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.
“It’s been both warmer and colder in the past. By the way, hold old is Lord Monckton? Can he recall when the Thames froze (and it did)?”
And there have been elimination of species (including the near extinction of mankind) several times in the past too.
@Roger Godby (#343):
I doubt it – it last froze enough for a frost fair in 1814. Knocking down the old London Bridge (which held back the water to form essentially a lake above it) and replacing it with one with fewer piers and no weirs, and embanking the Thames during Victoria’s reign, put paid to any repetition.
Have you heard the one about the vineyard at Greenwich that Samuel Pepys visited?
(Captcha – belated fashions…hmmm)
Gabriel, assuming an FFT means something IS A MODEL.
JBob is using FFT to see cycles. Well, guess what? Take a thousand random points and do an FFT on it. You’ll see “evidence” for lots of cycles. All the way up to 1 per thousand.
re 348 “Secondly, it is worthwhile to think carefully about computer modeling, as there is always the danger that the models will be treated as magic boxes which produce science.”
And climate modellers DO think carefully about it.
It’s the denialists and those who are intellectually lazy (but not so lazy they will not waste time going “surely it’s X???”) who don’t think carefully about it.
The problem is that you seem willing to suspect the model when
a) you can’t understand it
b) you don’t want to listen to those who do
this is not skepticism.
re 346: “tamino: In post 321, it seems that you are trying to suggest that a superposition of sinusoids must itself be sinusoidal. ”
It must have a pattern that will lend itself to sinusoidal movement. Especially if you remove some elements.
The ONLY difference between a step function, a straight slope and a sinusoid when your only toolbox is FFT is how many sinusoids you need to make it. The plain sinusoid being least.
So, as you reduce the number of sinusoids you will go from your step function to the slope to a sinusoid.
Now what is JBob doing? Removing sinusoids. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it, he doesn’t know what doing so will mean, but inevitably you CAN get a clear downtrend from ANY shape if you keep removing sinudoids from your FFT analysis and recreate the line from the paupered set. Just keep going until you see what you want to see.
If you don’t see a clear downtrend, keep going.
When you do see a clear downtrend, stop, else you may remove the apparent trend.
Gabriel Hanna, On what basis do you slander Spencer Weart and the other folks at the American Institute for Physics [edit]. Talk about ad hominem attacks. I happen to know Spencer Weart. Do you? I happen to know he is a very careful researcher. Do you have any specific issues with his research, or do you only do calumny?
And based on your little performance here, perhaps you’d care to tell us why we should take your calumny of climate modelers any more seriously than your views on historians of science much more accomplished than you.
As to your false dichotomy between climate mitigation and development, it is not a choice. If we choose to mitigate climate at the expense of development, poor nations will burn whatever they can to survive and undo any progress we make. If we choose development over climate mitigation, climate change will negate our efforts. They are two facets of the many sided problem of creating a sustainable economy.
Re: #346 (fustian)
Of course a superposition of sinusoids won’t be sinusoidal, and of course the right superposition of sinusoids can match any function.
But we’re not concerned with abstract harmonic analysis, we’re concerned with separating the physical signal from the noise in data — a finite number of data points over a finite time span — using models based on sinusoids. And we have to use fewer degrees of freedom in our model than are present in the data, or we end up reproducing the data perfectly but with all the noise still present; of course sinusoids can do that, but of course it’s also a useless exercise. When you smooth data with a small number of sinusoids, the fact that they only peak where they level off makes the model *tend* to level off where the data peaks — in this case, the last decade. So if any filter based on a Fourier transform levels off in the last decade, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised. We certainly shouldn’t draw conclusions on that basis when we haven’t applied a shred of statistical analysis.
J. Bob has applied some digital signal processing tools; that’s fine. He’s also dropped every name he can think of, for both scientists and methods; that’s embarrassing. He has made assertions based on some of the filter results while rejecting others which don’t support such assertions. He still hasn’t done any statistics. He shows every sign of ignorance of how the model can affect the outcome. He seems utterly oblivous to the fact that separating low-frequency and high-frequency behavior isn’t the same as separating signal and noise.
The issue is not digital signal processing, it’s the statistical analysis of time series.
Mark in post 355: I’m am finding myself very confused about this term “the slope of a sinusoid”. Could you elaborate?
The whole “removing sinusoids” thing is a pretty standard technique for smoothing. It’s called bandpass filtering, and, for example, is part of every audio recording.
Certainly if you’re interested in understanding any potential periodicity in your data, the Fourier domain is the go-to guy, and it’s a hugely popular place to do intelligent smoothing.
I’m at least partially versed in time series analysis, and I’m having trouble following this argument about the fundamental flaws of these techniques.
But, again, possibly I am simply misunderstanding.
tamino: in post 357 you seem to imply that a superposition of a limited number of sinusoids must turn downwards.
But, again, this is untrue.
Take a time range from 2000 to 2009. Take a single sinusoid that is very low frequency. In particular make its period double the 2000-2009 range. Then phase shift this single sinusoid until the concave upwards part fills the 2000-2009 section of the time series. What you now have is the result of a single sinusoid that is concave upwards.
Now, you say that you are not concerned with abstract harmonic analysis. Perhaps you should be.
Once again, apologies if I have misunderstood your points. It is all too easy to do so in these contentious and anonymous comment back-and-forths.
#347 Good to know you read my posts.
The C&T incident was just AFTER their paper came out. We had a noise problem with critical parts for a space mission. So no expense was spared. If “motherhood is the necessity of invention”, then “fatherhood is desperation”. And yes the equations were programmed into the WSMR IBM7090’s, state of the art at that time. The point is that there are many people out there that have skills in many areas. So just because one is not a “climate scientist” does not mean he is lower then any one else, or be talked down to . In fact my colleague, I would say, had far more skills then I did, but never once did he talk down to me. The view of the desert from Cloudcroft was great. Now that that’s over with, let’s get to the meat of it. Did you read #320? If so, comment on the analysis.
#350 Hi Walter glad your back. I am NOT using statistics, but what one would call an analysis method. Statistics is another method. Both are good when used in the right way. Tamino, I believe, is using curve fitting techniques to model input data. I’m using what you might think of is scanning the input data with a very fine frequency filter to find the “energy” (sort of like amplitude) present at each frequency. This “energy” is then plotted against frequency, called the spectral plot. You can then remove the high frequencies “noise” and leave the low frequencies (i.e. those with more then periods of say 40 years). The result is then, re-constructed by transforming the resultant frequency information back into the time domain and plotted. Now you see signals without the “noise”. Kind of like what a 40 yr moving average filter gives you, only I think it’s better. Now you can start looking at these curves, minus the short term “noise” to see what is left. That’s it. You now have a plot to start forming an opinion. As I have said before, that last ~50 year wave was interesting, as well as the downturn coming close to the climate4you combined global temp plot. But that’s just my opinion.
It still goes back to the question, is the recent temp rise due to man, or some natural cycle. Remember that trend line we talked about? Notice the temp, even with noise stayed close to the trend line. That to me would indicate at relatively constant ~2-3 deg./century temp rise over the past 350+ years, with some short period changes. What and why these short period changes are taking place, that is the debate. So we find out if they happened say before the last say 100 years, that just might indicate a natural earth cycle taking place. Which is causing this rather spirited debate.
#355 And now Mark.
“Now what is JBob doing? Removing sinusoids.”
Just what do you think Tamino is doing with a Butterworth filter?
re 358, no a standard technique to smooth out noise is to take an average.
Why was this not taken?
The problem with Jbob’s analysis is that he is 1)using a Fourier analys, then 2)filtering, then 3)drawing conclusions based on the behavior near the endpoints of his interval. There is no analysis of statistical significance nor any physics proposed. That is as near a good recipe for crap as I know.
tamino and Mark: My understanding is that you are looking for a “longer-term” climate signal and that “short-term” variation is believed to obfuscate the true picture.
But, there seems to be some notion that the bandpass filtering technique involves some willy-nilly removal of data with no idea of what the outcome means.
The whole point of doing this kind of smoothing in the frequency domain is that it does give you the intuition to do smoothing in a controlled, intelligent way.
How else can you intelligently smooth out the short term without damaging the longer term?
In fact, anything you do in the time series has an effect in the frequency domain. The frequency domain representation of a time series is not a different thing with different properties. It is exactly the same thing but expressed in a different way.
Even a simple moving average has a frequency domain equivalent. It’s ugly, and generally viewed as a very undesirable way of smoothing.
fustian says:”tamino: in post 357 you seem to imply that a superposition of a limited number of sinusoids must turn downwards.
But, again, this is untrue.”
tamino is not implying that. Leveling off at the max/min is what tends to happen with a limited number of frequencies. For this particular case, the recent highest temperatures are a maximum, hence a fit of superposed frequencies will tend to level off (after all, maxes have a slope of zero).
For a good idea of what tamino’s talking about, visit his blog, linked at the right under OpenMind.
J. Bob, what can be done by trying to identify and remove some of the obvious possible natural frequency mechanical and heating periodic forcings and their overtones on the coupled ocean-climate oscillating system eg. Daily earth rotation/monthly moon revolution, annual orbit around the sun?
further to 364.
Check the difference between an inflexion point and a peak. When you’re half way through the inflexion, there is NO WAY you can tell the difference unless you know a priori the complete shape of the curve.
Which if you’re using an FFT and expecting it to be a representation of the curve you do not.
Mark in post 361 says:
“no a standard technique to smooth out noise is to take an average.
Why was this not taken?”
Well, it’s not hugely different. A moving average is convolution with a box, while the more traditional bandpass is just convolution with a sinc function. You’re a little tidier in frequency with a bandpass filter. The box convolutional filter leaves larger side lobes in frequency.
Indeed, he apparently rejects the need to test for significance and appears to be wearing that badge proudly.
re 367, it is hugely different.
Putting a FFT analysis against 1000 rolls of a dice doesn’t let me find what the average is if I cut off any frequency higher than 1 per 3 values. In fact, please prove to me how you can guarantee getting the right value for mean and variance of the dice roll by this method with ANY cutoff.
Adding up all 1000 rolls will and the variance of ALL THE VALUES around that mean will give me the variance of the dataset from that mean and hence tell me things like: is the dice loaded?
#360 JBob:
“The C&T incident was just AFTER their paper came out. We had a noise problem…”
Sure, whatever. You’ve still got a noise problem.
“So just because one is not a “climate scientist” does not mean he is lower then any one else, or be talked down to ”
Except when he claims skills that exceed those of climate scientists and then attempts to use those putative skills to best the work of climate scientists. Once that threshold is crossed he’s fair game for all the same sort of critiques an actual climate scientist is exposed to, including being called out for promoting BS. If he chooses to remain anonymous and safely hidden behind swirling curtains of silly irrelevant claptrap about long-scrapped IBM computers, etc., that part of his woof and weave is inevitably incorporated into comments since that’s the fabric we’re handed to work with, as opposed to an actual personality.
Regarding your plate of stinky meat in #320, inexpert as I am it appears you’ve taken a selection of tenderizing mallets to the single data set you’ve picked as most amenable to your assumptions then pounded on it until you can see the wave you’re sure is there. Stripping away all the puffy pedantry, what I see is that you downloaded a slew of canned Excel algorithms you thought might be applicable to the task at hand and then proceeded to stab away at your data, squinting eagerly at the resulting tortured graphs to see if something would emerge in support of your preconceptions. Of course you can see what you want, just as we can all see patterns in the snow of an empty television channel. Others here have explained how that happens in more detail than I could possibly approximate, but even a layperson like me can see what you’ve done.
Really, Gavin and crew are too kind and circumspect. At least a few people are going to take your ramblings here to heart and form conclusions that will become part of the degenerate culturally demented anti-science mythology this site is designed to combat. You’re a source of friction against improving the human condition. Find a more benign hobby, please.
J. Bob
I’m not going to pretend I understand all the nuances of perspectives that seem to have numerous context problems. Instead, let’s try something different. I am making some assumptions about your perspective, so sorry if I get something wrong. Please note I am not a scientist, just trying to learn more about the science of global warming.
I am assuming you have some difficulty with the methods employed in modeling climate? So you have a reason to be in RC making comments.
Does your model/analysis perspectives match the observations in a scientifically relevant manner so as to explain the long term warming trend with attributions and a reasonably acceptable result?
Or, do you have any alternative explanation with attributions for the observed long term warming trend, glacial ice loss, Arctic multi-year ice loss, Antarctic warming, latitudinal shift, ocean acidification, speed of desertification change, rapid changes in seasonal shift and extended forest fire seasons?
Just curious.
PS as to global temps trending down, weather is not climate, facts out of context are less relevant (showing a graph that uses facts out of context to represent the global mean is lying), the temperature in Central England does not represent the global mean temperature, and rhetoric is not science.
You claim:
It is just as easy to argue that it’s not just about looking at one tool v. the other tools, but rather the contextually relevant aggregated picture that is reasonably verifiable.
In other words, let’s pretend all the models are wrong to one degree or another, not hard right?
What the heck is causing all the melting, unt, unt, unt (see above)? I mean, if we are cooling, why is everything warming, and melting…?
Where’s the Beef, er… Attribution
re Mark in post 369: That’s kind of apples vs. orange, isn’t it?
The set of outcomes from multiple rolls of the dice isn’t even a time series now is it?
I take my hat off to no one in my appreciation of using the mean and variance to characterize a distribution, but these are fairly useless tools at filtering out the high frequency information from a time series.
MONCKTON RESPONDS.
@Ray Ladbury: Check out the Wikipedia definition of “irony”. Obviously the people at the American Institute of Physics are not anti-science Neanderthals, and the people at the Sierra Club are not AGW denialists.
Next time try reading comprehension before feces-flinging.
I don’t know how I can be said to “slander” or “calumniate” climate models or modellers. It DID take decades to figure out how to make climate models that come anywhere close to real climate. Read the damn article. It honestly acknowledges the challenges and successes of climate models.
Just because I disagree with you about Kyoto or whatever, you choose to read into my post all sorts of things I haven’t said. Not only is this a fallacy, it also makes you a jerk.
Look how over the top and out of control your reaction is. I said not one thing that is untrue, and expressed myself mildly and without attacking anyone personally. I explicitly acknowledged the reality of AGW.
Oil companies do fund climate research and environmental activism, this is a matter of public record. Climate modelling is tricky and did take decades to improve to the point where they could actually model climate. Science is incapable of deciding moral and economic questions–to think otherwise is not science, but scientism.
Climate mitigation and development is NOT a false dichotomy. There are costs and benefits to anything, including environmental costs and benefits. Poor people do die without clean water and without development they are not going to get it, and that development is going to have environmental costs. There may be ways to mitigate them–Dean Kamen’s Stirling engine pump is one approach. But you can’t pretend that the course of action you advocate is all benefit and no cost. That’s absurd.
So you have to ask yourself, like a mature adult, how much cost is acceptable for what benefit, and if other people look at the same information and come to a different conclusion, they are not evil or stupid, and maybe you’d get farther by dealing civilly with them and trying to address their arguments, rather than accusing them of things.
@Mark–so, you’re accusing me personally of not understanding climate models and not listening to people who do?
I think I do understand climate modeling, in principle. I haven’t written my own code, but my master’s degree was for doing Monte Carlo calculations, so I know how to program, and if I studied the literature I’m sure I could write my own code within a year or two and happily model climate. But I don’t think I’d do a better job, or get anything different from what is currently done, and there’s plenty of people already doing that. Maybe you personally don’t know how to solve the Schroedinger equation, but you know OF it and you’re confident that me and my colleagues are on top of things, and if you took a year off to study quantum mechanics I’m sure you’d do just fine.
I don’t disagree with climate science. I disagree with policies advocated by some of the people who believe in climate science. That doesn’t make me stupid or evil.
@Mark & Ray Ladbury:
Let us suppose that I advocate a huge government program to do something about all of the asteroids that have a risk of striking the Earth. We’d have to develop some new technologies and possibly spend the entire planet’s GDP for many years on it.
Now let’s say that you (very sensibly) oppose this program. And then I responded by saying it’s clear you don’t understand, or don’t believe in, Newtonian mechanics.
Well, no, you oppose the program because it would entail a great deal of cost to secure the benefit of immunity from an extremely remote risk. It would be intellectually respectable for me to counter that since the risk is really the product of probability and consequence, and the consequence is the utter destruction of all life on earth (if it’s a big asteroid), then any amount of cost is worth bearing (the product of something and infinity = any number you want :)). But it would not be respectable for me to claim you obviously don’t understand gravity, or how orbits are computed, because you disagree with my policy.
Now let’s say there are a lot of people who don’t believe in gravity–they too would oppose my program. But it would be wrong of me to try to confound you with them as a way of scoring debating points.
Now of course the risks to humanity from AGW are unlike those from meteor strikes–that’s not the point of the analogy. AGW is not a one-in-a-million thing, it’s going on now. And it doesn’t kill everybody all at once. The point of the analogy is the difference between science and policy, and acceptable methods of debate.
Gabriel, it’s easy to make an argument you like when you control both sides’ contribution.
What makes you think we’d either of us object to your scheme? Or if we did that saying we didn’t understand newtonian mechanics would be wrong?
If your scheme involved flinging frozen chicken at asteroids with a catapault, maybe we would. But you’d have to give more information about your anti-asteroid efforts than you have.
Given that, your post is worthless.
Would you like to try some other method of explaining your “issue”?
re 374, please check up the appropriate meta-tags for irony so people can see when you;re being ironic.
Or, absent such facility, be clear and specific and stay away from phraseology that doesn’t say what you meant.
This is called “communicating”.
And leave the plank on your shoulder at home.
“I don’t disagree with climate science. I disagree with policies advocated by some of the people who believe in climate science. That doesn’t make me stupid or evil.”
It does make this the wrong place to complain.
Which means you’re only half right there.
“Climate modelling is tricky and did take decades to improve to the point where they could actually model climate.”
Please show us where you get that? Or, even, how it is relevant.
“@Mark–so, you’re accusing me personally of not understanding climate models and not listening to people who do?”
Yes, yes I am.
When you say “master’s degree was for doing Monte Carlo calculations, ” thinking this is proof of your qualifications in climate modelling, you show a misunderstanding of climate modelling.
When you say “Secondly, it is worthwhile to think carefully about computer modeling, as there is always the danger that the models will be treated as magic boxes which produce science.” you display ignorance of how models work and are treated.
When you proclaim “But the history of climate modelling has been (to oversimplify) make a model, watch it come out wrong, and tweak something until it starts to look right,” you display ignorance of what is going on. Would you proclaim your car engineer hits the engine with a spanner and tightens things until it works? No? Why not? You did the same here.
So yes, I do say you have no knowledge of climate models or its history, except what you could fit in the “Handy information” panel on the back of a packet of cornflakes at breakfast.
re 372 it is a time series, unless you rolled 1000 dice all at once.
re 367.
What you describe isn’t what JBob is doing.
What you’re describing there with your convovling box/sine is similar to lowess filtering.
Which in #302 I asked why he didn’t use it.
tamino also uses it and when pointing JBob to those pages would seem to me to be asking the same thing.
Gabriel Hanna writes:
How do you think a billion people in Asia and Latin America will cope with having their fresh water sources disappear due to glacier retreat?
For that matter, how do you think the world’s poor will fare if human agriculture collapses due to runaway drought in continental interiors?
Global warming is the most serious threat humanity has ever faced outside of nuclear war. If you aren’t aware of that, please start studying.
Gabriel Hanna writes:
That’s like saying, “I’ve written a lot of space vehicle launch programs, so I know how to simulate ocean dynamics.” Or “I’ve written a lot of web pages, so I know every programming language ever written.” You’ve gotta be f**king kidding.
Gee, and with my physics degree it took me twelve years to figure out how to write a reliable radiative-convective model of a planetary atmosphere. But you’re going to write your own research-quality GCM in two years! Wow! Why don’t you start doing that, and keep us informed about your progress?
This ought to be good.
In a new study making the news today, it appears that the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will only raise the level of the oceans 10 feet instead of the previously believed 20. Now that’s a relief. I thought we had something to worry about.
Oops, it seems as though the study says the level will be 25% higher along the East Coast of NA and in the Indian Ocean. Back to worrying.
Perhaps RC will comment on the study.
Gabriel Hanna,
It certainly IS a false dichotomy to pit climate change mitigation and development against one another, simply because anything one does has costs.
That is because there is no inherent and specific linkage implying that, a priori, you can’t do both.
In principle, it’s quite possible that we could do far more on BOTH counts, by (for example) cutting defense spending by 50%, or by deciding that development would be the best stimulus package and reallocating bank bailout funds, or by levying a carbon tax to fund both activities, or. . . but you get the point.
There are a great many trade-offs one could make, so focussing on this particular one to the exclusion of other options is not realistic.
Gabriel Hanna says, “…you choose to read into my post all sorts of things I haven’t said. Not only is this a fallacy, it also makes you a jerk.”
Uh, dude, I didn’t have to read anything into your words–they were there in black and white. Might I suggest that rather than trying to blame others for your poor communication skills you take responsibility for them and learn that maybe irony doesn’t work too well when 1)one is communicating entirely in print and 2)one is saying things that are flippant in the same piece.
There is a really big difference between the risks due to climate change and those due to a large meteoric impact: We know that the former will be realized within a century of so if we continue on our current course. Probability of the event equals 1. There are varying degrees of probability of various consequences, but sea level rise and ocean acidification are virtual certainties with serious consequences. To claim that we don’t know enough about the consequences to take action is either naive or disingenuous–and frankly, with you, it would be hard to tell which to assume.
Development and climate mitigation are both prerequisites for stability–and having spent 2 years in Africa doing development, I’d bet I’ve walked that walk more than you have.
Gabriel Hanna wrote: “But there is something much worse than global warming, at least in terms of the number of people killed by it, and that is poverty.”
Every major international organization that works to reduce or alleviate poverty has stated that global warming is already increasing poverty and making their work more difficult, and that unmitigated anthropogenic global warming will overwhelm and defeat all of their efforts.
To have any hope of reducing the suffering caused by poverty, we absolutely MUST deal with global warming. Otherwise, the global poverty of today, as bad as it is, will look like a golden age of prosperity compared to what will come.
#365
That’s a good one. Let me give it some thought. I don’t mean to put you off, but it’s one that I would not answer to fast on.
#362 & 369 – I seem to get the impression, from you, that statistics is the only analysis tool there is. There is a larger world out there, as denoted by the number of hits on a FFT search. Besides Butterworth filters, used by your side are not statistics.
#371
I started this little project with a open mind, to see it there was something to the “global warming” debate. Because of my background in science and engineering, it was fairly easy to take the longest temperature record available (Central England) filter out the noise, and see what long term signals were under the noise. Since climate, here anyway, is defined as greater then 30-40 years I filtered out those frequencies with periods less then 40 years. I also checked the program to see if it would re-construct input data, and it did, to less then 0.1 % error. When I looked at my filtered, long term data, posted above (#320), I noticed the long ~50 year cycle, and at the end, a peaking and small beginning of a down trend. Comparing the period from 1979 to 2008 with my graph, to a composite graph of land and satellite data from climate4you, there was a fairly strong resemblance. The surprise was the peak in the year 2000 of both graphs. So from this one graph, it looks like the current “global warming”, or “climate change” is part of a normal cycle. If the analysis methods I used, were good enough to satisfy DOD and NASA back in the 60’s & 70’s, why not here?
That being said, there are other data sets I have to look at, in a similar manner, along with correlation to ocean temperature changes. So I’ll have to see what the other data sets look like. Maybe my opinion will change.
Now are you saying that RC is only a climate modeling site, or a place where open debate in the area of climate can take place? The header says “Climate Science from Climate Scientists”, and from the comments, it is apparent that many do not have a science degree. So I assume, until told otherwise, that this is a open forum, in which ideas, relating to climate, can be freely exchanged. And as far as mathematical modeling, I have no problem with that, I’ve done it for over 40 + years. However, I also know many of the limits, and one is that it must reflect reality.
To check these models, I look at a composite surface and satellite temperature profile over the last 30 years. If the model says the temperature is supposed to go up, and the last say 8 years it’s flat or trending down, I’d say the model needs major surgery. Now if some say that Antarctic warming, and IJIS and NSIDC show consistent above average ice levels. I have enough thermal knowledge that says general warming is not taking place there. One does NOT make ice in a oven. The earth has always been heating and cooling, and not everything is heating or cooling at the same time, as seen from the polar ice. There are other inconsistencies, such as why NSIDC posts headlines two years old saying record low ice levels in the Arctic, but fails to mention this past year, being almost normal to the 1979 period. And it doesn’t help to know that the temperature data is now being “homogenized”, or adjusted. One has to dig a bit to work with “raw” temp data. That would seem to raise a lot of red flags. True weather is not climate, but weather data makes up climate data. And why all the vitriolic comments, not only to the analysis methods, but the personal comments? If nothing else, that alone would raise concerns about the objectivity and fear of questioning the official line.
So that in order to satisfy myself as to what is going on, it means starting at the very simple, and basic, then go from there. I have no “beef”, just trying to find the truth. Or are you saying that to disagree is to “beef”?
As to what is causing all this melting, or freezing, only with honest and polite discussion will we find the answer. As Hamlet said “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy ( or models)”. That is, we really don’t know, at this time what is going on.
Oh, I don’t quite get you last comment about “Attribution“. Would you explain it, a little more?
“#371
I started this little project with a open mind, to see it there was something to the “global warming” debate. Because of my background in science and engineering,”
So you have discovered then that your approach has no utility in this field of endeavour and have now (with the help of tamino) found more applicable statistical analyses that will work.
And so you’re going off to work on them now.
Yes?
JBob: “Now are you saying that RC is only a climate modeling site, or a place where open debate in the area of climate can take place?”
Yes, though there’s nothing in there that says that you can bring along a half-baked (if that) idea and run with it expecting people to just go “Oh, that’s soooo right, JBob..!”.
An open debate means that YOU have to accept a result of that debate being “your idea doesn’t have merit” and YOU have to accept “Try this instead, and *here* are the reasons why” and either show you know enough to explain why they aren’t good or use them.
If YOU refuse, then there’s no debate, is there. There’s just the “JBob Appreciation Club and others”.
Jbob says, “I seem to get the impression, from you, that statistics is the only analysis tool there is.”
Wow, Jbob, not only do you not know physics, you evidently can’t even read the word, ’cause you sure missed in in my post. You have also managed to utterly ignore the point Tamino was making–if the first derivative of a trigonometric function is positive (i.e. to give a local positive slope for an fft of an increasing function) then the second derivative is negative. That’s fine until you get near the endpoints. Unfortunately, you are trying to draw conclusions about behavior the endpoints of a finite data series. Get it?
JBob wrote: “As to what is causing all this melting, or freezing, only with honest and polite discussion will we find the answer … we really don’t know, at this time what is going on.”
In fact, we do know that CO2, methane and other so-called “greenhouse” gases cause the Earth’s atmosphere to retain more of the Sun’s energy that it would without them.
In fact, we do know that human activities, principally the burning of fossil fuels, but also deforestation, animal agriculture, cement manufacturing, and some other activities, are releasing large quantities of CO2, methane and other “greenhouse” gases into the atmosphere, and have been doing so at an accelerating rate for a century or more.
In fact, we do know that these activities have dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration of these gases.
In fact, we do know that this anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases is causing the Earth system to retain more of the Sun’s energy and that as a result the Earth system is rapidly warming.
In fact, we do know that this warming is already having dramatic effects on the Earth’s climate, hydrosphere and biosphere. In addition we know that the increase in CO2 is having other harmful effects, notably the acidification of the oceans.
In fact, we do know that continued anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases — which are currently accelerating — will cause additional warming, which will have increasingly severe effects, which will be enormously harmful to the human species and to life on Earth generally.
That is what is “going on”. If you believe that we don’t know these things are “going on”, you are simply wrong.
Filters aren’t used by statisticians INSTEAD OF statistics …
Tamino’s take-home point, that you continue to ignore, is (and I quote):
#389
Received the Physic’s Achievement Award from my undergrad university. Did they know something you don’t? Isn’t it more exciting with me around?
J. Bob Says (15 May 2009 at 11:49 AM):
“Received the Physic’s Achievement Award from my undergrad university. Did they know something you don’t?”
Possibly the difference between Physic http://www.thefreedictionary.com/physic and Physics :-)
Jbob, Ah, so you know physics. You merely eschew it in favor of your “fun-with-Fourier” approach. After all, why let physics (or statistical significance) get in the way of a good theory.
jbob,
you may (?) be annoying to the “pros” around here, but i think it’s WAY more fun with you around.
#392 JBob:
“Isn’t it more exciting with me around?”
For a little while, then it becomes cringe inducing to witness the drubbing you’re taking because you waded in without doing your homework and stubbornly refuse to retire. No wonder you’re sticking with anonymity.
You seem satisfied with your results on the English data set: “So from this one graph, it looks like the current “global warming”, or “climate change” is part of a normal cycle. If the analysis methods I used, were good enough to satisfy DOD and NASA back in the 60’s & 70’s, why not here?”
Accidentally inverted G sensors drawn into plans, confusion of metric and English units, omitting to take into account hysteresis, all these culminating in highly public and embarrassing failures resulting in the loss of thousands of man-years’ effort spring to mind, but let’s not focus on previous abject mistakes too much. Endless sad little heaps of fragmented components and shattered ambitions only tell us that steely-eyed rocket men have feet of clay.
You appear unshakably confident in your methods, so much so that you imagine you’re on the brink of overturning careers and undermining a field of scientific endeavor single-handed and armed only with Excel and some second-hand algorithm implementations. Why not ignore your critics here for a bit, move on and deliver the killing blow by reproducing what you think you see using the rest of the many inputs available? Further wrangling around a single group of datapoints seems pointless when you could spend that valuable time extending your research.
After you’ve done that it looks as though you’ll find a receptive audience here to help you check your sums. There’s obviously no lack of hostile and thus highly useful scrutiny available, all for free. Especially as you’re anonymous you have nothing to lose by that.
> more exciting …?
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aphysic
From yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Give global warming skeptics a voice, too
By J. Winston Porter
From News Services
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Will Rogers once quipped that it’s “what we know that ain’t so” that gets us in trouble. This might well apply to global warming, where the “science is settled” side is pushing massive plans in Congress to reduce carbon dioxide.
But the science is not settled. If it were, we would have great confidence in all these statements: 1. The world is getting warmer. 2. That’s more bad than good. 3. Humans are causing the warming. 4. We know how to fix the problem.
If either of the first two statements is wrong, then warming is not a crisis. If either of the last two is not correct, we can’t fix it. What are the chances that all four are true?
To find out, we must multiply the four individual probabilities by each other. If each statement has a 70 percent chance of being correct, the overall probability is just 24 percent that all are true.
Let’s look at these issues:…
http://www.ajc.com/print/content/printedition/2009/05/14/portered0514.html
chuck booth,
unfortunately, because the skeptics (i.e., deniers) yell louder the public thinks there are more of them than there are. that’s why we need PROJECT JIM!
A very worthwhile way of looking at the time series temperature data is Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). I wouldn’t be surprise if this has been brought up here before, but even if it has, it bears repeating. Unlike Fourier analysis EMD is not reliant on any assumption of the physical basis of the underlying waveforms: if there are cyclic components it will find them, but not at the expense of throwing away any trend.
The major, and accepted, problem with Fourier analysis is its inability to cope with trends, or what is known statistically as non stationary data. EMD overcomes this limitation. Norden Huang, who came up with the technique, has applied it to the HadCRUT temperature series in a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1986583. The most important mode is an increasing rise in temperature and a 65 year cycle: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1986583&rendertype=figure&id=F3
EMD cannot extract the underlying physics, but it at least it gives an unbiased analysis. From EMD analysis the resulting trend, rising from 0 K/century in 1850 to 0.8 K/century now, is compatible with anthropogenic global warming.