The following editorial was published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like The Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.
RealClimate takes no formal position on the statements made in the editorial.
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
Copenhagen as you can witness is all about deals and politics..can anyone envisage a worthwhile outcome?
I’m not religeous but i can remember one biblical story..there is nothing more difficult than for a rich man to pass through the eye of the needle. The more you are identified by your material things the less you are able to see the truth. C’mon West! Make Copenhagen work!..prove that democracy and capitalism has a future! Pardon the cynicism.
As long as we’re on the topic of the water vapor feedback, here’s an online edition of a detailed book on the subject of climate feedbacks. It’s fairly technical.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10850#toc
The intro spells out the basic math of how feedbacks apply, including combining multiple feedbacks – see the box on pp.19-20:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10850&page=19
The one thing I wasn’t sure about on the feedback calculations is whether they already allow for the fact that a feedback yields an additional forcing in response to a delta-T, but that new added forcing would in turn “feed back” again to force a further delta-T, etc. There’s an infinite series, but fortunately it converges as long as the gain is less than unity (the infinite series converges, and there are standard ways to convert such infinite series to simple equivalent formulae.) Only if the gain is > 1 would the feedback lead to a “runaway” vicious cycle.
The part I’m not clear about is whether the formulae such as those shown in the above link set out the “once around” feedback value, which would in turn go up by the rest of the terms in the infinite series, or if that effect is already worked into the stated value for the strength of the feedback (such as Dessler 2008’s finding of 2.04 Wm^-2K^-1)?
Re 342 J –
BPL’s statement regarding next ice starting around 20,000 or 50,000 years from now sounds about right from what I recall reading (my understanding written up here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=73&&n=36#2768 )
It doesn’t generally make sense to go to the trouble of inserting orbital (Milankovitch) forcing into models in the projections out to a mere 100 years. It’s just too small.
Of course, it would be interesting to see if climate models can, when fed the estimated histories of forcings, recreate not only glacial-interglacial patterns but also the LIA and MWP (whatever those things actually were!). Solar and volcanic forcing would be involved in that. However, there may also be some internal variability on such timescales (evidence so far as I know suggests present and likely future warming surpass the range of internal variability on the millenial scale) – to the extent this is the case, the initial states prescribed to the models become important – it becomes a sort of climate-scale weather prediction excercise – and if the butterfly effect makes day-to-day weather prediction no more skillful than climatological records (given SST anomalies, etc.) beyond ~ 2 weeks, than I’d guess centennial-millenial scale internal variability can’t be predicted well beyond a few centuries to a few millenia (?) (as prediction of future continental drift might fail beyond some hundreds of millions of years ?).
But you might try looking at the IPCC AR4 WGI, chapters 6 and … (well, skim the table of contents).
“the initial states prescribed to the models become important ”
It would be anyway to varying degrees depending on the time given to the model simulation before the time period of interest. Obviously you’d want to prescribe the ice sheets for a model run that is shorter than glacial-interglacial timescales, but you wouldn’t need to prescribe the correct atmospheric weather conditions at the first second of the run (wind and humidity and clouds – within reason (don’t start with the oceans boiled dry); you would need to prescribe CO2, atmospheric mass, etc.). Not that I have any experience with climate modelling – this just seems reasonable.
The Copenhagen juggernaut is of no concern. They’re just digging themselves into a deeper hole, from which extraction will be awkward, silly, and embarrassing, and the agreements that they may come to will be meaningless, not implementable, and the USA certainly will not ratify.
“When does the (most accurate) climate model predict the next Ice Age? Next LIA? Next MWP?” – 314
Detailed climate models aren’t run for the purpose of determining the climate state thousands of years from now. Hence they do not predict the things you ask for.
Given that the MWP and the LIA is mostly regional phenomenon, and since both would be swamped by the projected warming, the reason for your question is unclear.
297 – Steve Fish – Being more efficent is one thing, but telling people to go cold is another thing. I’m all for efficency; however, some are suggesting sacrafice instead of innovation.
I’ve got a question: I’ve been reading the ‘Temp leads CO2’ for the initial 800 years in thermal maximum periods in RC. That 800 yars is roughly the time to flush through the ocean from bottom to top. Also that some- to date unknown event caused temp to rise initially and then CO2 followed suit and amplified the process further. My question is was the CH4 levels also studied in the ice core samples. Your past article in RC stated that the rise in temp must have released CO2 trapped in the oceans. What if however the same thing happened then as is happening now..namely the methane hydrates began to thaw in earnest within the initial 800 years phase. That would have caused rapid and extreme forcing..pushing up CO2 and thus temp to very high levels…well after the very initial ‘temperate event’ had passed. So it may not have just been the CO2 in the oceans being releaed to the surface but also massive amounts of CH4?. Just a thought!
> “this is the kind of nonsense with which up I will not put.”
“… up with which I will not put.”
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
302 SecularAnimist: You are reciting coal industry propaganda. You may be paid by the coal industry, or your emotions have been hijacked by the coal industry propaganda over the past half century. Everything you said is wrong. Coal has killed over two hundred thousand Americans and is still doing so. Power reactors do NOT make Plutonium239 that is needed for bombs. Power reactors make Plutonium240. It takes a very special reactor to make Pu239.
Every time you dis nuclear, you are working for the coal industry and shooting yourself in the foot. What the coal companies know that most people don’t:
As long as you keep messing around with wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, the coal industry is safe. There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it. Hydrogen fusion could, if it worked. Hydrogen fusion has been “hopeful” for half a century so far. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
If you quit being afraid of nuclear, the coal industry is doomed. Every time you argue in favor of wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, or against nuclear, King Coal is happy. ONLY nuclear power can put coal out of business. Nuclear power HAS put coal out of business in France. France uses 30 year old American technology. So here is the deal: Keep being afraid of all things nuclear and die either when [not if] civilization collapses or when H2S comes out of the ocean and Homo “Sapiens” goes extinct. OR: Get over your paranoia and kick the coal habit and live. Which do you choose? I put quotation marks around “Sapiens” because it is not clear that most of us have enough brains to avoid extinction when it is clearly predicted and the safe path has been pointed out. Nuclear is the safe path and we have factory built nuclear power plants now. A nuclear power plant can be installed in weeks. See:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com
Pretend the year is 1850 and your doctor has just given you a choice: Amputate your leg or you die tomorrow. Anesthetics have not been invented. Will you have your leg off sir?
Your psychological pain is imaginary, not real. Get over it and live. Don’t get over it and your grandchildren die.
Nuclear power ends global warming and the human race lives.
No nuclear power causes the coal industry cash flow to continue to be $100 Billion per year in the US and Homo Sap goes extinct. The choice is yours, unfortuneately.
I would rather leave you on Earth an move to Mars with a dozen others. Then SecularAnimist can commit suicide by global warming while I watch from a safe distance.
Sorry this got so far off track, but the issue must be resolved to stop global warming.
I need a little help here:
http://itia.ntua.gr/getfile/849/3/documents/2008EGU_HurstClimatePrSm.pdf
This papers seems to be using a lot of graphs (they could be badly displayed) and math (statistics) to explain away the warming as natural.
Can anyone tell me if this paper has any merit. Has it been through the standard scientific process I wonder?
Its worth a look.
Here is my two pence worth on the “coming ice age in 1997”.
I actually read the original story in Newsweek. This is probably ore than most people posting here can say, including Gavin, who was probably still in his diapers/nappies. ;-)
I read the story because I was working in a remote part of the Sultanate of Oman, at a tie when the only western print media in the country was Time or Newsweek.
The climate there is atrocious (heat above blood temperature + 90% humidity) and I was working on the (un-air-conditioned) shop floor of a furniture factory.
A new ice age seemed like a good idea.
At the time I was what is now called an “environmentalist” though I a not certain that anyone had coined the word back then. Certainly environmentalism was not a mainstream idea.
Well, when I returned home to London, _no one_ had heard of this new ice age. (I’m from England). That’s _no one_. Not a soul.
Maybe a few (now retired) staff at the Met Office had heard the story.
In fact, unless they read Time, Newsweek or the NYT, (which they wouldn’t be doing) they would have had no reason to know about this story.
None of my environment friends mentioned it. However, they were campaigning on getting lead out of petrol.
And the oil companies said lead-free petrol/gas was either technically impossible, would melt the valves in your engine, or be so expensive (x 4 times) the entire economy would come to a halt. Besides, lead was not a nurotoxin.
Sounds familiar that lead free gas thing?
John, the CIA invested millions looking into whether guys with psychic powers could spot Soviet military installations. They’re not scientists.
SecularAnimist said:
… And yet you go to so much effort to misrepresent the harms and dangers of nuclear power.
Sometimes, I think environmentalists are their own worst enemy. I should know. I’m a bleeding heart liberal to the core.
Is it too difficult to analyse the pros and cons of nuclear power without invoking emotional arguments, and spurious economic arguments? We know nuclear is cheaper than renewable energy, and even marginally cheaper than coal. Globally, anyway. The US coal industry managed to undercut and marginalise nuclear power, mostly by playing on the very fears that you bring up again now.
SecularAnimist, you claim wind and solar are “mature” technologies. This worries me. While I agree that both are mature enough for us to begin deploying them now, both of them struggle to be cost effective and there are huge potential improvements to be made in solar cell efficiency and manufacturing cost. It isn’t just a matter of mass production (although that will help), it is a matter of finding materials and processes that are both efficient and cheap. Currently, the efficient materials are mind-bogglingly expensive (reserved for spaceflight, mostly), and the cheap materials are inefficient (organic solar cells struggle to reach 5% efficiency even in laboratory conditions). This situation will improve, but not overnight.
In short, you seem to be selling easy answers. I don’t think anything about all this is easy (except that we can and must ditch coal as soon as we possibly can).
Barton Paul Levenson said:
This is where things get harder to attribute. I don’t want to get into all the complexities of attribution, but if you go down this road then you also have to do the same for coal and other energy sources. Coal mining diseases have a very significant cost in terms of quality-adjusted life years.
This said, the source for accident figures we are discussing (I don’t know who provided it; I didn’t) is disingenuous. For nuclear, it quotes worker deaths, but it fails to include accident workers and members of the public. At Chernobyl, most of the victims were fire and rescue workers.
If you want a better source, David MacKay refers to two studies here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_168.shtml
JimM, chapter 26 is all about fluctuations and storage: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_186.shtml
He concentrates mostly on pumped storage, because this is particularly relevant to the UK but he discusses other ideas, too.
Gavin, You seem to imply that Milankovitch cycles prove that the century-by-century fluctuations in climate are not random. I’m not convinced. Milankovitch cycles take place over tens of thousands of years. The climate over the past two centuries looks random. What evidence to you have that recent climate history is deterministic?
[Response: Hey! where’d dem goalposts go? But sure, try the response to Pinatubo or the combined impact of volcanoes and solar in the LIA. Climate does respond in predictable ways to forcings even though there is unforced internal variability. – gavin]
Am I reading this right? J seems to think it’s a feasible experiment to run a fully-coupled GCM out for 50,000 years to see if it’s valid.
When would such a run terminate–some time in 2050?
There has been a lot of accusations of fraud in the past from people who don’t understand the concept of adjustment. If the accusation is of wanting to change global temperature, there’s no point going after one probe, so I took the entire CRU dataset and look at the bias of the adjustments.
Here you find the beautiful normal distribution with peak zero that I got as result.
I hope this will help in discussion with denialists when arguing about genuinity of temperature data.
Sorry if this is OT but I see comments already went all over the place.
[Response: Very nicely done. We are working on a similar post, so I’m sure idiot will accuse me of plagiarism (‘cept that I will link to your post). As you said in your post, you don’t have to trust the scientists, you just have to use the scientific method. Simple statistics like this demonstrate there is nothing at all to the allegations of data manipulation. –eric]
Edward Greisch writes,
Natural gas is a much bigger contributor to government coffers, and the electricity plants that have been getting through the permission process, in the USA, seem to reflect this. If you must throw dirt, throw dirt that makes sense.
(How fire can be domesticated)
Pete, Koutsoyiannis is pretty well known for his denialist credentials. For instance, I notice his plot of global temperatures ends in about 1970 before the current warming epoch. Gee, now why would it do that?
I note a lot of other denialist memes–e.g. global cooling and even a reference to that prestigeous scientific journal “Newsweek” (or Newsweak as I call it). Lots of short term series.
More to the point, I didn’t see anything particularly novel. Tamino has discussed the fact that climate doesn’t exhibit white noise many times. Koutsoyiannis complains that we don’t have enough data to determine H, but then he confines himself to considering no more than 10 years of variability (9 of the last 10 years have been in the top ten). However, All 15 of the warmest 15 years have been in the past 15 years. And 17 of the past 20 years have been in the past 20 years. Let me just say: I’m underwhelmed. Nothing here climate scientists didn’t already know–including the denialist memes and misleading graphs and statistics.
Giorgio,
That is a beautiful post. I would say it pretty much puts paid to the allegations of massive fraud via systematic adjustment.
and of course I meant to say: “And 17 of the warmest 20 years have been in the past 20 years,” in my previous post.
Re: Giorgio’s post – a simple average is not how the mean global temp is calculated. It’s “gridded” – ie a very few thermometers have outsized influence due to sparseness of the geography they are located in. So you need to take the adjustments and multiply by the sq miles of area the thermometer is putativley “measuring”.
And giorgio’s analysis has two other problems:
1. It proves there is no net UHI adjustment if the mean adjustment is zero. Oops.
[Response: These aren’t UHI adjustments, they are homogenisation adjustments. Oops. – gavin]
2. There can be a trend adjustment through time with that distribution – ie net negative in the early part of the century,net positive in the later part of the century. Oops.
[Response: You’ve misunderstood what he did. These are the differences in the trends already. oops. – gavin]
So, to do Giorgio’s analysis right, you would want to see the distribution of the adjustments per decade. This would tell you the net trend baked into the adjustments.
[Response: Giorgio’s analysis is simple and therefore brilliant. You can do more, very easily, if you like. Call us when you find something interesting. I won’t hold my breath.–eric]
Pete Best: asked and answered (grin)
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+hurst+koutsoyiannis
Nukeeeeees: please, please, not here. You can find this audience at a site dedicated to your issues –Barry Brooks’s blog is the place, new postings every day: http://bravenewclimate.com/
Looking over the GISS Temp updates, it looks like the efforts of Nick Barnes and colleagues have already been quite fruitful. I had not heard of this before last week; perhaps they deserve a bit of publicity. This looks like citizen-science putting in some hard work and doing something productive, as opposed to making a couple graphs and lobbing ill-posed accusations.
“The CIA didn’t regard the fear of cooling by scientists as a “global legend” at all. If they did then why did they write over thirty pages of alarmism in their 1973 report?
Comment by John O’Sullivan — 11 December 2009 @ 8:16 PM
Maybe because they were listening to 70’s kooks and charlatans equivalent to Svensmark and Lindzen of today. Maybe they were cherry picking for political purposes, the way Cheney & crew built the myth of WMD’s. They certainly weren’t listening to the scientists.
When Will the Present Interglacial End?
G. J. Kukla and R. K. Matthews
Science 13 October 1972 178: 190-202 [DOI: 10.1126/science.178.4057.190] (in Articles)
“Artificial heating, and production of dust and CO, by man’s activities were shown to have diverging effects on global temperatures (Mitchell, Schneider), at present subordinate to natural processes. However, with continuing human input these effects might eventually trigger or speed climatic change. The general conclusion of this section of the conference was that knowledge necessary for understanding the mechanism of climatic change is lamentably inadequate, and that the ultimate causes remain unknown.”
“Warm intervals like the present one have been short-lived and the natural end of our warm epoch is undoubtedly near when considered on a geological time scale. Global cooling and related rapid changes of environment, substantially exceeding the fluctuations experienced by man in historical times, must be expected within the next few millennia…”
To Feed the World: What to Do with Changing Climate
Science 9 November 1973 182: 604 [DOI: 10.1126/science.182.4112.604] (in Articles)
“The carbon dioxide released by fuel combustion tends to warm the earth’s surface but the simultaneous dumping of fine ash into the atmosphere has a cooling effect.”
International Environmental Problems—A Taxonomy
Clifford S. Russell and Hans H. Landsberg
Science 25 June 1971 172: 1307-1314 [DOI: 10.1126/science.172.3990.1307] (in Articles)
” For example, a global warming trend is a “greater” effect than is the extinction of a spe-cies.”
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Wallace S. Broecker
Science 8 August 1975 189: 460-463 [DOI: 10.1126/science.189.4201.460] (in Articles)
“If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. ”
Global Cooling?
Paul E. Damon and Steven M. Kunen
Science 6 August 1976 193: 447-453 [DOI: 10.1126/science.193.4252.447] (in Articles)
“Because of the rapid diffusion of CO2 molecules within the atmosphere, both hemispheres will be subject to warming due to the atmospheric (greenhouse) effect as the CO2 content of the atmosphere builds up from the combustion of fossil fuels.”
A Terminal Mesozoic “Greenhouse”: Lessons from the Past
Dewey M. McLean
Science 4 August 1978 201: 401-406 [DOI: 10.1126/science.201.4354.401] (in Articles)
“In late Mesozoic, the deep oceanic waters may have been triggered into releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a chain reaction of climatic warming and carbon dioxide expulsion. These conditions may be duplicated by human combustion of the fossil fuels and by forest clearing.”
CO2 in Climate: Gloomsday Predictions Have No Fault
Nicholas Wade
Science 23 November 1979 206: 912-913 [DOI: 10.1126/science.206.4421.912-a] (in Articles)
” Increased CO2.content of the atmosphere will lead to a global warming and significant climatic changes. The…that the basic model relating CO2 to global warming is correct, so far as they can see…the atmospheric C02, there will be a global warming of probably 3.0C, give or take 1.50C……”(sound familiar)
This is just from Science magazine, since that’s what I subscribe to (take that, Snorbert; I suppose you’d also like us to not split infinitives?&;>) – anybody got a list from Nature, or AGU journals?
Gavin:
You are wrong on both accounts:
1. These adjustments include any urban/rural adjustments.
2. They are decadal trends, but all lumped together. So we can have a normal distribution with for example, many negative adjustments int he first half of the century, and many positive in the latter half.
It’s simple to see the statistics by decade – let’s have a look?
In response to the side discussion on nuclear power, I do want to point out the absolutely shameful fear mongering that the anti-nuclear folks perpetrated on the public back in the day, which ultimately resulted in stomping out the nuclear industry in the US. IMO, nuclear is the only really responsible and viable primary generation source if you really want to reduce greenhouse emissions and reliance on coal and oil (which I think we all do), while providing 24 hour per day energy. But we really need to thank the anti nuclear crowd for, at least in some significant part, the emissions mess we’re in right now. Absolutely shameful. And honestly, I think that’s part of the reason why some are so wary and distrustful of grave “environmentalist” warnings. Unintended consequences can be devastating.
Mesa, I urge you to carry out your analyses. If such a manipulation exists, Giorgio has made it easy to find. Even you should be able to do it. We look forward to your results. When can we expect to hear back from you?
Kevan H, your site shows a copy of this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
Then you write: “The measurements agree with one another in the past fifty years, but disagree everywhere else. It is impossibly unlikely that five independent temperature measurements would agree to within 0.1°C in the past fifty years, but disagree as much as 0.6°C everywhere else. The measurements are not independent. They have been massaged until they agree with one another during that fifty-year period.”
You left off the caption from the source.
I can’t see how you come to the conclusion that the data was fake, unless you’re just looking at the colored lines on the page (there are ten, not five) instead of looking at the data source and the error bars, which are linked in the caption.
You’ve grossly misrepresented the science– heck, you’ve even misrepresented what you can see in the picture — to claim that the data were “massaged until they agree.”
I haven’t looked so maybe someone else posted this but here are some snippets from an AP story on the emails. Emphasis mine:
“E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.”
“The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.”
“The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones’ co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing”
“I do now wish I’d never sent them the data after their FOIA request!” Jones wrote in June 2007.”
“In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release everything the skeptic wanted — and more. Santer said in a telephone interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from skeptics that are designed to “tie-up government-funded scientists.”
“As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.”
“This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds,” said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. “We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here.”
“In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a “culture of corruption” that the e-mails appeared to show.”
“That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible.”
“In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown,” North said.”
“Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties, pointing to the title of his 1999 study: “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties and Limitations.”
“The skeptics started the name-calling said Mann, who called McIntyre a “bozo,” a “fraud” and a “moron” in various e-mails.
“We’re human,” Mann said. “We’ve been under attack unfairly by these people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091212/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails
If anything this should convince people that the climate science community has NOT been trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That they themselves believe what they have been telling others. True humanity always comes into play with humans (who’da guessed?). But they are doing their best under great pressure and continual attack that others might have withered under.
Now how about an expose’, a catalog of the skeptics many avenues of attack. Starting with how many FOIA requests were made in what space of time and their funding by the energy industry?
I had to leave one paragraph out because it contained the name of an African country notorious lately for the pirate activity. The name of that country was rejected a spam. :-D
Ray et al:
The point is that the “simply beautiful” analysis doesn’t show anything of importance. It’s like a lot of rhetoric – it means much less than meets the eye. I have no idea what the adjustments look like by decade – but someone should.
For real-world cost projections on a new nuclear power plant in the US, see
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/turkey-point/documents.html#application.
The projected cost is $5,492-$8,071/kW. Toshiba-Westinghouse has declared that cost projections for other proposed plants is proprietary information, even though their clients are asking for billions in federal subsidies.
In other words, now that you’ve made unsubstantiated claims that the data’s manipulated to show what scientists want, rather than prove it, you’re going to run away.
And people wonder why rational people loath denialists.
No, they’re the homogenized data. Moves from (say) urban Darwin to the (more rural) airport are included, yes, but the statistical treatment done by GISTEMP (for instance) are applied later to the homogenized data.
Yeah, we’ve noticed, Mesa …
#385:
“The point is that the “simply beautiful” analysis doesn’t show anything of importance.”
Talk is cheap. GG’s work is elegant, clear to understand and he’s bothered enough to do the work. What have you done here besides baseless rhetoric?
“I have no idea what the adjustments look like by decade – but someone should.”
Yes, you have no idea and can’t be arsed to do anything. Carry on, carry on…
Maybe RC could start a grassroots hue and cry over KevanGate (cf Hanks post 382), where Kevan has massaged figures and committed fraud to manipulate data and ignore errors to make a case for the unsubstantiate claims he makes on AGW…
Whaddaya reckon?
Then ManackerGate…
Rational people loathe denialists.
Denialists are loath.
I know, picky, picky …
“Gavin, You seem to imply that Milankovitch cycles prove that the century-by-century fluctuations in climate are not random. I’m not convinced. Milankovitch cycles take place over tens of thousands of years. The climate over the past two centuries looks random. What evidence to you have that recent climate history is deterministic?”
It “looks” random??!! What evidence do we have that anything in the universe is deterministic? Or don’t you believe in cause and effect? Or just not for climate science?
Multivariate stupidity.
In Climate of the Past Discussions there is a paper available from this link
http://www.cosis.net/members/journals/df/article.php?a_id=5292
which discusses a GCM run from the Eemian to the Holocene, about 110,000 years.
This is for those who want to know about rather long GCM runs. You will find other papers of potential interest on Abe-ouchi’s Scientific Commons page.
Mesa: You seem to think that GG’s trends are decadal. I think they are for the entire history of each station; they’re just expressed as deg/decade. Have a look in the code.
[Response: Yes, that’s right.–eric]
Mesa says, “The point is that the “simply beautiful” analysis doesn’t show anything of importance. It’s like a lot of rhetoric – it means much less than meets the eye. I have no idea what the adjustments look like by decade – but someone should.”
Well, actually, the analysis shows something very important–that taken as a whole, the adjustments show no systematic trend. This supports the case that the adjustments are not behind the rise in temperatures. Indeed, it makes the case that if the trend is a product of the adjustments, then the adjustments would have to be structured in a very specific and very unnatural way. GG’s analysis has made it easy for someone to take it further and show that such unnatural structure is or is not present. But then that would be someone who can be bothered to do the math, which clearly is not you.
Mesa, where are you getting your mistaken information?
Hank #382: I looks like you visited my piece on data massage and came away with the impression that I was talking about faking data. That piece was written in 2006, long before Climategate. Data massage is a process common in the hard sciences, whereby separate, diligent research groups look for errors in their methods until their results are consistent. If you go back and read the passage again, I think you’ll see that it’s not about faking data at all.
Gavin #367: My original question was about decades. I don’t have an ice-core data set on my hard drive (although it’s on my christmas list). As you say, the climate responds to certain events and cycles. My question is about what would happen in the absence of external events. What if the sun were absolutely steady and there were no eruptions for a thousand years, how would the climate behave? It would be nice if we knew how much variation occurred as a result of the climate’s internal chaotic forces alone. Does my question make more sense now?
[Response: Umm.. I don’t know. How should we investigate what might happen in any idealised situation that has never occurred in the real world? Gosh…. wouldn’t it be neat if we had some kind of simulacrum where we could test these things, in a computer or laboratory or something. Any ideas? – gavin]
Unfortunately, the whole Copenhagen thing is floored. As it is going at the moment, these things, like all things in this society, come down to money. If we agree globally, that man is to blame for Global Warming, then obviously, it was caused by the currently developed nations. So they should pay to fix it and provide additional money to the developing nations, to help them to cope with it. On top of this, the developed nations are asking the developing nations to limit their development. No agreement will ever come from that. Even if we agreed on a handout, the developing nations, do not have the adequate structure to manage these handouts. Even with tens of thousands of occupation forces in Afganistan, we can not be sure, that any aid goes to the chosen causes. The next conference, should only include the power base of developing nations to reach an agreement on how they are going to mitigate Global Warming and how they are going to “force” the developing nations to fall in line. Such a conference will only come about, after the first serious undisputed costly Global Warming event. I am happy to wait for that, as long as we can still fix it. Personally, I am doing everything I can for me to survive any such events.
> The measurements agree with one another in the past fifty years, but disagree everywhere
> else. It is impossibly unlikely that five independent temperature measurements would agree
> to within 0.1°C
Point to the data — what files are you talking about?
At his website, Kevan Hashemi presents the familiar hockey stick graph but with the label “Figure: Data Massaging: The Hockey Stick Graph.”
Then he states:
Hank Roberts responds in 382:
Kevan Hashemi wrote in 397:
Perhaps “fake” was the wrong word — since you seem to be implying that the scientists involved made a really dumb mistake that somehow nobody else ever caught. Regardless, the graph consists of “temperature reconstructions” based on proxies followed by the instrument record.
However, to be more accurate, what is actually being graphed is the reconstructed difference between the paleoclimate temperatures a given average temperature for a given baseline period where the reconstruction is based upon proxies — as what we are actually interested in isn’t the temperature but how the temperature has changed.
Furthermore, while the average annual or decadal temperature between two relatively close points may differ a fair amount (e.g., one is in the shade, one the sun; one is up a mountain, another in a valley; or one is within a foot of the surface, another up a tree) the deviation from their average will often be highly correlated. Thus climatologists focus on the latter. It would be nearly impossible to reconstruct average temperatures accurately for the entire globe, but given the highly correlated nature of temperature differences, the latter can be done much more accurately based upon far fewer points.
Now as the base period will be during the earlier, less reliable instrument record, you should expect the “temperature reconstructions” to begin to converge as you approach the better-instrumented present or at least baseline period. Finally, during the latter part of the instrument record there is no need for temperature reconstructions inasmuch as we have the actual instrument-based temperature record.
It’s how temperature proxy reconstructions are done.
It’s not about data-massaging, Kevan. And if it were, given how high-profile the paper is the “data-massaging” would have been caught very quickly and recognized as such by the entire climatological community.