Our favorite contrarian, the potty peer Christopher Monckton has been indulging in a little aristocratic artifice again. Not one to be constrained by mere facts or observable reality, he has launched a sally against Andy Revkin for reporting the shocking news that past industry disinformation campaigns were not sincere explorations of the true uncertainties in climate science.
The letter he has written to the NY Times public editor, with its liberal sprinkling of his usual pomposity, has at its heart the following graph:
Among other issues, it is quite amusing that Monckton apparently thinks that;
- trends from January 2002 are relevant to a complaint about a story discussing a 1995 report,
- someone might be fooled by the cherry-picked January 2002 start date,
- no-one would notice that he has just made up the IPCC projection curves
The last is even more amusing because he was caught out making stuff up on a slightly different figure just a few weeks ago.
To see the extent of this chicanery, one needs only plot the actual IPCC projections against the observations. This can be done a number of ways, firstly, plotting the observational data and the models used by IPCC with a common baseline of 1980-1999 temperatures (as done in the 2007 report) (Note that the model output is for the annual mean, monthly variance would be larger):
These show clearly that 2002-2009 is way too short a period for the trends to be meaningful and that Monckton’s estimate of what the IPCC projects for the current period is woefully wrong. Not just wrong, fake.
Even if one assumes that the baseline should be the year 2002 making no allowance for internal variability (which makes no sense whatsoever), you would get the following graph:
– still nothing like Monckton showed. Instead, he appears to have derived his ‘projections’ by drawing a line from 2002 to a selection of real projections in 2100 and ignoring the fact that the actual projections accelerate as time goes on, and thus strongly over-estimating the projected changes that are expected now (see here).
Lest this be thought a mere aberration or a slip of his quill, it turns out he has previously faked the data on projections of CO2 as well. This graph is from a recent presentation of his, compared to the actual projections:
How can this be described except as fake?
Apart from this nonsense, is there anything to Monckton’s complaint about Revkin’s story? Sadly no. Once one cuts out the paranoid hints about dark conspiracies between “prejudiced campaigners”, Al Gore and the New York Times editors, the only point he appear to make is that this passage from the scientific advice somehow redeems the industry lobbyists who ignored it:
The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential for a human impact on climate is based on well-established scientific fact, and should not be denied. While, in theory, human activities have the potential to result in net cooling, a concern about 25 years ago, the current balance between greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions of particulates and particulate-formers is such that essentially all of today’s concern is about net warming. However, as will be discussed below, it is still not possible to accurately predict the magnitude (if any), timing or impact of climate change as a result of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Also, because of the complex, possibly chaotic, nature of the climate system, it may never be possible to accurately predict future climate or to estimate the impact of increased greenhouse gas concentrations.
This is a curious claim, since the passage is pretty much mainstream. For instance, in the IPCC Second Assessment Report (1995) (p528):
Complex systems often allow deterministic predictability of some characteristics … yet do not permit skilful forecasts of other phenomena …
or even more clearly in IPCC TAR (2001):
In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states….
Much more central to the point Revkin was making was the deletion of the sections dealing with how weak the standard contrarian arguments were – arguments that GCC publications continued to use for years afterward (and indeed arguments that Monckton is still using) (see this amendment to the original story).
Monckton’s ironic piece de resistance though is the fact that he entitled his letter “Deliberate Misrepresentation” – and this is possibly the only true statement in it.
Theo, 235, please think before you post. To begin with someone may not know how much they do not know. And so answering REALLY DUMB questions isn’t a chore.
But if the petitioner were not to learn how little they know and, like, EDUCATE THEMSELVES and just kept walking into lampposts saying “Why does my face keep hurting???” We’ll give up picking them up and saying “Watch where you’re going” and start taking bets on when they’ll walk off the cliff. A useful real-world test of the random walk.
You see the bar at the top? See the “Start Here” button. Click it. Follow the links. Read, learn and come back enlightened or at least with more relevant questions.
As the science of toast is now confusing to me, please consider how much more difficult I find the science of climate change. And consider that in both cases I have to bow to the expertise of others as experts, so I am vulnerable to deliberate mis-information from profesional sceptics or just the misinformation of the ill-informed if it comes my way.
(But I do know what is, and why there is, the wurzel in a bender – which probably none of you folks do. Smirk.)
llewelly, It was hyperbole when I said some scientists think the earth is going to
“burn up”. I did see some previews for TV shows that dealt with a six degree celsius rise in temperature. The preview was very alarming. It might have been a National Geographic program.
I was clearly wrong when I thought some scientists were predicting 100 foot rises in sea level this century. A quick google search showed Al Gore has used the 20 foot sea level rise figure. So I will accept that as a maximum amount offered by some scientists. You are thinking we will probably get a 3-5 foot sea level rise since that is what the majority of scientists are saying.
I did recently see a tv show on hyper hurricanes hitting the East Coast in the past few thousand years – they raised the alarm that maybe we could get even stronger ones soon if CO2 levels keep rising.
Some skeptics like my self have become wearied that every rise in projected temperature is correlated with negative consequences and never positive consequences. More droughts, more storms, more deserts, more flooding, Atlantic current cessations followed by freezing conditions in the Northern hemisphere.
Climate changes will be good for some areas too. What is wrong with a greening Canada, a greening Alaska, Greenland and Siberia?
I think the historical record shows that hurricanes are not more prevalent than they were in the past. Are we getting information from different sources – or does each camp in the discussion decide to ignore certain information? I just read about an ancient huge snake found in South America that would have needed warmer temperatures to survive than what we have now. Some experts were surprised that there still could be a rainforest in such hot conditions.
This link below was rather surprising for me to read on an observed 800 year time dissonance between ancient warming and CO2 levels.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/
I think it is important that we don’t dismiss outright any variables. Sometimes nature surprises us. We know volcanoes in Iceland have caused melting. A Greenland hotspot can too. Let’s think deeply and not jump to conclusions too fast. It is only when we refuse to think and refuse to change (when appropriate to change) that we become dogmatic and overbearing.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22246005/
Thomas Donlon wrote: “What is wrong with a greening Canada, a greening Alaska, Greenland and Siberia?”
For one thing, a “greening” Greenland means the Greenland ice sheet melts, which could raise sea levels disastrously.
And worse, in a “greening” Canada, Alaska and Siberia, the permafrost in the frozen tundra will thaw, releasing huge amounts of methane, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, causing unstoppable catastrophic warming.
Mark @ 215
You wrote:
“Given there are still people (like yourself) who claim this global warming isn;t true still, 50 years may be required.”
I never made a claim that global warming isn’t. Check any or all of my posts.
But what I find worrying is that as I am _perplexed_ because of the teperature graph not rising consistently on a year-on-year basis, you have _assumed_ I am a sceptic. I’m not. I am merely “perplexed”.
Mark Says (7 May 2009 at 14:28):
“James, why is it so very many more cannot quit at all, if it isn’t addictive?”
Why do some people have trouble breaking any habit, even habits that don’t involve ingesting any sort of chemical at all? As for instance (to try to bring the back to something at least remotely related to climate), why do some people become compulsive shoppers? I’ve even seen it referred to as “shopping addiction”?
To return to my original point again, this is why the claim would better be avoided: because you run up against a major philosophical divide. It’s like arguing that AGW is caused by evil capitalism, when discussing the subject with a free market conservative :-)
Thomas Donlon Says (7 May 2009 at 16:27):
“We know volcanoes in Iceland have caused melting. A Greenland hotspot can too. Let’s think deeply and not jump to conclusions too fast. It is only when we refuse to think and refuse to change (when appropriate to change) that we become dogmatic and overbearing.”
OK, so how about doing some thinking, coupled with a little arithmetic? Figure out just how much volcanic activity it would take to produce observed warming, then explain how that could possibly have gone unnoticed?
Boreal forest is slowly dying up there … strange, I would think Canada would be greener with its boreal forest than it will be with a broad swath of dead brown trees.
That’s just me, though.
Donlon said:”I was clearly wrong when I thought some scientists were predicting 100 foot rises in sea level this century. A quick google search showed Al Gore has used the 20 foot sea level rise figure. So I will accept that as a maximum amount offered by some scientists. You are thinking we will probably get a 3-5 foot sea level rise since that is what the majority of scientists are saying.”
Al Gore was not claiming 20 feet this century.
At current rates, sea level will rise about 1 foot in this century. Recent research indicates accelerated glacier melting that could make the rate be much higher in this century, in the range of 3-5 feet total by 2100 that you use.
The 20 foot figure is the total rise from melting all the ice on Greenland.
“I did recently see a tv show on hyper hurricanes hitting the East Coast in the past few thousand years – they raised the alarm that maybe we could get even stronger ones soon if CO2 levels keep rising.”
More category 4 and 5 are what are predicted, and that is plenty enough.
“I think the historical record shows that hurricanes are not more prevalent than they were in the past. Are we getting information from different sources – or does each camp in the discussion decide to ignore certain information?”
Some campers don’t seem to understand the difference between a larger number of severe hurricanes, and more total hurricanes.
“I think it is important that we don’t dismiss outright any variables. Sometimes nature surprises us. We know volcanoes in Iceland have caused melting. A Greenland hotspot can too. Let’s think deeply and not jump to conclusions too fast.”
A deep thinker would ask – how much melting from volcanoes? The answer – not so much (that thought has already been thunk, and stunk).
Re 247:
Tom Dingaling Says:
7 May 2009 at 3:36 PM
Phil Fenton:
The absorption spectra for CO2 that you linked to is for the 750-755 cm-1 part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Is this part of the spectrum representative of the entire spectrum or is it anomalous? Is this the only part of the spectrum applicable (or relevant) to infrared heat retention?
You asked about broadening, that part of the spectrum shows broadening typical of the rest of the absorption band.
Barry Foster writes:
Please remove the hyphens and read:
http://www.geocities.com/bpl1960/Ball.html
http://www.geocities.com/bpl1960/Reber.html
t_p_hamilton,
You are apparently correct about Al Gore and his 20 foot sea level rise. I googled “Al Gore” and the words sea level rise – and the phrase 20 foot appeared in many of the hits. At your prodding I researched it some more and I didn’t find anywhere that Al Gore predicted the rise in this century. Al’s critics on the Google search asserted said that he used the word “soon” in his film when talking about a 20 foot rise of sea level – and that he has again used the phrase but rather in talking about the outcome if we lost Greenland ice – without specifying a time frame.
Grab yourself a fair coin and start flipping. Perhaps when you notice that you don’t get a precisely alternating heads,tails,heads,tails etc sequence yet after a few hundred flips are extremely close to a 50%-50% distribution you’ll stop feeling perplexed.
Thomas Donlon asks: “What is wrong with a greening Canada, a greening Alaska, Greenland and Siberia?”
Thomas, ever hear of the Canadian Shield? It is what was left after the glaceirs scraped away all the topsoil and brought it down to Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Kansas. Ever hear of the cos(theta) law–it says the light decreases with latitude as roughly the cosine of the lattitude.
Ever hear of Google? As Hank says, you can look this stuff up for yourself.
#212 Mark
Yes I know, but I couldn’t resist.
You are assuming that all “noise” is random, and be averaged out. Which is true if it’s ideal “band limited white noise”. Unfortunately not all noise is “white” but can have periods of “non-randomness” due to what ever. For instance if Joe decides to have a week long cook out, across the alley from the NOAA weather station, and if the wind is right, Joe will introduce 2-4 day noise pulse into the system that will not average out. Or if a iron foundry goes up a block away from a NOAA weather station, runs for ten years and goes out of business. Here a ten year pulse is added, and will not be averaged out. So there are many disturbances, or “noise” out there that are not even recognized. You can call in the “central limit theorem” to say that it will average out, and move on, recognizing it’s limitations.
The reason I like to use the Fourier Convolution method is that it give a more precise look if there are any periodic influences on the temp readings we have. Is there something new or just a natural earth cycle? Just using statistics done not seem to give as direct an insight that the Fourier analysis does. By adjusting the “kernel” or filter, I can easily look, or for, single or multiple waves or repeatable occurrences. This method does a better job then more classical signal processing, in that phase delays are reduced.
As far as statistics go, I have no problems with that. I have been through enough 3-sigma performance specs to last a lifetime. However I think that the Fourier method give a more direct insight as to what is going on. As I stated in the earlier post, using the Fourier analysis, showed a peak or slight down trend in current global temps. Tamino’s, use of averages, keep right on going up after 2000. Which analysis is closer to reality?
Phil. Felton,
You did a good job in researching this stuff for me. I’ll guess you are a scientist that specializes in this stuff.
Re Thomas Donlon @262, why not look at a transcript of An Inconvenient Truth to see exactly what Gore said?
Here you go:
http://forumpolitics.com/blogs/2007/03/17/an-inconvient-truth-transcript/
“I want to focus on West Antarctica, because it illustrates two factors about land-based ice and sea-based ice. It’s a little of both. It’s propped on tops of islands, but the ocean comes up underneath it. So if the ocean gets warmer, it has an impact on it. If this were to go, sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet. They’ve measured disturbing changes on the underside of this ice sheet. It’s considered relatively more stable, however, than another big body of ice that is roughly the same size. Greenland
In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland. 10 years later this is what happened. And here is the melting from 2005. Tony Blair’s scientific advisor has said that because of what is happening in Greenland right now, the map of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida.”
I’ve compared this transcript to the DVD sound track and it is accurate.
“If this were to go….”
“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted”
Note that no time span what so ever is mentioned or even implied.
Yet there is no shortage on the blogosphere of those asserting that Gore explicitly stated “in this century.”
Why would you have any confidence at all in those who would lie to you about something this easy to check?
Thomas Donlon (206?) — For the last 50 million years, largely due to the rise of the Himalayas, CO2 has been turned into carbonate, lowering concentrations (on average) with temperatures following. Here are two temperature graphs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png
re: 255 Theo, perplexed
You saw my mention of tamino in #195.
Did you look at the animation I suggested?
Various people have tried to explain this fundamental idea in various different ways.
Instead of just telling us you’re perplexed, how about addressing the various explanations and saying specifically why you don’t find them convincing. “Perplexity” is not an actionable description for helping people improve their explanations.
Igor (222), I still think I disagree, but you do have a good point.
SecularAnimist (229) Holy Toledo! You have no limits. It’s astonishing. This is a waste of time, but I’ll ask anyway. How do you account for the maybe 50+ million people who have stopped smoking the past 40+ years with minimal fuss. Per chance are you jumping into the nicotinic acid neuron connection ditch?? …too??? I’m supposed to believe your assertions on AGW??
People lie on the intertubes, just like in real life! I’m SHOCKED, I say, SHOCKED!
Now ask yourself why these lies rise so high on Google when you search, rather than what he actually says.
It’s not Google’s fault.
Could it be a concerted RWingnut ploy to discredit his message, just as they did when they said he claimed to “invent the internet” (which he never did), etc?
Theo,
A more climate-specific reason why we don’t see a steady rise in global temperatures is that other factors besides CO2 are important to temperature. The GHG forcing will dominate over time because it’s the only one being driven in a linear fashion by our ongoing “emissions program.” But variations in albedo (due to a number of different causes, from aerosols to land use changes to sea ice melt) will still continue to affect temperatures, as will changes in solar radiation, and changes in ocean current patterns, etc.
As a recent real-world example, James Hansen’s 2008 climate summary on the GISS site attributes the slightly cooler 2008 temperatures in part to the slightly decreased radiation associated with the prolonged solar minimum. There’s a fairly detailed discussion there of various factors affecting the temps that you may wish to check out.
Tamino,
Now that you have accepted the past 7 years as a natural deviation from a constantly warming atmosphere, perhaps you could explain what phenomenon causes this? One would assume that whatever natural effects must surely be greater and thus “smoothed” as a result of global warming.
Ray Ladbury Says (7 May 2009 at 19:33):
“Ever hear of the cos(theta) law–it says the light decreases with latitude as roughly the cosine of the lattitude.”
Also remember that basically the same law applies to surface area, something concealed by the usual Mercator map projection. That means that as the temperate zone moves polewards, there’s significantly less land area in that zone.
JBon, 265.
Odd that you are all over this for ABSOLUTE accuracy yet when you were using bandpass theory in your earlier graph attempts to “prove” that there is now a cooling and little correlation between temperature and CO2, you were using a bandpass filter of months, not decades and despite repeated attempts to get you to address that this isn’t an ACCURATE way of DOING the analysis (I’m using it as an ANALOGY, not as instruction on how you do it, unlike you), you ignored all requests.
I take it you’re going to go back to your analysis and redo your work based on what you’ve said now… yes?
Teo 255, you’re using weasel words: “I never made a claim that global warming isn’t. Check any or all of my posts.”
No, you just say “but doesn’t THIS mean that it’s wrong?”.
It’s doing the denialist creed whilst saying “I’m not *saying* it’s wrong, but…”.
Don’t use weasel words. People are smart enough to spot them, it’s just that most people are too polite to tell you off when using them.
Kevin, 250, I suspect it is more because the white bread is made from more refined flour and the access to the carbohydrates to both combustion and digestion is higher.
The reason why grazing animals have a problem with eating grass isn’t that the carbohydrates are hard to digest or poor but that they’re bound inside the plant walls and they must rely on bacteria to open them up.
We have less problem because we use boiling water to break up the plant and make the vitamins available.
Thomas Donton writes:
Let me get this straight. You’re blaming the melting of the Greenland ice cap on volcanoes???
Theo Hopkins writes:
CO2 isn’t the only thing that affects temperature in a given year. Besides the other greenhouse gases, it is also affected by changes in sunlight, cloud cover, surface albedo, aerosols, and the heat exchanges between the atmosphere and ocean. It’s not going to be a smooth curve upward. It never has been.
re 274 “Now that you have accepted the past 7 years as a natural deviation from a constantly warming atmosphere, perhaps you could explain what phenomenon causes this?”
Natural variation.
Rather like the height of any single human will be ABOUT the 5’8″ average for males, 5’2″ for females (and since there are about equal numbers of each, the average of all humans would be 5’5″) finding someone who is 6’3″ doesn’t mean that human heights are being forced upward.
And why this carp about “what phenomenon causes this”? Uh, maybe a confluence of a thousand phenomena all acting without trend or purpose reinforced each other and made a drift from mean.
Theo Hopkins,
You’ve no doubt heard that as a long-term investment, stocks pay a significant dividend over most other investments, right? OK, so did you sell your stocks at the bottom of the market because they weren’t rising steadily? Here’s an investment tip: that’s not how you make money.
There’s a story about somebody asking Andrew Carnegie what the market would do. Carnegie replied, “It will fluctuate, my boy. It will fluctuate.” Over time, though, companied do make money and as GM dries up and dies Google takes up the slack. There may be big fluctuations, both up (think tech bubble) and down (housing crash). Likewise, you get big fluctuations in WEATHER that may last several years. Overall, though, if there is a steady forcing like CO2 that keeps pushing upward, the fluctuations keep happening but at a higher mean value. So, the average temperature is significantly higher this decade than last and last decade than the decade before.
Thanks for replies to my earlier comments. I’ll rephrase my earlier question about noise in the global temperature time series data.
1. What level of noise is generated in the measuring process?
2. What level of noise is there in the actual climate?
I can understand something like the effect of a volcanic eruption or asteroid hit being classed as noise in the climate system.
I can understand gridsquare size, urban heat island effects and human error causing noise in the measuring systems.
What other causes of noise defined are there in each of climate and measuring systems?
Is there noise that is unaccounted for and what’s its level?
Has the overall level of noise in each process increased, decreased or stayed the same on say a 150 year basis?
I assume anthropic climate effects would not be classed as noise in the climate as that’s what we’re trying to establish. Is this a reasonable assumption?
Are historic global temperature time series produced that have had all known noise removed from them? If so where are they published?
What would be a reasonable period in such series to enable a reasonable measurement of trend?
“1. What level of noise is generated in the measuring process?”
What makes you think there is noise introduced by the measuring process?
“2. What level of noise is there in the actual climate?”
There’s no noise in the climate wrt climate, but there’s weather effects rather than climate effects in the data used.
“I can understand something like the effect of a volcanic eruption or asteroid hit being classed as noise in the climate system”
And how about “an unusually strong El Nino”?
“What would be a reasonable period in such series to enable a reasonable measurement of trend?”
30 to 50 year meaning period. You read any of these posts? That’s been answered about 15 times so far on this thread.
#282, Ray, Theo is trying to say that AGW should form a continuous rising temperature trend. With proper statistics , applied for a long period, it actually is. Despite variations, El-Nino and La-Nina driven or not, the Arctic has been showing such a feature, in over all Arctic Ocean ice thickness.
Which also varies, but with a more sharper downward trend than temperature. Sea Ice extent is more tricky and depends on many factors, especially dominant wind variations (even ENSO plays a role with it) . Again, every thing varies, wind, sea and air temperatures, cloud extent. even the TSI (slightly), everything. except gravity and the rotation of the earth. So it does not come as a surprise, that there is a variation, but a closer study of climate sensitive metrics, like sea ice thickness confirms a mathematical trend with Global temperature, this should hopefully convince…
“#282, Ray, Theo is trying to say that AGW should form a continuous rising temperature trend.”
The question I have is: why? Why would everything
If I were to push him off the top of the empire state building he wouldn’t fall down in a proper f=ma trajectory. He’d bounce off the walls for a start. He’d wave his arms about going “AAAAARRRRHHHGGGGG!!!!” which would affect his speed.
As he falls down, the wind whistling past his face will make his cheeks wobble and ripple. His clothes will bell and wave in the stream. Yet those ripples shouldn’t exist if airflow follows the nice curved lines of classical lamellar flow.
Since his cheeks will ripple, can he ignore the ground coming up at him because he can’t be falling since there shouldn’t be any ripples on his cheeks or shirt?
“#282, Ray, Theo is trying to say that AGW should form a continuous rising temperature trend.”
Stand in the wind with a sheet between your arms. Despite the wind blowing in a straight line, the sheet bells and snaps.
What’s causing that?
Theo is wasting your time.
#275 –Mark
Easy Mark, my call letters are J. Bob. Now my example about noise is that, while mathematically correct “band limited white noise” should have a zero mean, real “noise”, or “disturbances” may not.
I’m not sure where the “ABSOLUTE accuracy” term came up, as it was not in my last post. My figure below, should have the spectral plot (b) labeled as cycles/year. That would mean I was cutting off freq. above 0.02 cycle/yr (50 yr periods) off to see what the lower freq. were doing. So this ~50 yr cycle showed up. This seemed to replicate what is going on now, and a previous cycle in the 1700’s. And in the future I would like to do more analysis in this.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/t_est_05-NVRm1.gif
However your comment about using Digital Signal Processing-DSP (of which band pass filtering is a part of) is not a accurate way of doing things, is interesting. Then why do they use it financial trading, such as commodities, bonds, stocks etc.? Very simply, it’s another tool to make a dollar. If it didn’t work, they would not use it. Personally I used it for inertial platforms, used in orbit injection, and instrumentation, where tolerances were below arc-sec/sec., and that goes back to the mid sixties. If it was good enough for DOD an NASA then, it should be good enough now.
So just why do you think it’s not a “ACCURATE” way of doing analysis? There are many books and handbooks out there, authored by smarter people then you or I, who might disagree with you. Cooley and Tukey, who developed the FFT, for starters. Instead of being critical the DSP, look into it, you just might end up liking it. And you will have another tool to analyze the climate.
[Response: It is well known that all frequency-domain filtering techniques must contront the same critical problem, how to deal with the non-unique nature of the inversion back to the time domain near the boundaries of the time series. How have you dealt with this issue in your analysis? There are many papers in the climate literature devoted to precisely this issue. See for example my own article in GRL from last year on this very topic. -mike]
Son of Mulder:
A variety of factors contribute to noise–volcanic eruptions, ENSO, PDO and other oscillations, fluctuations in total solar irradiance, clouds, etc. and on and on. Many of these noise factors are rather complicated and not completely understood. However, noise, by its nature fluctuates–it goes up and down. Rising CO2 levels, however, provide a monotonic upward forcing about which all these oscillations. Thus you’d expect the current decade to be warmer than the last and the last warmer than the one before that. That is in fact the case. From historical data, we expect a steady forcing like CO2 would take ~30 years to stand out prominently from the noise. It does.
Wayne Davidson wrote, @285, of me:
“Theo is trying to say that AGW should form a continuous rising temperature trend.”
If there were a continuous rising temperature, then things would be much clearer. I understand, however, that there are fluctuations, so one has to do some statistics to the annual average temperatures. I also understand there is El Niño and La Nina. Nevertheless, the graph, at this moment, is somewhat flat.
But please leave this aside for the moment.
What does increasingly concern me is that to some posters on this discussion that if I show the slightest glimmer of doubt on temperature trends, I am cast as a lackey of the Heartland Institute and/or pig ignorant.
So please consider, with empathy, the mental journey I am on.
Once upon a time I believed in global warming. I was an environmental activist. I was part of what was probably the first large-scale street demo to raise awareness of climate change in London. That’s 20 years ago.
Since then, “sceptics” have turned up. There voice is often quite powerful, so I found I needed to find out more about AGW than just accepting what scientists say as gospel. A “yes it is”/”no it isn’t” argument is of little use. You have to use science. So I started to read things such as RC, which discuss the science as opposed to, say the Met Office site, that just say “This is the science”.
At this point I start to find things are not so clear cut as I had imagined. A good example is the two recent discussions on aerosols. Seeing that aerosols are the main counterbalance to CO2 induced warming, I was most surprised to find that scientists working in the field of aerosols were saying that presently often the science was very poorly understood, there were great holes in the data, and the uncertainties were sometimes so vast that potentially they could nearly counter AGW where it is now. Basically, things are not as clear cut some posters here say, even though everything points upwards on the long term temp graph. I have only just discovered this aerosol stuff: previously I would have expected the aerosol stuff to be as solid as the CO2 stuff – but at the moment, it is not
So there is stuff that makes me wonder. Stuff that perplexes me.
But maybe what is happening is that things are getting polarised so climate scientists are assuming public doubt about any aspect is a “skeptic” attack, when it merely honest questioning.
The other day I was talking AWG with a colleague who shares a hobby. He is a retired professor of marine biology but came into that field from a background of extreme pressure engineering (so he knows about bottom of the sea stuff, including methane clathrates, etc). When I challenged AWG with him on a particular thing he went into a highly unexpected and a fairly aggressive “defence mode” as if I were a fully paid up by Exxon professional skeptic. I have to assume that he has had to deal with so many non-scientists who deny AGW that he did not “listen” to my quite detailed, and very genuine, question.
Please do not confuse genuine enquiry and challenge to the orthodoxy as political denial and “professional skepticism”.
………………
PS. I will choose to write British “sceptic” when I mean genuine doubt and the US spelling “skeptic” when I mean the likes of Heartland. ‘Cause the paid skeptics are mostly American.
Thanks mike for your better response than I would make to #288.
Signal analysis wasn’t a big part of my degree, though I did do an awful lot of units, signal processing was only a small part of a unit that was really intended for electrical engineers.
Theo Hopkins Says (8 May 2009 at 10:37):
“What does increasingly concern me is that to some posters on this discussion that if I show the slightest glimmer of doubt on temperature trends, I am cast as a lackey of the Heartland Institute and/or pig ignorant.”
I think this is at least in part due to frustration with a lack of basic understanding of the science of AGW. There seems to be a widespread belief that the logical process of discovery is
1) Scientists observe rising temperatures;
2) Scientists observe rising CO2;
3) Scientists conclude that 2 causes 1.
So of course those who want to call AGW into doubt start by attacking 1. However, that’s almost irrelevant, because the real logical process is
1) Scientists study properties of CO2, and observe that it blocks IR radiation;
2) Scientists observe that CO2 is rising;
3) Scientists predict that 1 and 2 will cause rising temperatures;
4) Examination of temperature records shows good agreement with the predictions.
As for the variation over periods of a decade or so, consider a smaller-scale parallel. Annual temperature variation is caused by Earth’s orbital tilt, no? So we should see a sin wave temperature pattern, rising in summer, falling in winter – and if we don’t look too closely that’s just what we see. But by this model July should have fairly constant temperature, when instead there’s considerable day-to-day and week-to-week variation. (Especially around here, where the rare July snowstorm can be followed a week later by 100 degree highs :-)) Does that mean that there’s something wrong with our model of the seasons?
In #284 Mark asked “What makes you think there is noise introduced by the measuring process?”
Because if I use a thermometer in my garden to measure average temperature there and extrapolate it to the whole planet I think you’d consider that was unreasonable because it would differ from averaging temperature at every point on the planet. Now the difference between real average T and the results obtained by me in my garden or other measuring authorities would be noise to me in the time series introduced by the measuring method.
Then Mark said “There’s no noise in the climate wrt climate, but there’s weather effects rather than climate effects in the data used”.
Compare that with the list of noise items that are provided by Ray Ladbury in #289.
Mark then asked “And how about “an unusually strong El Nino”?”. I’d say that wasn’t noise but just an observable in the climate system.
I’d consider variations of solar irradiance as suggested by Ray as a noise generator.
As such El Nino may have some noise in it.
Son of Mulder, since climate consists of longterm trends, and an El Nino lasts on order of a year, you would be incorrect in assigning El Nino to climate. Systematic changes of ENSO over time would qualify. Think trends over time, not events.
re: #290 Theo
“I also understand there is El Niño and La Nina. Nevertheless, the graph, at this moment, is somewhat flat.”
Theo: if you can say this after all the other posts…
Have you yet looked at the Excel model I suggested? If not, why won’t you do that? If so, can you explain why you still say “the graph is flat” as though it means something?
Let me assume,for a little while yet, that you are truly sincere and perplexed. When you come basically quoting standard anti-science memes long debunked, and seemingly won’t go study anything that would help you learn better, you simulate a denier well, because you seem to apply (classical) skepticism to the real science, and none to the anti-science.
A real skeptic learning a new might well say:
a) The scientific consensus seems to be X
b) But, there seems to be some data that is contradictory, or else I don’t understand. Here’s my list: A, B, C.
For example, at one point, some satellite data seemed to contradict the ground data, and at one point was a perfectly rational concern. (I.e., one or the other, or both, must have been wrong. Turned out to be some of the satellite computations.)
Now, I’ll work down the list, study each one, or see if new data arrives. A real skeptic crosses them off. A denier then says, “ahh, but D”, and when D gets knocked off, “ahh, but E”.
But let me assume you’re sincere:
You need to do two things:
a) Build a coherent basis of knowledge in the real science, to whatever level of detail is adequate.
One 200-page general book might satisfy you, in which case I’d recommend:
David Archer, “The Long Thaw”, 2008.
and if you want a second, that overlaps, but illustrates some other issues (including especially Chapter 18, and the general process by which ideas become hypotheses and maybe real theories, in the presence of imperfect data), get:
William Ruddiman, “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum”, 2005
Plunging into the blog maelstrom is *not* the way to start, especially if you don’t yet have the background to assess what people are saying. Even at RC, it’s too much like trying to understand a long-running dramatic soap opera by picking a few episodes at random.
b) Learn to recognize disinformation, and have a good place to quickly look up something you don’t understand … and then start asking in blogs.
Read through the list at
Skeptical Science, and every time you see something that perplexes you, go there and see if there’s an entry.
So far, you’d want to look at #9 [1998] and #45 [aerosols].
For more detail, see here at RC.
Until you can at least get to a) and b), you are defenseless against folks like Monckton…
If I were to push him (That’s me, Theo) off the top of the empire state building he wouldn’t fall down in a proper f=ma trajectory. He’d bounce off the walls for a start. He’d wave his arms about going “AAAAARRRRHHHGGGGG!!!!” which would affect his speed.
No. As I plummeted down, I would shout out at each window, “So far – so good!”. (There is probably some mileage in this attitude for skeptics?)
I’m obviously not putting my points acrosss in the right way. My partner would probably concur. She has one of those fancy PhD things. My skills are painting pictures – arty stuff. I’ll stay out of this discussion until I consult with her. Sleep well.
The truth is out there and asking:
“Now the difference between real average T and the results obtained by me in my garden or other measuring authorities would be noise to me in the time series introduced by the measuring method.”
No, that would be because your thermometer is not global in size. Therefore you are not measuring the earth’s average temperature with it in your back garden.
“Compare that with the list of noise items that are provided by Ray Ladbury in #289.”
Compare with climate not weather. When you quote someone, do you ever read what you quote first to make sure you don’t look like a dork?
“I’d say that wasn’t noise but just an observable in the climate system.”
But it isn’t a climatological event, it is a weather event.
Hence, noise. It gets in the way of the signal.
Read up on EDGE technology and Frequency-based CDMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access
Anything not coded to your access channel is noise.
Mike – Good question. I took a look at your paper. I believe what you are doing is breaking the time series down in to what we used to call “sectioning”, for large increments of data. Am I reading you right? As I mentioned in an earlier post, I gave my Matlab and toolboxes away long ago, so I have a somewhat simpler system now, EXCEL spreadsheet and VB macro. Hence I had to “barrow” the FFT from Steve Smith over at http://www.dspguide.com
for my simple analysis.
That being said, the end conditions, or “leakage” was evaluated during checkout of the method. That is a known input, sine waves initially were converted to the freq. domain, and then inverted back to the real domain, and compared to the input. That looked OK to two significant digits, particularly at the end points. Also the 350+ year Hadcet yearly data checked the same way. In this case, the end points were the same to about 2-3 significant digits. So much for the quick & dirty checks.
One of the simplest methods to reduce leakage would go to the monthly Hadcet data rather the yearly average which I used. Then the “distance” from the end points is greater. Another would be to add a “Hamming”, or “Hanning” (2 different windows) window. One method Leif Svalgaard used at WUWT is truncating the end points in specific segments. He used for looking at the spectra plot of solar activity. The last method we used to use was to “pad” the end points. That is extend the interval of interest with added “synthetic” data. One of the simplest was to extend these points is with a linear extension of the data (low noise). In the case of high noise, superimpose a random signal on the linear extension.
However in my case I would increase the data points from yearly to monthly, and see how they compared. Another interesting check would be to go with multi-pole recursive low pass filters, (i.e. Chebyshev) and see how they compare at the end.
Your comments?
re: #294 Ray
The “weather-vs-climate” binary dichotomy is commonly used, but I’m increasinglyconcerned that it may not be an optimal way to explain it.
Colloquially, few people have a problem attaching the term weather to daily changes, especially local. I think most are fine with multi-decadal average changes being climate changes. ENSOs and other ocean oscillations cause people trouble.
In general, given a continuous range (as in this case, a duration), one must be careful to assign discrete labels in ways that make sense. If you tell someone “weather or climate”, a plausible next question is: “going from 1 day up, at what point does weather suddenly become climate? why there?” Ugh, at that point, the listener may be psychologically anchored into confusion.
I’d rather tell people something like (but simpler):
Things happen on time-scales from a few minutes up, we usually call the shorter ones weather, which is very noisy/unpredictable.
When we get to 5 or 10 year averages taken 20-30 years apart, we can find statistically significant changes in climate.
In between are ocean oscillations (like ENSO, PDO) that last one or more years and can have widespread effects. Colloquially, people might call them climate, but they are more like weather, because the the random jiggles average away over longer durations.
John Mashey, of course, the real definitions of climate and weather are:
Weather–what it’s doing outside right now
Weather forecast–what we think the weather is going to be from tomorrow to 10 days from now
Then you have seasons and finally climate. Personally, I think climate ought to be defined in terms of a confidence level for the trend–e.g. 30 years gives you about 90% confidence that you can really pick out a sore thumb like greenhouse warming from the noise. A lot of climate would take considerably longer than 30 years. It’s not a definition that the average person would relate to, but it’s precise. Of course, that leaves us with nothing to call weather on all the interim time periods other than noise.