have today with a continent over one pole and an enclosed basin over the other. Probably there are other configurations which also allow ice ages and I suppose models can do a fair job of deciding which ones they are.
Re: Dave Dardinger (#205),
I don’t think it’s that simple. Antarctica has been mostly inside the Antarctic circle for over 100 Myr. The Eocene peak was about 55 Myr ago. Current thinking is that the Antarctic ice cap didn’t start to form until about 34 Myr ago during the Eocene/Oligocene transition and, probably not coincidentally, at about the same time that Antarctic separated from South America. I’m still looking for an explanation of why temperatures started to decline 55 Myr ago.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#206),
atmospheric dust? from asteroid collision? or from vulcanism?
Re: DeWitt Payne (#206),
Well, the usual explanation is that it was do to the gradual closing of the gap between NA and SA which disrupted the currents from the Atlantic and Pacific. There’s also the state of the arctic basin, in terms of closure. Obviously there are other details which are important, but the big thing is the polar situation allowing the downwelling of cold water and its movement throughout the deep oceans.
Re: Dave Dardinger (#208),
This must be where the change in salinity also plays a part, because, looking at the chart below, as water is forced below the surface, below a certain point (~1000 m), its density actually increases (layman’s term: ‘becomes heavier’) and this is at temperatures below 4 deg. C (where normally water becomes less dense as it does at surface pressure and betwen 0 C and +4 C):
.
Water – fluid-density-temperature-pressure
Re: _Jim (#209),
The salinity of sea water prevents the decrease of density below 4 C.
Introduction to Physical Oceanography
Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Re: DeWitt Payne (#210),
Yes, all well and good, but, there is the addition of pure water at those high latitudes, leading to variable salinity values less (if S < 24.7, or approximately 2.5% ‘salt’) than that of ‘regular’ sea water (S = 33 ~ 37, or approximately 3.5% ‘salt’) that will then induce behavior that begins to come closer to the ‘water’ chart (or exact values as per the seawater density calculations via your reference) owing to the proximity and mixing in of freshwater/meltwater sources …
Re: DeWitt Payne (#202),
Instead of asking the question “What makes the modern world’s ocean bottom water cold?” ask the opposite question “What made the Cretaceous Ocean’s bottom water warm?”
There are two separate and competing ways that you can create dense marine brines.
Dense Marine Brine Formation Method 1: Cool your surface ocean waters in polar latitudes by supplying a cold dense and very dry katabatic wind to evaporate the surface seawater. This process, contact cooling re-enforced by evaporative cooling, creates cold dense brine that sinks to the ocean bottom. This process started in the Tertiary eventually flooding all the deep ocean basins with cold bottom water. For this process to work you need an icecap grown from a source of high mountains close to the pole. Polar mountains create mountain glaciers that can eventually cover a continent with ice, enhancing the generation of the katabatic winds and ocean cooling, in a process of climate feedback.
Dense Marine Brine Formation Method 2: Warm your seawater in shallow epeiric (continental shelf) seas, suitably located in the mid-latitudes trade wind belt. The presence of a warm dry wind from the Hadley Cell, high daily insolation, low precipitation and shallow water enhances the process of “drying out the sea” creating a warm dense brine that, because of water loss to the atmosphere, sinks to the seabed forming a warm dense bottom water.
During the Cretaceous the North-South aligned Atlantic Ocean was in its infancy, being only hundreds not thousands of miles wide (The modern Red Sea is an equivalent analogue to the Cretaceous South Atlantic Ocean). The mid latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere contained the East-West orientated Tethys Ocean. The Tethys had wide continental shelves dominated by carbonate ramps. Carbonate ramps are warm dense water factories. The only modern equivalent to the Tethys is the Mediterranean Sea, but this sea is enclosed and lacks any carbonate ramps, though it does generate dense warm bottom water which is exported into the Atlantic Ocean through the Straits of Gibraltar. The Arabian Gulf has a working carbonate ramp producing warm dense brine but this ramp is regularly turned off by sea-level fall during ice ages.
By the process of continental drift destroy the Tethys Ocean, create the Alps and Himalayas in its place, and thereby turn the Cretaceous warm world dominated by the warm water generating Tethys Ocean into the Modern world dominated by the cold water generating polar seas (in particular the Weddell Sea).
Consider what would happen if you warmed the World Ocean to Cretaceous temperatures by a process of solar heating of seawater in shallow epeiric seas. What would happen to all the Carbon Dioxide reservoired in the modern cold ocean? Where would all this gas go? Was the level of Carbon Dioxide if the Cretaceous atmosphere higher than now?
Of course it was.
Re: PhilipM (#216),
That’s a nice summary. Of course cooling and evaporation alone are not enough to form Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)in the Weddell Sea and around the Antarctic continent. Here the key process is brine rejection during sea ice formation resulting in dense high salinity brines. However , formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW)does result from cooling of seawater in the Norwegian-Greenland Basin.
This doesn’t change the veracity or elegance of your summary.
Re: Paul Dennis (#226),
Thanks Paul
Re: thefordprefect (#186),
“From what I have seen the logarithmic effect is usually explained by the absoption bands getting full – ie. no more radiation can be absorbed. Radiation is then absorbed by smaller absorptions bands and and by the under used width of the CO2 bands.
And the CO2 GH effect is vastly lessened by many of the bands falling within the H20 bands.”
.
I don’t konw where you have seen that but this explanation is not even wrong .
It is absolutely and totally forbidden that a band , any band gets “full” or “saturated” .
The population that is in an excited state is a CONSTANT for a given temperature (f.ex the CO2 15µ excited state represents 5 % of the total CO2 population at room temperatures) . This is prescribed by the MB distribution of the quantum states .
It doesn’t depend on the number of molecules , the intensity of radiation or the age of the captain . Only temperature .
So whatever amount of IR you throw at a CO2 population , they will absorb it all and REEMIT .
They can’t do anything else because they must do whatever it takes to keep the percentage of excited states constant .
.
Imagine a dam (CO2 molecules) and a lake whose level (percentage of excited states) is exactly at the top of the dam .
If you increase the flow in the lake (absorbed radiation) all that will happen is that the flow over the top of the dam (emitted radiation) will increase by exactly the same amount .
If you increase the height of the dam (temperature) , the level of the lake will go in a transient untill it gets to the new top and then it’s again exactly like described above .
There is no “saturation” .
Re: TomVonk (#190)
So where does the logarithmic effect come from in the ‘overflowing dam’ model?
Yes it is a bit amusing but remember that the DNA molecule was thought of in a dream. Speculation and guessing is part of science as long as you follow fundamental laws of physics.
Why was my comment remove:
I find it amusing how experts find it necessary to use tricks and simplifications to model climate change. I believe the reason is because to do it peroperly by first principles and using phsycial models that more accuraltey represent hte real wolrd climat would take years if not cneturies to computer on even the fastest supercomputer. I woner then why bother with the ttricks and simplifications when anyone can predict just about any temperature 10, 50, or 100 years into the future? What’s the point? One might as well throw darts at a board.
Finnish friends: Nissu vs Pulla — what’s the difference?
I’ve always assumed they’re just two words for the same thing, but I don’t really have any idea.
Anyone who can solve this puzzle? Thnanks! (I realize that this is just slightly OT, but then again, Caramilk has been here in the past 🙂 )
Re: MrPete (#200),
Pulla eli nisu eli vehnänen.
Re: UC (#204),
[Apologies for what I’m sure is google’s laughable translation 🙂 )
En voi olla Wainionpaa, mutta olen suomalainen on huono:). Jos Google koristeltu se sopii minulle, “Nisu” on vain nimi, ja “Pulla” tarkoittaa vain “pulla” (kuten, vehnä BUN)?
I thought you all might be interested in the raging debate over at the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/10/climate_issue.html some misinformation being presented as fact
Re: Jason F (#203),
Note Tim Osborn contributing to the thread too
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/10/climate_issue.html#P87120510
Steve & All
I have analysed the global temperature data, and based on historical mean global temperature anomaly patterns I have arrived at the conclusion that the globe has already started its cooling phase until about 2031 to the freezing temperatures of the early 1970s.
CO2 DRIVEN GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT SUPPORTED BY THE DATA
What do you think of it?
Girma Orssengo, Masc, PhD
orssengo@lycos.com
Nick Stokes,
in your protestations and quotes from Realclimate in nonresponsive answer to a couple previous questions.
Being disingenous virtually all the time WILL start biting!!
By the way, how do we segue to AGW when we are discussing poor procedures in DendroClimatology and how some authorities appear to be ignoring them?? Please try to keep on topic.
Keep that head HIGH!!!
http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/zgzjmr/product-detailAoenrfNUIRka/China-Refrigerant-F12-.html
That wiki entry is not totally correct, the patents for cfc’s were held by frigidaire and general motors.
Re: Max (#50),
The Wiki entry is not saying otherwise. It is saying a key “process” patent was held by Dupont.
Like many pioneering industrial products, Freons were indeed a collaborative effort.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfreon.htm
And I’m afraid your effort to link Dow and Dupont at the hip are a bit misquided. As far as the Boards, the only link I see is Dennis Reilly, who was a Conoco executive when Dupont bought them in the 80s. He eventually left to run another company.
http://www2.dupont.com/Our_Company/en_US/directors/index.html
http://www.dow.com/corpgov/leader/board.htm
Perhaps you’re thinking of the ill-fated Dow/Dupont elastomers joint venture from a few years back? Maybe at a twisted effort to get this back on topic, I think it was a Canadian-based scandal that ultimately killed the deal. 🙂
John M, I use to buy Refrigerant that had both companies logo’s side by side on the containers.
Re: Max (#55),
Perhaps because of something like this?
http://automotive.dow.com/products/lubricants/rl897.htm
If so, co-branding of this type is sort of like all those computers out there with “Intel inside” on the box.
Or was it a lot longer ago?
# 55 Max
Dear Mr. Max,
Since claiming that Dow and Dupont are the same company is simply counterfactual, trying to reinforce that claim is not going to win anything but laughter and more wellie.
But your original point is worth pursuing, in my opinion. Can anyone tell us the present state of science regarding the effect of CFC’s versus the ozone layer? Two years ago there were some articles claiming that the reaction rates of the stratospheric chlorine reactions were not fast enough to explain the ozone hole. Since then, silence. Has that question been resolved with new studies?
The CFC ban is highly relevant since it is routinely held up as a model for CO2 control.
Best Wishes
Bender has a scrap book!
http://kimncris.com/bender/new_page_1.htm/
Who knew?
Re: Craig Loehle (#227),
Leave my Vegas pix out this. Are you sure you’re not just upset your daughter’s dating a robot?
Re: bender (#229),
That puts to rest one question I have had: is bender is a reference to Futurama or The Breakfast Club?
The following just seem appropriate on a math blog.
Re: Geoff Sherrington (#235),
I especially like “Find x…here it is.”
Steve can snip away if this oldie but goodie is too off-color.
Bonus Question on Chem Exam: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle ‘s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:
Regarding several comments above concerning CO2’s (and other GHGs’) effect in terms of W/m^2 forcing. I think it is important to remember that it is the distribution of all GHGs vertically combined with the lapse rate that gives you the forcing. Together they control the effective emission surface’s delta temperature. For instance if all the CO2 was concentrated in a thin layer near the surface it would have little effect, similarly if the lapse rate was very low all the GHGs would have a much reduced effect. What you need to know is the height of the effective emission surface and hence its temperature (derived form the lapse rate). Adding CO2 raises the height of the effective emission surface and hence tends to lower its temperature.
I suspect that knowing the effect on the lapse rate of adding CO2 is of equal importance to knowing the effect on the height of the effective emission surface of adding CO2. I also suspect that the first effect is not as well understood as the second.
Alex
This may be a dumb question, but why is it that the SSTs near the ice edge in the Arctic are usually shown as several degrees warmer than average
( http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html ) – this would imply that the “average” SST there should be well below freezing, in which case it would be ice and not measured as an SST in the first place. If the area at the ice edge is at a location where there should be ice and not open water, then the anomaly should be one degree at best…or am I missing something?
Sorry if this has been asked/answered already.
Steve’s getting quite the bashing over at the JREF, James Randi’s skeptic site. Here’s the URL to the discussion if anyone is interested: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/736-global-warming-again.html
Steve: I didn’t see anything that rose above namecalling.
There is a new article on WUWT and the BBC about GCR’s and tree ring growth that might give dendrochrologist’s serious heart burn.
Link to the study is at:
Recent paper in Geology re an abrupt warming period…here is the reference…very interesting
Palynomorphs from a sediment core reveal a sudden remarkably warm Antarctica during the middle Miocene Geology October 2009, v. 37, p. 955-958, and the abstract
…
Abstract
An exceptional triple palynological signal (unusually high abundance of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial palynomorphs) recovered from a core collected during the 2007 ANDRILL (Antarctic geologic drilling program) campaign in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, provides constraints for the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum. Compared to elsewhere in the core, this signal comprises a 2000-fold increase in two species of dinoflagellate cysts, a synchronous five-fold increase in freshwater algae, and up to an 80-fold increase in terrestrial pollen, including a proliferation of woody plants. Together, these shifts in the palynological assemblages ca. 15.7 Ma ago represent a relatively short period of time during which Antarctica became abruptly much warmer. Land temperatures reached 10 °C (January mean), estimated annual sea-surface temperatures ranged from 0 to 11.5 °C, and increased freshwater input lowered the salinity during a short period of sea-ice reduction.
the above reference is from
October issue of Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America.
Another article from same journal…but the Sept Issue…also very interesting
Sept issue of Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America
Carbon dioxide and the early Eocene climate of western North America
1. Bridget L. Thrasher1 and
2. Lisa C. Sloan1
+ Author Affiliations
1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California–Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Abstract
We present results from an early Eocene (ca. 50–56 Ma ago) regional modeling sensitivity experiment that examines the role of atmospheric CO2 in determining the regional climate of western North America. This is the first paleoclimate modeling study to investigate the possible role of increased CO2 in influencing the early Eocene climate on a regional scale. We take a regional modeling approach with the goal of using higher spatial resolution to elucidate the role of specific climate forcing mechanisms (here, CO2) upon a region with relatively dense paleoclimate proxy data coverage. The spatial resolution of global climate models does not permit the close comparison of model results to proxy climate data in a way that helps to distinguish between regional and global climate forcings, which is a goal of this study. While our results suggest that CO2 was most likely at least as high as 2240 ppm, this high concentration does not yield a regional climate that matches regional proxy data in all aspects. Therefore, in combination with high atmospheric CO2, other forcing factors must have played significant roles in defining the nature of early Eocene climate.
•
o Received 30 January 2009.
o Revision received 13 April 2009.
o Accepted 28 April 2009.
Re: snowmaneasy (#243),
IE. they put 2240 ppm CO² into their model and it didn’t give them the result they wanted!!
Haven’t had time to read the whole thread so apologies if this has alrady been discussed but here’s a link to a particularly disgraceful and unprofessional display of pique by economist Brad DeLong directed at Pielke Jr. at Pielke’s blog.
It wasn’t enough to repeat that Pielke is “dishonest and wrong” and “a clever denier” on his own blog he had to go to Pielke’s and declare him “simply insane” as well.
The always reliable Joe Romm and Tim Lambert either show up or are quoted approvingly by DeLong as well.
This kind of ad hom tag teaming from an academic as supposedly respected as DeLong is the other side of blogging and makes the level of discussion here at CA that much more appreciated.
Re: Brian B (#244),
If you follow economics and the Subprime scandal you will come to realise that DeLong is of the same political cloth as the “Nobel” recipient Krugman. His jumping on board is not surprising Maybe he has worked out how to get an ignoble Nobel???
regards
My latest paper is out:
TREND ANALYSIS OF SATELLITE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DATA
Craig Loehle
National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc.
Energy & Environment (link to reprint: http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3230)
CLoehle@ncasi.org
Abstract
Global satellite data is analyzed for temperature trends for the period January 1979 through June 2009. Beginning and ending segments show a cooling trend, while the middle segment evinces a warming trend. The past 12 to 13 years show cooling using both satellite data sets, with lower confidence limits that do not exclude a negative trend until 16 to 22 years. It is shown that several published studies have predicted cooling in this time frame. One of these models is extrapolated from its 2000 calibration end date and shows a good match to the satellite data, with a projection of continued cooling for several more decades.
Re: Craig Loehle (#246), Craig, figure 6b doesn’t look like the RSS data at all. I think you used the mid troposphere data by mistake.
Re: Trent (#267), From what I have seen, models run with the inferred volcanoes, solar changes, and modern AGW guesstimates, produce only a small MWP and nothing comparable to today. For instance:
Crowley,T.J.,et al.,2000.Causes of climate change over the past 1000 years.
Science 289,270–277
Hegerl,G.C.,Crowley,T.J.,Allen,M.,et al.,2007.Detection of human influence on a
new,validated 1500-year temperature reconstruction. J.Climate 20,650–666.
I am not endorsing these papers, but they try to do what you suggest.
Re: Andrew (#270), Andrew, thanks, you are right. I fixed it and results are almost identical. It will be correct coming out in print and online (fortunately).
Hi,
I’ve been able to extract the climate systems response to change from 25 years of satellite data in order to test predictions of the AGW hypothesis. I’m sure that many of you will find this very interesting. I believe it to be an unimpeachable repudiation of the AGW hypothesis.
http://www.palisad.com/eb/eb.html
Regards,
George
Sorry, I meant http://www.palisad.com/co2/eb/eb.html
Both links now work.
George
Mostly, yeah. The part that worried me was the supposed destruction of your critique of Mann, the fact that it wasn’t publish in a science journal (like the “prestigious” Nature), and Nature’s rebuttal. It makes it seem as if the Hockey Stick is something to be trusted.
RyanO
If a warmer MWP means higher climate sensitivity, doesn’t this mean the IPCC projections should be more extreme? And wouldn’t that would mean your claim, that hockey stick makers are trying to flatten the MWP, is self defeating?
Re: Nathan (#251),
Sensitive to CO2 doubling? Where’s the evidence that the MWP (or MCO)was caused by increasing CO2?
Re: Nathan (#251),
In Gore’s movie and elsewhere, the temperature hockey stick (with its flat shaft) is compared against the CO2 concentration hockey stick (with its flat shaft). The implication is that the temperature ahs been controlled by CO2 for at least this period. The flat shaft of one is aligned with the flat shaft of the other hockey stick. This is the reason that the MWP has to be eliminated since if it existed than the direct correlation between CO2 and temperature would not be observed.
So the MWP is not indicated by examination of the CO2 concentration hockey stick. So a warmer MWP would say nothing about climate sensitivity to CO2.
Re: Nathan (#251),
Re: Dave Dardinger (#252),
Re: TAG (#253),
Broeker (2001) has the MWP being associated with a 1500-year THC cycle, Holocene CO2 being relatively constant. Hence the deep and widespread interest in Holocene natural variability. The higher the unexplained variation in the past, the wider the uncertainty on modern CO2 sensitivity (and other forcings). If some hitherto unknown explanation can be found for the variation (e.g. cloudiness, ocean convection), this could bid the modern GHG sensitivity up or down depending on which way the process was working during the MWP.
Nathan, you are still putting words into peoples mouths. Please stop doing this, it is very frustrating.
Warmer MWP is nothing to do with sensitivity. It just indicates the range of natural, poorly understood, fluctuations.
Also, you are ‘blog-spamming’ – you asked the same question at Lucia’s and got the same answer.
Re: PaulM (#254),
Nathan should be asking these questions at realclimate, where he would be … treated very well.
RealClimate has made the same claim as Nathan.
Re: MikeN (#256),
I doubt that, since it’s nonsensical. (Errr, wait a sec …) Can you post a link?
Several times at CA and other blogs people have mentioned that if the MWP was real and as warm or warmer than current temperatures, global warming is an even more serious problem. Can someone please explain this?
Current global warming theory has only one mechanism to explain significant, long-term temperature excursions — CO2. There is no evidence that CO2 increased significantly in the MWP. Further, the MWP continued for many decades, so it wasn’t a short-term transient event. Therefore, a real MWP falsifies current global warming theory. This is why AGW proponents have tried so desperately to remove the MWP.
Trent: “Current global warming theory has only one mechanism to explain significant, long-term temperature excursions — CO2. (…) Therefore, a real MWP falsifies current global warming theory.”
I am not sure I understand you correctly, but this seems to be completely wrong. First, in the historical record, it is assumed that CO2 acted merely as a feedback that amplified smaller warming events – not as an initial cause. Second, there are many other greenhouse gases that could give rise to warming. Third, there are other influences that influence the earths climate, such as oscillations over very short and long terms (e.g.,. Milanchovich (sp?) cycles ,etc.). In other words, CO2 is only seens as a driver of the CURRENT warming signal, but historic variations are explained by a large number of variables. By no means would a strong MWP falsify current global warming theory.
See here, for example. A perspective piece in Science from 2001 that argued for three things: (a) the MWP is real and global, (b) it is part of 1500 year oscillation that can be discerned from the historic record, and (c) that current greenhouse-gas warming is superimposed on that signal. So, here you see the MWP and current CO2-caused harming living in harmony.
I’m getting snipped by Gavin at RC as I go down the H&S (2002) rabbit hole.
Has anyone here read H&S (2002)? Am I going mad? It’s a peer reviewed, published, statistically focused paper which
– contains no error analysis,
– contains no sensitivity analysis,
– has no error bars on any plot,
– does not state or test key selection criteria (living trees, spatial diversity of dead trees)
– discusses 300 year and “remarkable” 170 year cool periods when the method is only sensitive to annual and decadal trends.
Am I misreading it? Is there an appendix I’m not aware of, full of highfalutin’ statistics and tests?
dhogaza, if you’re reading this, could you ask H&S this in your email 🙂
The paper is here http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf
Is this kind of thing common with other dendro papers?
I can’t cope, help please.
Mark
Paz
oops, forgot the link to the Science piece. Here it is.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5508/1497
Here’s something from Stefan on RC about impact of Hockey Stick being wrong:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/what-if-the-hockey-stick-were-wrong/
I actually think most of what he says there makes sense….however, the invalidation of the HS tells us a couple of things:
1. Current proxy reconstructions aren’t worth very much statistically and probably physically as well
2. There is a suspicious type of bias that creeps into some climate research
However, I don’t see any reason not to suspect that **all other things being equal** that increasing CO2 concentrations should tend to make things warmer going forward. How much warmer, how useful climate models are, and how big of a problem it might be, is a topic of interesting conversation for everyone, but I don’t see how the historical reconstructions aren’t a completely different beast than the forward looking predictions, unless somehow sensitivities or model fittings are being calibrated from the reconstructions.
Absent any models we can look at the last 100 yrs, where CO2 levels have risen a lot, temperatures seem to have risen modestly (absent possible instrumentation issues), and the planet hasn’t run off the rails. If you believe the earth was warmer than this in the MWP without crazy feedback loops wreaking havoc, then you can derive some comfort in the face of a possible modest temperature rise over the next possible 100 years – again **all other things being equal**.
I think positions too much stronger than this at this point, or triumphalism against all climate research, or an absence of any intelligent concern about possible problems with CO2 levels does this blog no service in the wider community of ideas.
Re: Mesa (#262), One has to be careful with reading. The “other” works are not annual which gives the necessary decadal response AR4 says is needed to make conclusions, or they have Yamal, stripbark pines, upside down series, divergent series, etc. You need but read “”AR4 – Attributing Climate Change”” to see that they do not answer the question asked, but a different question. Note that the start of this link assumes some other reconstruction is correct, or assumes things not assumed, nor stated by the AR4.
Remember the predicted Doom and Gloom for the ski resorts in the EU Alps? Hopefully local investors did not listened to the AGW Doom Factory.
Update; Austrian ski tracks have never been openend this early in the season (originally planned for Nov.27th). Kitzbühl has opened it’s season already for the first time so early in it’s 80 year existance.
Paz,
Thanks. Unfortunately I would have to purchase the article since I am not an AAAS member. Regarding each of your points:
1) I understand the feed back argument, but that requires that there is some other cause of warming which the CO2 is “feeding back” on. So this is not relevant to my question.
2) Is there reason to believe that other gases varied sufficiently in the MWP to cause the temperature increases? If so, what gases and why?
3) I am aware of periodic oscillations. However, astronomical cycles such as Milankovich, have much longer periods. Shorter period oscillations, such as PDO, are too short to explain the MWP. Further, AGW proponents pretty-much dismiss these short-term oscillations as being negligible. For instance, AGW proponents do not argue that a significant portion of the temperature increase in the satellite record occurs due to the record beginning at the bottom of the ocean cycles.
Since I can’t see the paper, can you tell me what is the cause of the speculative 1500-yr cycle? This would be a reasonable period for explaining the MWP. However, it would be about time for this cycle to be kicking in now as well. Also, I don’t think the GCMs include such a cycle.
Re: Trent (#264),
The 1500 year cycle is thought to arise from a resonance of known solar cycles, the 88 year Gleissberg and 200 year de Vries. Daansgard-Oeschger events, which occurred about every 1500 years during the last glacial epoch, may be linked to this resonance.
I remember the line being from RealClimate, but I can’t find it there. Perhaps it was on a different site. It’s not in Coby Beck’s list of talking points.
This is similar, but not the line I’m thinking of.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/natural-variability-and-climate-sensitivity/
Re: MikeN (#265),
Read the OP, but also be sure to read Pierrehumbert’s important (and very carefully worded) reply. The answer is there, but it is buried. Note the slagging of Esper in the OP, which Pierrehumbert, thankfully, rectified by proper contextualizing.
Thanks DeWitt. Yes, solar cycles are a reasonable explanation for the MWP. However, I seem to recall a thread on RC entitled something like “It’s the Sun — Not!” in which they dismiss solar influences. If solar cycles are responsible for a real MWP, they cannot be so easily dismissed as contributing to the current warmth.
Anyway, my basic question is this: If one started the leading GCMs at 0 AD and ran them for 2000 years of simulated time with the best estimates of external forcings, would they predict a warm MWP? I realize the difficulty with the initial conditions and the actual forcings to input, so this is just a thought experiment.
My impression is that GCMs simply to do not have mechanisms included in their physics to produce a warming of the scale of the WMP without greenhouse gas increases.
Re: Trent (#267),
Yes, and probably and even warmer little ice age. 8)
Re: Trent (#267),
I do not know the answer to this question.
But the paper mentioned by Jonathan (#271) invokes THC as an ezplanation for MWP/MCA.
.
AFAIK GCMs do not replicate a proper THC. But anyone, please, correct me if I am wrong. Not only that but other convective phenomena (AO, NAO, PDO, ENSO) are also not reproduced. The only atmospheric convection pattern that is somewhat faiuthfully reproduced is the ITCZ. I am happy to be corrected.
.
lucia has analyzed the noise structure of these models and they are wholly unrealistic. But don’t ask me about this. Ask her.
Re: Trent (#267),
This is the question I was referring to above.
Trent, sorry about the link. I accessed it from my uni and did not realize it was behind a paywall.
My main point was to show that a strong MWP does not need to be incompatible with anthropogenic global warming, since both can be caused by different effects.
I can’t access the article from home either, but if I remember correctly, the specified cause was not related to the sun, but to very low frequency ocean heat content oscillations.
Paz, Trent, try googling “Was the Medieval Warm Period Global Broecker” and you will find copies online.
Interesting the response my “What does a warmer MWP mean” question got.
PaulM – It’s a serious point though. Steve McI reckons it leads to higher climate sensitivity – and that was my vague understanding too. He said so in the Yamal substitution thread. Are you suggetsing I can’t ask the question at various places?
Now for RyanO’s theory to work, it would mean that CO2 sensitivity is reduced with a warmer MWP. It’s a pretty easy way to test if the desire to flatten the MWP is a sensible goal.
Bender
“Nathan should be asking these questions at realclimate, where he would be … treated very well.”
What do I care? I just wondered if anyone here had bothered to find out. This whole blog seems to be trying to find out about the MWP, I figure it just another line of investigation. And a pretty easy way to test the effectiveness of ‘flattening’ the MWP. Did you look at the Delayed Oscillator site?
Steve: Nathan, are you unable to read a complete a sentence or understand elementary logic. I said that “if you are right and the Stick being wrong means that climate is more sensitive, then we should know and govern ourselves accordingly”. I didn’t express an opinion on whether a warmer MWP leads to higher climate sensitivity as I have seen no exposition of such a relationship that rises above armwaving. If you have been running around to other blogs incorrectly paraphrasing me, I would appreciate it if you would make corrections.
Re: Nathan (#277),
You tell me. You want answers. I suggest you go to the authorities.
You haven’t given me a good enough reason yet. For the second time – as I asked at The Blackboard – what’s the relevance for the IPCC-reviewed literature?
Steve
Sorry, I misread you.
So, what do you think it DOES mean? Surely this is an important thing to understand.
Do you think that a warmer MWP leads to higher sensitivity.
Re: Nathan (#279),
Dude, this is not a matter of opinion.
Re: Nathan (#279),
Not only did I already answer your question, I chased down the relevant thread at RC and squared away some of the confusing bits for you. I then showed you how this same answer was given by two other people on this thread. I then tied it to cited literature.
“I chased down the relevant thread at RC and squared away some of the confusing bits for you. I then showed you how this same answer was given by two other people on this thread. I then tied it to cited literature.”
Which post?
You said I should ask it at Realclimate becuase they’d treat me nicer. I don;t want to know what they think. I wanted to know what you think.
“Broeker (2001) has the MWP being associated with a 1500-year THC cycle, Holocene CO2 being relatively constant. Hence the deep and widespread interest in Holocene natural variability. The higher the unexplained variation in the past, the wider the uncertainty on modern CO2 sensitivity (and other forcings). If some hitherto unknown explanation can be found for the variation (e.g. cloudiness, ocean convection), this could bid the modern GHG sensitivity up or down depending on which way the process was working during the MWP.”
This isn’t really an answr is it? Unless your answer is I don’t know.
“Dude, this is not a matter of opinion.”
what does this mean? That it shouldn’t be a matter of opinion, or it is known?
“You haven’t given me a good enough reason yet. For the second time – as I asked at The Blackboard – what’s the relevance for the IPCC-reviewed literature?”
As I mentioned before he talks about the divergence Problem raised here.
As I mentioned above, I haven’t seen any literature that rises above arm-waving on this topic. Until I’ve analyzed a topic, I see little purpose in simply speculating.
My previous point was directed to those people, like yourself, who, for whatever reason, believed themselves to be able to make such a claim. The correctness of the Stick is highly relevant to people who believe this and they should be carrying out due diligence on Stick studies, rather than merely relying on whatever efforts I may carry out/
Steve
I was asking the question, because I don’t know. I had a vague impression that it implied greater sensitivity, but didn’t remember where I got that from.
But, it is important, as RyanO was claiming that the hockey stcik makers were trying to flatten the MWP. If no one knows what the result of that means, why would they do it? The only reason anyone can give is that it makes the present warming look more important – which is pretty superficial. It does seem to be a key point.
But as you say, I won’t find the answer here. So I will look elsewhere.
Cheers
Bender
Thanks, Realclimate had already made a short discussion on it.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/good-climate-debate-faq/comment-page-2/#comment-9826
snip – please do not use this sort of language
Bender
Ok I won;t post here.
\
Steve: Nathan, your contributions are welcome here. It’s fair enough to ask what my opinion as. But it’s equally fair for me to observe that the line of argument is, to my knowledge, based on arm-waving and to ask for an exposition of the line of argument which could be analyzed.
Re: Nathan (#287),
No worries
I don’t have anything to add.
Re: Nathan (#302),
Nathan, there’s nothing wrong with asking tough, challenging questions but your stream-of-conciousness approach just doesn’t work. There’s so much noise, there’s no handle to grab. And when someone does manage to answer you squarely, you ignore it and go on with your old assumptions like nothing happened. I told you what the MWP meant and you completely ignore what I say. You’re not the victim here. Your audience is.
Well, you big-oil funded denialist, finally here’s something that uncovers all: http://www.straight.com/article-265275/taking-goliath.
“Finally, the truth is coming out.”
“Darth Vader public relations” by skeptics of AGW.
“Some of the sources—including Fred Singer, Roger Innis, Ross McKitrick, and Steve McIntyre—are covered extensively in Not a Conspiracy Theory.”
Well, well…. that sounds really apolitical, objective and neutral, doesn’t it?
I know this may be OT, even for unthreaded, but information has come to my attention that may seriously undercut the “Starbucks” hypothesis. I have been told, by reliable Canadian sources, that no self-respecting Canadian would develop a “Starbucks” anything. Rather we would expect a “Tim Horton’s” hypothesis.
Comments, Steve? 😉
Steve: Moi?? I am definitely not a Tim Horton’s person. I don’t even like Starbucks “mild”. I think that Starbucks’ blend in downtown Toronto is different than some American cities. I like the Toronto Starbucks better than U.S. Starbucks. The Tim Horton’s hypothesis, as you put it, is proved a fortiori. Any Tim Horton’s drinking Canadian geologist (or Pete Holzmann, for that matter) could do about 10 times as much work in the field as a Starbucks-sipper like me.
Re: Mike B (#289),
Just teasing, Steve. I figured at the very least I could sneak in the Coffee/Donut/Hockey Stick connection of Tim Horton’s.
Anthony reports today that the offices of NASA GISS’s Hansen and Schmidt are directly above Tom’s Restaurant of Seinfeld fame. Did inspiration flow from Newman, Kramer and George to NASA GISS or from Hansen and Schmidt to Seinfeld? Or was there a synergy? Much food for thought for scholars of a future generation.
Kind of interesting how cooler oceans and globally cooler temps calms fears about global warming. It seems pretty obvious the prediction by Bratcher and Giese of a change to a cool climate regime happened at the end of 2007. Since these climate regimes have lasted 30-40 years in the 20th century, the 21st century will probably have two cool regimes and one warm regime (just the opposite of the 20th century). It is kind of sad scientific organizations are not rethinking their positions based on the new evidence.
A must-read post at David Appell’s blog. Another new hockey stick, this time from, amongst others, Peter Huybers. New methodology, no word on the data.
Re: Bishop Hill (#293),
I sure hope he’s not talking about this manuscript … the data set is interesting: 14 proxies from Osborn and Briffa (2006) (excluding two) that includes Mann’s PC1, Yamal, Tornetrask, …, I can’t believe that has been seriously submitted somewhere!
Oops – link here.
LOL!
Re: Bishop Hill (#296),
I think it’s pretty eco-friendly as one can recycle Steve’s old posts! For starters:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=523
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=524
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1797
The problem with proxies is that they are *ONLY* proxies. If trends are large, for example, between glacial epochs and interglacials, then proxies will all more or less agree with reality at some coarse level of granularity. When trends are small relative to the natural variability in the data, all bets are off and as is abundantly clear, it’s relatively easy to select your proxy to produce any trend you want to ‘prove’. There are just too many degrees of freedom.
The best data we have is the weather satellite data, which is not a proxy or spatially sampled. Unfortunately, the project at GISS to merge this data into a usable form has succeeded quite well for characterizing clouds, but fails miserably for characterizing the surface. The surface temperature and reflectivity records and full of data discontinuities, even though given the methodology used to construct these composites, i.e. using overlapping polar orbiters to provide a baseline calibration for geosynchronous satellites, such discontinuities should be relatively easy to correct. For example, consider the monthly temperature record for the surface temperature (red is monthly absolute, dotted black is monthly anomaly).
There’s a massive discontinuity around 10/01, which was caused by the changeover from using NOAA-14 as the reference, to using NOAA-16. If you look at 5-year averaged data, the discontinuity morphs into a hockey stick.
Every 6-12 months, I send an email to Rossow at ISCCP and ask if this is going to be fixed, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a sense of urgency, although I am told that the problem is known, although poorly documented. If you follow the methodology outlined in the various ISCCP related papers, things like this shouldn’t be evident and that it is, clearly indicates a bug of some sort that should be relatively easy to fix.
What’s most surprising is that Hansen’s GISTEMP uses relatively sparse surface temperature measurements and satellite ocean temperatures from another source, instead of using the far more accurate data he has spent money to develop. I suspect this is because when you compensate the data and remove the discontinuity, there’s no warming trend evident. Sampled data and proxies are more easily tuned to get the desired results.
Knowing that these discontinuities exist is why I took the approach of using 25 year average data to extract the systems response to dynamic forcing. The effect of the 10/01 temperature discontinuity (the biggest of them all) is only one part in 300 since it only affects only one monthly transition.
BTW, if anyone has any comments about the ‘Testing AGW’ link I presented earlier, I’m interested in hearing about them so that I can better tune the article.
George
John A: Post 124 Revisiting the Yamal Substitution….
October 20th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
John, could you collaberate on the use of the acronym MWP? I thought it’s acronym was the “Midieval Warming Period”. Not “Modern Warming Period”…I feel this is important to understand in the sense of communicating, staying on the “same” playing field, so to say. In Steve’s acronym listing, it shows it as the “Midieval Warming Period”…I hope we don’t have to go with two different acronyms! Confusing, don’t you think??? Thanks!
Denny
Re: Denny (#300),
I don’t know what other people use as a convention. I use CWP for current warm period.
Re: bender (#304), Thanks bender for the input…I hope John A see’s my post. Maybe he can give me the take on this! It’s important for communications to be “right on” or a misunderstanding “will” occur! Wow…imagine that.Right? Seriously though, I take this serious! Anonyms “do” mean something. We do not need the confusion! Of course, if it’s a “bad habit” in this use, it should be brought to their attention…don’t you think, bender???
OH THOSE DENDRO’S AND THEIR HOCKEY STICKS!
In breaking news….
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/front/article/822142
Does anyone know if these are the model runs Hansen’s famous predictions 20 years ago were based on?
Re: Jean S (#306),
I don’t 100% know that these are the runs but they sure look like it. It might be possible to crosscheck some details against contemporary publications.
Just found at a Freinds Father wrote the 1975 Newseek article “A Cooling world”
Saving The Planet
Re: Hoi Polloi (#309), George Carlin always gives me a laugh. Thanks for linking that.
The American Statistical Association and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics are amongst the 18 signatories to this letter:
Click to access 1021climate_letter.pdf
stating –
http://www.amstat.org/
http://www.siam.org/
Steve, Hu, Craig, UC, and others:
has anyone tried to do Brown&Sundberg type multivariate calibration for local (“grid cell” wide) temperatures?
It seems to me that the only way one could derive meaninful quantitative temperature reconstruction (with reasonable CIs) would be to first derive local temperature series with CI for each CRU grid cell (of the target area), and, assuming CIs are finite/meaningful, then calculate the large scale temperature average by combining those. This is essentially what Tingley’s approach is implicitly doing. IMO it should be worth trying to do that explicitly with tested methods from statistical literature.
Hi all, a simple question –
I have been bothered by how you can tell where the extra CO2 comes from. There was some vague stuff on the UK Met Office site which is not worth looking up. But then I found this, which is quite specific, on the London Science Museum site –
“Scientists can tell the extra carbon dioxide around the Earth comes from fossil fuels by looking at the type of carbon. The carbon atoms in fossil fuels are lighter, on average, than those in air. Scientists can measure increasing numbers of lighter carbon atoms in the atmosphere over time. So we know the extra carbon dioxide comes from fossil fuels”
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit/evidence/science/human_activity.aspx
Are carbon atoms really lighter – on average, apparently, not all the time – in fossil fuels than in air? And how can this be measured?
This seems to me a key link in the AGW arguement. If what the SM says is defensible, my scepticism would decrease somewhat.
Re: Stephen Haxby (#313),
Carbon has two stable isotopes with mass 12 and 13. Saying that the carbon atoms are lighter on average means that there are fewer 13C atoms compared to 12C or the ratio of 13C to 12C is lower. Isotope ratios are usually determined by mass spectrometry with very high precision. The differences in ratio are quite small and usually stated as parts per million difference. Fossil carbon has a lower ratio of 13C than currently exists in the CO2 in the atmosphere so the observed decrease in the ratio of 13C in atmospheric carbon dioxide over time is evidence that the increase in CO2 is caused by burning of fossil carbon.
Re: Stephen Haxby (#313), what the SM says here is broadly correct. The simplest way to think about this is to make an analogy with radiocarbon dating: fossil fuels are very old, and so contain essentially none of the radioactive heavy isotope 14C, and so CO2 produced by burning them is on average lighter than the rest of the CO2 in the air. There are (as always) subtleties, but that’s the big picture. You can measure the levels of different isotopes by mass spectrometry.
UK-based Radio 4 listeners may have heard an interesting 10-minute talk by Clive James on “A Point of View” on Friday and Sunday, called “In praise of scepticism”.
The text is available here. One excerpt:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_sc/us_sci_global_cooling
Gavin gets a quote here…and I guess statisticians are relevant for dismissing issues related to global cooling but not qualified for dismissing issues related to global warming.
Take the kaufman09 data. Extract via spectral analysis the top four spectral components. You get the red curve below:
The period of the largest spectral component and the one that is most responsible for the recent warming (which started about 1750 BTW) is 948 years (amplitude 1.2) is ploted with the data below.
The other periods comprising the SoS fit are:
764 years (amplitude = .82)
1315 yrs (amplitude = .62)
580 yrs (amplitude = .41)
My point is not to prove anything about anthropogenic GW. My point is that one can not draw conclusions as to cause from hockey sticks – real or imagined. The effect can be reproduced from long period cycles that appear to have been in place well before the industrial age.
Re: J. Patterson (#30),
rogue waves…
Dewitt Payne and Jonathan, thank you for your clear answers. This has bothered me for a long time but I have never got a simple explanation, like the one you have given. Its not that complicated, so why the SM has to be quite so simplistic, I don’t know. But OK.
Hi Steve and folks,
just FYI: There is a knew book from the National Academies Press, published by the NAS-Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age. The title is: “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age”.
From the Executive Summary:
Sounds quite interesting, does it?
Cheers, Mundus
Statisticians reject global cooling
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_bi_ge/us_sci_global_cooling
Re: JohnT (#322), Deserves an award for weaseliness. Debunked here, here, and I would particularly note here.
Re: JohnT (#322),
IMHO, the reason this “study” was done, is BECAUSE of CA.
Time after time, the posts here have ripped papers up, simply because of questionable statictics.
This group was given ONE dataset of measurements. Was it GISS, HadCRU, satellite? Were they asked to compare it to any other data?
If you’re the one handing out the data, you’ll know what the answer will show.
De Witt Payne wrote : quote Fossil carbon has a lower ratio of 13C than currently exists in the CO2 in the atmosphere so the observed decrease in the ratio of 13C in atmospheric carbon dioxide over time is evidence that the increase in CO2 is caused by burning of fossil carbon… unquote
…or is evidence than some other imbalance is occuring in the carbon cycle. The equation of atmospheric C12 increase to industrial emissions is speculation, the ‘correlation equals causation’ fallacy. I’ve thought of four or five different plausible causes which might be disturbing the production or uptake of the different isotopes — it’s a biological signal. The increase of atmospheric C12 is a sort of proxy because there is no way we can label each molecule from a power station with its origin, a proxy which no-one is questioning. It always pays to add ‘or something else is happening’ to any vehement statement about this infant science.
JF
Re: Julian Flood (#323), The premise that all old carbon is fossil fuel carbon seems suspect on its face. Given that the dominate regulatory time constant detectable in the Vostok chronology is around 115 ka and presuming that this TC is related to the heat capacity of the ocean, isn’t possible that the ocean is releasing “old carbon” from sediments into the atmosphere?
Re: Julian Flood (#323),
I said it’s evidence, not the only evidence. A low 13C ratio is a necessary but not sufficient condition for fossil fuel to be the source of increased atmospheric CO2. Timing is another bit of evidence, also necessary but not sufficient. Correlation may not imply causation, but it is certainly necessary if there is causation. And timing does call into question other sources of low 13C carbon dioxide as you would then have to explain why any of them accelerated at precisely the same time as consumption of fossil carbon accelerated but not at any other time during the current interglacial.
Re: Julian Flood (#323),
The reason why that isotope talking point is meaningless is even simpler than that. We already know that for every two molecules that are put into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion, only one accumulates, and the other goes somewhere. So it’s trivially obvious that the atmospheric CO2 will have a large proportion that is anthropogenic. But that doesn’t mean that that’s what’s controlling the concentration. Let’s imagine that we know for a fact that the concentration was actually governed 100% by ocean temperature. The CO2 in the atmosphere would still be primarily anthropogenic, because there’s a net flow from combustion processes to the ocean, even if the ocean equilibrium were governing the atmospheric concentration.
Even if the the atmospheric partial pressure were nothing more than the fugacity in the ocean, the net flow is still from the combustion to the ocean. In other words, the isotopic composition in the atmosphere doesn’t tell us anything useful. It just confirms the obvious.
Re: Calvin Ball (#386),
It’s not the 13C ratio in the atmosphere itself but the change in the ratio over time that’s important. If the atmospheric CO2 concentration went up only because the ocean warmed, then the ratio would not change over time. The residence time of an individual CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is on the order of 5 years and the sum of terrestrial and oceanic reservoirs of exchangeable carbon are nearly two orders of magnitude larger than the atmosphere. That means that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere is not derived from fossil fuel combustion. In fact, fossil fuel combustion and the resulting change in the 13C ratio can be thought of as a stable isotope tracer experiment allowing one to estimate the size of the other reservoirs and their exchange rates with the atmosphere. We know the residence time in the atmosphere as well an upper limit on the ratio of the atmosphere to the other reservoirs from a radioactive isotope tracer experiment with 14C from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.
Hey Andrew, you mean Borenstein is the weasel right? I’m a long time CA fan. I saw the headline in yahoo news and figured that CA readers would have some fun kicking it around. As a matter of fact, I called out another Borenstein article about 2 months ago. The guy is a warmist.
There is an interesting follow up in WUWT.
Re: JohnT (#327), I blame media in general. I don’t think any individual, such as Borenstein, can be expected to inject any sanity into the environment he works in. But then again, just because I don’t blame him, doesn’t mean that I approve either. Isn’t there a biblical passage or something about following fools?
Re J Pateron “old carbon”
Methanophages would do it.
Are any climatologists primarily biologists?
JF
Nature is navel gazing again, this time about “overhyping” of results by scientists and their organizations.
And as usual, when shedding these crocodile tears (including bemoaning the lack of availability of data), not a word about climate science.
But then, they seem generally oblivious to the depth of the problem, since they conclude
I guess it’s a case of “hear some evil, see some evil…but not that much evil.”
The Munk Debates
On Dec. 1, Elizabeth May, George Monbiot, Bjørn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson debate the policy response to global warming
Resolution: “Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response.”
Dec. 1, 2009, 6:45 to 9:00 p.m., The Royal Conservatory, 273 Bloor St. West, Toronto
Looks like I picked a bad week to give up commenting on journals.
In another one of life’s sweet ironies, the autumn issue of the The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, which has Rajendar Pachauri in the cover story, has a piece on “The Growth of Citizen Science”.
How’s this sound?
Something tells me they didn’t have the likes of Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Lucia, or JeffID in mind when they wrote that.
But that’s just a hunch. 🙂
Re: John M (#332),
Yes,John, definitely sweet. For it was Science that made the “Internet” possible. That you can thank them because of it’s original intentions by in the late 60’s for scientists to communicate quickly on issues in research developement..I would say the Space Program had a lot to do with the Internet happening…Now look at what we have…I wish I could have been part of this in the 60’s. Of course speed was an issue but responses were still quicker than snail Mail.
Yes, in turn the Internet allows me to learn and understand what’s going on in Science amoung other things of my or your interest..The Growth of Citizen Science is a very good title, it states alot!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/earth-environment/article6896152.ecehttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/earth-environment/article6896152.ece
The Times reports that senio scientists (including Sir David King) are warning that exaggerated claims about AGW are making the public skeptical of AGW
Dave D,
Yeah, good point. Just trying to keep an open mind.
Sometimes I wonder whether the obfuscation effort is directed at maximizing the hockey stick, or at minimizing historical variability. Its possible that recent temp rise is not as bad as advertised, and its also possible that it isn’t exagerated at all, but it happens all the time.
I wish there were someone I could trust.
Re: Kevin (#159), Perhaps you would care to explain why you can’t trust Steve.
Re: Kevin (#159),
Per the question posed by PhilH (#161), “Perhaps you would care to explain why you can’t trust Steve.”, I suggest that you re-frame: is there someone in whom you may reasonably have high confidence?
This is germane to the notion “trust, but verify”. Openness to being verified should increase your confidence. First, it shows that the person who is being open is confident in the work. Second, the person’s work may actually be screened by others, so if that person has made an error it may well have been or get corrected.
Trust may imply belief without evidence. I prefer confidence on the basis of evidence, and an open process is itself a piece of evidence.
Err… “climate modeling business”…
Phil H
I have to trust my wife, or life does not work. Doesn’t pay to trust anyone else. Steve is just a guy(s?), and even if he does not want to have an agenda, he has an agenda. It is entirely possible he is paid by Exon Mobil. I don’t believe thats true, but it would be foolish not to consider the thought. I suspect most people that stop at CA more than a few times, or have read this far down the comment list are probably not of the trusting type.
Is his data and analysis transparent and well explained? Sure. But I believe a smart human can develop a sellable story around anything with enough time and effort.
Thats a debate for a cup of coffee, not a blog board.
Steve: I strongly encourage people to verify things for themselves. I’ve spent many years in mining speculation and take very little on faith. I like to look at original data wherever possible. Attentiveness to the original data (and due consideration of exactly what you can get out of it) is perhaps a distinctive feature of my approach to these studies. I’m less interested in the most recent multivariate method of purporting to get results from inadequate data, though I’ve obviously developed considerable knowledge of these often misguided methods. I try very hard to provide access to original data in the form of convenient scripts and often accompany posts with analysis scripts so that people can see exactly what the point of any article is.
Re: Kevin (#164),
#164: motive, agenda, conspiracy, etc.
Re: Kevin (#164), you write:
“But I believe a smart human can develop a sellable story around anything with enough time and effort.
Based upon Steve’s on-going speed of analysis and presentation across a wide variety of threads, I suggest that he wouldn’t have all that much time and effort available to developing a sellable story – his time and effort is mostly accounted for on the simple face of what he presents.
This I note is in contrast to a academic papers, which in general involve so much time that one may reasonably wonder whether or not a particular author has invested time and effort in developing a sellable story.
Re: Kevin (#341), I’ll reframe your question.
you are given two studies.
1 published in a science journal. the code and data behind it WILL NOT be released and cannot be released because the raw data has been lost.
2. A blog posting where the data and code is openly available so that critics can destroy the case being made.
no critics show up to attack it even though they read it.
which do you trust?
now, you don’t get to answer neither. Pick one or the puppy dies!
New hurricane paper:
Click to access nhess-9-1749-2009.pdf
Re: Andrew (#344),
that’s an interesting paper on hurricane risk. Their fig 4 confirms that the IPCC’s claim “Intense tropical cyclone activity has increased since about 1970” (chapter 3 executive summary) is a great example of start-date cherrypicking.
Regarding increase in wind speeds in the last 60 years compared with earlier times, Chen et al say “while these differences cannot unequivocally exclude possible Global Climate Change cause, we suggest that data quality issues are more plausible.“
MrPete and EW – many thanks for the follow up on ringwidth measurement. From the image with the sw name here is a link to the winDENDRO brochure which confirms recent products have 0.001mm resolution:
Click to access WinDENDRO.pdf
Mr Pete – looking a bit further at the WinDENDRO specs they recommend some appropriate scanners to go with their products. From the webpage:
http://www.regent.qc.ca/products/ProductSpecs/Scanners.htm
The highest resolution shown is 4800dpi = 0.005 mm/pixel (for model STD4800). In box at the top of page 3 of the brochure referenced in the post above, point 2 says a minimum of 4 pixel per ring is advised increasing this by a factor of 10 for cases of low contrast.
If we go with the 4 pixel per ring minimum at the moment, that would give a minimum ring spacing of 0.02mm per ring. As they refer to the need to have perhaps 10 times the pixels per ring in the case of low contrast samples it suggests that the 4 pixels per ring is really only able to identify, rather than measure, rings. For a (say) 1mm wide ring I’d welcome your comments on the practical limits of accuracy on incremental differences – it seems to me under ideal conditions, and scanning perpendicular the ring, the best resolution would therefore be 0.02mm. Notwithstanding Steve’s post just now on the other thread re: sample orientation (btw – the post numbers seem to have gone odd there?) am I on the right track here?
As it seems like you are active in this work I’d also appreciate any comments on the consistency of ringwidths as one proceeds rotationally around a sample and whether or not the annual width relations are maintained ring to ring. Similarly I wonder if the profiles displayed in trunk data are presevered and identifiable in bough/branch sections. As in the post on the other thread if there is a good web reference please point me to it. Thanks
Re: curious (#348),
Don’t infer too much! I’m purely an amateur at this, having learned enough to help out with the CA Almagre Adventure and a bit more.
1) You’re right that ringwidth measurements are much more coarse than indicated by the physical values seen. It always pays to remember that these measurements and tools were originally designed for a much simpler task: cross-dating of samples by identifying ring width patterns.
2) Look up Almagre tree #31 here. You’ll find amazing examples of how much variation can be found within a single tree, particularly the Strip Bark Bristlecones that have long been favored by dendros.
3) Think about it: you’re not going to find long-term records anywhere but lower down on a tree trunk. On Almagre, we did take a few samples from a humongous root just for fun. I don’t know if that data was readable however.
Hope that helps!
Anybody else curious of the origin of this claim?
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-09Volcano.asp
Ok – thanks, noted. I based my guess you were working in the field on the screenshot; a case of a picture speaks a thousand words – but not all of them true! 🙂
Also, for the record, I should clarify the reference in WinDENDRO’s brochure to 0.001mm resolution is wrt the file format used. Having looked at the scanner specs. I think it likely all this really means is it will be able to record a value for the 0.005mm pixel points. If you have first hand experience of the sw it would be good to know what you think – the left hand bar in your screenshot shows fields to 3dp.
Gavin Schmidt not involved in GISS
Gavin Schmidt has contacted The Sunday Telegraph and informed them that he is not involved in GISS:
Mr Christopher Booker writes:
“Dr Schmidt wishes us to point out that he is not “involved” in Dr Hansen’ s GISS temperature record, which is one of the four official sources of global temperature data relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by governments all over the world. I am of course happy to publish the correction he asked for, but I am intrigued that Dr Schmidt should want to dissociate himself from this increasingly controversial source of temperature figures.”
Source:
Re: steven mosher (#204),
You’re right, this is a Monty Python sketch.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode03.htm
Episode Three: How to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away:
And later in the Sketch:
A bit later:
As they say in the sketch: “A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?”
for steve mosher
from http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=125
Peter Hearnden:
March 6th, 2005 at 3:23 am
Paul Mensink said
“In short that answer would be: people who think only few people share their controversial opinion have little incentives to step forward and speak out.”
True, at least in that few people like me speak out here. Mine is the controversial opinion here. All of you the ones in need of a paradigm shift, imo. So, what will provide the final deciding blow for you ? Well, I’d – honestly – like to know, my view is I doubt anyone here will change mind short of being around when it 2C warmer – and some will still call that natural I bet. Me? Say five years noticable global cooling without obvious cause (like volcanic, meteorite) would change things.
APPEAL FOR A CO-AUTHOR
From time to time, when I have mentioned my simple climate model (here) to friends, colleagues, or bloggers, the reaction has often been “well why don’t you get it into peer-reviewed literature, and then [I might | the world might] give your theory more credence”.
I think my model has merit because I am not aware of any other model with less than 14 parameters which can fit the 14 data points (HadCRUT3 mean over each Solar Cycle from 10 to 23) better than it does (consider that a challenge!). Briefly, it posits a sensitivity in the region of 1.5 degC per CO2 doubling, and about 0.08degC per year’s shortness of solar cycle, and leads to unalarming projections for AD2100. I acknowledge that I was first made aware of the solar cycle length connection by articles by David Archibald.
Now, I have never published in a climate science journal, so I feel that my chances would be enhanced, and the quality of the submitted paper improved, by collaboration with a co-author with some experience of publishing in this field. I am aware that my article referenced above has flaws (for example it is too rambling), which I would be happy to address.
Gentle reader, could you be that person? Or do you know someone who could be that person? I can think of some ideal names, but those are probably pie in the sky.
I shall seek replies (or other useful advice) in this lonely climatologists’ column…
Rich.
Re: See – owe to Rich (#360),
After 3 days, wot no interest in sharing fame and fortune with me 😉
(Or am I getting climatological papers out of proportion here?)
Rich.
Re: See – owe to Rich (#387),
good stuff Rich
steve’s/CA got a lot on his/their plate at the moment.
your time will come.
ps. check out link below, he is in the same boat as you, have a chat.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/agw-and-gistemp-issues/
Re: dougie (#403), hi, thanks for the kudos. I followed your link to ‘chiefio’ but I don’t quite see your comparison – is he trying to publish some stuff?
Regarding Steve being busy with other matters, I know he’s not really interested in solar stuff, which is fair enough, but I hoped some other visitors might take an interest. It’s clear that some visitors to CA are pretty well qualified in science, so would be good co-authors if they were interested.
Rich.
The link to the Esper 2002 paper under ‘Hockey Stick Studies’ at the top left of each page appears to be broken. Here it is:
Click to access esper.science.2002.pdf
Is it possible to excise #338 and #350 and file them appropriately?
Re: bender (#365),
Where d’you think they should go?
Re: MrPete (#368), The last thread where Rob Wilson commented that they were screening against Polar Urals on MWP variance. I don’t recall the thread name, there have been so many recently.
Dear All
Can anyone point me to a discussion of Richard Lindzen’s recent paper which uses the ERBE satellite measurements to estimate feedback?
Ed
Re: EddieO (#365),
Lubos just did a thread on it. He (and Roy Spencer) believes that there’s a fairly basic flaw in the paper.
Has the 2007 worldwide methane release (discovered in 2008) been discussed here?
Here it is: Re-visitning the Yamal Substitution
I am replying to Rob Wilson’s #80
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7374#comment-362259
Re: bender (#371),
Done. Tricky but not tooo bad. 🙂
The Reverend Gore’s New Testament
Re: Hoi Polloi (#372), Gavin is really gushing there! This can’t be good for his “image” (although it won’t upset any RC readers) as scientist, who is supposed to be objective or at least pretend to be…
Now, I’m not saying that people with political viewpoints can’t be scientists, but they should be either open about it or totally suppress it. Gavin just denies any bias and then…this.
Re: PaulM (#371), They have done some very extensive examination of the records, so it looks like they have a strong basis for their claims. Impressive indeed.
Re: Hoi Polloi (#372),
Aurthur C Clarke immersed himself in science too so he also could write science fiction novels which made great SciFi movies like 2001. Story tellers have a way of capturing peoples imaginations, don’t they.
regards
I am officially confused.
Has CA gone anti gag on unthreaded? Just checking the snip policy – are there any style guides available?
Here’s a picture of my local Starbucks where I go most days. Taped off because of a murder a few hours ago.
url
Sad story notwithstanding, it’s good to know unthreaded lives on.
Interesting post at Climate Science on an apparent bias in weather models that puts too much moisture in the upper troposphere compared to observations. The author points out that climate models use the same physics for this calculation as weather models. I suspect that this is another validation of Gerald Browning’s contentions about the failures of climate and weather models.
I need some help from someone who’s handy at NetCDF and R. Usually I can read NetCDF files in R using ncdf, but I can’t read the file shown below. Any advice appreciated.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#380),
I have a fix for you.
The mv variable is the designated NA for the variable and it appears that somebody screwed that up in the file. This workaround worked for me:
Print out the function get.var.ncdf by typing exactly that in the console.
Copy the results to a new script window.
Redefine the function as getx.var.ncdf
Find the two places in the function where it says: mv <- nc$var[[nc$varid2Rindex[varid]]]$missval
Replace each with: mv = -1.000000e+30
Run the new function.
data1 <- getx.var.ncdf( nc, v1 ) will retrieve the data.
(…and I figured this out after the dinner wine! 😉 )
Re: romanm (#383),
How on earth did you ever figure that out? This ranks up with filtfiltx.
Memo to self: the function edited according to Roman’s instructions can be downloaded by:
That there were no murders at that Starbucks for many years is a promising start, but if we are going to use that data, we will need to know the readings from the bank thermometer across the street.
For what its worth,
I did an ncdump of rich_gridded.nc
and is accessible at
http://serl.cs.colorado.edu/~dennis/rich_gridded.dmp
I will need to take it down in a day
or two.
Well that just about wraps it up for AGW. A big thanks to Steve and his tireless crusade!
Steve: This doesn’t do anything of the sort. This sort of exaggeration doesn’t do this site any good and I wish that people wouldn’t make them.
Re: Mad Hominem (#1),
Apols for that – but still, credit where credit is due.
In a post that criticises “false allegations”, you might want to avoid making this sort of dishonest insinuation.
Re: pete (#12),
To Pete:
If you had been around this blog you would know that this was not an insinuation of dishonesty by Biffra, but a reference to what Michael Mann actually did in his iconic ’98 hockey stick paper.
Regards,
WJR
Re: Will J. Richardson (#13),
“Censored” in that case refers to holding back certain proxy records from the analysis.
Steve is dishonestly pretending that “censored” refers to holding back adverse results.
Re: pete (#14),
Facts are facts. The results in the “Censored Directory” were adverse. It is not a matter of opinion.
Regards,
WJR
Re: Will J. Richardson (#15)
The meaning of the word “censored” is also a fact, and Steve has misrepresented that fact.
Re: pete (#16), Pete, the Mann “censored” directory held back adverse results. My perception of Steve, after long experience reading this blog, is that he is adamantly honest.
Re: pete (#14),
No, “censored” in that case refers to a directory of MBH 98 SI data. And that directory was labelled “censored”
Try to keep up, Pete.
Re: Terry (#17)
There is a directory labelled “censored”.
“Censored” is a word.
Words tend to have meanings.
The meaning in this case is that certain data were excluded from the analysis. Steve is dishonestly pretending that the meaning is something else.
Was that clear enough for you to keep up with Terry?
Re: pete (#18),
Dang it, Pete.
Re: Kevin (#20)
Hey, he started it 😉
Just to be clear, I was aware of the “censored” directory. My issue is with Steve’s insinuation that results were censored from publication, when in fact data was censored from the analysis, a standard sensitivity-analysis practice.
Re: pete (#21),
Actually, you started it. 😦
Your base allegation just doesn’t hold up, no matter how much parsing you apply. The tone of Steve’s post was very clear. There is no insinuation that the results were censored from publication, rather a statement that he feels that is not the case. It requires some extreme gymnastics to reach your conclusion to the opposite.
Re: pete (#21),
I still think you have it wrong. The directory DID include analysis results (eigenvalues) from the analysis with bristlecones excluded.
Re: David Jay (#27),
Exactly: “censored” means that the bristlecones were excluded to get those results.
Steve would have you believe that “censored” means that the results in that directory were censored”.
Re: pete (#30),
You can easily refute Steve’s assertion by pointing out where in MBH98 these results were provided.
Re: pete (#30),
Say the opposite of reality until you get a reaction?
Re: Terry (#17), “Try to keep up, Pete.”
Given that he wasn’t aware of MBH’s “Censored” directory, Pete’s point was fairly made. So far he hasn’t shown any discourtesy in his followup comments, and so far he strikes me as being interested in a fair discussion. We need more people like that. Let’s please be nice to him.
Re: pete (#12),
Pete,
I think your read might be wrong. Two weeks ago I made a stupid remark about “censored” directories and Steve snipped me. I think he was trying to warn people like me not to say such stupid things. I think that is why it was in quotes.
Re: bender (#42)
Point taken, this might not be a deliberate attempt to mislead. I did notice that the word was in quotes, but I assumed that they were there for plausible deniability.
Maybe the above thread will alert Steve to the fact that readers are taking his jokes literally. He is very good at snipping people’s stupid remarks (e.g. comment #1 here). He does have rather a blind spot to his own though.
Re: pete (#390),
What is the “dishonest insinuation”?
What is the definition of “censored” that anyone has used in this discussion that you are objecting to?
All I see are people using the word “censored” to refer to the directory in question, which was called…wait for it…”censored”.
Re: pete (#390),
For reference, once again, here’s what I said:
To my knowledge, it is correct in all particulars. Briffa had said that they “would never select or manipulate data in order to arrive at some preconceived or regionally unrepresentative result.” I said that I took them at their word. Surely pete can agree with me on this point. I said (describing my own state of mind) that I did not think that there was a
‘”censored” directory with unreported adverse results with KHAD data together with verification r2 results.’ That’s what I think – for either meaning of the word “censored”. I presume that pete thinks likewise. Neither a “censored” (Gavin Schmidt style) nor a “censored” (data exclusion) directory. I presume that pete thinks likewise – no censored directory at CRU of either type.
So pete and I agree on everything that I said in this short paragraph. Undoubtedly, there are other issues that we agree on and other issues that we will disagree on. But it’s always a good idea to build on points of agreement and it seems that pete and I agree that Briffa did not withhold adverse verification r2 statistics.
it seems that pete wants to expand this discussion into whether other climate scientists have or have not withheld verification r2 statistics. However, this goes well beyond this particular thread and was not raised in the above sentences. It has been discussed on other threads and I refer pete to them. I haven’t been able to find a location where the adverse verification r2 for the AD1400 MBH step was reported. If pete can provide a reference, I’d be very appreciative.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#439),
In the spirit of determining a “common ground”, yes, I agree with what you explicitly said.
Now do you agree that, (a) between the lines, there is a dig a Mann for having a directory labelled “censored”, and (b) a reader, without fully understanding the context, might conclude that “censored” referred to hiding results, and finally (c) that the word “censored” as a directory name refers to the process of excluding data for sensitivity analysis?
Re: pete (#441),
I’m glad that you agree with the explicit comments. A reader, without fully understanding the context, might conclude from your remarks that Mann had fully disclosed the MBH verification r2 results, when I’ve reported elsewhere that the verification r2 results had not been reported.
I certainly wouldn’t want readers to be left with a false impression if, as you seem to imply, they’ve been reported somewhere and I’ve simply been unable to locate them. Perhaps you can help avoid any potential confusion on that front by telling us where the verification r2 results were reported so that I can remove any misunderstanding on the part of readers.
Understand that it’s late here and I’m signing off soon,
Re: Steve McIntyre (#444)
That probably explains your insistence on playing silly word games. Earlier you stated: “it’s always a good idea to build on points of agreement”. However, you seem to be reluctant to say whether you agree or disagree with my statements:
(a) between the lines, there is a dig a Mann for having a directory labelled “censored”.
(b) a reader, without fully understanding the context, might conclude that “censored” referred to hiding results.
(c) that the word “censored” as a directory name refers to the process of excluding data for sensitivity analysis?
In the interest of not misinforming your readers, I am not aware of any reporting of those particular results.
Re: pete (#454),
You might have a point…except that Mann claimed his results were “robust” whereas the supposed “sensitivity analysis” performed in the “censored” directory showed very much otherwise.
Re: Michael Jankowski (#459),
“Very much otherwise” is pushing it. The dispute seems to be limited to the 1400–1450 step of a reconstruction that goes from 1400–1980.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#439)
I’d just like to point out that when you go back and edit your posts it makes the discussion harder to follow. In reply to your most recent version:
Ok, yes, I agree on this point!
Here I disagree. There was an obvious subtext referring to MBH98.
As you know, some are of the opinion that the phrase “adverse verification r2” is meaningless. But that’s beside the point. You are implying that the name of the “censored” directory is evidence that Mann deliberately hid results.
Re: pete (#443),
And some aren’t. Zorita, for one.
MBH98 said that they calculated verification r2 results and their Figure 3 showed verification r2 results for the AD1820 step. So far I’ve been unable to locate the verification results for the AD1400 step, adverse or otherwise. Once again, if you can direct me to the location of these results, I’d be very appreciative.
We are not dealing here with symbolic meanings or poetry. I am writing very mundane prose. Please deal with the words that I wrote and their explicit meaning. No more, no less.
Come, come, Pete is right of course.
When you open a door to a room to find a body on the floor with a shadowy figure standing over it covered in blood and holding aloft a machete, the first order of business must be for you to apologise for your failure to knock.
Yes, everyone knows that, no need to keep repeating it.
i.e. “censored” refers to excluding data for sensitivity analysis.
Steve is making it clear that he doesn’t think Briffa censored results. The dishonest insinuation is that Mann censored results.
Re: pete (#26),
To: Pete
So you are saying that Mann released the adverse results of his sensitivity analysis? As I recall, Mann denied making such an analysis or calculating R^2. The discovery of the “Censored” directory showed he did both. Now why do you think Mann chose the particular word “censored” for that directory?
Regards,
WJR
Re: Will J. Richardson (#28)
He chose the particular word “censored” because he had censored (excluded) some of the proxy series.
Note that Steve agrees with this interpretation, referring to the “censored series”.
The ridiculous volume of responses to my one minor point does prove one thing: Steve has misinformed his readers by making snarky jokes about censoring.
Re: pete (#26), You’re kidding right.
This is way off topic.
Re: pete (#26),
David Jay neglected to mention above that these results were adverse to Mann’s conclusion that the MBH98 reconstruction was robust to the absence of bristlecones. The adverse results were withheld from publication. Mann censored the results.
Where are instructions on how to upload a picture, like a small jpeg file?
Thanks.
Re: AMac (#389),
Not sure is there is a HowTo on CA anywhere. First step is to have the image hosted somewhere. I use my personal hosting provided by my ISP. There are free hosting sites that will host it for some limited time. Bitbucket is one, I think.
Second step is to link to it either as a URL or as an inline image. Inline images are nice but if there are too many in a thread it bogs down. Also for inline the image should be no larger than 800 pixels wide, possibly smaller.
To add a URL or image to your post you can use the buttons above or hard code the HTML yourself. If useing a button you need to hit the button a second time to close the link.
Hope this helps!
Re: Earle Williams (#390),
Thanks, 2 jpegs uploaded to Bitbucket and made available for download at the Upside-down Mann thread and at Stoat.
Why mention Mann is a response to Briffa?
Re: willard (#411),
Are you now setting the Blog Rules?
Better yet, why mention Schmidt and refer to Mann in a response to Briffa?
I made one comment based on Steve’s post. The rest are replies to reactions from others
My perception is that it’s damned hard to find the point of most of Steves posts amongst all the sarcastic in-jokes.
Page 783:
Re: pete (#37),
I can see that it would be, if that’s all you’re looking for.
I’m not a mathematician, statistician, or anything even close, but I can almost always get the point of Steve’s post.
C’mon folks. Don’t feed the troll. Yet another hijacking down an irrelevant ill-conceived sidetrack in his own mind.
If it was my call, most of this would be snipped.
Re: romanm (#38),
I agree, mea culpa.
Thank you romanm.
Zamboni, ho! Pete, you’re awfully sensitive about Michael Mann’s guilty conscience. Oh wait, he doesn’t have one; we’ve all heard a lengthy and completely adequate explanation for his labeling the file that way and for why it contains work he claims wasn’t done.
===================================
Let’s concentrate more on Steve’s statement:
.
“For now, I’ll re-iterate the points at the start of this post: that the Briffa response accepts the legitimacy of the issues raised about Yamal at CA and that it does not endorse any of the attacks (or defences) advocated by Gavin Schmidt and realclimate supporters. Both constructive in different ways.”
and ignore the misleading statements from the troll who is simply trying to disrupt the thread.
Don’t know who “pete” is but he seems to have been successful in hijacking this thread from the substantive matters. To me Steve’s statement was just that without any “insinuations”.
I do see a ray of hope in the level of discourse reported here although tempered by the usual “moving on” ploy.
Well now that this is on unthreaded, let me point out that Pete is ignoring that the “censored” directory did indeed have data that showed the adverse effect of not using BCPs, which was withheld from publication.
For those not wanting to hunt through the archives, it is described here on p. 41.
Several folks have tried to make this point, but Pete is intent on arguing about the implied meaning (or more correctly, his inferred meaning) of the word “censored”, and whatever talking point he wants to extract from it.
Fair call snipping that mess Steve. I’d put it down to 2 things:
(1) A dozen different commenters shouting down what I consider a fair and useful criticism.
(2) My replying to said commenters.
I will attempt to avoid (2) in future.
(1) however is beyond my control. I know you’d prefer to have a useful discourse here. Quips like your “censored” joke above encourage the sorts of comments in (1). You know what “censored” means, in the context of censored series. However, it’s clear from the mess here that many of your commenters don’t. Please consider that such jokes have the effect of misinforming your readers, detracting from the rest of your work, and driving away commenters who might provide you with valuable constructive criricism.
Re: pete (#13),
Pete you should to admit you didn’t get the point. The “censored” comments was clear, and it is very funny that they found a directory with that name.
Re: Nicolas Nierenberg (#14),
Anyone with a sense of humor would have to laugh at his own misfortune if he were to suffer such an ironic incident. Admit the error, share in the laugh, and THEN move on.
I got the joke. I thought the joke was unfunny because it amounted Steve making a serious accusation that a) he didn’t actually believe, and b) many readers took at face value.
I’m talking about the clear and explicit meaning of the word in this context. Steve certainly took it to have the same meaning in his comments about censored series.
Re: pete (#430),
Let’s parse the paragraph you imagine let’s Mann off the hook:
What he seems to be saying here is that taking all the dendro proxies out of his dataset results in lower values of tests, but he nowhere provides the actual numbers. Also he then tries saying that the TREND is fairly robust and that therefore the tree-rings should be allowed. But again he doesn’t provide the actual numbers. But of course Steve was both able to isolate the problem with the dendroproxies down to the the bristlecone pines and one or two more sets and predict what the test data would show if he was ever able to find it and when he did find it, it showed what he predicted. IOW, while you can claim Mann warned us that his set of proxies were a load of c…, he still found an excuse to use them. All while keeping the numbers secret.
Now I might add that if I were a peer reviewer of the Original article, I’d have immediately asked that the numbers be put into a table so people could see what “notable decreases” and “fairly robust” actually mean. Weasel words like that should be automatically challenged. IOW, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on in accusing
Steve of anything.
Now apologize or leave.
Re: pete #424 I’m not a mathematician, statistician, or anything even close, but I can almost always get the point of Steve’s post.
Pray tell, pete – what was the point of Steve’s post?
How to describe whatever Schmidt reaped, bending One?
Re: willard (#20),
Go ask him. Be sure to report back.
And I suppose I have to add: pete, I didn’t mean what was the point of the word “censored.” What was, in your own words, the point of Steve’s post? Thanks!
Pay attention Terry #432. That was Jeff’s quote you are asking (goading) pete about.
Re: Joel (#434),
Oops, you’re correct and I’m wrong on that query, Joel. Apologies for mixing up the attribution of the question, and for goading in general. Sorry for the sloppy reading.
That the name of the directory refers to hiding results when it actually refers to excluding data.
I am objecting to Steve’s implication that “censored” refers to hiding results when he knows that it means excluding data.
This is why I called it an insinuation. The not-very-subtle read-between-the-lines meaning is clear. I suspect it’s clear to you too, and that you’re being deliberately disingenuous.
Re: pete (#436),
This has been hashed over several times in the past. Not trying to discourage you from boring everyone with repetitious nonsense. Just saying … if you read the blog …
Re: pete (#436),
False dichotomy,It was both. The results were numerical which were not reported in the paper. The results were therefore censored.
Will that answer be related to the Response to Briffa #2, Bending Unit 22?
And Pete, just to add to Dave D’s comment and to make sure why you think I’m disingenuous, is it your position that
Is the same as saying
(from my previous link to McKritick’s summary.
Re: John M (#440)
I think you were being disingenuous by missing the wordplay on Steve’s part conflating the commonly understood meaning of “censored” and the meaning of “censored” in this specific context.
Let’s be extra clear. The adverse verification r2 for the AD1400 MBH step has been reported at nature.com. I’m not aware of any reporting of the verification r2 for the AD1400 step of the sensitivity analysis.
Steve: C’mon, Pete. I know this stuff inside-out. The verification r2 isn’t in that SI – that’s the point.
It also means removing something you don’t wish to be seen.
Jeff Alberts:
Which is a reasonable interpretation of the directory name in this case.
Ironically Pete is willing to level a charge of “misleading” towards Steve, but hey no problem with Mann playing dishonest games with his data. Nothing misleading there.
Re: Carrick (#457)
It’s not a reasonable interpretation.
Steve certainly hasn’t used that interpretation. Take a look at this post, where he repeatedly refers to the “censored series”.
Nothing to see here, move along, ignore the man behind the curtain.
pete:
Actually it’s the most reasonable interpretation. .
You obviously think otherwise, but you’re not exactly an unbiased observer.
Warning: An off-topic, devil’s-advocate post.
I hope you don’t mind if I put it here.
First though:
Q: Why am I bringing this up?
A: (i) Although I have wondered along similar lines myself for all of 2 seconds or so, I never bothered to chase it up. That’s mainly because of laziness, but also because I felt I would have come across something like it by now, not that I am—shall we say—the keenest of observers of the AGW War but I generally like to keep my hand in.
(ii) I find it interesting for its own sake. Others might too.
So, if this road has been travelled here before I apologise for the unintentional backtracking.
__________________________________________
AGW enthusiast, Professor Ian Stewart, in a section entitled ‘Global Warming Swindle‘ in his recent popular mathematics book, ‘Hoard of Mathematical Treasures‘ (Hardback p 164-174), has a dig at ‘dissident opinion’, in particular one such opinion aired in the March 2007 Channel 4 Television documentary, The Great Warming Swindle:
He challenges the logic of that argument by means of an intentionally artificial and very simple model of two coupled differential equations designed to show in principle that the time lag (“about 100 (sic) years”) of the CO2 curve behind the temperature curve means, not as has been claimed by some “dissidents”, that “That much-trumpeted time delay is irrelevant […] — in fact, it is misleading. The resulting temperature change begins immediately [after a ‘kick’], and rises.” Here’s the fuller quotation:
THE MODEL:
* There’s some preamble early on to the effect that, “[After] a century (sic) or so later, the [temperature] effect on CO2 becomes apparent. This rise feeds back into the temperature, which responds far more quickly to CO2 levels than CO2 levels do to temperature rises. So the temperature rises. Now temperature and CO2 reinforce each other through positive feedback, and both climb together….” This is in the context of the absence of industrial output of CO2 where a periodic graph, with appropriate CO2-lag, is shown to illustrate the natural system, but no actual data sources for these two (unspecified, relative) sensitivity coefficients are quoted.
Graph 1
Graph 2
Graph 3
He ends by giving the following links:
Re: John Archer (#464),
#464 CO2-temp lead-lag is an unsuitable topic for this blog
Re: bender (#468),
his model simply mirrors his simplicity. where is the water vapor???
regards
Re: nevket240 (#471),
The topic does not merit discussion. Don’t waste your breath.
Re: John Archer (#464),
What bender said and additionally, posting images in a long thread like this is a waste of bandwidth and increases load and response times. Use links instead, please.
pete, I risk the zamboni here, but the fact that work which would have rendered his study worthless was done, was not reported, and was placed in a file called ‘censored’ is devastatingly preponderant evidence. You are puffed up like a frightened cat. There is use of symbolic meaning in this comment.
======================================
kim is correct. Not only is “removing something you don’t wish to be seen” a reasonable interpretation of “censored”, it is fully consistent with how this work were eventually treated.
There is such a thing as “censored data”, but I’ve not seen it used in any context associated with sensitivity testing. Perhaps, since Pete thinks this is a “reasonable interpretation”, he can provide a reference where this term is in fact used in that context.
(I won’t speak to how that helps with pete’s claim that referring to the title of the directory “censored” is then misleading as a reference to how data were in fact censored as in “removed from view”. I tried writing out the logic chain involved, and there were so many short-circuits in that logic, that my brain almost melted…some caution is needed there.)
Re: Carrick (#466)
I’ll try one more time: Steve uses the same interpretation as I do for “censored”.
Steve,
You are winning the data battle, but more importantly the presentation battle. Because I’ve never trusted AGW news to begin with I probably have confirmation bias. However reading the articles and comments for the other side of the debate I see overwhelming arrogance, aggression and inflexibility on their hemi-blogosphere. Keep up the patient, persistent and polite offensive.
KM
Steve: Keep in mind that I am not as “skeptical” as many readers. The main issues are physics and, as an interested citizen, I wish that IPCC and climate journals would devote more attention to careful and detailed exposition of key physical issues such as water cycle feedback.
Seems like Steve will be on Finnish TV next Monday 🙂
http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/etusivu
I guess this image is from the CA headquarters 😉
The page reports an “unphysical positive correlation” for the AD1400 verification r2 with the NINO3 index.
Which particular verification r2 are you complaining about?
Now please point me to where you give a simple (agree/disagree/don’t-accept-the-premises) answer to my (a,b,c) above.
Steve: We are all very familiar with this webpage and it doesn’t contain the verification r2 statistic. This has been discussed at length on other occasions. See for example our NAS Panel submission.
Re: pete (#473),
Fine time to ask.
Re: bender (#475)
I gave Steve a link to a reported adverse AD1400 verification r2 result.
Steve claims that “the” adverse 1400AD verification r2 result isn’t on that page.
Seemed like a good time to ask him exactly which adverse AD1400 verification r2 result he wanted, since he was unsatisfied with the one provided.
Steve: please read our 2005 articles. It’s not that I’m “unsatisfied” with what you”provided”;’ what you provided doesn’t have anything to do with the issue.
I see, you want the “adverse AD1400 r2 verification result for the 1854–1901 temperature data“, not the “adverse AD1400 r2 verification result for the SOI“?
Maybe I should have read your complaint in context, rather than just taking “the words that [you] wrote and their explicit meaning”.
Now, would I be correct to conclude, based on your evasion so far, that you are not going to answer points (a), (b), and (c) above?
pete:
Actually he uses the word in both senses.
I don’t have as much charity as Steve for people who hide results that are contradictory to the main thesis of their work. Nor too much for people like you who appear have some deep seated need to shill for them.
You don’t have much to contribute besides semantics games, so I’m out of here.
Weblog Awards 2009 is now taking nominations. Anthony has the details here.
Let’s help Steve make the finals along with any other sites you feel deserve recognition.
Possibly the most disturbing thing ever written on Climate Audit:
“However, if Briffa’s articles are to be considered as scientific articles, then the selection criteria need to be clearly stated and it should be possible to verify the choices. At present, I am not saying that there were no such rational criteria, only that the articles do not say what they were and, thus far, I have been unable to deduce what the criteria were.”
free the field note books, free the world!
Room Service: settle down, Nathan. Do you know what the selection criteria were? There are many mysteries in Team methodology. What were the retention criteria for MBH principal components? Or the Caramilk secret: how were MBH99 confidence intervals calculated?
Re: Nathan (#480), Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#481),
IOW, “We’re too busy saving the world to be bothered with minor details. Please polish your butt-kiss and suck-up skills, and maybe we’ll get back to you.”
Hey, Nathan and Rattus, I’m thinking of adopting some of the data and metadata practices of the Team in the medical research I do. Care to volunteer?
Steve, you could always phrase your question nicely and like, ask him. Oh yeah, you’ve burned too many bridges to be able to get an answer other than something like “you’ve impugned my professional and personal honesty too many times for me to consider this request. Why should I waste time answering your questions when all you will do is continue to attack me both professionally and personally?”
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#12),
Here’s an idea: people do their job properly and as required in their grants and by the journals in which they publish, so that Steve doesn’t have to babysit. Big-boy pants, Rattus.
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#12),
“Please,sir. Can I have more?”
Doing the peer review that wasn’t done right the first time is “attacking both professionally and personally”? Get real! The arrogant treatment accorded to Steve and any one else who dares to question the work earns the respect that it richly deserves.
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#12),
phrase your question nicely and like, ask him
Go back and read just the last TWO YEARS of CA which is when I started following this site regularly. Steve has asked so many times, and with true professionalism. Methinks the rat is a troll.
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#12),
Puh-leeze. I have asked nicely Briffa for data and got nowhere except through quasi-litigation. And Taimyr is even more clearcut than Yamal in terms of obstruction. Taimyr was first used in Briffa 2000. I asked in 2006 and got nowhere. In 2009, the Phil Trans B archive gave a different data set than Briffa 2000 – expanded by the Avam and Schweingruber additions. After nearly 10 years, the Briffa 2000 is not even available as a distinct data set, but only on a merged basis with other data and no metadata to show which was in the original data set and which wasn’t.
Nonetheless, I’ll ask Briffa to provide such metadata cc’ing Phil Trans B to give Briffa a little encouragement. It is possible that Briffa has decided that continued obstruction generates bad publicity with no benefit – a message that would be worth passing on to Phil Jones.
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#481), If one is unknown to the author of a paper and you ask for their data, my experience is that your odds of getting it are about 1 in 5. This is because there is nothing in it for them, and they plan to use the data again. You only get it if you are a professional ally. This is clearly against how the scientific method is supposed to work. If it is known that you are a) capable of and b) likely to find errors in the work, your chances of getting the data go straight to the bottom. While science progresses by correcting errors, individual scientists either view their work as perfect (really, some don’t think they have ever made a mistake) or that science is a series of independent works. Any critique of their own work is an attack on their person which could only be motivated by hostility. Kind of like how playwrights view theatre critics.
Not data Steve, real questions about why choices were made. You’ve made plenty of enemies Steve, and it started pretty much from the beginning. snip
Room Service: please calm down and stop using such offensive language. As you say, the Team adopted the tactic of treating me as an “enemy” “pretty much from the beginning” – well before the start of Climate Audit, which was a reaction to Mann’s attacks on us at realclimate.
Re: Rattus Norvegicus (#486), In my view, this is at best a naive attitude – “if you’d just asked politely, everything would have been settled long ago”. Sounds suggestive of an insufficient acquaintance with the topic “how to criticize mainstream science”. Unless one actually represents a force to potentially damage their reputation, all one rightfully deserves is a one sentence reply showing how little knowledge of whatsoever the critic has and how trivial his points are. If one bravely insists to continue the exchange (a good way to do a little forcing is to copy it openly to a few, not only one person), a classical phrase to end it from the opposite side would be —
“I regret to say that our exchanges have come to the point of diminishing return, after having presented to you simple and compelling considerations that addressed all your concerns.”
— with variations.
Rattus Norvegicus could be advised to do a little bit of criticizing for him/herself to acquire relevant experiences; fortunately or unfortunately, modern peer-review-literature does provide lots of opportunities to be criticized.
Re: Anastassia Makarieva (#488),
VERY good point, Anastassia.
It’s important to be polite, especially with respect to the people, yet always aware that the “falsification” at the heart of the scientific method is a continuous process of attempting to destroy one another’s best work.
Never hurts to remember the goal is to examine the work, not the person. Hard part: people do get attached to their work. 🙂
Re: MrPete (#489), It is normal that people get attached to their work and that they make mistakes. Actually attachment to one’s work is a feature of a passionate scientist. But in an imaginary peer-review-science with low standards of unaccountable and close review procedure (of course, the real peer-review-science is not like that) there would be a mixture of people who are sincerely attached to their work and make unconscious mistakes and people who are attached to their positions and funding programs that strongly depend on the official recognition of their publications. Such people would not care very much about their research, but would care about appearing solid, respectable and impeccable. The difference in the behavior of people from the two groups can sometimes appear subtle but in reality it is always statistically significant.
Well before I knew anything about CA, I had sometimes thought and shared these thoughts with colleagues that the hope of modern science rests with (relatively) well-off people who would pursue scientific research just out of love for truth and curiosity for nature, without bothering about earning a thicker piece of bread by rising their citation index. (Another (smaller) hope for science rests with enthusiasts who are ready to starve but pursue their route to truth.) “Publish in the peer-review-literature and be paid” principle kills science, in my view. But this looks like a bit out of topic and I have nothing against it being snipped.
To go off on a completely different tangent, there have been “allusions”? to copyright and patent issues related to Climate Audit requests for data, metadata and analysis code. A book I ran across discusses the barriers to progress in science and technology of current national and international law on patents and copyrights. The book is The Gridlock Economy by Michael Heller. If I understand correctly, he basically argues that copyrights and patents are scattered into so many minute pieces and are so difficult to discover and negotiate around, science and technology are now have great difficulty progressing. I learned of it from an interesting podcast with the author here, or find the podcast at Itunes podcasts under higher education, Econtalk. Maybe somebody here is interested.
A new unthreaded thread would be really nice. This one takes forever to load
In the “Another Correction from Upside Down Mann” post, the link in the text
“Continues discussion from ***here***. See technical discussion of emulation of CPS at, for example…”
Appears to be incorrect.
Steve: fixed. AMac, while the tools provided are pretty technical, they permit Mannian sensitivity studies. REgEM is another game entirely tho.
A note to RPJr:
Re: Joe Romm hatchet job
Joe Romm is a policy warrior. He does what soldiers are programmed to do. So let him say what he likes … for now. Don’t play guns with a cracked soldier. At some point there will be a renewed appetite for reason, and that’s when rationale people will again be called upon to serve. Until then, it’s Joe Romm’s McCarthyism. Just wait. It gets worse before it gets better.
Continue at http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7724