The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.
Carry on…
> AMSU
Philip, I don’t know of course, but I see some reports on how it’s checked.
Here’s one from a few months ago: http://www.cawcr.gov.au/staff/pxs/wmoda5/Oral/Tsyrulnikov.pdf
It might suggest someone to ask.
Gilles says: I don’t speak about gross estimates of the equilibrium temperatures, I’m speaking about spontaneous fluctuations of a fraction of degree. Where are the ENSO, the PDO, or the AMO, in BPL’s calculations ?
But you will agree that we do know how to calculate equilibrium temperatures with some skill, even for exotic atmospheres like Titan.
Re the internal oscillatory modes, these emerge as energy moves around within the climate system. You mentioned nonlinear oscillations in an earlier post; check out the late Barry Saltzmann’s work in Dynamical Paleoclimatology.
Pan or Homo?
It can be and has been argued that only one genus is justified, pick your name.
#879 John, you may be confident, OK that’s your opinion. But confidence is, in part, based in the accuracy of instruments you use. And you still haven’t resolved the difference between accuracy and confidence. How can you say the ice area/extent has increased say 50,000 sq. km., when the accuracy of your system is say 5%, or 500,000 sq. km. If I presented that to government auditors, I would be laughed off the podium, unless I gave a list of qualifiers presenting the change in true perspective.
I will agree the last few uptick years in Arctic sea ice are only a short term trend, but we only have about 30 years of reasonably accurate data on sea ice. So the decline from 1979-2007, and recent uptick might just be part of a cycle. So I would not suggest betting the farm, on a ice free Arctic sea. I would suggest talking to someone knowledgeable in Metrology.
#853 Barton
Barton, I understand all that, but remember one thing, albedo’s are not constant. Take snow cover as a simple case.The albedo can change by a factor of 2 depending on the terrain and composition of the snow, assuming say a clear sky. Adding clouds and particulates of varying degree, you can have a significant variation. Since most of the earth’s surface is water, water can have a even larger variations. So while the physical laws are great, those parameters, like albedos, are more then a little problem. And that’s just one parametric value.
but look at the ice data for 24 April 2010 v. say 24 April 1979 at Cryosphere Today ??
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=04&fd=24&fy=1979&sm=04&sd=24&sy=2010
How do we explain this?
CFU wrote: “We are genus Pan…”
BPL: “No, we are genus Homo …”
May I suggest that using E-Prime might clarify this discussion?
Some ordinary people [informal survey] now think GW is humorous. This is a really bad sign.
Comment by Edward Greisch — 24 April 2010 @ 4:54 AM
——
REPLY: To all RC participants….I first learned of climate change issues at the University of Illinois/Urbana in 1974, and began working on mitigation of agricultural methane releases in 1979, so I was in this quite early. I’m one of you.
However, you MUST be very careful when communicating your fears and conclusions to the lay public! When the comedians start to weigh in (as they are presently), it is the beginning of a long slide downwards. The past winter, which saw the entire UK island blanketed in snow and ice, did immeasurable harm to your cause among the common people.
People scare easily, and generally, they can be trusted to do the correct thing when given sober advice and the tools of democracy. Look at the amazing popularity of smoking bans in the USA and Europe for example, these are generating some real, measurable public health gains.
There is no easy/quick substitute to fossil carbon fuel, the energy density of most alternatives is far too low, and in general, the population is not prepared for drastic measures. Nuclear energy is decades away from being a contributor, especially in the USA, where we have no coherent plan to manage high-level radioactive waste.
Perhaps the biggest problem I foresee is the emergence of China to the world stage, they consider past carbon to be a legacy issue and demand their turn in order to build their society and advance. I don’t necessarily agree, but it is an understandable viewpoint.
In conclusion….tone down the panic, we yet have time to work on this through new, developing technologies (efficient lighting, smart grid etc.). Don’t make stupid claims about dying polar bears etc., because when they are shown to be wrong, the public will NOT forget easily! Work tirelessly to police your own science, my fellow scientists and I are quite embarrassed about the sloppiness and carelessness of data treatment by Dr. Jones of the CRU, inclusion of non-peer reviewed grey literature in AR4, and other mistakes.
The world is worth saving, embrace your skeptical critics and find common ground.
Ike Solem: “The comment that “Bob Grumbine’s analysis shows that internal variability stops influencing trends at about 21 years” is some serious nonsense right there”
Sorry, poor choice of words. The 21 years specifically relates to trend lengths of 21 years, and perhaps “dominating” would have been better than “influencing”.
The point of this discussion was that Simon Abingdon felt that the choice of 30 years to define climate was “arbitrary” (his word, not mine).
My point is that while the exact number 30 may be arbitrary, there is nothing arbitrary about the fact it has to be a reasonably long number.
Grumbine’s analysis looked at trends of various lengths in the temperature series, and concluded that at trends of 21 years or longer, the proportion of variance that is due to the internal variability of the system reaches a point where it no longer dominates the trend. In other words, for the temperature series, if you want to look at trends that reflect long term changes – such as the warming trends of the last 150 years – then you need to use a trend length of at least 21 years.
So the number 30, which was arbitrarily chosen by WMO (and applies to all climatic data, not just temperature), is borne out as being a good choice by applying statistical techniques that were not available when WMO made that choice (and long before there was any suggestion of global warming).
It’s kind of annoying to have to spell this out in so much detail when it has been gone through over and over again.
I still want to hear from Simon Abingdon why he believes that 30 is not a good choice, and that 1 year trends would be just as good for determining climate. Well, Simon?
Judith Curry endorsed this as a fair summary of what she meant by ‘corruption’ — http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/04/23/an-inconvenient-provocateur/comment-page-2/#comment-3141
Given that she’s criticizing the process — not individuals.
I suggested there and at Stoat focusing on the process.
See the public IPCC AR5 links (at Stoat), or google site:ipcc.ch attribution AR5.
It’d be strange if everyone concerned couldn’t agree to work on, or at least talk about, the process. At least everyone who wants it to work.
Chris #876
“Roy Spencer has not proven anything. His argument concerning climate changes brought about internally is simply not convincing. There is no mechanism, and “the system is complex” is not an acceptable answer. ”
Again why is the idea that a signal or long term pattern can emerge from what is initially a totally chaotic system surprising or implausible? There are countless examples in nature of this. And really to me it’s a very weak signal that we are even talking about. If you would have told me 5 years ago that the measured average yearly worldwide surface temperature has only changed less then one degree over the course of 100 years I would have been surprised it was so stable! If I took a group of people and put them in a room and raised or lowered the temperature by 1 degree I doubt most of them would detect a change. How this minute change has supposedly already caused an endless list worldwide problems me seems like a severe exaggeration.
The theory of anthropogenic CO2 forcing seems like an unneeded and awkward attempt at defining the cause of problem that really doesn’t seem like much of a problem and doesn’t seem to require a definable cause. If this is true it means that a whole lot of people have wasted a whole lot of time and most importantly a whole lot of the publics money. This is not a joke. If you guys want to separate people from their money and their freedom you’re gonna need to bring your A game. What I have seen so far, especially that steaming pile of dung of an IPCC report is not even close.
Gilles N°885, what is it you are talking about,I can’t follow, and I’m pretty sure I am not the only one. Your digression about the Icelandic volcano looks like a heap of horse manure to me.
Sam, what you do believe about the world, how you know what you believe, and what sources you rely on for what you believe?
Do you believe scientists in general “want to separate people from their money and their freedom” on other issues, in school or other parts of life?
Sam (911) — As I am confident that other regulars here will offer suggestions of what you might read to begin learning about climate, I’ll simple recommend the book I first read, climatologist W.F. Ruddiman’s popular “Plows, Plagues and Petroleum”. My favorite comment about the book is from an attorney. “At last, a book about climate that I can understand!”
For Sam — I just quoted this over at Stoat’s blog, but it’s a good question I think. Can you say how you read this?
“In our constitutional democracy an informed public must be able to judge the performance of those they elect. This requires a triangle comprised of political institutions, the community of experts, and a responsible public, all of whom are well informed. How will the public become informed about energy policy, for example? Studies tell us the public strongly supports energy independence, new sustainable sources, and incentives for energy efficiency. But fewer than half of those interviewed could name a renewable energy source or a fossil fuel, raising the question of how firm the public’s views are. Studies show, however, that people make judgments based primarily on their values, belief systems, world views, and emotions. Facts play a much more minor role. This gap cannot be bridged by loading the public with facts, or trying to make the public more science literate. How should scientists deal with this awkward reality?”
That’s from: http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2010/webprogram/Session1458.html
hat tip to: http://oberlinsciencelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/03/interviews-with-michael-mann-and-judith.html
Sam wrote: “How this minute change has supposedly already caused an endless list worldwide problems me seems like a severe exaggeration. The theory of anthropogenic CO2 forcing seems like an unneeded and awkward attempt at defining the cause of problem that really doesn’t seem like much of a problem and doesn’t seem to require a definable cause.”
If you wish to remedy your ignorance and get a clue about the actual science of anthropogenic climate change, this site is a great place for you to read up on it and ask questions.
If you want to slavishly regurgitate inane, ludicrous conspiracy theories spoon-fed to you by the phony “conservative” media about a vast world-wide hoax perpetrated by thousands of scientists scheming to take away “your money and your freedom”, and to aggressively maintain your willful ignorance, not so much.
Gee, Sam, you sure seem to be passionate about your point of view. However, you haven’t brought any interesting scientific evidence to the table to defend it, from what I can see. And no one of import is acknowledging your brilliant observations about chaotic systems. Such a shame.
Did you know that Washo the chimp could use sign language to call her keepers a pile of green dung when she was unhappy with them?
#911
[My italics]. ‘Science = common sense’
is a false equation. If it had been correct the ancients would have been able to understand the world and they utterly failed. What your ‘common sense’ (i.e pre-scientific) intuition overlooks is that this warming has been communicated to the top layer of the oceans and that that requires an enormous amount of energy. Please look at the data for the top 700 m of water here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm
As a a simple excercise I suggest that you work out the cost of doing that with electricity at current prices. After that you could try to find data for the ice which has melted and add that to your calculation. Just one consequence of that warming is the rapid dying of the world’s coral.
It may not be common sense, but the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere increases roughly exponentially with absolute temperature It can thus be shown that the few degrees warming which accompany a retreating ice sheet is also accompanied by a large increase in the world’s rainfall i.e. a big change in climate; another effect which may not be obvious until you learn the science.
Of course there was also the change in geography caused by the rise in sea level.
The same graph totally contradicts your other ‘common sense’ conclusion which is that the climate looks stable. There is no easy way to get rid of all that additional energy. It is going up relentlessly.
Sam,
Gee, I don’t know how to break this to you, but there is more to science than whether it surprises you. You would probably be surprised to know that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames regardless of motion or that the vacuum can exert a force on an object. See, Sam, there’s this thing called evidence–and you and your buddy Roy don’t have any.
A couple of tips:
1)Energy is conserved. When you see temperature in a VERY LARGE system like the climate rising even just a wee bit over an extended period of time, it says that very large amounts of energy are being added. “It just happened,” is the excuse of a teenager, not a scientific theory.
2)There is no “theory of anthropogenic CO2 forcing”. There is the consensus model of Earth’s climate and an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of that theory is that when humans add a powerful greenhouse gas to the atmosphere they will warm the planet. This has been known and accepted for 114 years.
3)Your surprise or lack thereof can be explained a whole lot more by your ignorance than by any characteristic of the climate system.
4)Come back when you grow up.
Re 877 Ike Solem says:
…””internal variability stops influencing trends at about 21 years” is some serious nonsense right there – particularly since orbital precession is an example of “internal variability” (in Earth orbital parameters) that influences climate trends on a timescale of thousands of years.”
Since the effects of climate on the Earth’s tilt and orbit are quite minor …
(at least outside of butterfly effects that might be realized over ? years (many many millions? – a shift in climate might cause a change in celestial mechanical ‘weather’ (redistribution of mass affects the tidal torques …) but not as much a change in celestial mechanical ‘climate’),
… I think it’s better not to identify those as part of internal variability with respect to climate.
Gilles@884, That’s all very nice, except we weren’t talking about the sun, were we? We were talking “global” temperature, and last time I looked at a globe, it was a model of Earth, my home planet, though perhaps not yours.
Titus @874 says, “Spencer’s book is explicitly talking about ‘climate scientists’.”
Well, except the conclusions of the IPCC have been endorsed by physicists, geophysicists, chemists, statisticans, national scientific academies… Not one major professional or honorific organization of scientists dissents. So, he is addressing the entire scientific community, but then given his endorsement of Intelligent Design, that is not an unaccustomed position for him.
Sorry if it has been brought up before, but with respect to the committe´s finding of the “regrettable neglect” in failing to show in the reports the uncertainties concerning the divergence problem from the published papers:
Looking at the MBH99 Hockey stick from GRL:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/millennium-camera.pdf
compared to the presentation in the IPCC TAR-report´s “Summary for policymakers,
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/WG1_TAR-FRONT.pdf
they look almost exactly the same to me. Am I missing something, or is there no significant difference?
And besides, the divergence problem is anything but hidden in the relevant Chapter 2 of the TAR-report. Could it be that there were very little to even this moderate critique from the otherwise generous Oxburgh report?
Re Sam 911 –
“Again why is the idea that a signal or long term pattern can emerge from what is initially a totally chaotic system surprising or implausible?”
1. We know there are places that are rainforests and deserts and coral reefs – to some extent this places limits on how much climate has changed recently. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; there are paleoclimatic studies. The climate system has some heat capacity and it requires some radiative imbalance to add or remove heat in total.
2. Why should it be surprising that additional CO2 would cause climate change? The optical properties can be measured in the lab and the effects in the atmosphere are varifiable from satellites; combine this with the established relationships of photon emission and temperature, and an actual understanding (as opposed to some magical concept) of how convection works, and it is obvious that adding CO2 should cause some surface+tropospheric warming. There are feedbacks – they are not known precisely but they are known at least in part, so that a climate sensitivity around 3 K/doubling CO2 or equivalent forcing and efficacy, give or take ~ 1 K, seems a reasonable expectation. Far from unneeded and awkard, it necessarily follows from established physics and observations.
3. “If I took a group of people and put them in a room and raised or lowered the temperature by 1 degree I doubt most of them would detect a change.” 1 degree F or C ? Are any of them near the freezing point with ice cubes in ice water? Are some of these people located where the warming is concentrated? The feedbacks are not distributed evenly; their is an expected pattern of warming that fits the observations; a pattern of warming from uneven feedbacks will cause changes in winds and latent heating; weather patterns shift. The range between the last ice age and recent times is only about 6 deg C or so in the global average.
4.”If you guys want to separate people from their money and their freedom”
What about the money and freedom of people who are contributing less than the average per capita CO2(eq) emissions? What about the people who live where the effects will be worse than average? What about people in the future? Regulating such pollution can protect rights. Would you want your neighbor dumping his/her dog’s you-know-what in your yard? Would you allow your neighbor the freedom and economic benefit of that option? A market works best generally if the costs and benifits of an action are realized by the those who make the decision to take that action; therefore proper regulation is good for the total wealth of all people. At least some of the people who try to defend the ‘free market’ from proposed climate policies clearly have poor understanding of economics.
“you’re gonna need to bring your A game.”
Done.
“What I have seen so far, especially that steaming pile of dung of an IPCC report is not even close.”
If you want steaming piles of dung, look at what the contrarians have. To the extent that they have anything true, it isn’t anything not included the mainstream science. They take a picture of a mountain, point at the corner of the picture where there is no sky, and proclaim that the mountain does not exist. They implicitly assume uncertainty can only work in one direction and shift the burden of proof away from their extradinary claims back to what has already been established. They take facts out of context and cherry-pick data, and they construct arguments that strain logic and expel Occam’s razor (why try a strained alternative explanation to substitute an explanation that is, scientifically, convenient), and sometimes they just make stuff up.
Ray Ladbury @922 you say:
“Not one major professional or honorific organization of scientists dissents”.
So what? Where would we be today if everybody adopted this attitude. Certainly not science as I understand it.
And how did ‘Intelligent Design’ creep in? And again, so what? Some of the most influential scientists in all our history have had all manner of personal beliefs. Good on them; it appears to improve perspective.
And how did the IPCC creep in? Let’s stay on subject and we may get somewhere.
What do you think of the content of his published work? You now have an opportunity to question it through the scientific process.
Why do you guys seem to equate my not agreeing with your theories about climate to me not knowing anything about climate or science? You are beginning to sound like broken records.
Specifically the primary reason why I am not convinced by the theory of AGW is that the estimates of climate sensitivity seem to be well… Estimates! To me this is the elephant in the room and without a real value for it all your dire predictions are hard to take seriously. Without feedbacks CO2 concentration doubling simply cant cause much warming. So if climate sensitivity is low or near zero then we dont have much to fear, correct? I have looked at what I think is every way it has been estimated and each method has a huge range and most seem to be based on historical data that could have very limited precision to be kind. The “consensus” estimate is 3 degrees….. Consensus?! Is this like a beauty pageant where judges get to vote on the value of a constant?? My stubborn refusal to be convinced by AGW theory does not stem from not understanding enough about it. I think the opposite is true — although I harbor no illusions that most of y’all will strongly disagree with me.
911 Sam: If you had read the rest of the comments on the “Second CRU inquiry reports”, you would have received the answer to your question. The answer is: “It only takes a small change in the global average temperature to shift the wind and therefore the rainfall enough to disrupt agriculture. If agriculture is disrupted, people starve. When there is no food, civilizations collapse. When there is no food and civilization collapses, everybody or almost everybody dies.” Since there was quite a discussion about this, I know that you didn’t read the other comments before commenting. A “minute” change is not insignificant if it kills Billions of people. YOU, Sam, are guaranteed to be among the dead if civilization crashes, and we care about you. That is why we are doing this.
CFU @ 851:
Springer is a =publishing= house. That 880 million euros figure is what Springer, the publishing house, collected in total sales, from all of its PUBLISHING activities.
Unless you can find some line item in Springer’s books which says that they are kicking back the money to researchers, it’s you that’s sadly mistaken.
You know, Leonardo da Vinci was an extremely intelligent, extremely focussed, extremely logical, extremely observant mind.
But if you read his notebooks, he was also wrong an awful lot. Wrong on optics, wrong on the circulation of the blood, and on and on. Sometimes, “not even wrong.”
Not his fault; he didn’t have nearly as many of “the shoulders of giants” to stand on as we (or even as Newton, who uttered the quote about “giants.”)
Even in the 16th century, it wasn’t really enough to look around with the eyes of common sense and reason closely–not even if you were really, really good at those things, as Leonardo undoubtedly was.
Today, it’s much more futile. You have to learn the basics, as many here have pointed out, and build context from there. That’s why papers so often start with a survey of the literature–context.
#904 J. Bob
I did not present my confidence but you overlooked that. The methods of measuring the thickness are many, including freeboard measurements from direct observations, satellites and sonar above on and below the ice. The combined assessments yield high confidence, as stated by Walt from NSIDC.
The fact that you choose to ignore facts in context invalidates your opinion on the matter since you are obviously not examining the evidence in context of the overarching and related science and observations on the matter. You are cherry picking the perspective to fit a preconceived agenda of ‘we don’t know’. Pathetic on all levels.
If you actually work for a government and do not present the relevant context of what is happening with global warming then you should be fired.
Since I know you don’t know the relevant context, you should be fired.
No person whose responsibility it is to report to government on this issue should ignore the relevant context. Any who do should be fired.
Any politician who ignores the relevant context should be exposed for such ignorance and should not be re-elected.
It’s simple, if it is your responsibility to present facts in evidence and relevant context and you don’t, then you don’t belong in any such position of responsibility.
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“But you will agree that we do know how to calculate equilibrium temperatures with some skill, even for exotic atmospheres like Titan.”
Of course, if “some skill” means within an accuracy of 10°C or so. I’m speaking of fluctuations in the observed range (a few tenths of degrees) during the observed timespan (a few decades) : you cannot easily dismiss that a natural cycle could produce that , or at less contribute significantly to it. Why do you think that even the IPCC estimate of climate sensitivity has still an inaccuracy of more a factor 2 ? Why do you think that Judy Curry issued : ” I think the confidence levels in the IPCC are too high and uncertainties have been inadequately characterized: much of what is in the IPCC WG2 report (impacts), the 20th century external climate forcings, the historical surface temperature record prior to 1960, attribution of the 20th century climate variations (including the role of the multidecadal ocean oscillations)”??
Multidecadal ocean oscillations ? what the hell is she speaking about ? does she ignore radiative balance and cosine law ???
Ray ladbury : although I must admit that I am much more sensitive to my local temperature than to the global one (the fact that Arctic was 5°C warmer this winter, being “only” – 15 °C instead of – 20 °C didn’t heat a lot my house for instance) , I am really speaking about global temperature.
911 Sam: We know about something like 2 dozen civilizations that have already crashed in the past due to much smaller climate changes than the one that we have already made [1.4 degrees in 2 centuries]. We know that we are causing it because we measured the optical properties of gasses. Oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to infrared. Carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared. We know that Venus has a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere and the temperature on Venus is over 800 degrees. There is no life on Venus. Carbon dioxide [CO2] is definitely the cause of global warming. We have measured the CO2 every day for many years. Satellites and ground stations measure the temperature all over the world. The world average may be doing something different than what the temperature is doing where you are. We are not depending on one data source, but many. They all agree. CO2 is the problem and it doesn’t take a big change to disrupt civilization.
RL:”1)Energy is conserved. When you see temperature in a VERY LARGE system like the climate rising even just a wee bit over an extended period of time, it says that very large amounts of energy are being added.”
Sorry again and again, but even if you didn’t understand my explanation, this is still wrong, for a numbers of reasons. Energy is NOT temperature, that’s the first thing you learn in thermodynamics. Even more here because you measure a surface temperature which is not a volume integral. I gave you already examples (red giants, volcano), to show that surface temperatures can raise without input energy, or the opposites, there are plenty of similar cases : a heap of hot ashes for example has LESS energy than the cold wood that existed before since a lot has been lost during its burning. Another example : imagine a plate of copper illuminated by the sun at some distance, reaching the famous equilibrium temperature computed by BPL. Now couple it with a heat pump that cools one half of the plate and heats the other half with MORE energy since it adds the electric power used to power the pump. There is obviously an input of energy (the pump); however due to T^4 dependance of radiance, the increase of temperature of the hot part will be lower than the decrease of the cold part, and the surface average can well decrease (that is probably the case for helium-cooled infrared telescopes like Herschel (http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=16) although I didn’t compute precisely its average surface temperature.
Your argument is based on the naive picture of an isothermal, constant capacity earth. Of course we can expect this a crude approximation, and not so false. But it is just not accurate enough to deal with the current variations (a few tenth of degrees in some decades). I’m surprised that a physicist like you speak of “VERY LARGE system and EXTENDED period of time. Ghosh , large with respect to WHAT ? the question of significance is much more relevant.
The funny thing is that you use this very implicit argument when saying that the warming can apparently slow or even stop during some decades because of “natural variability” – although the energy is supposed to have increased anyway ?
“Springer is a =publishing= house. That 880 million euros figure is what Springer, the publishing house, collected in total sales, from all of its PUBLISHING activities.”
And that doesn’t cost be anything.
None of my taxes go there.
So how is your delusion my tax problem?
“Enough other people have now explained why your rush to judgement was wrong.”
Uh, no they haven’t.
Headlines are made by media organisations that will attract readers by controversy.
Agree or disagree?
Part 2: if you agree, does the “sexing up” of a story by a controversial headline make the science that is in the ACTUAL STORY wrong?
Yes/No
CFU (895): Study taxonomy and english, BPL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo : Pan Paniscus.
Chimpanzee: Pan Troglodytes
Chimp is not Pan.
Chimp is Pan Troglodytes.
BPL: Study primatology, CFU. Pan paniscus is the “pygmy chimpanzee.” Pan troglodytes is the regular chimpanzee. Pan is the genus for chimpanzees. They are not a species, they are a genus with two known species. Similar, Homo is not a species, but a genus. There have been half a dozen species with that genus (Homo habilis, ergaster, erectus, Neanderthalensis, flores, sapiens). Homo is the human genus. The two are very different morphologically.
[Response: This is too tedious. Chimp talk is OT. – gavin]
CRS (908): my fellow scientists and I are quite embarrassed about the sloppiness and carelessness of data treatment by Dr. Jones of the CRU, inclusion of non-peer reviewed grey literature in AR4, and other mistakes.
BPL: Which “fellow scientists” would those be?
Sam (911): The theory of anthropogenic CO2 forcing seems like an unneeded and awkward attempt at defining the cause of problem that really doesn’t seem like much of a problem and doesn’t seem to require a definable cause.
BPL: But you don’t know the first thing about radiative transfer, do you?
Sam: If this is true it means that a whole lot of people have wasted a whole lot of time and most importantly a whole lot of the publics money.
BPL: If this were true it might be true, except that the money the world spends on scientific research is trivial compared to, say, military spending, or even building fast-food joints.
Sam: This is not a joke. If you guys want to separate people from their money and their freedom you’re gonna need to bring your A game.
BPL: Yes, we’re all about separating people from their money and their freedom. By the way, Sam… one of us is standing right behind you RIGHT NOW!!!
Sam: What I have seen so far, especially that steaming pile of dung of an IPCC report is not even close.
BPL: It would help to actually study the subject.
Sam (926): Why do you guys seem to equate my not agreeing with your theories about climate to me not knowing anything about climate or science?
BPL: Because of the vast ignorance of the entire field betrayed by your every post.
Gilles (931): I’m speaking of fluctuations in the observed range (a few tenths of degrees) during the observed timespan (a few decades)
BPL: 160 years of measurements is not “a few decades.” It’s sixteen (16) decades. When people say “a few” in English they rarely mean more than ten, and usually three-six.
The temperature trend is up, very statistically significantly (p < 0.01). Something's causing it. We have a good idea as to what.
Gilles (933): the question of significance is much more relevant.
BPL: I just regressed Hadley CRU dT on year (i.e., elapsed time) for 1850-2008. The positive coefficient on the year term had Student’s t = 16.11, which is significant at the 4.4 x 10-35 level. THAT is significance, mon frere.
Gilles,
We are talking about Earth’s climate, which I hope you will agree is large–at least once you visit Earth. So, either come up with a mechanism for how the climate (surface, oceans, troposphere) can warm without energy input. Failing that, quit trolling. Your sole goal for 4 months now has been to derail discussions. I have yet to see you offer anything of worth to any discussion here.
Sam@926,
Actually, it is not your disagreement with climate science that makes us think you are ignorant, it is the fact that you have formed opinions with
1)zero knowledge of the evidence
2)a straw-man idea of the theories that is just flat wrong
3)no knowledge of how science is done
4)no knowledge of what scientific consensus is
5)noscientific training
Let’s take your example of climate sensitivity. There are about a dozen separate lines of evidence that give us climate sensitivity estimates. Do you know ANY of them? Do you know that ALL of them yield an estimate of about 3 degrees per doubling? Do you know enough about science to realize how remarkable that level of agreement is?
Now, let’s look at scientific consensus? Do you know what it is or how it is defined? It ain’t a vote. Rather it is the set of tools, theories, techniques and ideas that are so indispensible to understanding the phenomenon under study that you cannot make progress (e.g. publish in peer reviewed journals) without it. There has been consensus that CO2 is a greenhouse gas since the 1850s. There has been consensus that anthropogenic CO2 ought to warm the planet since the 1950s. You have a lot of catching up to do, Sam, before anyone with any knowledge will take your opinion seriously. Maybe start by reading up on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Titus, First, when every major scientific organization that reviews the findings in a field agrees with them, that ought to tell you something. Second, intelligent design is not science. It can never be science. I can prove mathematically that it can never be science. The fact that Spencer seems to think that ID is a credible scientific alternative to evolution suggests some fuzziness on what constitutes the scientific method.
Now as to Spencer’s work, if we check out Jim Prall’s database of climate publications and citations, we see that Roy ranks fairly far down the list–most of the work cited has to do with the UAH temperature time series. There is not much in his record that would indicate a deep understanding of climate as a whole. We also note that he hasn’t published much of late, other than a couple of posters. And if the reason he hasn’t been publishing in journals was to work on his book–what a waste! From the exerpts I’ve read, it is excrable.
So, in sum, there isn’t much that distinguishes Roy from an average climate scientist–other than the fact that he rejects the prevailing theory of Earth’s climate and has proposed no viable alternative beyond saying “it just happens”.
Steven Sullivan — 20 April 2010 @ 10:36 AM
I seem to be the only person who has read this book by Montford. Everyone else takes the view that there is no need to respond to the points in the book as “Why should we respond to every skeptic crank?” The above quote is even prepared to write Judith Curry off because she cited a book, which no one is prepared to read! My academic field is not climate science, but I have spent the last few weeks trying to get at least a reasonable overview of the key issues. I am not a denier, but the reason why the debate surrounding the hockey stick *is* important is that is has been rammed down our throats as justification for potentially dramatic policy measures which are going to cost us taxpayers and energy consumers a great deal of money in the coming years. It is also a window into the science for those of us coming from outside. The point is, if this, the most highly publicized finding, is dodgy, then it makes one question the whole way climate science is done, or at the very least, the way it is transmitted to us great unwashed through the IPCC.
To be honest, much of what is written about in Montford’s book is pretty mind boggling; it documents fairly convincingly a large number of problems with the way this body of research has been done. No doubt there is another side to the story that can be told and it would be nice to hear it so one can take a more balanced overall view. But there is little doubt that way the data was not made public (when it could easily have been), certainly not released to the ‘other’ side is shocking (in my field data must be made available, no question). I don’t think the book is brilliantly written – I have a number of problems in places. Nor do I really think that the veracity or otherwise of the hockey stick is that important for the warming debate. But even if it’s only half accurate, you cannot run a science like this!
[Response: You are right – you do not run science through criticisms in books that few people have read. Instead you write papers and submit them to the peer review process where hopefully they can be checked for validity, relevance and logical coherence before being made available to the whole community. Until that happens where are the valid issues that the community is supposed to respond to? – gavin]
“Energy is NOT temperature,…” Gilles — 25 April 2010 @ 1:16 AM
Are you saying that when a plate of copper is illuminated by the sun, “reaching the famous equilibrium temperature”, that temperature but not energy is being transferred by photons?
BPL :”The temperature trend is up, very statistically significantly (p < 0.01). Something's causing it. We have a good idea as to what."
"something" is very vague, so it cannot be nothing but true. But tell me, for instance, which "something" caused exactly the absence of solar spots during the Maunder minimum? was there a deficit of input energy, and if not, what else?
Again I do not claim that CO2 is not producing an increase of temperature. I say that it is not obvious that the observed variation cannot be due to anything but an increase of the forcing : it's incorrect to state "but it is an obvious consequence of the conservation of energy " : it is not. And definitely the amount of variation due to CO2 and to natural cycles is NOT easy to ascertain with simple calculations -although it is critical to fix the exact sensitivity to CO2.
It is rather strange that people admiring the huge work made by climate scientists do also believe they can prove this complicated stuff by some back-of-the-envelope computation and some rapidly made correlations posted on blogs. If it were that easy , we wouldn't need climate scientists.
"Are you saying that when a plate of copper is illuminated by the sun, “reaching the famous equilibrium temperature”, that temperature but not energy is being transferred by photons?"
I'm not saying that, i'm saying that climate is not as simple as a plate of copper.
the above quote is even prepared to write Judith Curry off because she cited a book […]
I wrote Curry off because she showered us with nebulous unsubstantiated charges and morganantic advice and then left. If her academic work were that shoddy, Georgia Tech would fire her.
Sam #911
“Again why is the idea that a signal or long term pattern can emerge from what is initially a totally chaotic system surprising or implausible? There are countless examples in nature of this. And really to me it’s a very weak signal that we are even talking about. If you would have told me 5 years ago that the measured average yearly worldwide surface temperature has only changed less then one degree over the course of 100 years I would have been surprised it was so stable! If I took a group of people and put them in a room and raised or lowered the temperature by 1 degree I doubt most of them would detect a change. How this minute change has supposedly already caused an endless list worldwide problems me seems like a severe exaggeration. ”
So on the one hand we have a group of mathematical models of climate, based upon well-established physical principles. All of the models that are broadly consistent with what we know and have been able to deduce of the historical climate record predict substantial warming from current levels of CO2, and dangerous warming from anticipated levels of CO2. Nobody to date has been able to come up with a physical model of climate for which this is not the case. Existing temperature records exhibit a rise in average temperatures coinciding with the increase in CO2 released into the atmosphere by human activities, and this increase is in agreement with the predictions of these models regarding the influence of CO2 on climate.
So what do you offer as an alternative hypothesis? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the following:
1. There is some unknown physical mechanism that limits the effect of atmospheric CO2 on global average temperature, such that the true effect of anticipated CO2 increases on global temperatures is negligible.
2. The observed rise in temperatures over the last century or so is due to some other unknown physical mechanism, which you speculate may have chaotic dynamics, which coincidentally has produced a rise in temperature that agrees with climate models. However, this rise in temperatures is temporary, and it is going to stop Real Soon Now, so we shouldn’t worry about it.
Does that about cover it?