The Disinformation Cycle

Thanks to Drudge and Instapundit another round of "global warming stopped in 1998" is making the rounds of the blogs.

It's only been a few months since the last time and yet you only have to look at a graph of GISS temperatures to see that warming hasn't stopped:

i-1b943873d017f8f464acd94b6e0e88aa-gisstemp.png

Falsehoods like this are able to survive and spread due to the efficiency of the disinformation cycle shown below. Notice that there is little chance of actual facts about the world getting in.

i-ab89faab5eada418172705842c8906d5-disnfocycle.png

What is particularly disappointing about this particular case was that one of the nodes in the cycle, Counterpoint was produced by Australia's ABC and violates the ABC's Code of Practice, which states:

5.3 Every reasonable effort must be made to ensure
that factual content is accurate and in context and
that content does not misrepresent other viewpoints.

And here is where mainstream climate science has been misrepresented:

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. ...

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Rather than present to listeners the opinions of a climate scientist, Duffy allowed Marohasy to misrepresent the science. This is particularly striking because in the immediately preceding segment he had no trouble in getting an expert on nutrition to rebut Gary Taubes' rather unorthodox claims about diet and nutrition.

But wait, there's more. Ken Parish criticised Marohasy for her misrepresentation of the temperature record. In her response, Marohasy pointed to this article to support her assertion that the claim that global warming had ended was not even controversial. The second paragraph of the article states:

"Global warming has not stopped," said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) climate program.

This seems to me to be both hard to miss and easy to understand. Marohasy surely knew that her assertion was false.

The ABC complaints page is here.

More like this

About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs): GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) - The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is…
The latest story doing the rounds of the global warming deniers (Drudge, Instapundit, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair etc ), is this one Michael Asher: Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man…
Last year on Counterpoint Anthony Watts appeared: Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests? Anthony Watts: That's correct. It's an interesting situation. The early arguments…
Some more responses to Michael Duffy's wrongheaded column. Gavin Schmidt's letter in yesterday's SMH: The opinion piece by Michael Duffy contains multiple errors of fact and plenty of errors of interpretation ("Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored", November 8-9). ...…

I listened to this broadcast with curling toes, and I too was amazed at the contrast with this segment compared with the reasonable treatment of the Gary Taube story. I could only wonder if Duffy and his team decided to lend balance to something which is fluff to them, so that they have a better chance of getting away with the tripe such as that presented by Marohasy.

Climate denial is to Duffy as a flame is to a moth.

Sadly, I predict many posts here reiterating the "warming stopped in 98 - really! (although it never actually happened in the first place)" drivel, probably followed by some oik trying to tell us that we can't measure temperature that well, so we can't say anyway.

Really, what will it take for it to sink into these people's heads?

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Great choice of graphic to illustrate a discussion about the warming trend during the last ten years.

I can imagine a doctor showing relatives a chart like that showing that the patient had been alive and recovering for the vast majority of his time in hospital - "Never mind about that bit at the end where all the statistics flatline - they are so untypical of his condition during his stay here."

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tim,

You're no better than Ken Parish so I'll repeat my comment to him:

You are not being very honest by using the graph that you used in your post but then again what does honesty have to do with climate alarmists? (further comment added - if we are talking about the last 10 years then let's use a graph that is up-to-date and gives much greater detail as to the period in question).

So let's look at a better graph shall we which focuses on the two satellite records which are the most reliable sources of temperature data available:

http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/MSUvsRSS.html

It certainly appears to support Jennifer's assertion and contradicts the claims by alarmists of an "accelerating warming"!

The shame of it all is that the lies being propagated by the alarmists are diverting focus and resources away from legitimate environmental and humanitarian problems! You should be ashamed of yourself!

Hello Tim!

You left me out the loop!

By Harold Pierce Jr (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

"Is the Earth still warming?"

"No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take an hour ago as your point of reference. If you take this morning as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not the answer you'd expect if I had any clue about the difference between weather and climate."

Just like a denialist, bringing a weatherotologist to a climate fight.

Hi all

Tim, that graph you use is shit, we all know 1998 was the warmest year, not 2003.
Which part of the GISSTEMP, HADCRUT shows warming in the past 5-7 years? At worst it is flat. What about cooling seas the models said was not happening?

AGWers, go find another bogus study to hang your hat on.

Regards
Peter Bickle

By Peter Bickle (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Hi all

The graph cited above certainly looks different from this one in an earlier post in 11/07:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/11/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_1…

I argued that this showed little warming from around 2000. See 1998 was the warmest year. Obviously you are haning your hat on the graph at the beginning of this post as it is more of an increasing trend. I can safely say that graph is bullshit.

Regards form New Zealand
Peter Bickle

By Peter Bickle (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tim, you are being intellectually dishonest by showing the graph you show with the timescale you show. Not only do all 4 datasets show a leveling off of global temperatures since about 20002, but recent ocean temperatures show the same thing.
Stop spinning and get back to science!

Sadly, I predict many posts here reiterating the "warming stopped in 98 - really! (although it never actually happened in the first place)" drivel

You called it, dude ...

So dhogaza let me get this straight, are you going to argue the global temperatures have risen since 2002?

I don;t care about temps since the 1800's.

Are you going to argue the data set forth by others on this thread?

same story over and over again.

advantages:

* we know the counter arguments by heart now.
* all relevant graphs and informations have been bookmarked and just need to be copy pasted..
* easy argument, even when drunk and late at night.
* with their repetition and their inability to bring on a coherent argument on the SAME TOPIC over and over again, sceptics clearly demonstrate their incompetence.
*the argument gets weaker every time it is repeated

disadvantages:
* BORING AS HELL.

So sod, the same thing. Just because you say it over and over again you can not dispute the temps have not risen on average since 2002, can you?

SOD, only telling the story of the data from NASA, Hadley Ist etc. Don't shoot the messenger(s). No Hockey stick shape there chappy.
Another thing, I am hearing the term Global Warming less these days, only climate change. There is no GW at present as it is not getting warmer, but due to the indoctrinantion over the past years people associate GW = Climate Change.

Regards
Peter Bickle

By Peter Bickle (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Why not give us an interesting post on Dr Willis from Nasa telling us that the deep ocean has been on a slight cooling trend for the last five years, proving that Hansen's "Smoking Gun" has been extinguished? Or about the Gouretski and Koultermann's paper saying that ocean temperature gain over the fifty years before the Argo project had been exaggerated by a factor of 0.62? Or about the Nasa Aqua Satellite data that proves that clouds are a negative feedback which mitigate temperature rise?

Perhaps if you read those impeccable mainstream sources of information and analysis you will understand why there has been no global warming recently, and stop being denialist about it.

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

It's called noise, if you go look at any of the global surface temperature graphs you could argue that the globe cooled between 1980 and 1990, and again between 1983 and 1993, and also between 1987 and 1997. People don't argue that such periods of apparent cooling are anything other than noise now because to do so, given subsequent warming, would be idiotic.
Ten years is too short a period to make claims that there is a change in the trend.

So sod, the same thing. Just because you say it over and over again you can not dispute the temps have not risen on average since 2002, can you?

dear Bob et al,

all you need to do is to click on the wonderful graph that Tim provided to you. you will end up on the NASA site, that provides the data (scrolldown a little, chose "tabular data")

save the text file and import it into excel. mark the numbers from 2002 and create a diagram. add (linear) trendline and the equation.

and suprise, suprise, you will see that the slope is still POSITIVE!!!!

yours sincerely,

sod

BTW, for all the ignoramuses writing here, climate is determined over a period long enough (usually about 30 years) to ensure that representative values are obtained. The issue is climate change, not weather change.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

... climate is determined over a period long enough (usually about 30 years) to ensure that representative values are obtained.

Oh, so it's 30 years now? Are you sure you've moved those goal posts far enough sod?
So where has the heat been "hiding" exactly lo these past ten years? Not in the ocean. Not in the atmosphere. Not in the ice sheets.
Maybe it's in that big steaming pile over at RealClimate.

Oops, meant to address that last point to Chris O'Neil.
Apologies sod, you were instituting a completely different logical fallacy.

It is amusing to see the global cooling denialists squirming. Chris O'Neill describes a discussion about a suggested cooling trend of ten years as an issue of "weather change". I don't know where you live Chris, but the weather often does not stay constant for ten minutes in the UK.

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Oh, so it's 30 years now? Are you sure you've moved those goal posts far enough

Lance, shall we search the internet, on what time scale shows up most when discussing CLIMATE?

30 years, 5 years or 10 minutes (that seems to be, when Patrick thinks climate starts..)

Oh, so it's 30 years now? Are you sure you've moved those goal posts far enough sod

Lance, dear, the use of 30 year rolling averages has been the norm for a very long time.

So where has the heat been "hiding" exactly lo these past ten years? Not in the ocean.

One study and poof! everything we know is wrong! 30 future studies pointing out problems with this study, and Lance and friends will be claiming all those studies are wrong.

Lance, you're dishonest as hell.

Strawmen. Simplifications past the point of losing important information, prior to making a judgement. Oh they sound convincing, as long as the audience is uninformed.
We had a wet, overcast summer here, surface temperatures were lower than average. Do I therefore believe that global warming stopped? But humid air is more warming than dry (remember H2O's greenhouse properties) - more heat has entered the atmosphere over where I live than a graph of surface temps indicate, than would have had it been hot and dry. The ocean/atmosphere phenomena that gave us the rain and cloud - la nina - has correlation with overall global surface temperature being lower, without really changing the net heat balance of our biosphere - more heat is coming in than leaving. It only appears to be cooling, with heat building up, probably in our oceans. Did the Arctic have record loss of ice last NH summer? Worldwide losses of glacial ice? How about temperatures down boreholes rising? Are these trends?
The denialist arguing is about the points that, on the surface, look like they support the position that global temperatures have flattened or dropped, as long as the arguments are about specific graphs, ignoring influences outside the CO2/Surface Temp graphs, like la nina, like impirical evidence of global warming (ice, growing seasons, borehole temps etc).
I'll keep on believing the scientific bodies charged with making sense of our climate over the detractors, who fail to do any real critique of their favoured criticisms, who do what they so loudly claim the IPCC and others do - cherry pick the data and arguments to provide the results they want (because that's what they do, they believe that's what our most prestigious scientific bodies must be doing). Give me NCAR, NAS, NASA, Hadley, CSIRO ahead of any of these self styled expert critics.

This makes no sense to argue about. The GISS trend is +.5 over the past 30 years and +.7 over the last 130 or so. Even their highest year of +.62 doesn't exceed that. But this isn't the first time the yearly has gone up and down, so we'd expect it to continue to trend this way. And the yearly for 2007 is the same as 1998, the last decade's worth, and both are lower than the maximum in 2005. So what exactly is it you're looking at when you say what the weather and hence climate are doing?

Or as Wikipedia says:

Climate is the average and variations of weather in a region over long periods of time. Climate zones can be defined using parameters such as temperature and rainfall.

And quotes the IPCC:

Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather", or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.

So 10 years is certainly a valid climate period if even months can be considered. If you count the start and end years for the last 10 only, they are certainly the same number. And they're lower than the single year peak. But if you look at the trend, the last 10 years are up.

I fail to see what this argument is about other than semantics and what data is being looked at for what time period.

ML

Flypaper for denialists.

Tim does decision-makers a service.

Hi is redirecting the small, diligent, prodigious cadre of denialists away from decision-makers and on to The Internets and newspaper comment boards. Much better, y'see. Imagine if decision-maker's staffs had to listen to the same recycled denialist drivel every third day when Drudge flashes a red light.

Best,

D

I see, a month, that's the period for the derived mean anomaly after all. Like what's the climate this March versus last or last or last... Also that 30 year WMO period mentioned is just what the standard base period used is. That all makes sense.

ML

"if we are talking about the last 10 years then let's use a graph that is up-to-date and gives much greater detail as to the period in question"

i question your use of a graph which obscures the reality of what is happening, by not giving us the minute by minute, second by second changes in temperature. or are we expected to believe from your graph that the temperature remains completely steady for days at a time? I don't think so. What are you hiding?

well, from monitoring my remote reading outdoor thermometer, i can tell you that global warming has definitely stopped; in fact, it stopped several times during the past couple of hours, restarting each time, ending a long (12 hours) sustained warming period; and we now (8 pm) seem to have entered a period of sustained global cooling. stay tuned!

Aren't the daily numbers derived from the mean of the minimum and maximum temperatures for the day at each location? Do they take how long the temperatures exist and their distribution? Are the minimums getting higher, the maximums getting higher, both, neither, what? What about humidity and prevailing winds? Cloud cover. Amount of sunlight and time of year.

It seems that if all these types of things aren't and haven't been taken into account the daily numbers are rather worthless in and of themselves.

By Jason Bintinal (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

If you choose to use James Hansen's fraudulent temperature record

I like the instant self-marginalization.

Thank you for tipping me off that the rest of what you say isn't worth my time.

Engage [kill]!

Best,

D

The disinformation cycle diagram rocks!

Coincidentally, yesterday I just drew up a diagram showing how global warming "debates" work. (It doesn't have cows and monkeys in it though...)

* * *

Max Lini:

I fail to see what this argument is about other than semantics and what data is being looked at for what time period.

You do know the issue of global warming isn't just about "semantics" don't you? You do know that global warming is a phenomenon which has very real effects on the livelihoods -- and often the very lives -- of lots of people the world over, don't you?

"Oh, so it's 30 years now?"

It's the only period that the warmers can make a case out of. Longer or shorter and it all falls apart. Longer and you get inconvienient cooling phases, along with issues like coming out of a mini ice age. Longer yet and you get the MWP and the Holocene optimum. Shorter and you get no warming from 1998. So now you are suppose to believe that 30 years is the optimum predictive period. If it's gone on for thirty years, then it will go on for three hundred. "Just trust my model!" LOL. You can smell the desperation.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Dano,

I rarely agree with your self-important little pronouncements, but in this case I think we agree. Well at least in that Tim is doing a bit of trawling.

Chris O'Neill (got both 'l's that time) and Sod, actually I'll agree with you guys too, that thirty years is a fair period for climate trends. That doesn't mean that heat can be hiding in your hat for ten years. It isn't in the ocean my friends and that was supposed to be the "pipeline".

dhogaza, I'm even extending an olive branch to you, try not to chew it off all in one bite. Yeah, it's only one study but it is a five year NASA study with thousands of highly accurate data points that completely refutes Hansen's "smoking gun".

Ten years is ten years and there is mounting evidence that isn't going your boy's way. It would do your credibility some good to admit as much.

Longer and you get inconvienient cooling phases, along with issues like coming out of a mini ice age.

Excuse me? Why will "cooling" be inconvenient in periods when there weren't massive loads of anthropogenic carbon emissions?

If there's cooling, AGW is a myth; if there's warming, AGW is a myth. Jeez, you guys are a bunch of clowns.

bi:
"Why will "cooling" be inconvenient in periods when there weren't massive loads of anthropogenic carbon emissions?"

That's the point. Cooling was going on just before the favored 30 year period, and while CO2 was rapidly climbing.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Indeed it's not that hard to work out minimums on the time period you need to do rolling averages over.

We know El-Nino/SO is on about a 5-7 year period. We therefore need to take averages of over 7 years to remove the effect.

The solar cycle (currently close to a minimum) is on an 11 year period. We therefore need rolling averages of at least an 11 year period to remove this effect from the data set.

I would speculate that it would be sensible to use some kind of window function other than a square function to get rid of any other high frequency signals, this might ultimately lead to something like a "proper" digital filter getting used - but this is beyond my expertise, except to observe that it would require even longer windows to get adequate results.

By Patrick C (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber:

That's the point. Cooling was going on just before the favored 30 year period, and while CO2 was rapidly climbing.

Oh, that. The "scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s" fib, which has already been torn apart by Connolley et al.

I guess that's why you couldn't simply give a specific time period the first time round. Hiding your specific claims, that's the denialist way.

Dano said: "Flypaper for denialists."

Ssh! Hopefully none of them noticed, but you can't be too careful.

"Shorter and you get no warming from 1998."

Nonsense. If you take the last NINE years of the junkscience graph, the mean-line is clearly going back uphill again.

Just a hint of advice: I realize most of you guys are paid petro industry trolls, because true anti-science nutcases get off onto flying saucers and pyramids and stuff, instead of sticking with the same few talking-points on the revolving schedule*. But really, you ought to do it as if you meant it. As propagandists, you guys are just sad failures.

* P.S. You may want to omit the old "Antarctica is gaining ice mass" thingy, for a while. A huge chunk of it just fell off.

First of all, the satelite temperature analyses are not "the most reliable source of temperature available." The rate of warming between the two disagree by over 20%. Add the UW and V+G analyses and they disagree even more. It is impossible for all of them to both be equally "reliable." The GISS and HadCRU analyses, on the other hand, show virtually identical rates of warming over the past 30 years despite their different methods.

Secondly, for anyone who believes that global warming has stopped, look at the offical RSS temperature plot from the RSS website:
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/plots/sc_Rss_compare_TS_channel_…

Every time that wiggly line goes above the trend is "warm." Every time the wiggly line goes below the trend, it is "cold." We are currently in a cold period, and there is no question that the last few months have been quite cold (compared to the trend), but it is no colder now than it was warm in 1998. We are in a strong La Nina. It is not the sun, or cosmic rays, or pixie dust. It is the weather. Noise. The global warming signal is 0.02 degrees per year lost amidst natural variability that can fluctuate up to one degree in a year depending on the month.

Temperatures will continue to be below average for as long as La Nina persists which will likely be much of this year.

After Tim's post of this material I knew that the trolls would apparate here faster than Death Eaters at Voldemort's rebirth, but I didn't credit that their little Secret Squirrel communication network would chatter quite so quickly.

It's brought most of the usual suspects to buzz in here with their tried (tired?) but untrue chestnuts more quickly than flies swarm around a drover's bum when he takes a dump in the bush.

Sadly for them anyone who spends a second or two testing their propositions very quickly sees their houses of cards falling to the ground. And any observer who can't muster even that modicum of curiosity required to confirm (read 'refute') the denialists' whacky claims is probably of no consequence in effecting the changes that are necessary if the worst is to be mitigated.

Not any more.

I wonder how many of these trolls would be prepared to put money on their claims, using any of several web sights offering such services with carefully calculated odds?

Eh?

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 25 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber posts:

[[It's the only period that the warmers can make a case out of. Longer or shorter and it all falls apart. Longer and you get inconvienient cooling phases, along with issues like coming out of a mini ice age.]]

If you do the matrix math by which the effect of Milankovic orbital cycles is calculated, you find that we passed the peak of the interglacial 6,000 years ago and should now be in a prolonged period of cooling. But we aren't.

[[ Longer yet and you get the MWP and the Holocene optimum.]]

The MWP wasn't global.

[[ Shorter and you get no warming from 1998.]]

There is warming since 1998:

http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/Ball.html

[[ So now you are suppose to believe that 30 years is the optimum predictive period.]]

Climate is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as the regional or global average weather over a period of 30 years or more. Which part of that do you not understand?

[[ If it's gone on for thirty years, then it will go on for three hundred. "Just trust my model!" LOL. You can smell the desperation.]]

You really don't get the sample size concept, do you?

What is apparent from the denialists here is that their entire thesis hinges on what is perceived to be a long enough time scale to measure discernable change. This is especially a problem given the stupendous scales over which climate is generated (this is also true for the maintenance of biogeochemical and hydrological cycles). But these people just cannot free themselves from their internal genetic programming that makes them equate time in human years. They are trying to inject stochastic thinking into making predictions about systems and exhibit long time lags and which are very, very deterministic. What this reveals is that very few of the denialists (perhaps none on this thread) are trained scientists. I'd venture that none have papers in peer-reviewed journals. This is a challenge to the sceptical mob sadly overpopulating this thread: please state your credentials in science. This is important because it means that you might have been taught to understand the difference between determinism and stochasicity, as well as the fact that certain cycles go well beyond human life spans unless they are very significantly forced by another party (in this case, us).

I've seen the same vacuous logic applied by the sceptical know-nothings on the debate of habitat loss versus extinction rates. They perceive that the effects of habitat loss on extinction must be instantaneous, or nearly so. In other words, 'loss of habitat patch x' should result in the loss of 'species population y' virtually instantaneously, which would mean within a few years. But if these people knew a shred about population genetics, as well as more complex social aspects including behavior, they'd realize that the 'extinction debt' can manifest itself over decades and even centuries after the initial change. In other words, the loss of primeval forests in the eastern United States during the middle 18th century is still rippling through ecological communities today. Tilman and May, in their 1994 Nature paper, argued that some effects of habitat destruction from as far back as the 1500s are probably still only now being manifested in ecological communities.

The main point is that the current changes in global climate patterns are most likely the result of processes generated several decades ago at the very least, and perhaps even before then. Bernard J has summed up much of what I feel in his excellent post above (#46). To reiterate, its more and more clear to me that Charles Darwin was correct when he said that "Ignorance begets confidence more often than knowledge".

By Jeff Harvey (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

I heartily second Jeff Harvey's challenge in #48 for the deniers here to state their bona fides when they see fit to specifically refute the science of the best in the field. Without doing this they are merely taking cheap pot-shots and leaving behind a smear of implied equality of expertise, when none in fact exists at all.

How many of the sceptical crowd will rise to this challenge?

I also want to put on record a resounding reiteration of Jeff's comments about the difference between determinism and stochasicity, about the length of cycles in the biological and geological realms, and about the complex nature of feedback, response, and equilibrium in living and in non-living systems. I have witnessed with complete helplessness the march of extinction debt through the taxa with which I have worked, and the ripples that Jeff mentions that were propagated in the past will be as nothing compared with the waves to come from modern human activity. And if any of the oiks here want to stand toe-to-toe and deny this, I'm sure that I and many others here would be delighted to rub their faces in their ignorance. Remember, bring your bona fides with you. Oh, and if you want to use Lomborg as some authority, I would suggest in advance that you make this a very considered decision indeed...

I do have a gripe with Jeff though - I was saving Darwin's quote for a juicy moment myself! As a consolation, I would encourage the trolls on this thread who may not have made it to the discussion of Beck's highly dubious graphing abilities to also take on board Lister's comment that I quoted there.

The two concepts go well together...

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

It beggars belief: 30 years and more of an upward trend is not good enough one way, and yet is too long to wait the other way.

And to some we undoubtedly have that about 7 years (or less) of an upward trend would mean nothing with regard to warming but does mean everything to cooling.

What we have from the colderistas is prima facie evidence ... of double standards.

Bugger.

The link in #49 should have led to here, where the quote is at the end.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

This whole thread is a furphy. First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900, contrary to Lambert's dishonest graph. What were the measured temps in Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby etc in 1885 and 1900? So the "globe" according to Jim Hansen, the world's 2nd biggest liar after only our Al and closely followed by Tim Lambert, was jolly cold in 1900, which produces that gratifing upward trend in the GISS graph. Secondly, Anthony Watt has shown how nearly all GISS temp sites in the US and South America are fatally contaminated by being located in carparks or under aircon etc (in the US because GISS could not pay for fat Americans to go check the measurements in greenfield sites, so from 1999 all have been located within 20 metres of air con & buildings which do not require fatsos like Hansen and his mates to waddle to the green field sites to take the readings). This explains the rise in GISS temps since 2000 which are totally unsupported by either Hadley CRU in the UK or the satellite record since 1980

So I see no one answered my post. So we must be in agreement that since 2002 there has been no warming. Basil has an analysis on Watts that shows a clear breakpoint at that time:

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/to-tell-the-truth-will-…

And Lucia shows the projected trajectories based off current fits:

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ipcc-projections-overpredict-recen…

And Dano, if you don't know the GISS temp record is crap, then you haven't been keeping up with CA taking the RC hockey team to the woodshed. Answer me this? Why is the GISS records always changing? Look back over history and you will see a constant changing (cooling) of past temperature records. Is there time travel involved?
NO---Hansen keeps on splicing records of faulty stations (reads Watts analysis of on 10% stations complying with standards). While he attempts to match satellite measurements, his spilicng is forcing the temps of the past to get colder---pure crap!

Bob B- nobody has answered because it appears you are incapable of comprehending the answers. Only someone like you will listen to Watts, and as for climate audit, they are a joke. Basically, you havn't a clue.

Guthrie, I laugh in your face. CA has taken Hansen and Tamino to the woodshed several times and they keep on walking away with red faces. Hansen was forced to correct his records. That is the JOKE! And the RC response? Well it wasn't important any way--that is the joke! Hansen has past records changing with time. That is scientific? Tamino is getting his butt kicked left and right as he tries to resurrect Mann. I think it is funny how RC and you guys try to wish Steve would just go away. But every time Steve does an analyis you guys are forced to listen.

Also guthrie, tell me have you ever heard of gauge R&R?
It's pretty basic in most fields--except for apparently climate science. What is an absolute joke around the world is how Hansen blindly uses crappy measurement techniques--laugh that away:

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/how-not-to-measure-temp…

Nothing like a little leg work and data to shows GISS temo is crap!

Tim Curtin and Bob B.

Do you believe that glaciers are melting at rates different to those observed historically?

Do you believe that the bioclimatic envelopes of plant and animal species are shifting to different regions compared with those seen historically - or where such envelopes are geographically dynamic, at rates different to those seen historically?

Do you believe that the timings of plant and animal life-cycle events are shifting compared with those seen historically?

Do you understand that such events are reliable integrators of multiparameter systems? Do you understand what this concept actually means?

I am very curious.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

And Dano, if you don't know the GISS temp record is crap, then you haven't been keeping up with CA taking the RC hockey team to the woodshed.

Come on, Dano, the fact that Climate Audit has posted complaints about RealClimate PROVES that the GISS temperature record is fraudulent. This is simple denialist logic, man. Plus, there's a weatherman from San Diego who has all kinds of theories on Neptune's warming and how the carbon dioxide is coming from the oceans.

So, three blog posts show conclusively that the Earth has entered a cooling period, that CO2 does not cause warming, and that the socialists are out to tax our babies. You're not for taxing babies, are you, Dano?!?!?!?!?!?

CA has taken Hansen and Tamino to the woodshed several times and they keep on walking away with red faces

What kind of perverted shenanigans are going on in that woodshed?

Boris, the fact is the weatherman is doing real science, you know the kind where you actually go out and look at the stations themselves. You are the denier and are just throwing out jabs because you have no scientific answer for that. You are not using any facts to base you emotional post on. Go on follow the weathermans' post I linked to and tell me that Hansen should rely on that temperature station.

Bernard, I am not a biologist. But I do know (new) vegetation was found recently under glaciers in Greenland:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2514

Bob B- you bluster like a fat overweight bully who runs back to his mother every time someone says "boo".

Tell you what, why don't you show us where tamino is being beaten up? (The addiction to violence on your part is telling). And where have CA shown anyone to be wrong at all?
And as for guage R&R, what has that got to do with climatology?

As for the CA piece that you link to in post #60, it is irrelevant wibbling with no relationship to actual science.

Looking at pictures of weather station:real science::looking at picture of naked women:real sex

Just in case Marohasy et al try to wring a little more out of the 'climate is actually cooling' bogie-man again - and perhaps by extension also try to say for the umpteenth time that the world of science actually predicted an ice-age in the early 70s, but then changed its collective mind, which proves that they know nuthin' - John Fleck and William Connolley over at Real Climate have pinned the tail well and truly onto this donkey.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

guthrie you just made my point!

"And as for guage R&R, what has that got to do with climatology?"

guthrie, you try to fit simulations and models to data--right?. Don't you think it matters how you collect the data? Do you think measurement accuracy, resolution, repeatabilty matter? Do you think it matters that Hansen's GISS data set could be way off?

As far as Steve at CA goes--here is a sample of unanswered questions:

"The question for Tamino. Which is incorrect: the information on retained PCs at the Corrigendum SI? Or the claim that the algorithm illustrated at realclimate was used in that form in MBH98? If there is some other explanation, some way of deriving the Vaganov AD1600 and Stahle/SWM AD1750 using the realclimate algorithm, please show how to do it. I'll post up data and code for my implementation to help you along. C'mon, Tamino. You're a bright guy. Show your stuff."

crickets chirping at open mind

CA made Hansen correct his GISS data set which showed 1934 as the warmest year in the US

Well, I admit to having a soft spot for Drudge. On this issue, he practices pure "on the one hand, on the other hand journalism". The upside is he is very quick with new stories about the latest research and etc. The downside is he balances them off with a fair heaping of crap.

It is amusing to see the global warming denialists squirming. I pointed out that events lasting less than 30 years are too short to be called "climate". Patrick Hadley doesn't seem to realize that ten minutes is shorter than 30 years.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Chris, why 30yrs? Shouldn;t you be using something much longer? 30Yrs doesn't cover PDO cycles.

"I guess that's why you couldn't simply give a specific time period the first time round."

I didn't realize that I needed to push your nose into the obvious. And I'm not talking about the news stories of the 70s. I'm saying that if you go longer than 30 years, and include that cooling period, you will get much less of a warming trend.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Bob B:

Chris, why 30yrs? Shouldn;t you be using something much longer? 30Yrs doesn't cover PDO cycles.

So where'll that leave the "global warming stopped in 1998, and 2007" folks?

Oh, never mind. Denialist logic doesn't have to make sense.

- - -

Bernard J.:

I heartily second Jeff Harvey's challenge in #48 for the deniers here to state their bona fides when they see fit to specifically refute the science of the best in the field. [...] How many of the sceptical crowd will rise to this challenge?

None, apparently.

Now, to give the denialists one less excuse to throw mud: I have studied basic statistical theory, and I know what a t-test is, and I know (informally) what's a Markov chain.

Unfortunately, when I explain why Douglass et al. (2007) is bogus because it treats model output as raw observations (in its σ[SE] calculation), the response from denialists is simply `la la la la la la la' followed by an unrelated talking point. Make what of that youw ill.

Levenson:
"you find that we passed the peak of the interglacial 6,000 years ago and should now be in a prolonged period of cooling. But we aren't."

How do you know. On a longer time scale the 20th Century may well be noise.

"The MWP wasn't global."

Yes, it was.

"There is warming since 1998:"

No, there isn't.

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-post.html

"Which part of that do you not understand?"

What part of "Warmers don't get to pick their own periods of significance" don't you understand?

"You really don't get the sample size concept, do you?"

Yes I do. What part of "Warmers don't get to pick their own periods of signigicance" don't you understand?

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Bob B:

CA made Hansen correct his GISS data set which showed 1934 as the warmest year in the US

both before and after the correction. So your point in mentioning 1934 was ....?

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"Looking at pictures of weather station:real science:"

Apparently that is more than Hansen has ever done. The moron thinks that a site is pristine if there are no lights and the population is low. But the station could be sitting on a slab of blacktop and Hansen would never know it.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

#71, Someone said CA was a joke. I responded by saying they forced Hansen to make corrections. Further I contend that Hansen splicing the likes of the LA surface station is making past temperatures cooler. So can you PROVE to me your graphs are worth the space taken up on your posting. I think Hansens whole GISS set is pure crap. Prove me wrong.

Bob B and Tim C: (Hey, its nice when the deniers have cute rhyming names.) You both brought up the documentation of the surface records as an issue. I assume you are both aware of John V's analysis - after all he posted it over on ClimateAudit. So what do you think of the results?

Regards,
John

By John Cross (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber:

I'm saying that if you go longer than 30 years, and include that cooling period, you will get much less of a warming trend.

I don't know what he means by "much" less (that cooling period amounted to 0.1 deg C) but certainly as we go back further and further we would expect the trend to become less and less because the rate of accumulation of CO2 becomes less and less.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Bob B:

71, Someone said CA was a joke. I responded by saying they forced Hansen to make corrections. Further I contend that Hansen splicing the likes of the LA surface station is making past temperatures cooler. So can you PROVE to me your graphs are worth the space taken up on your posting. I think Hansens whole GISS set is pure crap. Prove me wrong.

So your point in mentioning 1934 was ....?

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

# 73

What a hoot. Really Real Climate LOL

Were they founded by a socialist Marxist organization as well:

Domain ID:D105219760-LROR
Domain Name:REALCLIMATE.ORG
Created On:19-Nov-2004 16:39:03 UTC
Last Updated On:30-Oct-2005 21:10:46 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Nov-2007 16:39:03 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
Status:OK
Registrant ID:B133AE74B8066012
Registrant Name:http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110

is very interesting.

Bob, you really havn't got this argument thing learnt yet, have you? You have to demonstrate that your claim is in fact valid and relevant before there is any point in us answering it.

Same goes for Tiler, but since I know what he is like from the dot.earth thread, I don't expect him to listen.

Bob B,

If you and Watt are right about Gistemp, it makes a net difference of ~0.0055C.

Thine own crap is the purest of all crap. It's such a tiny piece of crap, yet you believe you can extrapolate an entire pony from it.

By luminous beauty (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

guthrie, I'm done here. This site is a bunch of alarmist that can't argue with real data.

You asked me about gauge R&R and I told you. How on earth can you measure temperature to tenths of a degree when your measurement tool is shown by data (fact) to not be accurate to within 5 degrees? Go read all the posts on Watts up. No one can argue his findings--only people who don't understand measurement accuracy and it's implications
.

Lee:
P.S. You may want to omit the old "Antarctica is gaining ice mass" thingy, for a while. A huge chunk of it just fell off.

ROFL. Are these the kinds of fairy tales that make an alarmists day? Get a more complete story here.

http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002869.html

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

I think Hansens whole GISS set is pure crap. Prove me wrong.

I think Bob B. is a shoplifter. Prove me wrong.

Chris:
"that cooling period amounted to 0.1 deg C"

It also includes time. The trend is based on both.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

So, as expected, Bob B flounces out of the thread, having presented no useful evidence in support of his hobby horses.

"The story behind Environmental Media Services"
Activist Cash?! Berman & Co?!!!
You're actually trying to back up your shaky claim by referencing a TOBACCO FRONT GROUP?!!!
Man, that's too funny.

By Laser Potato (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

A poster in this thread made the point that during the period when ST was declining, ice caps were also declining. This suggests that the truly useful measurement would be the thermal energy of the biosphere, rather than temperature measurements. Elementary thermodynamics tells us that when ice melts, a very large amount of thermal energy is transfered from the surrounding environment into the resulting liquid water. It seems very probable that when the Artic ice cap ceases to decline, ocean and land surface temperatures will snap back dramatically, as the cap melt will no longer be sinking all that thermal energy.

By Alec Campbell (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Bob B:

Chris, why 30yrs? Shouldn;t you be using something much longer? 30Yrs doesn't cover PDO cycles.

It's an arbitrary choice depending on the practical purpose. But for something like determining the sensitivity to CO2, obviously the longer the better but even periods significantly longer than this are affected by other variables as well. Of course, people who try to read something into variations over 5 years or even 10 years are just idiots.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

ROFL. Are these the kinds of fairy tales that make an alarmists day? Get a more complete story here.

Yeah right, the Antarctic ice isn't melting, and even if it is, it's not our fault, and no it's not melting! It's growing!

It'll be nice if the denialists apply the same logic to the global temperature drop from January 2007 to January 2008. But of course, it's due to a "global cooling" trend. It's not due to La Nina... or maybe it is, since Watts himself says so. And it's obviously due to "global cooling", since Daily Tech says so. Notice how again denialist logic doesn't need to make sense?

Bob B:

This site is a bunch of alarmist that can't argue with real data

like 1934?

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber:

Chris: "that cooling period amounted to 0.1 deg C"
It also includes time. The trend is based on both.

Tilo obviously didn't realize that when I said "as we go back further and further" I was talking about time.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Hey Tim, is there any way for you to fix that comment-posting bug in which urls containing underscores replace text with italics? It makes it very hard to follow people's links. Or is this just scienceblogs' bad code?

Lance (#21) said: "So where has the heat been "hiding" exactly lo (sic) these past ten years? Not in the ocean".

Well Lance, for some one who claims to be a scientist you do not do much research on the many "claims" that you make.
If you had done a little bit of research on the ARGO data you would have found that there were a number of errors in the data the floats were accumulating.

Here is a quote from the ARGO website: "it has just been learned that Argo profiles from SOLO floats with FSI CTD (Argo Program WHOI) may have incorrect pressure values. Profile data may be offset upward by one or more pressure levels, resulting in a significant cold bias for these instruments".

Mmmm could that be where the "heat is hiding"?

Here is another error which was found, it too had a cooling bias: "While studying the pressure offset errors, a related problem was discovered in a group of WHOI/SBE profiles. Reported pressures from these instruments corresponded to the bottom pressure of bins rather than to the mid-bin pressure. This ½ bin pressure offset error is generally less than for the profiles noted in (1) above".

More details can be found at:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2tlluo
and
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2kc9mu

By Ian Forrester (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Saurabh (#93), when I encounter this problem or if the url is very long, I switch to tinuyurl to solve the problem.

Hopefully other people will try this too.

By Ian Forrester (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Ian Forrester it is good to see an alarmist even acknowledging that Argo exists. The dates mentioned on the sites where errors are described are 10 October and 14 September (no year included). Are to suppose that Dr Willis was not aware of those errors in his recent statements that there has been a cooling trend over the last five years?

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

If you are actually curious about findings funded by neither government nor industry see http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html .

Significant recent warming of planet earth ended in 1998. If it wasn't for the 22 year period from 1976 to 1998 when the atmospheric carbon dioxide level and average global temperature happened to increase at the same time, the term 'greenhouse gas' would be virtually unknown and Kyoto and the rest of the Global Warming Mistake would never have happened. It is going to take a long time to un-brainwash much of the public and get some climatologists and the IPCC to abandon their self serving agenda.

By Dan Pangburn (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

The LA temperature record is urban and therefore does not factor into any of the trends that go into the GISTEMP analysis. Furthermore, the correction at that site adds warming in the PAST. Finally, JohnV's analysis shows that despite all of the Auditors work, a dataset using only the highest quality sites produces a temperature record with trends virtually identical to GISTEMP.

Anyone who wants an example of a "crap" analysis, need only look to the nearest Spencer or Christy paper.

Since sea level rise has continued during the supposed "cooling" of the ocean, and since thermal expansion is the biggest chuck, there are a few possibilities: 1) The heat is going deeper 2) The ice sheets are melting far faster than anyone imagined, thus picking up the slack. 3) The measurements are faulty.

"Are to suppose that Dr Willis was not aware of those errors in his recent statements that there has been a cooling trend over the last five years?"

What does Willis say?

Abstract. Two systematic biases have been discovered in the ocean temperature data used by [Willis], Lyman et al. 2006. These biases are both substantially larger than sampling errors estimated in [Willis] Lyman et al. 2006, and appear to be the cause of the rapid cooling reported in that work.

oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf

By luminous beauty (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"What does Willis say?"

You are talking about 2006. We are talking about measurements from this year, for which the errors from 2006 have been corrected. Please catch up.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

cce:
"Since sea level rise has continued during the supposed "cooling" of the ocean, and since thermal expansion is the biggest chuck,"

First, you have no idea if thermal expansion is contributing anything at this time. You are simply making that up.

Second, sea ice formation and melt have nothing to do with the global sea level.

Third, the melting of certain land ice formations can continue even if surface temps cool. Land ice does not reach equilibrium with the temp in a year. It takes many, many years.

Fourth, the trend in sea level rise is starting to go more sideways. You can see this if you look at the last couple of years on this sea level chart. Also note that the trend on that chart amounts to 13 inches per century. "Oh, oh, the sky is falling, the sky is falling."

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"Here is another error which was found, it too had a cooling bias:"

Old news Ian. It's already been corrected for. Do try to come up to date.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Getting back to the exchange that Lambert is crying about.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued.

Concering Marohasy's first statement, we have the records from RSS and HadCrut3 since 1998 here.

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-post.html

And we have the records since 2002 for RSS, HadCrut3, GISS, and UAH here.

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/search/label/6%20Year%20Temperatu…

The facts are before you Tim Lambert. If you have a shred of integrity you will apologize to Jennifer Marohasy.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"Fourth, the trend in sea level rise is starting to go more sideways. You can see this if you look at the last couple of years on this sea level chart."

Not satisfied ignoring the fact that the level of noise in global temperature measurements makes 10 years too short a period to claim a change in the trend, Tilo Reber goes for broke and ignores the fact that noise makes 2 years too short a period to claim a change in the trend for SL changes.

Some commenters are looking for missing heat. Perhaps it is hiding in the latent heat necessary for melting ice?

"Tilo Reber goes for broke and ignores the fact that noise makes 2 years too short a period to claim a change in the trend for SL changes."

It's your guy who is making the claim that sea levels are currently still rising. If you want to say that we cannot know anything about what sea levels are doing now, tell it to cce.

"Not satisfied ignoring the fact that the level of noise in global temperature measurements makes 10 years too short a period to claim a change in the trend,"

There is no such thing as "noise" in the climate. Everything happens for a reason. The only issue is if we know the reasons or not. One thing we do know is that the CO2 level has continued to climb for that ten years. And we also know that AGW proponents claim that CO2 climate sensitivity will override all natural effects. So the question is, what natural effects are overriding CO2 now, and why isn't CO2 stronger than those effects. La Nina is roughly a one year effect. The solar cycle has only been at a minimum for a little more than a year. So where is the problem? Why aren't we warming?

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

First, thermal expansion is the primary cause of sea level rise, with the remaining portion due to the melting of ice sheets and alpine glaciers. This is not in dispute. I also know that the claim is that the ocean has supposedly been cooling for over 4 years, not two years. Therefore, since we know sea level has continued to rise in the past 4 years, then either melting ice has accelerated dramatically to pick up the slack, or the heat has gone deeper into the ocean, or the measurements are wrong. Your choice.

Second, I said nothing of sea ice.

Third, if the ocean was cooling, the ocean would be contracting immediately.

Fourth, 13 inches per century is about double the rate of the 20th century, and the current rate is over 4 times the rate at the beginning of the 20th century. That is called "acceleration."

Fifth, the AGW signal is about 0.02 degrees per year. Natural variability, ENSO in particular, far exceeds that, causing year to year changes as high as 1 degree, if you cherry pick your months correctly.

Tilo: You are talking about 2006. We are talking about measurements from this year, for which the errors from 2006 have been corrected. Please catch up.

OK, put up or shut up. Post a link to the damn paper already. Surely you are not talking about this:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/hc_bias_jtech_v2.pdf

The corrected data shows no significant warming or cooling over ... 2 years. I hope for your sake you are not trying to claim that this is a life changing result.

Damn!

Ian Forrester and luminous beauty got spanked by Tilo Reber and Patrick Hadley before I even got to see their desperate Google based rear guard actions. Nice shots boys.

Alec Campbell and Franz,

The latent heat of melting is not where the "missing" heat went. The net sea ice extent is essentially constant over the last ten years. There's also no evidence for a net loss of either Greenland or Antarctic ice over the period.

There's also no evidence for a net loss of either Greenland or Antarctic ice over the period.

you mean on denialist websites?

because in the scientific literature, there is lots of this!

Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
Isabella Velicogna1,2* and John Wahr1*

Using measurements of time-variable gravity from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, we determined mass variations of the Antarctic ice sheet during 2002-2005. We found that the mass of the ice sheet decreased significantly, at a rate of 152 ± 80 cubic kilometers of ice per year, which is equivalent to 0.4 ± 0.2 millimeters of global sea-level rise per year. Most of this mass loss came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5768/1754

Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
Andrew Shepherd1 and Duncan Wingham2*

After a century of polar exploration, the past decade of satellite measurements has painted an altogether new picture of how Earth's ice sheets are changing. As global temperatures have risen, so have rates of snowfall, ice melting, and glacier flow. Although the balance between these opposing processes has varied considerably on a regional scale, data show that Antarctica and Greenland are each losing mass overall.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;315/5818/1529

don t let the facts hit you to hard...

Sorry? Did a request for a paper in a science forum just get a link to a newspaper article? Really? Is that it?

By jodyaberdein (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber said: "You are talking about 2006. We are talking about measurements from this year, for which the errors from 2006 have been corrected. Please catch up".

And just what catching up have you done? As far as I can find Willis has not published any new data since he admitted the errors in his 2006 paper. His 2007 Correction to "Recent cooling of the upper ocean" does not contain any data, just an admission that the original paper was in error.

Surely you are not claiming the NPR link that you provided as "corrected data"?

You and Lance and other deniers who frequent this site are so stupid that you think that people will not check up on the "facts" that you provide. Of course, you never check up on them your selves, just cut and paste from the denier sites you frequent.

If all you can post is rubbish, then please put it in a proper garbage disposal system, not on a high quality site such as this.

By Ian Forrester (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"Therefore, since we know sea level has continued to rise in the past 4 years, then either melting ice has accelerated dramatically to pick up the slack, or the heat has gone deeper into the ocean, or the measurements are wrong. Your choice."

Argue with Andrew. He claims that you cannot say anything about a four year measurement period.

I also want the evidence that thermal expansion is the primary cause of sea level rise.

"Fourth, 13 inches per century is about double the rate of the 20th century"

So what. 13 inches is still 13 inches. And there is no evidence that even that rate will be maintained.

"Fifth, the AGW signal is about 0.02 degrees per year. Natural variability, ENSO in particular, far exceeds that, causing year to year changes as high as 1 degree, if you cherry pick your months correctly."

Where do you get the .02 per year?

Your natural ENSO variability has been at work for less than a year. But you have a 10 year flat trend.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

The latent heat of melting is not where the "missing" heat went. The net sea ice extent is essentially constant over the last ten years.

Lance, Lance, such two-dimensional thinking is so inappropriate for a PhD physics dropout. Surely mass is the important quantity, which is somewhat more closely correlated to sea ice volume than sea ice extent ...

Sorry? Did a request for a paper in a science forum just get a link to a newspaper article? Really? Is that it?

No, of course not, how could you imagine such a thing?

NPR is a radio network, not a newspaper. :)

"Argue with Andrew. He claims that you cannot say anything about a four year measurement period."

Tilo Reber, are you an idiot or a liar? Serious question.

Just because you can't exactly quantify the contribution of various factors to the noise, doesn't mean you know nothing about them.

"Your natural ENSO variability has been at work for less than a year. But you have a 10 year flat trend."

Ahh, a liar, you're ignoring that you're using an ENSO year that's way above the trendline as your starting year. As I pointed out earlier, by deliberately picking a warmer starting year and a cooler finishing year there are several 10 year periods over the last couple of decades in which a dishonest person can claim GW ended, though it didn't.

Bob. B "So we must be in agreement that since 2002 there has been no warming."

Uh yea just like I am in agreement that there was no warming 1980-1987 and no warming 1988-1997. You skeptics never seem to grasp noise, you don't seem to be able to relate the nature of past record with it's noise with what we see in the last few years.

"Basil has an analysis on Watts that shows a clear breakpoint at that time:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/to-tell-the-truth-will-…
"

And how deceptive it is. Notice he doesn't divide pre-1998 ino periods of several years or he would find OTHER flat/cooling periods too. No he makes one big trend through 1979-1998.

Again just look at the graph for petes sake. You don't have to do any calculations just eyeball the thing and you can see there have been multi-year cooling and flat periods before. The idea that you are trying to push that the flat/cooling period since 2002 is anomolous is a joke.

"Answer me this? Why is the GISS records always changing? Look back over history and you will see a constant changing (cooling) of past temperature records."

The temp records are not simply produced from raw data, they are processed to remove biases.

[QUOTE]Is there time travel involved? NO---Hansen keeps on splicing records of faulty stations (reads Watts analysis of on 10% stations complying with standards).[/QUOTE]

It's been shown that if you exclude the faulty stations and only use the good ones the trend is close to GISS. Ie GISS are correctly adjusting for the faulty stations.
http://yaleclimatemediaforum.org/features/1007_surfacetemps.htm

Im not suprised you might not have heard of this. Watts is obviously hesistant to go down the route of talking about this because of what it shows.

[QUOTE]While he attempts to match satellite measurements, his spilicng is forcing the temps of the past to get colder---pure crap![/QUOTE]

You skeptics always fail to see the forest from the trees. GISS matches up well with the HadCrut dataset and the noaa surface record. How can Hansen be making the GISS temps higher by fraudulently altering data and still produce a record that matches with HadCrut?
See http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/whats-up-with-that/#more-614

Bob.B
"How on earth can you measure temperature to tenths of a degree when your measurement tool is shown by data (fact) to not be accurate to within 5 degrees?"

last post I make to you mr contrary

How can we determine the average value of a die roll is 3.5 when a dice does't go to 0.5 resolution?

It's something by something we like to call "averaging". Look it up.

Dear god another one

Tilo: "One thing we do know is that the CO2 level has continued to climb for that ten years. And we also know that AGW proponents claim that CO2 climate sensitivity will override all natural effects."

Oh do we know that? No we don't because it's false. Your premise is false, your argument is false. On short timescales of course the co2 does not override all natural effects.

Once again like Bob.B you don't put the last 6 years into comparison with previous flat/cooling periods in the record. What's so special about the current period that makes you able to say something about the theory being wrong, but which you weren't able to say (and get it wrong) about the previous flat/cooling periods? ANd no if you give it any thought co2 has not risen enough since the late 80s/90s to suddenly override any natural variation.

"On short timescales of course the co2 does not override all natural effects."

On NO timescale will CO2 "override" ANY natural effects. They will all have an effect, some towards cooling, some warming.

Anyone thick enough to write that "...we also know that AGW proponents claim that CO2 climate sensitivity will override all natural effects" is a jibbering retard who may be safely ignored to everyone's benefit.

Whoops, I didn't!

"Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. "

The response is wrong and misleading. The "no" is not backed up by that form of cherrypicking analysis. If you take 2000 as your point of reference then the Earth is still warming. Enough said.

Use a proper method and one that won't give false negatives when applied to any period in the last 30 years of warming. I'll eat my hat though if a skeptic actually verifies their crazy temperature analyses against past data though.

"Sorry? Did a request for a paper in a science forum just get a link to a newspaper article? Really? Is that it?"

Does Hansen publish a paper every time he anounces the temperature for a year. This is an announcement about the results of ocean temperature measurements. Where did you get the idiotic idea that there should be a paper with it.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"How on earth can you measure temperature to tenths of a degree when your measurement tool is shown by data (fact) to not be accurate to within 5 degrees?"

You don't need a thermometer to be accurate within a few tenths of a degree, just to give results that are repeatable to within a few tenths of a degree, in order to measure a temperature TREND to within a few tenths of a degree.

Just the typical denialist confused about the trend of a series of measurements vs. a single measurement.

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

From UAH I plugged in the 12 month running averages for
12/02, 12/03, 12/04, 12/05, 12/06,and 12/07- thus getting the yearly averages- to get a
regression line 0f - 0.001286 and a regression coefficient of -0.0486, so over the last 6 years we have had an insignicant cooling trend of
about -0.1286 degrees C per century - A. McIntire

By Alan D. McIntire (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Cthulhu:
"If you take 2000 as your point of reference then the Earth is still warming. Enough said."

Who made you God? What makes you warmers think that you get to select the starting points? Marohasy was completey honest. She said what points she was using, and her statement was completely correct.

Let me make this perfectly clear. AGW nuts do not get to cherry pick their own periods of significance. You can push 30 years as the one and only meaningful time period until you are blue in the face. No one is convinced.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tim and all you other 'alarmists' you should check out this post at Ideonexus.

Ryan convincingly shows that not only has it been cooling since 1998 but cooling has been the natural state of the globe for years. It is all in the data and a simple bit of analysis brings it out. All this crap about '30 year trends' is just a smokescreen. Fancy time-series analyses are just the scientists' way of trying to pull the wall over our eyes. How many of us really understand all that babble they spew? None of us, so it can't be true!! Plus it was cold where I lived today so clearly global warming is a myth!!!!

How can you fail to be convinced by this?

FDB:
""Anyone thick enough to write that "...we also know that AGW proponents claim that CO2 climate sensitivity will override all natural effects" is a jibbering retard who may be safely ignored to everyone's benefit."

Gee, FDB, that's no way to talk about the Reverend Hansen. Given his 3C per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity and his knowledge of ENSO events, he should have had a model with a large enough error to accomodate a little old La Nina. But he didn't. So he must have thought that the error bands that he used were large enough. And he must have thought that CO2 forcing was strong enough to keep him within his error range. But it is obvious that he is the retard - and so are you.

Now, let me explain it to you retard. If the temperature had been rising according to the 3C prediction prior to this last brief La Nina, then the La Nina would not have been able to take the trend for the entire 10 year period to flat.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"I would speculate that it would be sensible to use some kind of window function other than a square function to get rid of any other high frequency signals, this might ultimately lead to something like a "proper" digital filter getting used - but this is beyond my expertise, except to observe that it would require even longer windows to get adequate results."

now you've touched on one of my bugaboos. moving window averaging is mathematically equivalent to a low pass filter; and like any such filter it has "ringing" or resonances at specific frequencies. it will overemphasize cyclic variations whose cycle length depends on the width of the average. although I can't recreate the mathematical proof, at least I could follow it once upon a time. playing with random numbers in excel demonstrated it to my satisfaction.

the "proper" way to do it is exponential averaging, where the influence of any data point on the average diminishes exponentially according to the number of data points which has passed. and, in an incredible stroke of luck, it's trivial to program; for the initial point, point zero,
Average(0)=Value(0)
for all succeeding points
Average(n)=((K)*Average(n-1)+Value(n))/(K+1)
where K is any number >=0; greater K gives more smoothing, K=0 gives obviously no smoothing. All you need to do is keep a running total.
No ringing!!!
But do they listen to me? No. Bwahaha etc. (Actually, I did not "discover" this like some crackpot. I merely stole it like any good scientist. It's pretty common in stock market technical analysis, where actual money rides on proper detection of cycles without false positives.)

"You skeptics never seem to grasp noise"

The only noise that I hear is coming from the alarmists. There is no such thing as climate noise. Everything happens for a reason. Just because you don't understand what that reason is doesn't mean that it's noise or that you can brush it off.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

for whatever reason, the equations for the preceding post got swallowed?

for point zero:
avcerage(0)=value(0)

for points > 0:
average(n)=(k*(average(n-1)+value(n))/(k+1)
where k >=0

re: #128 kav
Great pointer, thanks...

however, many may have ignored your post because irony isn't always obvious, and your words unfortunately simulate the other view well enough I almost didn't follow the link.

By John Mashey (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

good lord, this thing must be trying to execute the equations. OK, then: for the first data point, the average is just that value, obviously. for each succeeding point, you average the previous average with the current data value; optionally, weighting the average by k and therefore dividing the sum of k times the previous average, plus the current point, by k plus 1. of course, in the trivial case where k equals 1, that's just the average of the previous average and the current point.

ha. let's see it swallow that.

"Just because you can't exactly quantify the contribution of various factors to the noise, doesn't mean you know nothing about them."

Typical AGW hypocricy! "I can tell that the sea level has continued to rise as usual in the past four years because it suits my purpose. But you cannot tell that the rate of rise has slowed, because that doesn't suit my purpose."

Take it elsewhere - I'm not interested.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"The temp records are not simply produced from raw data, they are processed to remove biases."

No, they are processed to produce biases. How else would the Reverend Hansen be able to puff himself up in front of government committees with pronouncements of "death trains" and "25 meters of sea level rise."

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"It's the only period that the warmers can make a case out of. Longer or shorter and it all falls apart. Longer and you get inconvienient cooling phases, along with issues like coming out of a mini ice age"

this of course, leads to the incredible corollary that not only animals, but also plants are capable of averaging; and only using the number 30! thus, they too have fallen for the AGW hoax, and have been erroneously moving their ranges northward in the northern hemisphere! if we could teach trees to average with a longer or shorter period, they would realize their error and return to their original range!

"CA has taken Hansen and Tamino to the woodshed several times and they keep on walking away with red faces

What kind of perverted shenanigans are going on in that
woodshed? "

"I saw something nasty in the woodshed!" -Ada Doom

Lance, before you get all excited and start spanking people do a little bit of reading and you will find that you are supporting lies and rubbish if you support TR, PH et al. You are supporting lyin' denyin' fools if you support them.

Also you said (#111): "There's also no evidence for a net loss of either Greenland or Antarctic ice over the period".

You may want to re-word that after you read up on the data produced by the GRACE satellites. No wonder you are a physics drop out. Are you sure you didn't drop out shortly after kindergarten?

By Ian Forrester (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

this of course, leads to the incredible corollary that not only animals, but also plants are capable of averaging; and only using the number 30! thus, they too have fallen for the AGW hoax

No, no, no, they've not fallen for the hoax.

They're the leaders of the conspiracy!

"How can Hansen be making the GISS temps higher by fraudulently altering data and still produce a record that matches with HadCrut? "

Let's wait until after we have taken a good look at the HadCrut methods before we decide on that.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"So we must be in agreement that since 2002 there has been no warming. "

in the sense that there is definitely no 30 year average since that time showing any warming, yes.

but once again, my precision observations show us to be in the grip of an unusually strong cooling trend since 8 pm, just as observed yesterday.

#108 cce says "First, thermal expansion is the primary cause of sea level rise, with the remaining portion due to the melting of ice sheets and alpine glaciers. This is not in dispute. I also know that the claim is that the ocean has supposedly been cooling for over 4 years, not two years. Therefore, since we know sea level has continued to rise in the past 4 years, then either melting ice has accelerated dramatically to pick up the slack, or the heat has gone deeper into the ocean, or the measurements are wrong. Your choice".

Scientists generally agree that thermal expansion makes up approx. 50% of sea level rise. However according to Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press).

"Despite the short period of the present analysis, these results have important implications for climate. First, from 2004 to the present, steric contributions to sea level rise appear to have been negligible. This is consistent with observations of ocean surface temperature, which show relatively little change in the global average between 2003 and 2006 [Smith and Reynolds, 2005, see NCDC global surface temperature anomalies]".

Steric means expansion/contraction in this context.

This is taken from Roger Pielke Sr's. blog, Feb 15,08:

http://climatesci.org/2008/02/15/important-new-paper-by-willis-and-coll…

Now tell me cce, why do you favour the correctness of one data series metric over another? If one assumes (reasonably in my opinion) that oceans down to 3,000 ft. (per Argo) have slightly cooled in the past 4-5 years, and we know from satellite readings (UAH & RSS) that the troposphere has slightly cooled over this period, then where has the heat gone from the IR adsorption relating to the 10.2 ppm of CO2 which have gone into the atmosphere over the past 5 years (Mauna Loa)?

I doubt very much has gone into the deep ocean. From the NPR story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025

"Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet".

My O my, negative feedbacks! But that cannot be right, the models say so, only have positive feedbacks occur.

Missing from this NPR story is the possibility of counteracting cooling over this period, from natural causes eg ex sun and/or "cooling" particulates.

By Geoff Larsen (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

"So I see no one answered my post. So we must be in agreement that since 2002 there has been no warming. Basil has an analysis on Watts that shows a clear breakpoint at that time:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/to-tell-the-truth-will-…"

which gives us

"The Chow test involves fitting a regression to the sub parts, and comparing the sum of the mean square error (MSE) of the sub parts to the mean square error of a regression fitted to the entire time period. If the sub parts come from sufficiently different regimes or circumstances, splitting the time series into two parts will reduce the total MSE, compared to the MSE of a single regression fitted to the entire time period. The Chow test follows the F distribution, and is a test of the null hypothesis of no change, or difference."

isn't that getting into hockey stick territory?

"And Lucia shows the projected trajectories based off current fits:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ipcc-projections-overpredict-recen…"

who in hell would look at this graph and decide the violet line was the most likely prediction?

this of course, leads to the incredible corollary that not only animals, but also plants are capable of averaging; and only using the number 30! thus, they too have fallen for the AGW hoax

No, no, no, they've not fallen for the hoax.

They're the leaders of the conspiracy!

Which leads to the question: Who or what isn't part of the great AGW hoax? If E&E is any guide, it's not only the mainstream climatologists who are part of the conspiracy, but also mainstream journalists (unlike Gunter), mainstream doctors (unlike Schulte), mainstream economists (unlike Castle), mainstream politicians (unlike, uh um)... Now this must be a pretty big conspiracy indeed!

In other news: Studies Show Your Dog May Well Be The Antichrist.

"Hey Tim, is there any way for you to fix that comment-posting bug in which urls containing underscores replace text with italics? It makes it very hard to follow people's links. Or is this just scienceblogs' bad code"

stick the url in < and >
no brackets http:\\www.not_a_real_link.com
with brackets

Tilo,

The article that you cite says that there has been half an inch of sea level rise in the past 4 years despite measurements showing the ocean is cooling.

AR4 WGI Chapter 5 attributes 1.6 mm per year of sea level rise to thermal expansion, more than half of the 3.1 mm per year observed.

13 inches of sea level rise is enough to cause big problems for low lying coastal nations and unsurmountable problems for many island nations. All of the evidence tells us that it is accelerating, which we would expect given all this "physics" that tell us that the world is going to be warming up for the forseeable future.

I got 0.02 degrees per year from the oft-stated IPCC generalization of 0.20 degrees of warming per decade. You start your "10 year trend" at the height of the 1998 El Nino.

3 degrees of warming for doubled CO2. Do you think CO2 concentrations have doubled since 1998?

Geoff,

You can choose the following: 1) The energy has gone deeper. 2) Ice sheets and alpine glaciers have greatly accelerated melting. 3) The measurements are wrong. Those are the implications of sea-level rise of half an inch during the same period of time the ocean is supposedly cooling (or flat). I don't really care which one you pick, but you have to pick one.

And FYI, about half of the models in AR4 calculate negative cloud feedbacks.

"Lance, Lance, such two-dimensional thinking is so inappropriate for a PhD physics dropout. Surely mass is the important quantity, which is somewhat more closely correlated to sea ice volume than sea ice extent ..."

dhogaza,

The volume of the oceans is approximately 1.37 X 10^9 km^3. How much ice do you think it would take to raise its temperature enough to offset the missing heat?

Did you catch the exponent there it was a nine! That is one BILLION cubic KILOMETERS of water. Please tell me you don't believe there is a big enough difference in the thickness of arctic sea ice over the last ten years to lower the average temperature of the oceans enough to offset the "missing" heat.

Ian Forrester,

"Lance, before you get all excited and start spanking people do a little bit of reading and you will find that you are supporting lies and rubbish if you support TR, PH et al. You are supporting lyin' denyin' fools if you support them."

OK, so I never heard of either of these guys before today but I haven't caught them stretching the truth yet, which is more than I can say for you. Speaking of doing a little reading, do you remember when you claimed a certain study "proved" that the arctic had not been ice free for thousands of years and then I actually read the paper and it explicitly said it couldn't address the issue? Well I do.

Now, I'm not saying that makes you a liar just that you attacked me for being a "denialist idiot" and then when I called you on the paper that you claimed proved your point you fell silent and have yet to concede the point.

When I get all puffed up and overstep my facts I fess up. Hey this is a heated, real time, discussion and there are few amongst us that haven't overstated or misinterpreted a study or paper in our haste to answer some loud mouth on the other side.

I'm not here to play "gotchca!" (well maybe a little), I really want to have a discussion based on the facts.

To start to pick at the ARGO study based on errors already corrected has all the hallmarks of what you guys claim "denialists" do to climate research "pick at the edges to discredit findings they don't like". Seriously let's try to look at the evidence and keep the jabs good natured.

"The article that you cite says that there has been half an inch of sea level rise in the past 4 years despite measurements showing the ocean is cooling."

Probably a trend based estimate. We don't know if it is actual. The University of Colorado's chart still looks like it's slowing over the last four years. I need to find their raw data.

"13 inches of sea level rise is enough to cause big problems for low lying coastal nations and unsurmountable problems for many island nations. "

We've had that kind of rise all along, only over slightly longer periods. It never has been a big deal.

"All of the evidence tells us that it is accelerating, "

Looking at the UC chart, there is no acceleration.

"I got 0.02 degrees per year from the oft-stated IPCC generalization of 0.20 degrees of warming per decade. "

It's based upon models. There is no emperical evidence to support it. Even your cherry picked 30 year trend won't support it. Beyond that, the forcing effect of CO2 is logarithmic. So more CO2 will get you progressively less forcing.

"3 degrees of warming for doubled CO2. Do you think CO2 concentrations have doubled since 1998?"

So far, the industrial era has given us about 40% of a doubling. Considering the logarithmic effect of CO2, it should have given us close to 1.5C temp rise - if the IPCC number is correct. It hasn't come close. It has given us about .8C. And that includes coming out of a mini ice and a very active sun. Not to mention that there may still be .2 to .3C error in the surface records. Certainly the proxies that are current don't show as much increase as the instrument records.

The effect of El Nino and La Nina worked on less than two of the last ten years. All eight of those other years play into the trend line. La Nina is breaking up right now. We will see where things stand as it's effect fades. My bet is that the trend continues flat to down for the next 25 years. And that is with, as Hansen likes to say, "business as usual".

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

cce:
"If anyone cares, here is the daily average global (NH+SH) sea ice extent from 1973 to 2006."

Your chart looks like garbage. Where are the seasonal cycles. If it's "Daily", why are there straight lines between years. Why did they stop updating it in 2006? Here - try a real chart.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.wi…

We are currently about 1 million square kilometers above the average.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

Naomi Oreske's video has been discussed here. Myanna Lahsen has written a nice paper about the George C. Marshall "trio":

"Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist ''trio'' supporting the backlash against global warming"

Overlaps with Oreskes.

By John Mashey (not verified) on 26 Mar 2008 #permalink

1) So four years of sea level rise is a "trend based estimate" but four years of ocean cooling is apparently a pretty little line of dots going straight down with no measurement uncertainty.

2) The current sea level rise of 3+ mm per year is over 4 times that of the early 20th century.

3) According to the RSS satellite temperature analysis, there is 0.18 degrees per decade of warming over the past 29 years, or 0.018 degree per year.

4) The effect of CO2 is logarithmic, but CO2 concentration is increasing exponentially.

5) The thermal inertia of the ocean implies an additional ~0.6 degrees of warming beyond what we have observed to date.

6) The chart shows the average global daily sea ice extent for each year. It represents both minimum, maximums, and everything in between. There is 12% less ice on the average day in 2006 than there was on the average day in 1972. I have specifically removed the seasonal cycles so that people are not bamboozled by the weather. 2007 is not included because GSFC updates their data ever two years.

The volume of the oceans is approximately 1.37 X 10^9 km^3. How much ice do you think it would take to raise its temperature enough to offset the missing heat?

Oh, dear, I pointed out that Lance's Flatland comment was stupid, and he responds with a deflection.

Lance, dear, if you don't want people to think you're stupid in the first place ... learn to think to three, before you post. Extent is equal to 2.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.wi…
We are currently about 1 million square kilometers above the average.

we are, but only because you include the wild swings of the southern sea ice AND chose to cherry pick ONE specific moment.

the downward trend in the graph you linked to is OBVIOUS. the straight line in the lower graph is the average, and we ve been above it over the last 4 years only during extremely short periods!

basically each of your posts shows, that you have absolutely ZERO understanding of the topic. your link to a newspaper article, when the PDF of the REAL paper had been linked already, was the most telling part of it.

Tilo: "Does Hansen publish a paper every time he anounces the temperature for a year. This is an announcement about the results of ocean temperature measurements. Where did you get the idiotic idea that there should be a paper with it."

Jeevus, where would anyone get the idiotic idea that there should be a paper with it. Worth repeating.

Where would anyone get the idiotic idea that an NPR story was a quantitative statement about the state of a very complicated measurement?
Here's the link I had previously. It is for a paper in submission, from Willis, from 2008.

Figure 4 shows that when you remove the bad data (yes, they are still talking about bad data) the measurement goes from cooling to slightly warming.

Of course it is only for a span of 2 years, so the significance with respect to global warming is small at this time.

You might want to actually follow the science instead of press releases if you are interested in more than just sneering at people. Yes, yes, I remember "auditing" doesn't need to actually understand the science. Or does it?

saurabh, ... anyone.

Underscores in URLs translate to italic because that is part of markdown syntax (which can be used here -- see text and link above comment box).

Making URLs linkable by putting in angle brackets is OK (a la z); it is quick and easy, but it's a right royal pain when you get long links.

Get into the habit of using markdown or HTML tags (hope the following formats correctly -- it does in preview), since then the explicit URL, however long, is not displayed, just an appropriate piece of text.

Markdown style: [Linkable text] (actual URL link), i.e. linkable text in square brackets and actual URL in parentheses

HTML style: <a href = "actual URL link">Linkable text</a>

I have yet to read a substantive response to my previous offering here. There is no doubt that almost all the contributors here would produce a delightful rendering of The Messiah (as I have done in Cairo, Lagos, and Port Moresby), this whole thread remains a furphy. First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900, contrary to Lambert's dishonest GISS graph. What were the measured temps in Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby etc in 1885 and 1900? So the "globe" according to Jim Hansen, the world's 2nd biggest liar after only our Al Gore and closely followed by Tim Lambert, was jolly cold in 1900, which produces that gratifing upward trend in the GISS graph. As Anthony Watt has shown again and again, 60% of the Hansen/NASA/GISS temp sites across the Americas, both N & S, are fraudulent. Check www.climateaudit.org and Anthony Watts' own site). What is wrong with the Satellite data since 1980 except that it does not support Tim Lambert and his camp followers? Please do not respond to this post without displaying the satellite data (available from my website www.timcurtin.com).

Bob B posts:

[[guthrie, you try to fit simulations and models to data--right?. Don't you think it matters how you collect the data? Do you think measurement accuracy, resolution, repeatabilty matter? Do you think it matters that Hansen's GISS data set could be way off?]]

You appear to be laboring under the misapprehension that global climate models are somehow tuned to GISS temperature data. They aren't. The only climate data that goes into those models in average information for each grid square -- elevation, albedo, water fraction. The rest is physics. GISS temperature data never enters into it. The RESULTS from running the models are checked AGAINST GISS temperature data, but that doesn't mean the GISS temperature data is somehow going into the models.

Bob B writes:

[[CA made Hansen correct his GISS data set which showed 1934 as the warmest year in the US]]

Yes, the temperature anomaly for 1934 was revised upward by 0.02 K and the anomaly for 1998 revised down by 0.01 K, changing their relative positions. Were you under the impression that that made some kind of difference as to the reality of global warming? 1934 and 1998 had already been within a hair's breadth of each other; they still are. The overall shape of the temperature history is still the same.

Tilo Reber posts:

[[***"you find that we passed the peak of the interglacial 6,000 years ago and should now be in a prolonged period of cooling. But we aren't."***
How do you know. On a longer time scale the 20th Century may well be noise.
]]

What do you mean, how do I know? How do I know it's warming? Are you serious?

[[***"The MWP wasn't global."***
Yes, it was.
]]

Ooh, good counterargument there. I'm sure it convinced a lot of people.

[[***"There is warming since 1998:"***
No, there isn't.
]]

Yes, there is:

http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/Ball.html

[[What part of "Warmers don't get to pick their own periods of significance" don't you understand?]]

The part where you think "warmers" are "pick[ing] their own periods of significance." 30 years is the WMO standard for climate. Do you understand what a standard is?

[[***"You really don't get the sample size concept, do you?"***
Yes I do. What part of "Warmers don't get to pick their own periods of signigicance" don't you understand?
]]

See above. You really don't get it. If you want p < 0.05 you need a sample size of 30 or greater. Don't take my word for it, go look at a table of Student's t statistics. This isn't a question of opinions. You're just wrong. Plain, flat-out, dumbass wrong, like if you were saying that 2 + 2 = 7. It doesn't.

Bob B posts:

[[How on earth can you measure temperature to tenths of a degree when your measurement tool is shown by data (fact) to not be accurate to within 5 degrees?]]

We couldn't have gotten a clearer declaration of Bob's statistical illiteracy if we asked for it.

Bob, you can have a smaller error for many measurements than you have for one measurement, even if all the individual measurements have large errors. That's kind of the point of using more than one measurement. In fact, that's kind of the point of the whole mathematical discipline of statistics.

Want the math?

PArt of the fun of Bob B is that he seems to think we have a time machine with which climatologists hshould have gone back in time and carried out modern measuring validation techniques on the old equipment. And he also seems to think that trend is less important than the individual data points. He's another one with engineers disease, unfortunately.

"...Jim Hansen, the world's 2nd biggest liar after only our Al and closely followed by Tim Lambert..." Tim Curtin

tim is, of course, the dainty little flower who threatens law-suits at the slightest hint of a slur ot his oh-so-precious reputation.

By Ian Gould (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

Dan Pangburn writes:

[[Significant recent warming of planet earth ended in 1998.]]

No, it did not. Warming is positive from 1998-2007. It is not statistically significant because 10 years is not a big enough sample size. Why did you pick 1998 as the starting year, Dan? Because it was an El Nino year and therefore abnormally hot? If you pick 1995 as the starting year, you have N = 13 instead of N = 10 and suddenly the warming is significant. And of course it's even more significant if you pick 1978-2007. Do you understand the importance of sample size in determining whether a trend is statistically significant or not?

[[ If it wasn't for the 22 year period from 1976 to 1998 when the atmospheric carbon dioxide level and average global temperature happened to increase at the same time, the term 'greenhouse gas' would be virtually unknown and Kyoto and the rest of the Global Warming Mistake would never have happened. ]]

The theory of global warming dates from a paper by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. "Greenhouse gas" long predates 1976. Have you ever actually studied any climatology?

Gator, thank you for the link to the Willis, Lyman, Johnson and Gilson paper. That paper accepts the important Gouretski and Koltermann (GK2007) findings which argued that for nearly 50 years before the Argo floats were launced the XBTs had been systematically exaggerating the rise in ocean temperatures. GK2007 said that their best estimate is that the increase in Ocean Heat Content Anomaly (OHCA) since 1957, which is described as "Hansen's Global Warming Smoking Gun" should be reduced by a factor of 62%.

Since the XBTs were falsely reporting warmer seas before the Argo floats found cooler temperatures this led to a false conclusion that a rapid cooling trend had been discovered. At the same time 8% of Argo floats were found to be faulty. After corrections the belief of Willis quoted in the recent NPR interview is that there has been a statistically insignificant reduction in OHCA over the past five years.

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tilo Reber, still not getting it, posts:

[[You can push 30 years as the one and only meaningful time period until you are blue in the face. No one is convinced.]]

No one except the ones who have taken an introductory statistics class, that is. You know, the kind where the textbook has a table of t-statistics in the back?

For the last time, Tilo:

You need a sample size of 30 for p < 0.05.
You need a sample size of 30 for p < 0.05.
You need a sample size of 30 for p < 0.05.

The p stands for "probability," and refers to the chance that an apparent relationship is due to random chance and not to causation.

Tilo posts:

[[Now, let me explain it to you retard. If the temperature had been rising according to the 3C prediction prior to this last brief La Nina, then the La Nina would not have been able to take the trend for the entire 10 year period to flat.]]

Tilo, you seem to be under the impression that global warming theory says carbon dioxide is the only thing that influences global temperatures. It isn't. You won't get a simple linear relationship between CO2 and temperature. You need to take other things into account, including:

1. The influence of water vapor and other greenhouse gases including CH4, N2O, and O3.

2. The influence of aerosols such as sulfates from industry and volcanoes and desert and industrial dust and sea spray.

3. The influence of clouds and the Earth's albedo.

4. The influence of El Nino/La Nina cycles.

5. The influence of cryosphere melting and its extent and location.

Climatology isn't simple. If you monotonically increase CO2 the surface temperature will increase over time, but it will not be a neat, smooth, simple curve. You have to model it including all the forcings and feedbacks.

Tim Curtin said:
"First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900, contrary to Lambert's dishonest GISS graph".

Can you explain this? The GISS temperature database has a record from, for example, Kandy in Sri Lanka (7.3 N) that dates from 1881. I am confused.

By Benny Lin (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

I see you guys have found out that Tilo Reber is a conspiracy theorist, a Climate Truther.

My favorite was the "There is no noise in climate" line. lol.

Tim Curtin.

Please do not respond to this post without displaying the satellite data

I'm not sure that requesting that we don't respond to your posts unless we do it exactly your way is quite the way things work. Although I must say that the thought that such prohibitions might cut both ways is rather appealing... If you believe that you have a substantive, evidence-based and defendable, non-CA (?!) or other agenda-based (after all, you don't like the AGW 'agenda') literature review that supports your impression of the temperature profile over the last several centuries, perhaps you should refer us and calm our warming hysterics for good.

But why stop there? Whilst you are knocking us senseless with a similarly peer-reviewed cover article for Nature, detailing your incontrovertible evidence of how atmospheric CO2 concentrations will plummet through the floor if humanity does not maintain its current rate of emissions, you might also address how Beck's electrocardiograph of atmospheric CO2 concentration over the last 200 years (with which you apparently found no significant problem) is somehow uncoupled from the rates of those human emissions that you deem so critical for the continuance of life on Earth. Oh, and I'm interested to see how those same CO2 fluctuations are reflected in the carbonate record for a similar period, or in the historic measures of oceanic pH.

Please.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

Tim Curtin.

Oh my gosh.

I did not post without displaying the satellite data.

I guess that there's no hope now of the references I asked for?

Deary me.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

RE: #171 Hello Barton Paul!

"2. The influence of aerosols such as sulfates from industry and volcanoes and desert and industrial dust and sea spray."

I ask everbody this simple question: Since 1900, where has all of the billion (and billion and billion!) pounds of ultrafine particles of rubber, asphalt and brake dust gone?
The simple answer is: Everywhere! To this add all of the soot from combustion of coal, liquid fossil fuels, wood, agricultral waste, BBQ's, natural wildfires, etc.

The amount of black "atmospheric sludge" I clean out of my gutters several times a year is absolutely amazing. This stuff looks and feels like fine asphalt, and when it dries out it is just about as hard.

If you moisten your finger and swipe it on the top of your car or any exposed smooth horizonal surface, it pick up a mixture of bownish black particles

By Harold Pierce Jr (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

RE: #171 Hello Barton Paul!

"2. The influence of aerosols such as sulfates from industry and volcanoes and desert and industrial dust and sea spray."

I ask everbody this simple question: Since 1900, where has all of the billion (and billion and billion!) pounds of ultrafine particles of rubber, asphalt and brake dust gone?
The simple answer is: Everywhere! To this add all of the soot from combustion of coal, liquid fossil fuels, firewood, agricultral and wood waste, BBQ's, natural wildfires, etc.

The amount of black "atmospheric sludge" I clean out of my gutters several times a year is absolutely amazing. This stuff looks and feels like fine asphalt, and when it dries out it is just about as hard.

If you moisten your finger and swipe it on the top of your car or any exposed smooth horizonal surface in urban areas, it will pick up a mixture of gritty brownish, black particles which also includes highly-corrosive concrete dust. Check out the walls of car tires. These are coated with the fine reddish brown dust from brakes pads and rotors.

High-speed motor vehicles on highways results in all this dust being thrown up into the air where it is blown anywhere and everywhere by the wind to e.g., the polar regions. Not good.

By Harold Pierce Jr (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

For Tim Curtin:

Point 1: Went to your Web site. Couldn't find the satellite data.

Point 2: Here's some satellite data.

RSS MSU/AMSU data

Point 3: I recently heard Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems "in concert". He made the following points:

1. Surface temperatures are rising.
2. Tropospheric temperatures are rising.
3. Atmospheric relative humidity is rising.

Conclusion: (from his abstract, actually)
"Satellite microwave observations show that water vapor, a natural greenhouse gas, has increased by 2.4% during the last 20 years. Satellites can also measure the temperature of the troposphere, and these measurements indicate the troposphere has warmed by 0.4oC during the last 20 years, which is in general agreement with surface thermometers. Thus the water vapor has increased at a rate of 6% per degree of global warming. Climate models predict a similar rise with temperature. There is no serious discrepancy between the satellite observations and the climate models with regards to the increases in water vapor and temperature."

So please take this as a "substantive response" to your posting here, which in light of Wentz's statements, appears to be completely, utterly, and fabulously lacking in any factual value whatsoever.

Tim Curtin states:

First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900,

Wanna bet? or you just gonna admit you were blowing smoke.

Patrick Hadley,
I disagree with your assessment.
The paper clearly states that XBT measurements are still based on a 1995 work. The paper then says like GK2007 "suggests" errors may remain in the XBT fall rate calculation. That is all. This paper very carefully states it's conclusions that more study of the XBT sensors are needed, and that they don't think the OHCA has changed much from 2004 - 2006. That's it.

If Willis thinks otherwise, it is not in this paper. And having seen how reporters often get things wrong, I'm unwilling to accept a news story as a bit of scientific evidence.

Satellites do not measure temperature, Jack. They measure electromagnetic radiation.

You put up the wrong link dhogaza. That comment is a post by Tom C about falsification time frames regarding IPCC guesses. Or did you mean the entire topic itself? I thought the guy that runs the blog is an astronomer that programs text recognition software.

ML

RE:#180 Hello Eli!

Tim C. should go the late John Daly's website at http://www.John-Daly.com, and check-out the temperature-time plots in "Station Temperature Data". There are lots of temperature records that start before 1900, especially in his neck of the woods (AU and NZ), and just about anywhere that was once part of the old colonial empires. And there probably are lots more that he didn't included because these stations are now in or near big cities which all were once small towns and established thousands of years ago. And there is the CET.

By Harold Pierce Jr (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

Oh, sorry, yes, the post that starts the thread.

The guy who runs the blog does time-series analysis professionally. I know that CA has claimed to have "outed" his true identity but 1) I have no idea if it's true 2) I think it's incredibly sleazy and rude to do so.

Gator, my point about Gouretski and Koltermann's paper being referred to by the paper you linked to was to show that it appears to have been accepted by the climate science community as a mainstream contribution. I have no idea how accurate its estimate of 62% over-reporting of heat accumulation in the oceans since 1957 will prove to be. GK themselves give a very wide margin of error on this figure. I agree with you that more research is needed.

The reason I mention it is that if the GK2007 factor of 62% is correct then it would make a big difference to calculations of the amount of extra heat retained by the planet as a result of AGHG. And yet as far as I can see it has never been discussed on RealClimate, in the MSM, or in any other pro AGW blog that I can find.

By Patrick Hadley (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

If somebody wants to remain anonymous then people should respect that. Why care who he is or if he wrote TS and WWZ or not? He seems to know what he's talking about, maybe it's just the details of the statistics. I don't know who's right or wrong or if anyone is either.

The comments tamino makes to fred are good. 7 nears is too noisy yes.

'Response: All of which again underscores how little we can determine from such a short time span, given the noise level.'

But everyone is just trying to falsify things. tamino says as much to TCO also.

[Response: I see that post is based on analysis of annual data since 1998: 10 data points. Annual data show less autocorrelation that monthly, but it's still not zero. However, *estimating* autocorrelation coefficients using just 10 data points is next to impossible. In that case, it would be better to estimate the autocorrelation using a longer time span of data, and apply those estimates to analysis of the 10 data points.

It appears that her more recent attempts to falsify IPCC projections is based on monthly data, but in that case the AR(1) model isn't really good enough to do the job.]

ML stated:

Satellites do not measure temperature, Jack. They measure electromagnetic radiation.

D'oh! Then I guess everything published on the MSU/AMSU lower tropospheric temperature measurements is useless, eh?

For anyone wondering about the actual method, MSU/AMSU measure nadir brightness temperatures. Quoting the National Academy Press, "The intensity of radiation observed in these [MSU] channels is directly proportional to the temperature of the air; hence, MSU can be used as a satellite "thermometer" for measuring air temperature."

I expect that you were just testing me. You weren't trying to make it look like Mr. Wentz didn't know what he was talking about, were you? Perish the thought.

Tilo Reber:

Now, let me explain it to you retard. If the temperature had been rising according to the 3C prediction prior to this last brief La Nina, then the La Nina would not have been able to take the trend for the entire 10 year period to flat

WITHOUT the El Nino right at the beginning of the 10 year period.

Cherry-picking extraordinaire. Start at the El Nino and finish at the the La Nina. I think I know who the retard is.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

No I was not testing you Jack. Proportional to the top part of the air being read at the time. The word I used is measure and they measure IR from micrometers around 4-7 for water vapor and around 9-13 for thermal imaging. The temperatures are calculated from the measured information. As far as I know only the top layer of it also. Some data is used to determine temperature to some extent but it is not temperature itself being read.

Oh dhogaza I should mention that the reason I said at Open Mind he is an astronomer, there are quite a few links to astronomy and I have seen things about VSTAR before and I assumed.

AAVSO: American Association of Variable Star Observers
AFOEV: Association Francaise des Observateurs d'Etoiles Variables
CBA: Center for Backyard Astrophysics
Sky & Telescope Magazine
Space Telescope Science Institute
VSOLJ: Variable Star Observers League in Japan

Oh dhogaza I should mention that the reason I said at Open Mind he is an astronomer, there are quite a few links to astronomy and I have seen things about VSTAR before and I assumed.

Yes, true, there are, and I suspect that field is very likely where he's done his analysis work professionally.

Sorry to have lumped you with those who've outed him, it really annoys me as I said above, and you appear to agree so ...

"My favorite was the "There is no noise in climate" line. lol."

So you must be a believer in the idea that things happen for no reason Boris. Do you also sacrifice chickens to the gods?

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

So you must be a believer in the idea that things happen for no reason Boris. Do you also sacrifice chickens to the gods?

Noise happens for a reason. Do you think that noise in an electrical signal just happens for no reason? You have no idea what is meant by "noise". Clearly.

"Tilo, you seem to be under the impression that global warming theory says carbon dioxide is the only thing that influences global temperatures."

No, I'm under the impression that global warming theory says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing global temperature. And I'm under the impression that the IPCC climate sensitivity number for CO2 forcing is about 3 times too high. Ten year flat spells and emperical evidence don't support the IPCC number.

By Tilo Reber (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

I was under the impression it was a hypothesis.

So you must be a believer in the idea that things happen for no reason Boris.

When you're done making an idiot of yourself on the internets, look up unforced variability sometime.

Oh, nevermind. The only place you'll learn about it is the fraudulent scientific literature. Chickens, indeed.

"Dammit you kids, I'm trying to sleep, will you stop that sound which happens for a reason, the reason for which I do not know."

Tilo Reber:

And I'm under the impression that the IPCC climate sensitivity number for CO2 forcing is about 3 times too high. Ten year flat spells and emperical evidence don't support the IPCC number.

This is absolute garbage. Papers giving empirical estimates for climate sensitivity are listed here, as well as estimates based on models. The Annan paper also has an empirical estimate.

BTW, can you fix the broken record about "ten year flat spells" not supporting sensitivity estimates. We already know that they don't confirm or deny the IPCC sensitivity estimate. "Ten year flat spells" don't mean anything significant to climate sensitivity. Annan's paper points out that many studies "using the overall warming trend of the last several decades or century" .. "have generally shown that the recent warming does not provide a useful constraint when compared to the long-established (albeit subjective) estimate of 1.5-4.5 â¦C." Your cherry-picking extraordinaire doesn't impress many people.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

At #193 Tilo Reber posted this gem:

I'm under the impression that global warming theory says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing global temperature.

Erm, I think all of the 'crank warmers' would start by saying that the sun is the dominant factor that influences global temperature.

And then they would continue by stating clearly the effect that water vapour has in a greenhouse context - without it the planet woud be an iceypole colder than any of the Denialist Ice-age nightmares.

Tilo, all of your much-loathed 'warmers' recognise and understand that a so-called greenhouse effect is absolutely necessary for life to exist on this planet. However, the global warming that is being considered in current times, whilst being a fracion of the total greenhouse effect, represents a significant shift of the temperatures to which global ecosystems have adapted (very much so in terms of the idea of 'bioclimatic envelope') and the rate of temperature change is especially problematic in biological terms. And it is principly the increasing concentration of CO2 that is mediating this climate change.

As you seem to be a bit thick when it comes to assimilating this concept, consider yourself travelling down your local highway at 55mph. If you get the speed-woodies and decide to go 60mph, your friendly constabulary officer will pull you over and book you, despite all of your crying, leg-flashing, and protestations that 5mph more is such a tiny bit extra, what difference does it make? And Officer Plod will tell you rightly what kinetic physics knows - that that little bit extra makes a hell of a difference.

Stop misrepresenting the gist of the structure of the globabl warming theory, and stop deluding yourself that you are cleverly going to paint the so-called 'warmers' into a corner by doing so.

Either that, or you truly are under the misapprehension that you stated above. In which case, go get a basic education.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

Boy oh boy.

It seems the drover took a dump right next to the carcass of a festy 'roo, given the way his bum was covered in flies as soon as his duds were down around his ankles.

That's the best way that I can describe how the oiks have flown in. I'm not sure which Secret Squirrel network it actually was that brought them out of the woodwork, but our esteemed host Tim has tapped a rich vein of Deniers with this thread.

I'd be hard-pressed to be convinced that there hadn't been a call to arms somewhere on the 'sceptics' circuit to jump onto this thread and push their cause. Perhaps a few of them could stop playing cherry-picking games over which year to select in order to show that "the world is cooling Jim", and address some of the real-world integrators of climate change, as I suggested at #57. I really am curious to see how they explain away the undeniable evidence that sits accusing right before their eyes.

Come on gentlemen, step to the plate.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 27 Mar 2008 #permalink

I'd be hard-pressed to be convinced that there hadn't been a call to arms somewhere on the 'sceptics' circuit to jump onto this thread and push their cause.

Well, this is certainly true at Climate Audit. However there standards are a bit (not much) higher than wherever this flood of posts has come from.

But CA is organized towards bringing the troops to bear on science sites when they're in disagreement, and they cackle and cheer and pot-shot with comments that aren't allowed on the target site, continuously accuse scientists of scientific misconduct and fraud, etc etc.

Tilo posts:

[[No, I'm under the impression that global warming theory says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing global temperature.]]

No. It says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing the current global temperature increase.

[[ And I'm under the impression that the IPCC climate sensitivity number for CO2 forcing is about 3 times too high. Ten year flat spells and emperical evidence don't support the IPCC number.]]

They don't calculate it from temperature observations, they calculate it from radiation physics. And three times too high verges on the physically impossible. Just from CO2 alone, without any feedbacks, you get 1.2 K increase from a doubling. With feedbacks it's most likely in the 2.5-3.0 K range.

Hello

Looks like this is a hot spot here. 30 years at WMO and in statistics for linear trends such as climate, right? And there is supposedly a linear trend in the perturbation of the climate system by human influence.

Well, this is a 7-year graph that combines 4 temperature records by Lucia. It doesn't have 1998 as the strongest El-Nino in it. It still shows a downward trend when you include the latest data (unlike in GISS graph). This downward trend is extremely likely naturally caused ("noise"). So my question is: How would you seperate such "natural noise" from a long term trend that starts in or before 1880?

I just love this paper by Syun-Ichi Akasofu and his claim that we are still recovering from the LIA. He underlines this with a straight line trend graph. (figure 1c). He suggests that AGW may only be a fraction of the warming. Which particular paper that relies on hard facts (not just GCM) has refuted such a claim? (I know one by a physical scientist who supports that claim - albeit in German).

climate..trol:

So my question is: How would you seperate such "natural noise" from a long term trend that starts in or before 1880?

Duh, calculate a long term trend.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 28 Mar 2008 #permalink

Re 88: "people who try to read something into variations over 5 years or even 10 years are just idiots"

Chris: you may have inadvertently insulted Phil Jones and colleagues at HadCRU, who not only pay attention to such variations but even to the impression they give in the graphs they produce, to the point of just having changed their methodology so that observers only get the right impression when looking at those graphs. Read the prominent warning they've felt obliged to include at the top of their famous global temp graghs: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ Getting a little nervous for nothing?

Anyway, I propose that we all do the following exercise:

1) Forget all the preconceptions we may have about GW, AGW, CAGW, etc.

2) Look dispassionately at the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above, paying special attention to the last portion of the curves.

I am sure that, by following the above instructions correctly, we will all come to the conclusion that, indeed, global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945. In fact they have recently gone below the reference 1961-1990 average (a curious thing to happen 30 years into the most unprecented warming the world is supposed to have undergone in many thousands of years).

Whether they will continue cooling or will again pick up, only time will tell. But at least now we all agree on the basics and have a common ground to carry on discussing without getting angry at each other. See how easy?

The HadCRU graphs were including partial years and counting that as an entire year. That was leading to numerous unobservant skeptics proclaiming overly huge temperature dropoffs because January and then February 2008 were overweighted by a factor of 12 and 6.

And only the uncertainty goes below the '61 - '90 average, which last happened just before the '98 El Nino. I think this should serve as a warning for people who insist on comparing the weather to climate.

The major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide, which causes 9-26%; methane, which causes 4-9%, and ozone, which causes 3-7%. It is not possible to state that a certain gas causes a certain percentage of the greenhouse effect, because the influences of the various gases are not additive. (The higher ends of the ranges quoted are for the gas alone; the lower ends, for the gas counting overlaps.)[3][4] Other greenhouse gases include, but are not limited to, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons (see IPCC list of greenhouse gases).

@Chris
You can't be serious, Sir. Never mind your preoccupation with me as a person: Are you saying then that all the long term trend must automatically be 100% anthropogenic since 1880? This is a serious question, please!

You're right, cce. The negative global anomalies were only reported by RSS and UAH. HadCRU's negative anomaly last December referred only to the SH, which had last happened...in 1994. Still, a 0.056 anomaly 3 decades after the GW masking effects finally unmasked themselves and the temps would continue rising unabated, according to the models, is still a curious thing to happen, isn't it?

The other thing I find curious is HadCRU's sudden change in methodology. Last year they were faced with exactly the same problem, when an anomalously warm January created the opposite impression in unobservant believers. Why didn't they change their graphs then? If I didn't know better, I'd think that they have some agenda :-)

Anyways, if 2008 continues equally cool, all they have done is postpone the shame. At the end of the year the smoothed graph will look as it did before the adjustment. They've actually put the nails in their coffin, me thinks, by openly admitting that a mere additional 7 months like the last ones and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures "have dropped markedly in recent years".

In the mean time, how about performing again the exercise I proposed above? Will you cce agree that we're witnessing a period of temperature stasis (if not cooling)? Looking at your website, step 1 of my exercise may be a bit difficult to overcome, but step 2 is nothing more than believing your own eyes!

temps would continue rising unabated, according to the models, is still a curious thing to happen, isn't it?

Do you think the IPCC has banned ENSO and other quasi-periodic natural variation in the climate system?

The models don't tell us that temps will "continue rising unabated", the figures you see are for the average increase over time.

Thank you Eli. I was mistakenly talking about the GOES meteorological satellite range. For MSU, the microwaves measured are 4 channels from about about 5mm to 6 mm. So you are correct and they are measuring the oxygen absorption bands. And AMSU measure more channels or depths. Then RSS or UAH or whomever take the data and convert the channels according to brightness in various wavelengths, calculate an inversion and indirectly infer temperature.

I hear they are quite good at it.

RSS is showing since 1980 a combined brightness index change in the lower troposphere with about +.18, middle at +.11, tropopause of +.03 and lower stratosphere of -.3

That does not include the last 7.5 degrees at the poles.

No I don't believe we are witnessing a period of temperature stasis. I think we are witnessing a period of La Nina, no more mysterious the anomalously warm El Nino of 1998. People are trying to ascribe "cooling" to periods too short to be statistically significant, and I think 30+ years of warming (0.14-0.18 degrees per decade) despite strong natural variability throughout is proof of this.

Mikel:

Anyways, if 2008 continues equally cool, all they have done is postpone the shame. At the end of the year the smoothed graph will look as it did before the adjustment. They've actually put the nails in their coffin, me thinks, by openly admitting that a mere additional 7 months like the last ones

I thought there were 10 months left this year (for the HadCRU record).

and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures "have dropped markedly in recent years".

Where does this quote come from? Global temperatures have not dropped markedly in recent years before the last 2 months. In any case the drop in the last two months means nothing significant to the warming effect of CO2 which has changed insignificantly in the last 2 months. Global warming denialists seem to have a lot of difficulty with the concept that long term change (in CO2) only causes long term effects (as in long term average temperature). Long term change does not cause short term effects.

Look dispassionately at the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above, paying special attention to the last portion of the curves.

I am sure that, by following the above instructions correctly, we will all come to the conclusion that, indeed, global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945.

Let's see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

So 0.2 is not unlike 0.02? I think you need your eyes testing. Or maybe you should take off those global warming denialist glasses.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 29 Mar 2008 #permalink

First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900, contrary to Lambert's dishonest GISS graph. What were the measured temps in Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby etc in 1885 and 1900?

Well, not exactly Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby (and I can't be bothered to check whether GISS or Hadley use any of their data -- I'm sure you'll check and get back to us if they aren't, and then I'll try to find a few more perhaps), but ...

there were temperature/meteorological readings/stations in Darwin (~1882), Singapore (~1872), Colombo (1852), Belize (1887), and the USA had meteorological stations across the Caribbean in the 1870s. You could also pick a GB Empire 19th century outpost and look for meteorological observations.

Dear Cretin O'Noall: Are there any FACTS that will refute your mad theories?

Perhaps it should be Dear "Tim Cretin" then, should it? No, perhaps not. So don't do it to anyone else!

What we "all" know is that "there are no FACTS that will refute your mad theories"!

*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*

Brings to mind a very old joke:

Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I'm a pair of curtins. What can I do?

Pull yourself together, man!

climatepatrol:

Are you saying then that all the long term trend must automatically be 100% anthropogenic since 1880?

When you start talking about a "7-year graph" and within the context of this thread the impression I got was that you wanted to know how to filter out "7-year" natural noise. It's good that you moved the issue to something that's actually significant which is the relationship between long-term temperature change and long-term CO2 rise.

He suggests that AGW may only be a fraction of the warming. Which particular paper that relies on hard facts (not just GCM) has refuted such a claim?

If you want papers that don't use GCM (i.e. they use empirical methods) to derive climate sensitivity then a list is here, along with a list that do use GCMs. The Annan paper (which is in the list that uses GCMs) also has an estimate based on just empirical information.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 29 Mar 2008 #permalink

Max, one thing that frequently gets lost is that the conversion of the microwave brightness to temperature is itself complex, but keeping all of the data on the same scale as the instruments and satellites move around, decay, are launched, etc is much harder. My attitude toward RSS/UAH and Prabhakhara (there are a couple of others too) is about the same as my attitude towards the surface reconstructions, e.g. there is a learning curve and you want to look at the whole group. Trends are more reliable than anomalies, and absolute temperatures are unreliable.

A little while back on another thread I made the comment that I recently met a professional economist who was previously paid to deny climate change. He now not only acknowledges that he did this whilst knowing that there was a valid basis to AGW, but took a significant cut in his salary to move 'to the other side' and take a position in climate policy in government, and he is very firm in reminding everyone that the ideas of denialists are marginal and continue to have ever declining relevance to government and policy.

Dano reiterates this point here, as well as providing some sage advice (which I need to follow more than I have thus far done) to not play whack-a-mole with the repetitive and discredited likes of the Tim Curtins of the world.

Someone else in the last day or so (sorry, but I can't remember who it was) pointed out that Tim's physics lunacy had been covered on earlier threads, and after about 5 seconds of searching I found two here and also here. It was at a time when I was between internet connections, so I missed the entertainment at the time, but reading these two threads brought both tears of laughter and shudders of bemusement to me.

All I will say Tim Curtin is that your blithe repetition of your loopy ideas, and your ignorance of repeated pleas to consider what you have said about so many things in the past, only continue to show what a fool you are making of yourself. Any half-alert reader will realise that you are more cracked than Humpty Dumpty after his Great Fall, and that you are an embarrassment to the denialist cause.

Most significantly, your completely beyond-the-pale ad homs such as those directed to Chris O'Neill above, and your effort from last year

Sod: I am (hopefully for the last time) breaking my self-denying ordinance not to respond to pseudonymous twerps like you, on the grounds that people like you and Dano and Jody et al are probably one or all of the following: (1) cowards; (2) wife beaters, (3) pedophiles, and (4) all of the above

are not a reflection of a person in control of his faculties.

Between your so-called science and your personal abuse of those offering genuine criticism you are only serving to show your ever-increasing irrelevance, and sooner or later even those who barrack for you are going to realise that this little emperor is wearing not a stitch at all.

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 29 Mar 2008 #permalink

Would someone knowledgable care to comment on this part of the interview:

".......What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled...."

Is the above an accurate representation of the Aqua data and how it fits in with expectations?

Chris #220
Thank you very much! That's a precious link. I'll look closer into Gregory 2002 (ocean heat uptake, climate sensitivity of 1.5K) and Tung 2007 (temperature response to the solar cycles, range 2.3 - 4.1K, and the sceptic Schwartz 2007 (1.1K).

To ALL
According to Folland et al. 2001, the global SST-LAT combined trend 1861-2000 is +0.61°C +/- 0.16°C uncertaincies due to data gaps, random errors, SST bias corrections, urbanisation and CA's favorite: including uncertainties due to changes in thermometer exposures. The latter is not mentioned in TAR because the effect of the uncertainty is apparently considered miniscule on a global scale. So much for the trend and uncertaincies of GW (without A).

Anyway I like the tone and level of discussion in this particular thread. I didn't expect that I must admit.

Best,
CP

Dear Chris,

I knew it wouldn't be easy for some but I see that, inside your reply, you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems. BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn't happen?

Now let's discuss the rest of your reply:

I thought there were 10 months left this year (for the HadCRU record).

You are correct. A typo from my side. But in fact I meant to type 9 rather than 7: March will also be cool, you'll see.

Where does this quote come from?

Fom the HadCRUT3 link above, please read again the prominent warning on top of the page.

Global temperatures have not dropped markedly in recent years before the last 2 months.

The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.

Long term change does not cause short term effects.

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves,... you name it.

Let's see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

I don't know where you take those figures from. But you misunderstood my mention of the year 1945, I'm afraid. At that time some sort of regime change seems to have occurred that reversed the previous warming and a marked cooling ensued that lasted around 3 decades. I don't know if something similar is going to happen now but, if so, we still have no figures to make comparisons.

In this respect, I find HadCRU's explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming prizeless: they blame it on the more frequent La Ninas since 1998. In other words, we might be witnessing a regime shift in the PDO. This is quite remarkable for 2 reasons:
1) The PDO (and AMO and other poorly understood ocean cycles that strongly affect surface temps) would not be statistical constructs, as some have suggested (for example Mann) but real phenomena. This would make natural variability higher and thus there would be less to "explain" about the recent warming.
2) As a matter of fact, it could be argued that these cycles, especially the PDO, explain by themselves most of the observed temperature swings of the last century.

Or maybe you should take off those global warming denialist glasses.

But I am no such thing! I am very skeptic about CAGW and rather skeptic about any significant AGW as well but all main satellite and surface records show some warming in the last decades. It's not me who argues with observed data.

Finally, a I suggest a second exercise so that we all come to an even deeper agreement:

1) As above.
2) Look carefully at the end of the HadCRUT3 curves for the Southern Hemisphere anomalies: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/hemispheric/southern/a…

Again, I'm sure that we'll all agree that the SH has experienced a marked cooling in the last decade. Past that point, we may start discussing how this reoconciles with GCM predictions/projections.

If your metric is imbedded oceanic energy then warming stopped around 2003 or 2004.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the HadCRUT data, you could use the same methodology to conclude in 1995 that global warming stopped in 1990, conclude in 1988 that global warming stopped in 1983, etc. etc. etc.

Guess what? None of these things happened.

Tim Lambert lying about this is not particularly surprising. Since environmentalists are people who lie all the time.

Randalph, whilst I am on the same page with you regarding ocean heat uptake, may I suggest to concentrate on the wheat and not on the chaff. With regards to "lies", I would be careful there. The same outdated temperature chart can be found at Giss Nasa. Tim is safe. But then, one can easily download the monthly tabular updates of temperature anomalies and make our own chart, chosing any other time period and smoothing. It is like a ping pong game... But there have been some very valuable contributions to the discussion in this thread - for both sides of the camp.

@Bernard J.
I addressed the issue of ad hominem attacks in my blog. Such public smearing happens on both sides of the camp.

Mikel Mariñelarena, you are my favorite. Thank you for your most valuable contributions - both in tone and content.

Such public smearing happens on both sides of the camp.

What's this "camp" exactly, and what goes on inside the camp?

The camp: For instance the online community

Oh wait. So is it the camp, or is it a camp?

Or is it Câmp, Romania? By "politically active" do you mean there's some sort of secessionist movement to turn Câmp into an independent country? That's very bad, you know. That's high treason, and as we all know, treason isn't something you should try at home.

Anyway, how many cowards, wife-beaters, paedophiles, and coward-wife-beater-paedophiles are there in Câmp, I wonder? Probably quite a lot. They're probably all concentrated in one side of Câmp, and on the other side are all the good people who aren't either cowards, wife-beaters, paedophiles, or coward-wife-beater-paedophiles, or maybe some of them are cowards and wife-beaters, cowards and paedophiles, or wife-beaters and paedophiles, but not all three of the above.

And in the middle of Câmp, Romania, we probably have people who aren't for or against paedophilia. We need balance, you know. This persecution of Galileo-like paedophiles has been going on for too long.

Mikel:

you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems.

Not that I noticed. He didn't deny there were cool times. His point was about some people asserting significance of something that was insignificant. I think you should read him more carefully.

BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn't happen?

Yes and it appears that he would have won the bet if Knappenburger had been honest about taking it. i.e. there has been no statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures from January 1998 through to December 2007.

and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures "have dropped markedly in recent years".

Where does this quote come from?

Fom the HadCRUT3 link above, please read again the prominent warning on top of the page.

OK so it was a hypothetical statement based on the extremely unlikely assumption that every month this year will be like January. Not surprisingly, that's already wrong for February.

The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.

I agree that cherry picking extraordinaire is done for spectacular effect.

Long term change does not cause short term effects.

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves

AGW is related to the long term probability of such events. Please try to understand the difference between weather and climate.

Let's see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

I don't know where you take those figures from.

Well, you said:

the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above

which was http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ . So I don't know how you can say you don't know where those figures are from. You're the one who supplied the link.

I find HadCRU's explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming prizeless

What "explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming"? HadCRU doesn't mention any "current cooling/lack of warming".

it could be argued that these cycles, especially the PDO, explain by themselves most of the observed temperature swings of the last century

Right, so all we have to do is go back to the same point in the previous cycle and temperatures were similar. Sure, just tell us when that was and what the temperature was then.

Finally, a I suggest a second exercise

I suggest you complete your first exercise first, since I have indulged you by doing it. And this time have a look at http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ without wearing those global warming denialist rose-colored glasses.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 30 Mar 2008 #permalink

Oops, I forgot that my attempt at humour isn't among the Official List of Approved Humour Types Sent Down From On High By The Denialist Higher-Ups Such As Steven Milloy. Standard operating procedure demands that, when unapproved brands of humour are detected, the denialist's brain should simply explode.

Bernard J. scripsit:

some sage advice (which I need to follow more than I have thus far done) to not play whack-a-mole with the repetitive and discredited likes of the Tim Curtins of the world.

Yeah, let's not play whack-a-mole. Playing explode-a-brain is so much fun!

Following up on climatepatrol's remarks on the "both sides of the camp": Wikipedia tells us helpfully that Câmp in Romania can refer to either Câmp in Bihor County, or Câmp in Bistriţa-Năsăud County.

Now this, clearly, is very troublesome... because if you don't know exactly which Câmp is being "politically active" and trying to secede from Romania, the only thing you can do against this treasonous activists is to do nothing.

At the same time, though, high treason clearly demands an immediate response. But wait! Inaction is itself a sort of action! Ergo, the problem of treason is now solved, by performing the act of not acting.

Mikel M. posts:

[[The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.]]

Nobody with a clue cares. Two months is not long enough to decide anything at all when you're talking about climate. Try 30 years.

Mikel, whilst the Jan 07 on Jan 08 change (GISS land & sea) was large, it was also only this spectacularly large because Jan 07 was spectacularly out of line with previous years' Jan anomalies (i.e. 2004: 0.52; 2005: 0.68; 2006: 0.44; 2007: 0.86; 2008: 0.12). It's just monthly weather.

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves,... you name it.

Because global warming is expected to increase the frequency of such severe weather events. So while no single weather event is evidence for or against global warming, they illustrate problems that are going to become increasingly common if global warming is not brought under control.

I expect myself to comment on some of the points that have been raised in this comments section soon but for now I will leave you with this link:
http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/comment.php?comment.news.56
Should work, if not I'm a n00b at this so sorry. That article is moronic at best and I left ten comments (just to be annoying really) showing why. I hope I did OK at putting the dog down fellow scientists, sorry fellow AGWists. If I didn't do a good job I hope you can explain why, and I hope the antis can criticize my comments constructively too.
I've been reading this for a few days now and only really just found ScienceBlogs and it's brilliant! I'll comment properly soon.
Finally, can Barton Paul Levenson or someone else direct me to a website describing how the t test relates to climate change exactly and exactly how 30 years comes from this from tables of statistics I think you said (how do they calculate the tables etc). I've never studied the t-test (yet I will in due course I'm sure) and am intrigued by it.

By Alex Deam (not verified) on 30 Mar 2008 #permalink

Also why won't it let me comment when I' signed in with my new TypeKey? It's says I can't comment without a name and email, so I've had to do this pseudo-anonymously or something lol.

By Alex Deam (not verified) on 30 Mar 2008 #permalink

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. Just to avoid going round in circles, let's leave the readers pass their judgement on the substantial points made by each of us, shall we?

Only a couple of quick comments:

1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 - Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I'm correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that's as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

2) Actually, I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It's useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

May I also ask if you have performed the second exercise I proposed? You do not see any warming of the SH in the last decade, I hope, do you??

Best regards,

Mikel

1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 - Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I'm correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that's as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

So, you cherry pick a strong El Niño year, and you lose the bet, and you STILL insist that warming isn't happening.

You're just fucking dishonest.

I expect myself to comment on some of the points that have been raised in this comments section soon but for now I will leave you with this link

I looked, and the first thing I noticed was the large bald eagle dominating the globe they use as a logo.

I would suggest that indicates an ultra-nationalistic point of view which isn't worth bothering with.

he past couple of weeks have brought more studies claiming we must quit CO2 cold turkey today or the planet is pretty much doomed. One such dire warming comes from a climate model study out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology that states that we must totally quit releasing CO2 now to stop increased warming within 500 years. But are these climate models simply trying to prove the "Butterfly Effect"?

Well, I got suckered into reading the first paragraph of the site you linked to, and what crap.

No scientific studies say we must stop releasing CO2 into the atmosphere today or tomorrow, cold turkey.

"A little while back on another thread I made the comment that I recently met a professional economist who was previously paid to deny climate change. He now not only acknowledges that he did this whilst knowing that there was a valid basis to AGW, but took a significant cut in his salary to move 'to the other side' and take a position in climate policy in government, and he is very firm in reminding everyone that the ideas of denialists are marginal and continue to have ever declining relevance to government and policy."

My own experience was somewhat different - while employed by the Queensland government part of my job was to look for credible anti-AGW arguments and to come up with high estimates of the likely costs of mitigation.

The key word in there is "credible". I'm still looking.

By Ian Gould (not verified) on 30 Mar 2008 #permalink

Andrew W. asks: _Would someone knowledgable care to comment on this part of the interview:..._

This is a great opportunity to learn something. JM is referring to a study by Roy Spencer et al. Do a search for "Spencer aqua satellite" or something like that until you find a recent paper. Then read. You should find that even the great Roy Spencer himself is very careful to qualify his findings and how relevant they might be to GW. This is a peer reviewed paper after all. For giggles, then compare to his 2007 congressional testimony. You can say anything to congress!

Re: 240:
1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 - Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I'm correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that's as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

You apparently didn't read the Annan post that you linked to earlier in the thread. WCM's original offer was "we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures."
Annan was willing to take the bet because of the incredibly small likelihood of the trend being statistically significantly downward. The bounds on a 95% confidence interval for the data are ~0.1 (RSS) and 0.15 (UAH) per decade. In order for WCM to have won the bet (they ended up refusing to bet when Annan contacted them), the mean trend would have had to have been -.1 C/decade or cooler. The result was essentially exactly what Annan expected. As he pointed out, the key qualifier that WCM included was "statistically significant." It wasn't even close.

Backing the starting point back a year to Jan 1997 gives statistically significant (p=0.05) warming in the UAH analysis.

By Harold Brooks (not verified) on 31 Mar 2008 #permalink

Re 241:

Hi Dhogaza,

Whatever is happening in the world you're so angry about, it's not my personal fault, believe me.

In fact, I'm also very unhappy about so many things. One of them, for example, that my children are being indoctrinated to hate the industrial civilization (and the western values, in general). But I'd never take it too personally with any blogger. Instead, I understand that you angry believers are simply victims of the same mass hysteria campaign.

As for the issue at hand, let's face it. The world must start warming much faster.
We cannot continue in a stasis forever and see the AGW predictions materialize, it's just arithmetically impossible. If they aren't already, a few more years at the current levels and they will be falsified. Besides, the longer it takes for the warming to resume, the more difficult it gets for the GCM predictions to become possible: the warming trend would have to resume at unrealistically accelerated values.

Whatever is happening in the world you're so angry about, it's not my personal fault, believe me.
...Instead, I understand that you angry believers are simply victims of the same mass hysteria campaign.

Whose fault is it that you lie, if it is not your personal fault?

Brooks bringing the full metal stupid:

"As for the issue at hand, let's face it. The world must start warming much faster. We cannot continue in a stasis forever and see the AGW predictions materialize, it's just arithmetically impossible. If they aren't already, a few more years at the current levels and they will be falsified. Besides, the longer it takes for the warming to resume, the more difficult it gets for the GCM predictions to become possible: the warming trend would have to resume at unrealistically accelerated values."

Reality beating him like an ugly step son:

"The University of East Anglia and the Met Office's Hadley Centre have released preliminary global temperature figures for 2007, which show the top 11 warmest years all occurring in the last 13 years. The provisional global figure for 2007 using data from January to November, currently places the year as the seventh warmest on records dating back to 1850."

I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It's useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

What I told you above which you would see if you weren't blind, i.e.

"the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C."

which means that your conclusion that

global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945

is complete garbage. The last decade is nothing like the decade around 1945.

May I also ask if you have performed the second exercise I proposed?

That link had a table of numbers, not curves as you implied.

we may start discussing how this reoconciles with GCM predictions/projections.

If you believe that GCMs predict El Ninos/La Ninas then you have been sadly misled.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 31 Mar 2008 #permalink

Yes, Eli. My only point is that they don't measure temperature.

As far as the arguments on time periods, I would hazard a guess that if you pick any month and get averages of longer and longer time frames, the numbers get smaller and smaller as you go back. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 years. It seems more an artifact of the averging process. Or maybe because it is because it is getting warmer. Does anyone know how to prove or disprove either?

My other question is if the 4 satellite bands of RSS add up to +.02 since 1980 what are we looking at? Or do they have to be adjusted or can not simply be added?

It seems all we really know is that greenhouse gases absorb infrared.

ML

Max Lini:

As far as the arguments on time periods, I would hazard a guess that if you pick any month and get averages of longer and longer time frames, the numbers get smaller and smaller as you go back. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 years.

Instead of guessing and indulging in idle speculation, why don't you get hold of some data and work out the answer yourself?

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 31 Mar 2008 #permalink

Re 248

It's alright Dhogaza. You can get angry at me and call me a liar (!?) if you feel better. You can even believe that I'm being paid to come and post here, I'm OK with that if it helps with your personal frustrations (in fact I would be very OK with that being true). But at the end of the day hard facts are hard facts:

- IPCC warming prediction for the first 3 decades of this century (regardless of the SRES scenario): +0.2 C/decade
- Trend of the last decade: ~0 C.

Re 246

Harold,

Not sure if your numbers are correct but... wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

One of the reasons why I suspect he was not expecting a flat trend though is that he was also betting on the 1998 record being broken before 2010. But you can believe that the final result is "exactly" what he expected, if you want. Me, I believe in reading people's minds as much as I do in New Yorkers drowned by a Greenland meltdown.

Re 249

Hi Elspi, hope you're doing fine today.

You'll have to forgive me, I'm not a native English speaker and I was totally unable to follow your first paragraph. Are you calling Brooks stupid or was that epithet meant for me? (It was me who wrote what you quote. Poor Brooks replied to another totally different part of my post). ??

As for your second para, a few comments:

1) You must be one of the very few people in the world who pays serious attention to the Hadley Centre pronouncements. Did you know that they predicted that 2007 would be the warmest year on record (inevitably translated by the media to "2007 will be the warmest year on record")?

2) Let's imagine that, after the record 1998 warmth, temperatures would have remained at exactly the same level every year since then. You're among those who believe that the world would have experienced some further warming in the last decade, aren't you?

3) Now, honestly, you must get acquainted with the concepts of autocorrelation and autocorrelated series. If you think that the global temperature of this year returning to a value close to that of 1850 is a plausible thing to happen, we're both wasting our times by talking to each other.

RE 250

Chris: I can't help noticing that you guys refuse to talk about the SH temp record. What's so wrong about temperatures going down in that half of the world? Deeply concerned as you must be about the coming catastrophes, you should rather feel happy that the records show much less warming than anticipated, shouldn't you?

Re ENSO, you're right, GCMs are unable to predict or account for the PDO and other (I insist, poorly understood) ocean cycles. On top of that, these cycles are superimposed on each other and on other equally poorly understood phenomena (LIA, CWP,...). Bear in mind that it's not me who claims to know what all the relevant forcings in the climate system are, it's you believers who do that. Hence your shaky predictions.

This graphic compares GISS, HadCRU, and the two major satellite analyses, all adjusted so that the 1979-2007 trends intersect in January 1979.

The dip in the mid '80s and early-mid '90s are primarily the result of El Chichon and Pinatubo. Everything else is natural variation (which dwarfs the AGW signal over short periods), and it shows why you have to ignore the weather and look at the long term trend.

http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg

It wasn't Annan's bet. It was Pat Michaels' bet.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/05/yet-more-betting-on-climate-w…

"If we were of a betting sort (and there are some nasty rumors going around that we are), we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures"

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS didn't exist in 1998, so he has to be talking about the UAH analysis. Both of them are flat, but still positive for the period in question (0.01 degrees per decade for RSS, 0.05 for UAH), which is obviously not negative, nor is it significantly negative. And from the graphic I just posted, it shows just how anomalously warm 1998 was in the satellite analyses of the lower troposphere, which are more sensitive than surface measurements. 1998 was up to ~0.5 degrees warmer than the surrounding years in the satellite analyses. Annan knows these things. He wasn't betting (assuming any bet was actually made) on a strong warming trend since 1998 in the satellite analyses. Only a fool would have taken that bet.

Not sure if your numbers are correct but... wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

One of the reasons why I suspect he was not expecting a flat trend though is that he was also betting on the 1998 record being broken before 2010. But you can believe that the final result is "exactly" what he expected, if you want. Me, I believe in reading people's minds as much as I do in New Yorkers drowned by a Greenland meltdown.

You said that Annan would have "barely won the bet in its literal formulation." He wouldn't have won it barely. It wasn't even close and he would have won it easily. In the post that you linked to, he talks about how the trend is basically flat, if you start in 1998. That's not reading his mind. That's reading what he wrote.

He has put a 50% of the global temperature record (1998) being broken before 2010 (~75% if you include 2010) and, given the GISS analysis, it already has been broken (2005).

By Harold Brooks (not verified) on 01 Apr 2008 #permalink

Mikel:

Trend of the last decade: ~0 C

An insignificant hard fact is still an insignificant fact. Being insignificant means it's open to abuse by blatant cherry-pickers.

Not sure if your numbers are correct but... wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

This is what you said:

I see that, inside your reply, you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems. BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn't happen?

To which I replied: "Yes and it appears that he would have won the bet if Knappenburger had been honest about taking it. i.e. there has been no statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures from January 1998 through to December 2007."

So it was actually me who first said that Annan would have won that bet. So you appear to have a memory problem as well as your cognitive problems.

I can't help noticing that you guys refuse to talk about the SH temp record.

I can't help noticing that you have an overwhelming desire to "move on". It's like the guy who craps in your home and says "don't worry about that, why don't you move on like me".

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 01 Apr 2008 #permalink

Dear CAGW-believers,

A brief recap on the Annan bet saga. I mentioned that bet to illustrate a point in one of my posts. Chris pointed out that Annan would have won it, as there had been "no statistically significant negative trend". I don't know where he got that conclusion from but I suspected that he just drew a line from the Jan-98 to the Dec-07 values, not the best way to estimate a trend at all. I did the numbers for him on the RSS records and it turned out that the trend I got was just barely positive. I had no problem to acknowledge as much.

Since then, and far from welcoming my straightforwardness and engaging the substantial points I've made, you guys keep rejoicing like children on the apparent victory of your hero in that trivial bet.

Contrary to Chris' speculation, I do not want to "move on". I'd be delighted to discuss with mature people those points:

- Temperature stasis in the last years.
- Cooling of the SH.
- Natural variability, ocean dynamics and AGW predictions.

But let's be realistic, the chances of this discussion taking place here are no bigger than the last decade temperature trend. Tough.

Dear Tim Lambert,

I believe this is the first time I've posted in your blog. Thanks for letting me do it, it was fun.

But let me tell you a story. The other day I was having some wines with a Methodist friend of mine and we ended discussing religion. While he tried to convince me about life after death, I tried to explain my atheism but being careful not to convince him of my belief. What's the point in spoiling a nice person's faith in Heaven? It was useless. He finally got very troubled and we changed the subject to carry on having a good time.

Morale of the story: it's seldom worth while having a discussion with believers of any dogma. They will often take a critique to their believe system worse than a personal attack. You try to respectfully express your opinions and they will call you a liar, stupid, dishonest, carrier of cognitive disorders,...

Perhaps you should think about what you are doing wrong to attract this crowd of global warming Talibans to your website.

Best regards,

Mikel

Mikel- you don't win scientific arguments by wandering into someone's blog, insulting the locals, and making some silly statements and avoiding actually discussing anything substantial. Now that you have decided we are not worthy of your presence, the sooner you leave, the better, rather than wasting time strewing pointless homilies in your wake.

Guthrie et al., youze got snookered.

This is April Fool's day, and Mikel is a parody character. Come now - GW Taliban? Haw.

Best,

D

Mikel,

Fact 1: It was Pat Michaels bet, not Annan's bet. Michaels bet was "a statistically significant downward trend" from January '98 to December '07." http://www.worldclimatereport.com/archive/previous_issues/vol4/v4n8/fea…
Fact 2: When Annan posted in 2005 (which would go on to be the second warmest year for UAH, RSS, and HadCRU, and warmest for GISS), the trend for UAH was still negative after 7 years. Now it's essentially flat.
Fact 3: It was a least squares regression, not "drawing a line between two points," as any glance at the facts will show you. http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/msu.gif
Fact 4: It wasn't the RSS analysis. It was the UAH analysis. But no matter, Michaels would have lost either way.

Pat Michaels may still be a think-tank lackey, but at least he now predicts warming, which I'm sure went over well at the recent get-together put on by the Heartland Institute.

All of these facts can be drawn from the post on Annan's blog, which you linked and are therefore capable of reading yourself. You claim to offer "straightforwardness" but all you have provided is distortion. If you want an example of ideological dogma, look no further than skeptics who, for the past 30 years, have denied there was any warming, and now that this has been established beyond all reasonable doubt, they shift the goal posts so that there's no warming since "1998" or "2002" or "January 2007." I will go out on a limb and predict that the next time a new record is unambiguously set, the clock will be reset again, and the same thing will start all over.

Mikel:

far from welcoming my straightforwardness and engaging the substantial points I've made

One point you made was:

I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It's useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

and:

global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945

To which I replied:

What I told you above which you would see if you weren't blind, i.e.
"the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C."

At no point did you respond in any detail to this substantive point. So not only do you not engage the substantial points I've made you then have the cheek and hypocrisy to complain that I'm not engaging the substantial points you've made. It's a good idea not to complain about others behaviour while behaving that way yourself.

BTW, I didn't call you names. I was just describing your behaviour. There's probably no point in asking you to try to understand the difference.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 01 Apr 2008 #permalink

@ALL

What I told you above which you would see if you weren't blind, i.e. "the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C."

Okay then. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K in the 1940, then the next decade (2008-2017) must have about +0.4K of warming in order to match the IPCC-projections of an average of +0.2K per decade. But with each month of temperature of whatever GISS, NCDC, Hatcrut, you name it, to be out, time will work for the sceptics. By that time, it will be too late though. The One World Order will be on its way with the minor "crisis" of CAGW encouraging its establishment. Remember: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the new world order." David Rockefeller, speaking at the UN, Sept. 14, 1994. Source: Wikipedia.

I know this is not science. I don't claim to speak science here. But after this "brain exploding" exercise of multiple F6 twisters by the pseudonyms bi and sod (and other warmers), making virtual landfall in my country, this is my response.

@ Barton
Sorry, Barton. But sometimes the common sense of an atheist is better than the errors of us christians.

"One World Order"? "global warming talibans"?

The CLimateTruthers are out in full force this time of year.

"time will work for the sceptics".

More comic level book analysis.

The sceptics may win the odd battle but they'll lose the war. This is the crux of the matter. But so long as they can obfuscate and distort the underlying science, they and their well-financed brothers in the anti-environmental 'brownlash' crowd will continue to do everything in their power to ensure that business-as-usual is the only business. Meanwhile our planet's ecological life-support systems will continue to go to hell in a handbasket.

By Jeff Harvey (not verified) on 02 Apr 2008 #permalink

climatepatrol:

What I told you above which you would see if you weren't blind, i.e. "the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C."

Okay then. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K in the 1940, then the next decade (2008-2017) must have about +0.4K of warming in order to match the IPCC-projections of an average of +0.2K per decade.

Sorry, I couldn't see any logic that required the use of "0.2K in the 1940s" in the above statement. However, I could make such a logical argument to make up for your deficiencies. i.e. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K cooling in the 1940s, then the next decade (2008-2017) could likely have about 0.2K more warming than the 1950s. Since the 1950s had about 0.1K of warming (mostly in the last half of the decade), this means the next decade could likely have 0.3K of warming. BTW, there is no "must" involved in the IPCC projections when cherry=picking an insignificant set of data is involved. Anyone who uses the word "must" in that context simply reveals how ignorant and naive they are.

But with each month of temperature of whatever GISS, NCDC, Hatcrut, you name it, to be out, time will work for the sceptics.

Sure, if you say so. You're infallible, like the pope.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 02 Apr 2008 #permalink

In #225 Mikel said:

March will also be cool, you'll see.

The GISS figure for March is now available. It was the equal 3rd hottest March on record, 0.4 deg C hotter than February and 0.55 deg C hotter than January.

Mikel can now apologize for blatantly lying to us.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 09 Apr 2008 #permalink