Defining (and enforcing) a clear line between information and mis-information is impossible, but that doesn’t mean misinformation doesn’t exist or that there is nothing to be done to combat it.
I found myself caught in an ‘interesting’ set of exchanges on twitter a few weeks ago (I won’t link to it to spare you the tedium, but you could probably find it if you look hard enough). The nominal issue was whether deplatforming known bull******s was useful at stemming the spread of misinformation (specifically with respect to discussions around COVID). There is evidence that this does in fact work to some extent, but the twitter thread quickly turned to the question of who decides what is misinformation in the first place, and then descended into a free-for-all where just the very mention that misinformation existed or that the scientific method provided a ratchet to detect it, was met with knee-jerk references to the Nazi’s and the inquisition. So far, so usual, right?
While the specific thread was not particularly edifying, and I’ll grant that my tweets were not perfectly pitched for the specific audience, this is a very modern example of the classic Demarcation Problem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) in the philosophy of science.
Science and Pseudo-Science
The demarcation problem is classically linked to the difficulty in deriving general principles that distinguish real science from pseudo-science. Everyone can name what (to them, and maybe many others) are examples of pseudo-science: astrology, homeopathy, cold fusion, etc., but coming up with characteristics that define ‘pseudo-science’ but that exclude ‘science’ is very hard (and maybe impossible).
For instance, the popularity of a scientific idea is not a useful metric, since many initially fringe ideas have subsequently become the consensus (perhaps all consensus ideas at some point were fringe?). More fruitfully, is the way in which pseudo-scientific ideas are argued for salient? Clearly, ideas that are built on logical fallacies, cherry picking, or rhetorical tricks, shouldn’t be relied on and are frequent signs of misinformation . However, the existence and use of poor arguments does not preclude the existence of better ones. Rightly, we tend not pay much attention to unfalsifiable theories, but not everything unfalsifiable is pseudo-science (string theory, for instance, though some might argue this!). However, some theories’ predictions simply can’t (yet) be tested. Gravitational waves weren’t pseudo-science just because it took a century to verify their existence.
Conversely, many pseudo-sciences make many falsifiable statements (many, indeed, that have already been falsified). Popper’s claim that scientific claims are demarcated by falsifiablity is thus hard to support. What about the skill of predictions? After all, this is the gold standard of scientific theories. Theories with a track record of successful predictions (not just hindcasts) would seem to be sufficient to be considered scientific, but it’s clearly not necessary. And so on…
Pseudo-science and misinformation
Pseudo-science is often thought of at the level of a theory or a body of work, not at the level of a single fact or argument. However, misinformation can be far more granulated and doesn’t necessarily have to relate to a coherent view in any respect. Like pseudo-science, misinformation is often clear in specific examples (claims that vaccines implant micro-chips! or they make you magnetic! or that Space Force is about to stage a coup!) but hard to define in general.
As above, misinformation can’t be defined simply as anything that isn’t part of a scientific consensus (too broad), or that isn’t falsifiable. Sure, it might be easy to say that misinformation is information that is demonstrably false, but that begs the question of how this should be demonstrated and who is to judge when it has been.
Going further, what about information that is simply misleading? As we’ve seen in the climate discourse it’s easy to find red herrings that are true as far as they go, but that don’t go very far. Did you know that climate has changed before? Or that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas? These claims are not false, but are often used in the service of a false premise (that human-caused climate change is either not happening or not important). Even here, there is a normative (subjective) judgement. Who is to say what is important? for what? or who?
Cherry picking, where a specific, often noisy, metric is highlighted to counter the larger scale picture (see anything published by Steve Koonin) or a single outlier study is hyped without taking account of the caveats or the other work in the area (anything pushed by Bjorn Lomborg), is another example. These claims are intended to mislead, but it is often the implicit warrant of the argument that is the misinformation. And how can you reliably detect what is implicit in an argument for any particular audience? Thus misinformation is often context dependent.
However, the existence of edge cases like this doesn’t mean that one can never say that something is misinformation. In exactly the same way that just because science is uncertain about some things it does not follow that everything is uncertain. Perhaps we should follow Justice Potter Stewart?
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.’
Can the impacts of misinformation be minimized?
Despite the trouble that arises in trying to find hard and fast rules that delineate misinformation from information, it is still worth pushing back. [And contrary to the opinions of some, pushing back is just as clear an exercise of one’s free speech as is the misinformers pushing their misinformation].
There was a conference last week (#DisInfo2022) on the role that disinformation is playing in our political discourse and had a lot of discussions on what it is and what should be done.
Most pushback is however, reactive. Someone somewhere puts out something stupid, and more informed people respond with facts, or context, or scorn. The pushback rarely gets the same attention as the push, and the exercise is generally futile expect perhaps at the margin, or as record that can be reviewed later. The misinformation peddler benefits from the attention and they parley that into a reputation as someone who ‘owns the libs’ or is a ‘brave truthteller oppressed by the establishment’ or ‘a victim who is being unjustly persecuted’ – a veritable Galileo even!
Perhaps more useful is the idea of inoculation against misinformation (e.g. van der Linden et al (2017) or [2]). The idea is that if people know what kind of argument or tactic is used by misinformers, they’ll recognize it when it’s used and be able to dismiss bad arguments when they arise without additional help. I think in the end this is the way most bad arguments die – people develop a kind of ‘herd immunity’ to them and the misinformers find that these bad arguments no longer generate the buzz they once did. But like viruses, the bad arguments will evolve as they misinformers try to find something that works, and sometimes they can come roaring back when everyone thought they were dead an buried. Thus maintaining the ‘herd immunity’ to misinformation is a constant battle. It never gets settled because it’s never really about the topic at hand, but it’s almost always a proxy for a deeper clash of values.
However, the empirical evidence suggests the most effective way of preventing misinformation spreading, is simply to reduce exposure to it. For instance, paying people to watch CNN instead of Fox News seems to work. Deplatforming repetitive disinformers does too. Here’s another case.
Freeze Peach!
Social media deplatforming is often strongly criticised as being against the ‘spirit’ of free speech (not the actual First Amendment, which only enjoins the US government). But should the free marketplace for ideas be a total free-for-all, where voices are drowned out by bot farms pouring sh*t onto everyone else’s stall? Creating and curating accessible spaces and environments that elevate information over misinformation seems to me to be an essential part of building an informed democracy (which is what we want, no?). This might not be completely compatible with platforms that are really optimized for engagement rather than discourse (this remains to be seen). But it is surely an impossible task if we don’t take the misinformers seriously.
References
- S. van der Linden, A. Leiserowitz, S. Rosenthal, and E. Maibach, "Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change", Global Challenges, vol. 1, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/gch2.201600008
- J. Cook, S. Lewandowsky, and U.K.H. Ecker, "Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence", PLOS ONE, vol. 12, pp. e0175799, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175799
V: Thanks for the effort, BPL. But I was referring to the period from 1900 through 1979.
BPL: For 1900-1979, r(CO2,dT) = 0.465, r^2 = 0.216, p < 0.000014. Highly significant.
V: .216 doesn't look like a particularly high r^2 value, Bart.
However, in any case, let's get real. If we take Spencer Weart's assessment seriously (“[Research] has shown that the temperature rise up to 1940 was . . . mainly caused by some kind of natural cyclical effect, not by the still relatively low CO2 emissions.”), then, regardless of what numbers you manage to come up with, realistically they can tell us little or nothing regarding the influence of CO2 on the climate. According to Weart (and he is certainly not alone), the influence was negligible. Thus, even if you can come up with a number statistically consistent with some level of correlation, the correlation you've found wouldn't really matter. And this has been my point all along — to stress the difference between what technically could be called a correlation and a correlation that is meaningful, a correlation that actually tells us something about the matter at hand.
And as for the following period, between ca. 1940 and 1979, since there was no evidence of any warming trend while CO2 levels rose considerably, then there was obviously no correlation, regardless of whatever numbers you manage to come up with. And by the way, since a correlation is based solely on the relation between two datasets, any attempt to explain why or how the data is what it is (based, for example, on the influence of aerosol pollution) has NO bearing on the correlation (or lack of it) per se.
“…as for the following period, between ca. 1940 and 1979, since there was no evidence of any warming trend while CO2 levels rose considerably, then there was obviously no correlation…”
Again with the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
Very interesting, thank you!
Re. “.216 doesn’t look like a particularly high r^2 value, Bart. ”
Another bit of “wisdom” from our resident denier.
What does 21.6% of the variance mean? Let’s simplify to the binomial case.
In an additive model, it means 21.6% of the time you can predict the outcome and win while 78.4% of the time it is random–yet of course you win half of those too.
I suggest we play a little game with any denier who dares for say $10/throw for a hundred throws or so where I win 21.6% of the time, regardless and we go 50-50 the rest. Do you think my wallet will get fatter? What is the trend?
Hint: On 100 plays E(x) = [$216 (for the sure wins) + $0 (for the remaining plays)] = $216. I’ll play that game!
Will I see a trend in my wallet? Is it significant?
BTW…casinos make mountains of money because they set up each game to rake in more like 4-10% per play just as described here. If they raked off 21.6%,/play I seriously doubt many–all of them deluded–would play. Yet our denier throws his FUD regardless.
Nice illustration!
V: regardless of what numbers you manage to come up with, realistically they can tell us little or nothing regarding the influence of CO2 on the climate.
BPL: Does anyone realize what a strongly ideologically anti-science remark this is? “regardless of what numbers you manage to come up with… they can tell us little or nothing.” Numbers don’t matter.
I think that encapsulates Victor’s whole problem.
Weaktor is descending into solipsism and nihilism.
And here we see it again, the sale of the cycles, an old hinduistic and buddhistic and marxistleninistic idea of history, life, and destiny, by what they tell us is ” scientific” and ” Historical” methods.
“Research has shown that tyhe temperature rise up to 1940 was… mainly caused by some kind of natural, cyclic effect. not by the still relatively low CO2 emissions”
Think of that. , and that “Research has shown”.
I happen to be professional scientific and technical expert on cycles, feedback and oscillation and can say again and again that it is not that easy to repeat the success of Milancevic.
It comes rather from the flat earthers and blind believers. From rather dark mideival ages in Europe.
He exels in superstition folklore and deep, popular illusions
@carbonito – “a professional scientific and technical expert on cycles ??? ”
— First – your famous college`s name is MILANKOVITCH not Milancevic.
The difference between a troll like Victor, who denies global warming due to CO² –
and you, who denies the cooling effect of clouds, is unfortunately not as great as you imagine.
While Viktor is fed tons of bananas by everyone here in the forum
(although 12-year-olds already know: “DON’T FEED THE TROLL”)
– you only occasionally get a lemon from me.
That’s unfair to Victor, who probably doesn’t even know that you’re at his side with your troll posts – and I’ll have to try harder on the lemons.
What, the Schürlers hardly are aware of is that all physical objects in the universe heat and cool at the same time unless their temperature is zero. then they do not heat, They only cool as heat sinks being no heat sources. But such physical objects do hardly exist in the universe.
If they heat and cool exactly the same at the same time for a while, , then their temperature is constant.
If air or cloud temperatures sinks, then the clouds and airs are rather netto heating.
So clouds are shurly cooling and just as shurly are not heating is another of shurlys illusions and supersticious beliefs. .
@carbonito
Another completely unnecessary, meaningless answer that makes it clear that you probably suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder.
First you deny the cloud albedo (-47W/m²), which is effective in the short-wave range –
then you bubble up something from thermal radiation between 2 bodies in space…instead of noticing briefly and succinctly that the long-wave radiation down surface through clouds around + 28W/m² increased.
How long will you need to classify the cloud radiative effect with -19W/m² ???
Demonstrating dark holes in the mind – seems to be your favorite pastime.
Hr Schürle
A major problem of yours is that you do not judge it and criticize- control yourself and perform in the light of physical experience and knowledge and elementary basic meteorological experience learning and knowledge.
Your alternative “artistic” surrealism is not the best basis for becoming a master of art and a teacher of climate.
Baccalaureus 1, Mittlere Reife, different from Arbeiter und Bauernfakultät in Greifswald DDR (now taken down) would do!
Victor wrote:
“So yes, I picked 80 years out of a much longer data set and drew the conclusion that OVER THAT 80 YEAR PERIOD there was no correlation between CO2 levels and global mean surface temperature. To make myself perfectly clear I added “NB: I was referring to the first 80 years of the previous century, NOT the entire climate record.”
“You managed to ignore my caveat, accusing me of cherry picking that period as representative of the entire climate record. That was certainly NOT my claim.”
MS: I didn’t ignore your caveat. Your caveat does not obviate your cherrypick. You claim there wasn’t positive correlation between CO2 and global average surface temperature during the 80 year period you extracted from the entire temperature record. Then you declare this shows that climate science has gotten it wrong, that CO2 did not cause the temperature increases before and after your 80 year cherrypick. That’s cherrypicking, Victor.
BTW, you didn’t actually compute the correlation for your 80 period. You simply declared the correlation was not positive. How did you manage that?
I could take the opposite approach to yours. I could select the period before your 80 years and say, “See? Little increase in CO2 and little increase in temperature.” And I could select the period from the end of your 80 years up to the present and say, “See? Increasing CO2 and increasing temperature.” Now I have two cherrypicks to your one. Twice as many, so my argument is twice as strong as yours. You agree, right? Or would you accuse me of cherrypicking?
Victor writes: “I most certainly did NOT dismiss aerosol pollution, but devoted considerable attention to that claim both here and on my blog:”
MS: You cherrypicked again, Victor. You selected several regions where you conclude there was little aerosol pollution and you show the temperature decrease in the those regions. You even say the aerosol pollution is localized in industrial regions. But you don’t show how much the aerosol pollution cooled the industrial regions. You ignore it completely. The global average surface temperature is the average of all the data, not just the data you cherrypick. You think your blog shows that aerosol pollution didn’t flatten the global average temperature graph because there was no aerosol pollution in the regions you picked. But you ignored the effect of aerosol pollution in the industrial regions.
Victor writes: “Also: if you had the slightest understanding of correlation you would know that correlation is based on the relation between two datasets and has NOTHING to do with any explanation as to how or why the data in question is what it is, which is another matter entirely.”
I know that, Victor. At no time did you actually compute a correlation. You simply declared there is no correlation.
I almost forgot:
Victor writes: “Also: if you had the slightest understanding of correlation you would know that correlation is based on the relation between two datasets and has NOTHING to do with any explanation as to how or why the data in question is what it is, which is another matter entirely.”
MS: Yes, Victor, “between two datasets,” not between cherrypicked segments of two datasets.
I personally wonder, and I recommend all of you to wonder whether we can employ and trust Victor Grauer of cherry- picking, that is quite an art.
I grew up withn it and our children the same. They climb up and steal like ravens, but they know what they pick. They are up on the branches and up on the ladders before we even can forbid them,
Can we be sure and simply relax and take it for given that he will pick cherries for us at all, which is quite an art, and not just the rotten ones and mostly anything but cherries?
Conscider that critically also from that cunning standpoint or wiewpoint of yours. of you have any.
I feel we need to reign in the bullshit being pumped onto this thread by Victor the Troll.
He is now running amok, citing a handful of crazy denialists academics (indeed, the usual suspects) to support his nonsense, throwing around Anscombe’s quartet to discredit OLS. cherry-picking Fyfe et al (2016) and using it to show you can indeed completely “overstate” the early-2000s warming slowdown, Adding to this, the list of cherry-picked quotes he uses to support his bullshit will be asking for over-time payments and his shoes must be wearing thin dodging all the valid argument presented in-thread, argument showing his grand theorising is entirely crazy.
Enough is enough.
….
Victor Grauer,
The graphic posted 4th May 2022 on this webpage shows what we are discussing (and what you are grossly misrepresenting).
In red is the global temperature record 1880-to-date, GISTEMP LOTI to be precise.
Also graphed (in pink) is global temperature calculated using CO2, not CO2 concentrations but CO2 forcing. Using forcing is more precise than concentration as the relationship between the two is not linear. And it should be useful for you, Victor, as it will accentuate your 1998-2016 hiatus.
Thus the pink trace takes CO2 forcing correlated against GISTEMP using OLS to calculate a wholly-CO2-driven change in global temperature.
(The data is the same as that which gives a straight line when temperature is plotted against CO2 forcing rather than plotted against year, that a graphic form Victor has complained about in the past. I hope he will not find fault in this form of graph although Victor has already up-thread branded such a graphical representation as “misleading”.)
Of course, there is more than just CO2 forcing the climate so I also plot in black the same calculation using the forcings as set out in IPCC AR5 AII Table 1.2. The Volcanic forcings are always a problem for such an analysis as this, so one trace (difficult to see) ignores Volcanic and the other uses a 25% volcanic forcing.
Now Victor, what is your grand theory again?
☻ Victor says there is no correlation with CO2 before 1940 because “CO2 levels remain relatively low. No correlation, obviously”
Okay the CO2 trace is straight while the temperature trace is wobbly, but there is a good correlation for the period 1880-1940. Victor is wrong to say there is no correlation
☻ Victor says there can be no correlation 1940-1979 because CO2 was rising & temperature was falling, or at best not rising. Okay this period begins with the 1940s wobble, but there is exceptionally good correlation post-1947.
☻ Victor says the period 1979-1998 is the only period when there is ever any correlation between temperature & CO2 and post-1998 Victor’s hiatus destroys that correlation. So perhaps we should ask one of the nurses in the lunatic asylum Victor lives-in, just to check he is looking at what he is supposed to be looking at.
It is, of course, valid to point to the pre-1947 wobbles and ask what they are all about. The earlier ones are likely down to assessment of the volcanism prior to 1910. More difficult is the 1940-46 wobble. This is mainly an Ocean phenomenon and perhaps its size is still accentuated by the changes in SST measurement through ww2. But the SLR data does show there is certainly something more than a measurement issue causing the wobble.
But, Victor, you are left clutching a half-a-decade-long wobble to support you grand theory that the IPCC is entirely wrong. It is but a tiny fig leaf you have left. Perhaps you should be spotting that everything else you think you have in hand has fallen down.
It is all very unseemly.
OK, let me try to keep things really simple. Here’s the scattergram supplied by one Robert Grumbine, as reproduced on my blog post: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KfE5s-4q1s4/ScLVic4P0hI/AAAAAAAAAB0/IWBy3fClff8/s320/fig4.jpg Global temperatures are represented on the vertical axis, CO2 levels on the horizontal axis.
Looking carefully at this graph, we see, from the leftmost point to roughly 310 ppm on the horizontal axis little more than a jumble of randomly distributed points. From there till roughly 335 ppm on the horizontal axis, we see a vaguely horizontal pattern. It isn’t until 335 that we begin to see the diagonal rise suggesting a correlation between temperature and CO2 level. The diagonal continues from there until roughly 365 ppm and from there to the end we see a levelling off.
By focusing on the diagonal representing 335 ppm through 365 ppm and ignoring everything else, Grumbine feels confident that he’s pinpointed a decisive correlation, supporting the widely held belief that CO2 levels are driving global temperatures. Looking more closely, however, we see that 335 ppm was not reached until the year 1978, while 365 ppm corresponds to 1998. Thus the “correlation” Grumbine is claiming applies ONLY to the roughly 20 year period from 1978 through 1998. Prior to 1978 and subsequent to 1998 there is no diagonal, thus no sign of correlation. While it might be possible to claim a correlation in strictly statistical terms, as seems clear the very limited correlation represented here has little or no meaning as far as the long term relation between temperature and CO2 is concerned.
In fact Grumbine’s scattergram as a whole strongly suggests that long-term correlation is lacking, since the graph begins with a level of 295 ppm, corresponding with the year 1897 and the diagonal does not begin to appear until 335 ppm, corresponding with the year 1978 Thus we see no sign of correlation from 1897 through 1978, a period of 81 years. And since 365 ppm corresponds with 1998 and Grumbine’s graph ends with 385 ppm, corresponding with 2010, we can tack another 12 years to the 81, leaving a total of 93 years (at least) to the time over which, according to Grumbine, we see no sign of correlation — vs. the 20 years when we do.
Thanks, by the way, to BPL, whose careful tabulation of dates vs. CO2 data I’ve drawn on in the above assessment. https://bartonlevenson.com/CO218502019.html
Uh, Dude. The graph says right in the upper left corner that you get an r^2 of 0.78 to a linear correlation with [CO2]–and that is without even taking the log–which you should do given the physics.
If you don’t see a correlation there YOU ARE BLIND. They need to take away your driver’s license at the very least.
Victor, “Looking carefully at this graph” is not how you calculate correlation.
“In fact Grumbine’s scattergram as a whole strongly suggests that long-term correlation is lacking…”
Nor can you conclude that “long-term correlation is lacking” by feeling “strongly” that a graph “suggests” something to you. Are you using “lacking” here to mean near 0?
Here is how you calculate correlation:
https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/correlation-coefficient-formula/
Of course, this is Victor the Troll commenting here, so the comment is bullshit in its entirety.
Robert Grumbine does not ignore the data below 335ppm (so pre-1978) or above 365ppm (so post-1998). Grumbine uses the full data available back then (CO2 to 2007, not to 2010 as the Troll says) and plots them against HadCRUT3 which defines the 1850 start date (so not the 1897 start-date the Troll says). He finds strong correlations for 1850-2007 & 1959-2007 with the wobbly bit 1850-1958 which Victor objects-to still showing correlation, indeed the same correlation, but not as strongly.
And we can repeat the process today using GISTEMP (so from 1880 to 2021).
The CO2-GISTEMP correlation 1979-1998 (paraded by the Troll as uniquely showing a correlation) is almost identical to that 1880-2021, the difference far smaller than the confidence intervals of the data points being analysed.
Of course, the Troll is bothered by the wobbles although he manages to mistake the close plotting of data points due to the smaller annual increases in CO2 back before 1979 for what he adjudges to be “a jumble of randomly distributed points.” As for the period without wobbles and showing a correlation, there are actually less wobbles (away from the OLS-modeled values) 1960-1978 than in the Troll’s cherry-picked period of 1979-1998, and less wobbles again 1999-2021.
So the Troll is insane attempting to suggest there is “a total of 93 years (at least) to the time over which, according to Grumbine, we see no sign of correlation — vs. the 20 years when we do.” Grumbine’s webpage says otherwise and importantly the data says otherwise. The Troll can’t even count up how many years of data Grumline has used, the Troll being 40% out.
Simply the Troll spouts bullshit.
Victor
If your comparishion method based in 2 datasets tells you that there is no corelation between co2 in the atmosphere and global mean temperature, then compare and check it up by a set of other and indepoendent methods, where you will need 3 at least. Now if they together give another result, then there are reasons to belive that your own comparishion mehod has got a systematic error.
Or what we call a Bias. That must be corrected before you can fully rely on your method and sell it to others. Or dare to set on it and to build further on it.
My first guess is that your very ideas of numeral and graphical datasets is corrupted as such or perhaps unqualified or even both.
I have been in that situation many times and had to examine closer and to correct my thoughts and my methods. Knowledege of the nature accidental and systematic errors and the difference between it and what we can do and not do with that is very basic in everyday life, thus it is also a very basic training. .
Nonsense. This “analysis” is nothing more than an exercise in self-deception–Victor seeing what Victor wants to see.
For instance, the partition of his ‘295-310’ segment (characterized as “a jumble of randomly distributed points”) from the ‘310-335’ ‘segment’ (“a vaguely horizontal pattern”) conveniently ‘erases’ what would otherwise be seen as a warming trend from 295-335. But Victor’s partitioning allows him to disregard the fact that his second segment is pretty clearly warmer than his first, neatly ‘hiding the incline.’
Nor is the supposed ‘leveling off’ of his celebrated hiatus period any more convincing. That partitioning, of course, is no more than the good ol’ cherry-pick of starting with the denialati-celebrated El Nino of 1998. Eliminate that outlier from the scattergram, and there’s a clear warming trend. And of course, there’s no acknowledgement of what we all now know happened post 2010.
Victor’s theme song should be The Boxer. “Still a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.” (And, I’d have to add, accuses others of precisely the same.)
“Lie, la-lie.”
As it looks to me now, Victor Grauer is not a troll, and he is hardly mad either.
He seems criminally sane.
And it looks further like that he is a systematic industrially trained and obedient submittive sales promotion specialized worker with that kind of background training experience and career-plans……. trained to obey to his mission and to ignore- disregard- and give a damn to other and wider horizons than that.
“PERINDE AC CADAVER” it is called. That iseems to be his high training and style.
He is probably an employed and owned worker in the denial industries, ” the Merchants of doubt” or even aspiring for such an employment all the time due to his special heritage, submission, and background.
I see that large social media firms are getting more strict in our days and cleaning up & ex- communicating such activists. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, even Google, and some of it come under stricter EU legislation.
In Russia it is extreemly strict.
Quite surprizingly, Dr. Roy Spencer is also now partly hit by it, for some of his activities and missions being harmful. (See his website)
(Not onloy King Donald Grozny.)
But Spencer has now and then delivered quite valuable essays.
I would say that Victor Grauers activity is now and then harmful to my own interests on areas solidly way off from the climate dispute, because he fights, contaminates and propagates against necessary elementary respect of nature and logics and of scientific orientation and attitudes in common civil life.
It falls under the cathegory of possibly harmful quackery. or black magics.
(Satanism Whitchcraf they called it earlier.)
PS
It is very typical of the Putins that they smash down the iron curtain and never reply or react anymore when faced with this and accused of this,,…..
……….. and publish that they are allways ready for negosiations.
That is dia- lectic materialistic scientific allways to have the upper hand in chosmology martial art progressive sport with black belt.
But it is not polite.
DS.
One characteristic of bullshit–evident in both the Heartland screeds, Weaktor’s obtuse rants and JCM’s self-righteous prattling is heavy reliance on false equivalence. They either downplay the expertise of the climate scientists or overplay their own competence–turning the whole fuck-tussle into a mere difference of opinion.
It’s not a difference of opinion. It is fools, shills and trolls denying the truth.
Shills, I did not know that word and looked after. We say Klakkør from french claqueur.
I did in fact entail some of the same d/o
Today they are also called influencers. Camouflated and perfumed propagandists and sales agents.
It stinks.
Perhaps also paid and organized and trained stupidifiers, a neo-logism from my side.
Ray Ladbury and his peers create a toxic discussion thread, happy to revert back into their comfort zones to re-hash 40 year old concepts in correlation coefficients about CO2 and global temperature curves (is this what modeling is to you? lol). Spinning their wheels in an enforced echo chamber. Entirely tuning out and excluding outsiders. The comments thread rendered practically pointless and represents an embarrassment to the work of climate scientists. The vast majority of scientists who work in the field are interested to engage in frank and honest discussions to advance their science, and to make the problem definition and answers relevant to the issues of society. The discussion thread appears completely disconnected from the realities on the ground, where climate changes and impacts operate on all scales. Broad scales with a sensitivity to CO2 over centuries, and local scales far more sensitive to other factors. The comments thread has no relation to ordinary practicing climate scientists, the vast majority of whom have not fallen into the dismal talking points enforced in the comments here. The discussion thread having been reduced to the talking points on TV, which is about 5% of what’s going on out there. To your great satisfaction, a week of this has been more than enough to gauge the dull and dismissive discussion here. Farewell and good luck to you.
Since the subject came up …
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2022/05/05/correlation-between-co2-climate-forcing-and-temperature/
This is one of those moments, when I think, “Ok, that’s it. That settles it. The correlation is very strong; it is statistically significant, and anyone with normal intelligence (i.e. a 5th grader) will accept the result as scientific knowledge and move on. No need to visit this point again unless something new and strange appears.”
But that’s not what happens. Victor has left the building, apparently, but I doubt he has changed his mind. He will appear again on a new thread and act as if this one never happened.
I shall not mention and stress that point 0f pearls and swines.
But I repeat that rumor of all animals being equal exept pigs, who are more equal than the others.,….
And tend to believe that this is actually where we have him professionally and politically.
I did entail even that earlier. It is higthly and typically trained dictatorship of dilettantism.
It is deeply drilled and trained manners and heritage of those incureable progressives. The bloody KADRE and Führer- class of The People of the the new, rather “scientific” world order.
I have been studying a few suspects at the regular monthly open climate surrealist meetings where the local national worshipful are meeting. Obvious routine and drilled bottom ” socialism” and systematic lacks of orderly higher formation.
But, a way of really hurting that is to tell his high, anonymeous political officer, who pays him for his systematic propaganda in the open media, , that he is actually hurting the credibility of the very mission project.
Wherefore his small salaries should be ended and that money be re- directed for gentle gifts to more worthy needy.
Believe it or not, I have managed to stop and to break down incureable progressive longtime agent missionaries on the free market by that argument before
Hr. Tamino
I have looked into your reference.
Ant I am able to see that the CO2- curve has got a long bump that can be related to WW2, its beginning and consequenses.. Only that it must be examined in terms of safe data for possible and plausible burning of fossile fuels. Maybe the change from coal over to oil and gas- products in theese years also mean a lot. Heavy transport on land and at sea changed from coal to diesel in theese years.
I thought and I wrote before that it was a heap, the hot or warm late 30ies. But your curve up to 1940 looks quite harmonic with a break in 2nd derivative the acceleration right at the outbreak o9f WW2.
Then we see another bump due to Jelzin and the breakdown of the soviet union. Also clearly seen in the Keeling curve. That together looks antropogene.
The issues raised in my previous post are perfectly legitimate. You may disagree with certain details, timings, etc. and prefer to reject my conclusion – I have no problem with that — but characterizing my analysis as “an obtuse rant” or “bullshit” says more about your “obtuseness” than mine.
I’m sorry but I must insist on the difference between a meaningful correlation and one that, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. The value of a strictly statistical determination has been convincingly questioned by statistician Francis Anscombe, whose “Anscombe’s Quartet” I’ve linked us to in an earlier post. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Anscombe%27s_quartet_3.svg/650px-Anscombe%27s_quartet_3.svg.png NB: all four very different sets have the same r square value of .816. According to the Wikipedia article on correlation, “these examples indicate that the correlation coefficient, as a summary statistic, cannot replace visual examination of the data.” According to another Wikipedia article devoted exclusively to Anscombe’s Quartet, the examples “were constructed in 1973 by the statistician Francis Anscombe to demonstrate both the importance of graphing data when analyzing it, and the effect of outliers and other influential observations on statistical properties. He described the article as being intended to counter the impression among statisticians that “numerical calculations are exact, but graphs are rough.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
As I see it, the analysis provided by Grumbine is a perfect example of the sort of problem noted by Anscombe. While the r2 value is relatively high, it appears to have been achieved largely due to the influence of an outlier, the relatively brief period from 1979-1998 when CO2 levels and global temperatures rose simultaneously. The scattergram provided by Grumbine is also deceptive because the same 20 years dominates its overall length, due to the wide range of CO2 levels measured during that period.
As I see it, the data points appearing in the lower leftmost corner, roughly up to the 300 ppm mark, are a hopeless jumble. From ca 300 to ca 310 we see a sharp rise, no doubt reflecting the rise in temperatures lasting until ca 1940. From there until 335 ppm, corresponding (according to the table provided by BPL) to the year 1978, I see an essentially horizontal pattern, reflecting the period from the mid 40s to the late 70s when temperatures on the whole remained fairly steady. It isn’t until ca 335 that a diagonal pattern appears, reflecting the clear correlation we see during the 20 year period where temperature and CO2 levels rose together. As I see it, the meaning of all this collected data becomes apparent ONLY when we take the temporal relations into account — something a strictly statistical analysis fails to register.
That’s how I see it in any case. I did not, of course, expect others posting here to agree with my assessment and that’s OK. But please don’t accuse me of falsifying the data or playing some kind of cheap trick.
Victor writes: “I’m sorry but I must insist on the difference between a meaningful correlation and one that, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. The value of a strictly statistical determination has been convincingly questioned by statistician Francis Anscombe,”
The correlation isn’t “strictly statistical,” Victor. CO2 rises, and then temperature rises. That’s meaningful. We know the physics of greenhouse gases. We know what increase in temperature to expect for an increase in CO2. We see the expected increase in temperature when we see the increase in CO2. That’s meaningful. Nor is this the only time period we have to work with. We have all the paleoclimate data.
Weaktor, all you are saying is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. That is why Tamino, in addition to looking at the r-squared also looks at the statistical significance of the result. You did know that he is a professional statistician, didn’t you?
And wait! Don’t answer yet. There is also a physical mechanism that explains the correlation. When that happens, you can take it to the bank. And this is why you sound like an idiot when you bring up your piddly-shit little objections based on nothing but your own stubborn lack of understanding.
So let’s have a laugh at the abilities of Victor the Troll in reading the Wikkithing page on Ascombe’s Quartet, it be extremely unlikely that the blithering fool did any more than that.
The four sets of data presented by Anscombe all have the same outcome from OLS (including an R-sq of 66% and not 81.6% as Victor say). The point of Ascombe’s Quartet is to demonstrate that an OLS does need the data graphing-out because the result may not be, as in Anscombe’s first example, a simple linear relationship.
It could as in his second example hid a stronger quadratic relationship, or as in the third example, could show a different yet stronger linear relationship hidden by the presence of an outling data point, or could return the statistical result on the strength solely of a single data point as the remaining data points have an identical X-value so could not alone show any correlation.
Anscombe (1973) is certainly not saying correlation should be thrown under the bus. He is saying that only a fool would rely in it without examining what the data looks like graphed out.
This is not uncommon advice.
And conversely, only a blithering fool like Victor the Troll would then throw correlation under the bus and spout arrant nonsense.
Victor, with his blunderful logic declares the period (indeed brief period) 1979-98 to be “an outlier”, a term he has picked up from the Wikkithing page without understanding what it means. Of course it is a simple process extracting these 1979-98 data-points from the regression to see if they are “outliers” that are “largely” responsible for Grumbine’s result.
And what will we see?
Golly!! Will Victor be shown to be speaking a modicum of sense for once?
Of course not. The HadCRUT3 & CO2 data I have to hand are not exactly that use by Grumbine fourteen years ago but near enough. The removal of the period 1979-98 from the correlation shifts it from +0.0086ºC/ppmCO2 (+/-0.008 for 2sd) to +0.0084ºC/ppmCO2, a change of just +0.0002ºC/ppmCO2.
So Victor’s “outlier” is, not as moron Victor insists, “largely” responsible for the result. It is entirely insignificant!!!
Victor is correct in one respect. He does not “expect others posting here to agree with (his) assessment” although he is flat wrong to think he has dodged the evidentially-based accusations of his employing falsification & cheap (but obvious) tricks.
MA Rodger
Youur last section, “Victor is correct in one respect…… cheap but obvious tricks.”
……sustains what I suspect and have insinuated or suggested officiaqlly about him.
He feels safe and he can give a damn to whether others posting here agree with him because of that ownership and sponsorship. The same has been seen to be the case here with those incureable and eternal Cominform and Comintern KADRE missionaries who had their constant small, secret salaries per year in US dollars from an automatic, secret machine inside Krjeml. If only they showed active a bit in their local western newspapers and could show to repetition of the old, orthodox scientific soviet paroles. However nostalgic.
Such arrangements and personal ownerships are quite thinkable in the case of “Merchants of doubt” and Thinktank inside of Chateau Heartland in Michigan also.
I call that Arbeiter und Bauernfakultät in Greifswald with patent from Leningrad. A very constant and stable nostalgic arrangement for many many years , With roots and origine and securiy military backup from behind the iron curtain, thus immune to arguments. And labeling itself “Sceptic” also.
The paralels are many.
V: I’m sorry but I must insist on the difference between a meaningful correlation and one that, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless.
J: I’m sorry, but previously, you’ve referred to this as “no correlation.” In scientific terms, that’s quite different from a “meaningless correlation.” It’s equivalent to the difference between saying 1 +1 doesn’t equal 2 and saying that 1 +1 = 2, but that doesn’t mean anything. This is supposed to be a scientific discussion, not one where you pick any definition that pleases you for “correlation.” When you do that, it undermines the rest of your argument, although it does illustrate how pseudoscience can be propagated.
V: The value of a strictly statistical determination has been convincingly questioned by statistician Francis Anscombe…
J: I looked at Anscombe’s examples. Your procedure amounts to taking subsets of data within example 1 to show that there isn’t a correlation. You might as well be arguing that example 1 is meaningless because the slope is steeply upward as x rises from 4 and 9, and then it flattens out to 14.
V: As I see it, the meaning of all this collected data becomes apparent ONLY when we take the temporal relations into account — something a strictly statistical analysis fails to register.
J: As I see it, you switched from talking about correlation – which you agreed involves a relation between two data sets – to talking about TIME. That’s a third variable. If you bring it into the discussion, then you need to show that you’re using it properly. You aren’t. Choosing subsets of the data based on time, but eliminating others, is cherry picking.
V: I’m sorry but I must insist on the difference between a meaningful correlation and one that, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless.
BPL: Insist all you want. You’re still wrong.
The warming effect of CO2 doesn’t depend on statistics, it proceeds from radiation physics, which you resolutely ignore. The statistical correlation is only confirming evidence, and since it was predicted in advance, extremely strong confirming evidence.
For those other than our resident trolls, anyone having trouble with what “proportion of variance accounted for” means, here is a quickie R script that runs on freely-available base-R which gives a very basic intro to the idea…
———————————–
# Let’s try two random sample of 40,000 trials
n = 40000
set.seed = 123L
S1 = sample.int(2,n, replace=TRUE)-1
S2 = sample.int(2,n, replace=TRUE)-1
cor(S1, S2, method = “pearson”)
# Should be near zero
# Now let’s try an additive model where we replace a 21.6% proportion of the values
# in Sample 2 with the corresponding value from Sample 1. That is, S2 will predict 21.6%
# of the values perfectly and they therefore correlate 1 but the remaining 78.4% proportion
# of values are predicted randomly and will correlate near zero.
S2_rev = S2
S2_rev[1:trunc(n*.216)] = S1[1:trunc(n*.216)]
cor(S1,S2_rev, method = “pearson”)
# We should see a value near.216 now
# NOTE: We could have predicted ANY 21.6% portion of values or, as is actually more “normal” in
# the real world, constructed linear combinations (CO2 here) to partially predict such that we are correct #21.6% of the time on average.
————————————–
Kevin McKinney:
“the partition of his ‘295-310’ segment (characterized as “a jumble of randomly distributed points”) from the ‘310-335’ ‘segment’ (“a vaguely horizontal pattern”) conveniently ‘erases’ what would otherwise be seen as a warming trend from 295-335.”
V: There was no such warming trend. From 295-300 we do indeed see a shapeless jumble. From 300 – 310 ppm we see a steep rise, corresponding to the well-known temperature rise from 1910-1940. From 310-335 we see a largely horizontal distribution, reflecting the well-known mid-century hiatus from ca 1940-ca 1978. It’s only after the late 70s that we see a warming trend, coupled with a rise in CO2 levels, reflected in the strong diagonal from 335-365, the ONLY period where a diagonal appears.
KM: Nor is the supposed ‘leveling off’ of his celebrated hiatus period any more convincing. That partitioning, of course, is no more than the good ol’ cherry-pick of starting with the denialati-celebrated El Nino of 1998. Eliminate that outlier from the scattergram, and there’s a clear warming trend. And of course, there’s no acknowledgement of what we all now know happened post 2010.
V: While the data point for the year 1998 reflects a temperature surge, due most likely to El Nino, the following data points are independent and do NOT reveal any warming trend. The last 7 data points clearly represent the beginnings of what is now known as the hiatus. As for what happened after 2010 we have a very informative scattergram provided by one Danley Wolfe, covering 1999-2015: https://archive.ph/VP5ZZ/4450888313a8e9a35c9319dca60c624cb84d9998 His data is drawn from NASA GISS global mean temperature and Mauna Loa/Keeling CO2.
Wolfe’s complete analysis is available here: https://archive.ph/VP5ZZ An excerpt:
“A first order fit of this data yields “an equation” relating temperature to (only) CO2, viz. T = .0024 * CO2 + 13.648; with an R-squared value = 0.033. . . .
The R squared of 0.033 prima facie tells you this correlation is, well … just meaningless. Therefore, using a 1st order regression is meaningless, as is any calculated climate sensitivity. The spread of data indicated by the standard deviation vs. min-max spread of the data shows the data are simply a scatter, no more.”
.033 would be on the low end for a casino, but even so, a European roulette game has even lower predictable winnings for the house (.027). Yet Rick’s bar did quite well regardless.
Meaningless? Not to their wallets, certainly.
OMG, someone actually dredged up that hilarious Danley Wolfe “analysis” from the Comedy Classics vault at WUWT, wherein monthly (!) CO2 are plotted without removing the well-known strong seasonal variation?
At the time of “publication”, the howlers were summarized at HotWhopper:
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/04/danley-wolf-continues-long-drawn-out.html
Yes. “Look, all the idiots agree with me,” isn’t quite the Gotcha Weaktor thinks it is.
V: While the data point for the year 1998 reflects a temperature surge, due most likely to El Nino, the following data points are independent and do NOT reveal any warming trend. The last 7 data points clearly represent the beginnings of what is now known as the hiatus.
J: Cherry picking 1998 doesn’t help your argument. If the 7 years afterward are truly independent, and there is no relationship between temperature and CO2, the remarkable thing is that the temperatures STAY ELEVATED compared to pre-1998. It’s like saying that there’s nothing unusual about Wile E Coyote staying elevated after he runs off the end of the cliff. When he realizes that he’s “independent” of the ground, he plummets. Why do temperatures fluctuate, but keep going up instead of plummeting, since you’re telling us that CO2 isn’t holding them up? You also neglect to bring the data set up to the present. As the global temperature keeps rising, the correlation strengthens further.
V: As for what happened after 2010 we have a very informative scattergram provided by one Danley Wolfe, covering 1999-2015:
J: How convenient of Wolfe and you to start in the cool period right after one big El Nino, and then cut it off just before the next one. Sampling monthly is even more egregious, since there is an annual CO2 cycle, and correlation is a totally misleading tool for examining cyclic behavior. This illustrates the improper use of time as a third variable, as I mentioned above. It is indeed very informative, but in the context of propagating misinformation – or perhaps disinformation.
V: There was no such warming trend. From 295-300 we do indeed see a shapeless jumble.
BPL: Stop cherry=picking, Victor. You have to use ALL the data points, not just the ones you like.
Just more of the same self-delusion. The first response merely reiterates the same illegitimate, unjustified partitioning. (Actually, that’s the primary method of the whole sorry screed–cherry-pick segments in order to dismiss them, then dismiss the remnant because it’s ‘just a small proportion’ of the timeline.)
The second is just wrong–what I had said was correct.
The third extends the record by a mere 5 years, of the last 12. And to add insult, it analyzes a span already known to be too short. Come to think of, that ‘s likely *exactly* why everything after 2015 gets ignored.
The highly emotional nature of almost all the responses to skeptical posts on this forum, replete with nasty personal attacks and juvenile name-calling, is consistent with the ravings of a cult as opposed to rational scientific debate. I’ve been here long enough to not be surprised by such nonsense, more consistent with the “arguments” of crackpots than rational thinkers.
The HotWhopper response to Wolfe’s analysis (written by “a sixties-something woman with an interest in climate science” and a background in management), filled with empty rhetoric and ridicule, is a classic example. The animated gif she presents is based on a carefully selected cherry pick, where two obvious outliers clearly associated with the preceding temperature rise distort both the scattergram and the statistics — an excellent example of why Anscombe’s quartet is so important. The following 14 data points are perfectly consistent with Wolfe’s result.
As for Wolfe’s jaded view of the IPCC, it’s clearly one-sided and I won’t attempt to defend it — but as should be clear to any unbiased observer his scattergram is right on.
I doubt that we’re thinking of the same thing, but I fully agree that Danley Wolfe’s scatterplot is “right on”.
It is a right-on demonstration of what happens if you take two sets of data — both of which contain a well-known short-term noise component that must be removed by averaging before doing any comparison — and construct a scatterplot without removing the noise. The result would be quite startling if it DIDN’T look like a shotgun blast.
Victor says:
And in the very next sentence adds:
Hypocrite much? At this point Victor can hardly be less that “sixty-something” himself, and betrays no more than “an interest in climate science.” Management, or musicology? Let’s call that one a wash. Of course, Victor does present as male, so there’s that.
Then we get this mansplanation:
Uh, dude, that’s the same span select by Wolfe–you know, your source? If it’s a cherry-pick, that’s not on Sou.
As for Victor’s other rebuttals of the article’s numerous specific criticisms–oh wait, there aren’t any. I guess those thousand or so words stand unaddressed.
Victor the Troll,
You do not appear to understand that the period quoted by Wolfe is Jan 1999 through to March 2015 which will provide 16 annual data points (not 14) and thus the two data points you complain about being used within the hotwhopper item are there because the ridiculous Wolfe (which you describe as “right on”) says he uses that data, abet in a monthly form.
Of course being a bare-faced liar, Wolfe actually uses only the period Nov 2000 to Mar 2015 to obtain his scattering on the graph (while perhaps using only Dec 2000 to Mar 2015 in his regression).
And Victor, I think you misunderstand Anscombe. The first of his quartet-of-examples behaves exactly as you would expect a regression to behave. It uncovers a relationship between a confusing scatter of data points and thus identifies two-thirds of the variations in Y as being relative to X.
And correlation can be even more cleverer than that example. Thus the scatter of data points cherry-picked by the outrageously dishonest Wolfe can be show to be partly due to a linear relationship between Temp & CO2 even though this relationship represents only 3% of the scatter.
Of course Wolfe makes no effort to eliminate the noisy scatter (as the reference he makes to a statistical analysis advises should be done) and much of the noisy scatter presented by Wolfe is readily addressed. If he had, he would have found the annual CO2 cycle is responsible for a quarter of the scatter and with a similar amount resulting from the month-to-month temperature fluctuations. Likewise, the inept Wolfe ignores the remaining fluctuations which too great to get a sensible handle on the value of the CO2-Temp relationship using such a short run of data, this even though there is ample data to overcome this problem, he ignores it, as the hotwhopper item illustrates.
But what should we expect? This wondrous Danley Wolfe you bring here to boldly tell us all what-for is a grade-1 listed liar.
He is a marionette of some kind. I try and psychoanalyze and identify rather his owner.
I try and translate Sprellemann. from verbum sprelle, and man. Sprelle, german spratteln. There you may have it Sprats. And Sprett. uncoordiunated shiverinbg and jumping.
Such as the hanged up mechanical marionettes.
Thus, who owns and controls and pay him?
Putin also has got his intelligence service and his balanced, scientific propaganda comittee.
spilgard says:
OMG, someone actually dredged up that hilarious Danley Wolfe “analysis” from the Comedy Classics vault at WUWT, wherein monthly (!) CO2 are plotted without removing the well-known strong seasonal variation?
V: Too little data can be a problem for sure. Until now I’ve never heard of anyone complain about too much. :-)
” I`ve never heard of anyone complain about too much”
The quality of Data and the relevance of Data, Genosse.,
I would not employ Victor for cherrypicking, because Cherrypicking is quite an art that needs higher formation and science.
PS
I had to adjust little Aidan on it, who went up on the ladder before it could be forbidden. And said, you will also need a large bag such one that I am wearing. Then, by long arms you will get it but take a look, they must be good from both sides and you must not break any branches.
It is quite an art and quite a science you see, and not for rabid besserwissers and dilettants- DS.
Re. “Too little data can be a problem for sure. Until now I’ve never heard of anyone complain about too much. :-)”
And here we come to V’s absolute and fundamental ignorance of statistics….
FYI, V, uh, er, the whole _point_ of statistics is to throw away most of the data–the error portion and to extract only the signal. Good Lord! It’s why we have stats in the first place. At base, statistics as a field is the very development and application of tools to deal with “too much data”.
That would be in contrast to V’s approach of attempting to throw away as much of the trend portion and to maximize the error (non)signal. in order to “conclude” denialism.
I wonder when the side of my head will stop hurting?
Ladies and gentlemen
On the modern demarcation problem and on science and bullshit
I come to think that the quality of what we can focus on, discuss, and have in mind, dream of, is perhaps the most important educatintg and diciplinary order. because:
Old rumors say that when the crib is empty, the horses will bite.
and
Idleness is the root of all evil.
and that 5 men having to lift and moove a stone weighing 2 tons hardly discuss cooperation. The obvious task and its necessity gives the order and behaviours. And it extinguishes all moral & political discussions of rules and regulations of behaviours.
Let me also suggest the Causa finale cathegory of causes. The purpose and goal of it that causes the work and the behaviours and the cooperation. What is it for? What is the meaning and purpose of it?
It is also the LOGOS- aspect, the sense and the reason.
This all together should mean that the subject and task and content of our discussions should be pointed at and defined sharper and better.
Then What shall we do with the drunken sailors?
The pillary, the borehole and the crankshaft must also be in order.
MA Rodger says:
that only a fool would rely in it without examining what the data looks like graphed out.
This is not uncommon advice.
And conversely, only a blithering fool like Victor the Troll would then throw correlation under the bus and spout arrant nonsense.
V: Is it lack of reading skills, monumental obtuseness or simple dishonesty that would lead you to accuse me of wanting to “throw correlation under the bus”? Really MAR, you need to get a grip.
MAR: The HadCRUT3 & CO2 data I have to hand are not exactly that use by Grumbine fourteen years ago but near enough. The removal of the period 1979-98 from the correlation shifts it from +0.0086ºC/ppmCO2 (+/-0.008 for 2sd) to +0.0084ºC/ppmCO2, a change of just +0.0002ºC/ppmCO2.
So Victor’s “outlier” is, not as moron Victor insists, “largely” responsible for the result. It is entirely insignificant!!!
V: This totally absurd claim is typical of the obtuseness I see emanating from just about every boneheaded response I’m seeing on this thread. Do you actually know how to read a scattergram? The period in question is associated with the ONLY diagonal appearing anywhere in Grumbine’s graph. Since the presence of a diagonal is the signal that a correlation may be present, if you eliminate that period, there is NO longer any evidence of a correlation whatsoever. You can juggle the numbers all you like, but that won’t make Grumbine’s effort any more convincing.
There does appear to be an exceedingly large dose of the “absurd” being presented here.
But I’m pretty sure I can work out why.
Victor the Troll complains here that I accused him up-thread of wanting to “throw correlation under the bus.”
Then in the next breath here he gets so upset with the findings from a correlation analysis also up-thread that he “throws the correlation under the bus” and suggests I don’t know “how to read a scattergram.”
According to poor Victor, the graphic by Grumbine plotting HadCRUT3 against CO2 1850-2007 has only one period (which Victor calls “the period in question” meaning his cherry-picked period 1979-98) which is “associated with the ONLY diagonal appearing anywhere in Grumbine’s graph.” And then we learn that it is “the presence of a diagonal (which) is the signal that a correlation may be present,” So “if you eliminate that period, there is NO longer any evidence of a correlation whatsoever.”
Apparently I “can juggle the numbers all you like, but that won’t make Grumbine’s effort any more convincing.”
Given pretty-much all the data sits happily on Grumbine’s “diagonal” I do agree that I would be hard pushed to “make Grumbine’s effort any more convincing.”
And as I described up-thread, the result doesn’t change if we ignore totally “the period in question” so it is way way beyond my comprehension why anybody but a deluded fool would try to convince the world there would then be “NO longer any evidence of a correlation whatsoever” if I were to “eliminate that period.”
Luckily I consider Victor the Troll to be nought but a deluded fool.
V: Since the presence of a diagonal is the signal that a correlation may be present, if you eliminate that period, there is NO longer any evidence of a correlation whatsoever.
BPL: But you’re not justified in removing that period, Victor. You can’t simply chose the evidence you want and ignore the rest. We’ve been telling you that for years.
The quote from MAR in my previous post got truncated accidentally. Here it is in full:
Anscombe (1973) is certainly not saying correlation should be thrown under the bus. He is saying that only a fool would rely in it without examining what the data looks like graphed out.
This is not uncommon advice.
And conversely, only a blithering fool like Victor the Troll would then throw correlation under the bus and spout arrant nonsense.
John Pollack says:
Cherry picking 1998 doesn’t help your argument. If the 7 years afterward are truly independent, and there is no relationship between temperature and CO2, the remarkable thing is that the temperatures STAY ELEVATED compared to pre-1998.
V: Yes they do. They stay elevated while CO2 levels continue to soar. Why that is no one can say. But obviously there is no longer any sign of correlation, which is the topic of conversation here, no?
JP: You also neglect to bring the data set up to the present. As the global temperature keeps rising, the correlation strengthens further.
V: To reveal a long-term correlation a scattergram must display at least a roughly diagonal image throughout the entire period in question, not just in bits and pieces. A diagonal representing 20 years (out of ca. 130) followed by a horizontal representing 17 years followed by another diagonal representing 6 or 7 years doesn’t cut it.
Victor writes: “They [temperatures] stay elevated while CO2 levels continue to soar. Why that is no one can say.”
No, Victor! We can say, and it has been said. El Nino and La Nina are the names of periodic phenomena where either more heat goes into the ocean (La Nina) or more heat comes out of the ocean (El Nino). After the 1998 El Nino during which the ocean released a lot of energy, the ocean began absorbing more energy again, so the global average temperature rise slowed while CO2 rise increased.
Victor writes: “To reveal a long-term correlation a scattergram must display at least a roughly diagonal image throughout the entire period in question,”
Tamino computed the correlation and its statistical significance, but you are still ignoring those actual computations. You can’t refute them with your scattergram when the physical cause of the high correlation is known.
V: To reveal a long-term correlation a scattergram must display at least a roughly diagonal image throughout the entire period in question, not just in bits and pieces.
BPL: No, Victor, you’re making stuff up again. That’s not how correlation works. You can’t choose the bits and pieces you want and throw out the rest. You have to use the whole dataset. When will you learn?
When the Big Rock Candy Mountain comes to Dunsinane?
Victor
You display and publish and tell that you are not able to read graphs and maps.
Q: How does it feel every time when you are caught and seen and photoraphed and pointed at and told about with your pants down?
Carbomantanus. You are correct on this. Victor cant read graphs and scatterplots. Gave him a link to a guide to understanding scatterplots years ago. Hasn’t made a difference.
The grumbine scatterplot he thinks doesn’t show a correlation between CO2 and warming does show a good correlation, although obviously not a perfect correlation. Its distribution of dots is about half way between the first two examples quoted below:
https://chartio.com/learn/charts/what-is-a-scatter-plot/#:~:text=A%20scatter%20plot%20(aka%20scatter,to%20observe%20relationships%20between%20variables.
Victor is politically motivated as you suggested upthread. IMHO he is a left leaning concern troll. He has stated he leans left and is worried about the costs of mitigating climate change, especially on poor people and he’s been very critical of mitigation proposals. He might be going further to dismiss the climate science.
I am not criticising his left leaning views as such, or saying some of the issues he raises arent worthy of comment. Its just that the way he evaluates this correlation issue is wrong. Even I can see this as a relative lay person, having only done very basic stats. at university level.
Nigel, re: Weaktor: “IMHO he is a left leaning concern troll. He has stated he leans left and is worried about the costs of mitigating climate change, ”
A classic example of the fallacy of argument from consequences.. Weaktor is also a narcissist. He loves to have attention heaped on him by people who should be smarter than him–e.g. almost everyone.
Ray Ladbury. Yes Victor seems to crave attention to an unusual degree. I would say he might possibly have NPD, and I have considered that myself, but the classic symptom list doesn’t seem fit him all that well (eg Mayo clinic). I think he’s just unusually stubborn:
https://hbr.org/2015/05/signs-that-youre-being-too-stubborn
https://www.psychmechanics.com/why-are-people-stubborn/
https://www.powerofpositivity.com/stubborn-person-traits-according-psychology/
Please excuse my morbid fascination. I did some psych. papers at university just to get some extra credits, and i have been interested in this stuff ever since.
V: They (temperatures) remain elevated while CO2 levels soar. Why that is, no one can say.
J: Many have said. Carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) have the overall effect of warming surface temperatures. But they are not the whole story. The average surface temperature can fluctuate up or down a few tenths of a degree due to other factors, and those fluctuations can persist for a while because of the thermal inertia of the climate system, especially the oceans. However, we now have measurements of the heat accumulating in the oceans, as well as the atmosphere. Without the action of greenhouse gases, there is no reason for temperatures to stay elevated. They should drop toward the old normal. Instead, they flatten out for a while after a strong El Nino (when some stored heat comes out of the ocean for a while) and then rise again.
V: But obviously there is no longer any sign of correlation, which is the topic of conversation here, no?
J: Yes, it’s the topic. But you’re wrong about the correlation. You really need to do the math to see how it works. Many of us have. Positive correlation means that when CO2 is high, so is temperature. Adding more years when both are high increases the correlation, overall. That’s the math. If you don’t like it, you need a different measure than correlation.
V: To reveal a long-term correlation a scattergram must display at least a roughly diagonal image throughout the entire period in question, not just in bits and pieces.
J: That’s why it’s important to use the whole record, not dissect it into bits and pieces as you’re doing. You’re insisting that every cherry-picked piece should display roughly the same slope. Using that procedure would allow you to falsely negate any data set with statistical noise in it. It’s a worthless exercise, because you can always do it to negate a correlation that you don’t like, even if it’s a valid one. It’s up to how you pick your cherries. You’ll always be able to find some in the noise, whether they’re significant or not.
JCM: “Ray Ladbury and his peers create a toxic discussion thread, happy to revert back into their comfort zones to re-hash 40 year old concepts in correlation coefficients about CO2 and global temperature curves (is this what modeling is to you? lol). Spinning their wheels in an enforced echo chamber. Entirely tuning out and excluding outsiders. The comments thread rendered practically pointless and represents an embarrassment to the work of climate scientists.”
V: No comment. JCM’s statement speaks for itself.
Kevin McKinney:
“the partition of his ‘295-310’ segment (characterized as “a jumble of randomly distributed points”) from the ‘310-335’ ‘segment’ (“a vaguely horizontal pattern”) conveniently ‘erases’ what would otherwise be seen as a warming trend from 295-335.”
v: According to BPL’s table, 295 ppm corresponds to the year 1897. 335 to the year 1978. So let’s take a look at the data: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2020_Global_Time_Series-1.png
Do you see a warming trend between those two years? What I see is a warming trend from ca. 1910 to 1940, followed by a clear period of NO trend until ca. 1978. And yes, 1978 was warmer than 1897. Apparently that’s your idea of a trend, which says a lot about your competence. Moreover, the scattergram is designed to display evidence of correlation, not simply temperature data.
MARodger:
He [Grumbine] finds strong correlations for 1850-2007 & 1959-2007 with the wobbly bit 1850-1958 which Victor objects-to still showing correlation, indeed the same correlation, but not as strongly. And we can repeat the process today using GISTEMP (so from 1880 to 2021).
V: MAR, like Kevin, seems incapable of distinguishing a correlation from a simple difference in temperature between two dates. If Grumbine “finds strong correlations for 1850-2007 & 1959-2007” and 1880 to 2021 that certainly does NOT show up on his scattergram.
MAR: The CO2-GISTEMP correlation 1979-1998 (paraded by the Troll as uniquely showing a correlation) is almost identical to that 1880-2021, the difference far smaller than the confidence intervals of the data points being analysed.
V: Once again: there is NOTHING in Grumbine’s scattergram suggesting a correlation between 1880 and 2021.
Martin Smith:
“The correlation isn’t “strictly statistical,” Victor. CO2 rises, and then temperature rises. That’s meaningful. We know the physics of greenhouse gases. We know what increase in temperature to expect for an increase in CO2. We see the expected increase in temperature when we see the increase in CO2. That’s meaningful.
V: It would be meaningful if it were borne out by the evidence. But it’s not. The clearest example of this is the period 1940 through the late 70s, when CO2 levels rose significantly while temperatures didn’t rise at all.
MS: Victor writes: “They [temperatures] stay elevated while CO2 levels continue to soar. Why that is no one can say.”
No, Victor! We can say, and it has been said. El Nino and La Nina are the names of periodic phenomena where either more heat goes into the ocean (La Nina) or more heat comes out of the ocean (El Nino). After the 1998 El Nino during which the ocean released a lot of energy, the ocean began absorbing more energy again, so the global average temperature rise slowed while CO2 rise increased.
V: There is no reference to El Nino or La NIna in Grumbine’s scattergram. Nor is there any reference to the ocean absorbing any energy. That’s an assumption, by the way, not a fact. I was analyzing the data displayed on Grumbine’s graph, not attempting to account for why those numbers are what they are. And as far as an explanation is concerned, diversion of heat into the ocean is only one of a great many different attempts to explain the “hiatus” away.
spilgard says:
I doubt that we’re thinking of the same thing, but I fully agree that Danley Wolfe’s scatterplot is “right on”.
It is a right-on demonstration of what happens if you take two sets of data — both of which contain a well-known short-term noise component that must be removed by averaging before doing any comparison — and construct a scatterplot without removing the noise. The result would be quite startling if it DIDN’T look like a shotgun blast.
V: Seasonal variation is NOT noise. Wolfe chose the monthly record most likely because that was what he found in the database. Adjusting for it would in any case make no significant difference. Typical nitpicking.
More nitpicking, this time from John Pollack:
Carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) have the overall effect of warming surface temperatures. But they are not the whole story. The average surface temperature can fluctuate up or down a few tenths of a degree due to other factors, and those fluctuations can persist for a while because of the thermal inertia of the climate system, especially the oceans. However, we now have measurements of the heat accumulating in the oceans, blah blah blah
V: Let me say it once again: I was analyzing the data displayed on Grumbine’s graph, not attempting to account for why those numbers are what they are. And as far as an explanation is concerned, diversion of heat into the ocean is only one of a great many different attempts to explain the “hiatus” away.
JP: That’s why it’s important to use the whole record, not dissect it into bits and pieces as you’re doing. You’re insisting that every cherry-picked piece should display roughly the same slope.
V: Sigh . . . I did use the whole record. The so-called “correlation” was based on Grumbine’s cherry pick, not mine.
And here we have V violating the new policies mere hours after they have been put in place. Specifically: “To encourage people to post less often, but more substantively, we will limit commenters to one comment a day (so make it count!). Additionally, we will try to enforce a ‘one comment, one point’ rule to avoid people just cramming ten comments into one. ”
And here we have a post with 9 points…
Or, possibly the troll thinks that cramming “only” 9 comments into one is OK?
A suggestion learned over the course of a lifetime: NEVER promulgate a rule which you are not willing to enforce. It’s worse than useless to do so.
JCM: …
V: …
Kevin McKinney:…
v: …
MARodger: …
V: …
MAR:…
V: …
Martin Smith:…
V: …
MS: …
V: …
spilgard says: …
V: …
More nitpicking, this time from John Pollack:
…
V: …
JP: …
V:…
jgnfld,
I posed the question for the moderators as to whether the rules were universal or only applied to the UV thread… no answer, so I don’t know if each individual is allowed one comment per day for the entire blog, or one per day per thread, or whether your complaint is appropriate if it is only UV.
And I think I made a comment to you on the other thread that the problem isn’t Victor but all the people that he apparently “owns”… who just have to reply! even though it’s the same silliness, repeated over and over.
I understand that Victor is getting what he wants, but I haven’t figured out what you and the other puppets are getting. (And I know you personally do exercise some restraint.)
Why respond at all? If you think the moderators should do something about Victor, just let the thread have no content other than his. See how that goes.
Since asking hasn’t gotten a response, yet, I guess this will be a test: My 2nd post for this day, but my first for this topic today.
As I’ve long said, the effectiveness of fighting climate trolls is long past. Once the social wave has crested, there is no utility in doing so except one-on-one to help a person, or group, in a face-to-face setting. As public policy, as this site should be considered to be, the diminishing returns curve is very far past peak.
No, people, tilting at decrepit, broken down windmills is not a good use of your time.
Pretty much all the people complaining about others posting too much spend thousands of words, and posts, on Victor while completely missing the hypocrisy.
One thing the new rules should do is end or mostly derail that freight train of wasted words.
Duty Calls.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png
Social media addictive adrenaline response?
Maybe it’s time to roll up the pushers and give the junkies a chance to take their lives back.
Victor the Troll’s collected responses here do seem to demonstrate a reliance on the 2009 analysis by Robert Grumbine as the Troll insists he is “analyzing the data displayed on Grumbine’s graph” (aka ‘scattergram’) and strong correlation “certainly does NOT show up on his scattergram.” And “moreover, the scattergram is designed to display evidence of correlation”, apparently.
So there’s no arguing with that. Conclusions set in concrete.
Unless perhaps that Grumbine anlysis is repeated to allow the veracity of the troll’s statements to to be analysed.
Robert Grumbine’s analysis dates to 2009 but we can use the available HadCRUT3 and CO2 data to re-create it. The data used isn’t exactly the same, evidently, but different versions of early CO2 numbers and the adjustments to the published HadCRUT3 since Gumbine’s analysis will not make a significant difference for any repeat analysis.
And what do we find?
Do we find it is as the troll says? Is it that only for the 20-years 1979-98 of which we can say “During that period they (CO2 & temp) were indeed correlated.”? Is the rest of it as it should be; devoid of any such correlation?
Here is posted (14th May 2022) the Grumbine scattergram. The red data points are those 1979-98.
And what we find is the data entirely misbehaving. Contrary to Victor’s demands, the correlation for the entire data is not absent as it is supposed to be, but strongly present.
As everybody knows this data is forbidden to correlate together outside 1979-98, but there is no mistake.
Removing the data for period 1979-98 to prevent their correlation being stolen by the unruly wobble data makes no significant difference whatever. The strong correlation continues to appear, and continue to appear, even after the bad wobbly data have been put on the naughty step.
Only the period 1979-98 does behaves as it manages to show an even larger CO2 correlation. But, darn it, this one legitimate correlation is strangely identical to the correlation for the period 1979-2007, a period that includes Victor’s ‘hiatus’, a period which obviously can have zero correlation.
Even the period 1850-1979 with all those wobbles yields a strong correlation, and one consistent with the ‘all data’ value.
So I think the only way to duplicate Victor’s results would be to instigate some stronger measures, something a lot stronger than the naughty step. Perhaps some judicious torture applied to some of the data would get it to behave and to give up all this bogus correlating.
But I’m not sure I have the experience of torturing data to be able to get away with it.
Here’s a three-step Excel exercise for any lurkers interested in learning about the mechanics of scatterplots, short-term noise and how to avoid repeating Danley Wolfe’s self-inflicted tragi-comedy. The reader may then decide whether short-term noise has no effect upon scatterplot-based analysis and whether accounting for it constitutes nitpicking.
Step One: Construct two identical datasets and use a scatterplot to show that the two datasets are related.
In Excel, populate columns C and D with identical number sequences incrementing by 0.1 to get about 120 rows (data running from 1.0 to 13.0).
C2 to C122 and D2 to D122: 1, 1.1, 1.2 1.3, -> 12.8, 12.9, 13
Result: The Excel scatterplot using columns C and D shows (no surprise) perfect correlation between the two identical datasets.
Step Two: Add some short-term random noise to the two datasets and use a scatterplot to “prove” that the two datasets are, in fact, completely un-related.
Populate columns F and G with data from columns C and D plus some random noise.
F2 to F122: =$C2+20*(RAND()-0.5) -> =$C122+20*(RAND()-0.5)
G2 to G122: =$D2+20*(RAND()-0.5) -> =$D122+20*(RAND()-0.5)
Result: What?!? The scatterplot using columns F and G has turned into a shotgun blast, almost as though the perfect correlation is masked by the short-term noise. If you like, click the “save” button repeatedly to generate fresh values for the random noise — the new scatterplot points will bounce around but always resemble a shotgun blast. If you wish to go the tragi-comedy route, stop here and announce that you’ve proven that the two datasets show no correlation, thus are completely unrelated.
Step Three: If you’re a typical nitpicker, apply a simple moving average to the two datasets and use a scatterplot to show that the correlation between the two datasets has miraculously re-appeared.
Populate columns I and J with a moving average of the values in columns F and G.
I22 to I122: =AVERAGE($F2:$F22) -> =AVERAGE($F102:$F122)
J22 to J122: =AVERAGE($G2:$G22) -> =AVERAGE($G102:$G122)
Result: What?!? How’d that correlation manage to re-emerge in the scatterplot of columns I and J when Step 2 proved that it doesn’t exist? Sure, it has some wobbles from the residual short-term noise left by the averaging filter but how can it be there? Again, if you like, click the “save” button repeatedly to generate fresh values for the random noise — sometimes the refreshed scatterplot will have less wobble, sometimes more, but always showing the same correlation pattern.
“blah, blah, blah” indeed!
By now, Victor has demonstrated most of the points in Gavin’s posting as he promulgates misinformation.
My interpretation and summary:
1: Victor’s strongly-held hypothesis is that carbon dioxide has not been an important source of the global warming since the industrial revolution.
2: Ignoring other evidence about the warming properties of CO2, he decides to focus exclusively on correlation. As he explained it in Dec. 2021, correlation is not causation, but a lack of correlation makes causation highly unlikely. (Basically true for linear relationships.)
3: He looks at correlations between CO2 levels and temperature, e.g. Grumbine’s. Oops! For the whole period concerned, it’s over 0.8.
4. This is where he achieves the clearest demarcation between information and misinformation. Instead of either rejecting the original hypothesis or finding a different test, he sticks with correlation, but takes great artistic license in how he uses it. It’s creative, but not scientific.
a) He attacks the definition of “correlation.” Instead of using the scientific, numeric definition, he switches with the looser dictionary definition. Which one he’s using is often unspecified. He sometimes refers to “meaningful” correlation instead – the meaning being up to Victor.
b) Correlation in this context is a number measuring quality of fit of a linear regression between two variables, but he introduces a third variable, time. As it is covariant with both CO2 and temperature, this presents numerous opportunities for misinformation:
1) He asserts that a plot of CO2 vs. temperature is misleading, because an annual series has a higher
data density in the early years. He prefers the noisy early years of the data set, before a clear trend
in both CO2 and temperature emerges and intensifies.
2) He switches from CO2/temperature to year/temperature. Then, incorrectly assumes that if there is a
strong quasi-linear relationship through the whole data set, then each cherry-picked segment should
show the same slope. He proceeds to switch back and forth from time to CO2 level, and cherry pick
various subsets of data. He avoids any tests of statistical significance, even when offered by others.
This is important, because his procedure can be followed to get null results from virtually any data set
with proper cherry picking, but will lack statistical significance.
3) He willingly accepts an analysis of a subset that features monthly sampling of CO2 and temperature,
not annual averaging. Introducing cyclic behavior into a linear regression is a well-known to cause
distortion and reduce correlation, but he dismisses objections to doing so as “nitpicking.”
4) In another example of innumeracy, he fails to realize that adding years that are substantially above
normal in both CO2 and temperature levels will strengthen the correlation that he is trying to discredit.
Instead, he focuses on short term slope issues. He won’t calculate the rising correlation as recent
data is added..
5. Overall, he uses the various misinformation techniques to create a very lengthy unfalsifiable argument.
For those wanting a humorous approach to an unfalsifiable argument, I recommend the shopkeeper’s role in Monty Python’s sketch of The Dead Parrot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvTBkjL6Dxo&ab_channel=SketchiT
V: “And yes, 1978 was warmer than 1897. Apparently that’s your idea of a trend, which says a lot about your competence.”
Glass houses, V…
No. The point is that the whole period of 1940-78 was warmer than the whole of your first cherry-picked segment.
V: What I see is a warming trend from ca. 1910 to 1940, followed by a clear period of NO trend until ca. 1978. And yes, 1978 was warmer than 1897. Apparently that’s your idea of a trend, which says a lot about your competence.
BPL: I told you how to measure a trend a long time ago, Victor. I’ll repeat it for the benefit of everybody else–you regress your datum against time, and if the slope is significant, you have a trend.
For Hadley CRUTEM4 dT against year 1897-1978 I get a slope of 0.00405 with a t-statistic of 5.779, significant at p < 1.39 x 10^-7, which is blindingly significant. So there is very much a positive trend over that time, and he's right and Victor is wrong. Surprise, surprise.
Sigh! https://skepticalscience.com/escalator
The back and forth with Weaktor is the very definition of futile. He doesn’t understand statistics. He doesn’t understand correlation. He doesn’t understand science. And he refuses to learn. No basis for discussion. He is wrong. Everyone who isn’t an idiot knows he is wrong. End of discussion until his learning curve proves to have a positive slope.
Agree. Seven years plus of futility. Victor has no formal training in statistics or science yet considers himself smarter than those that do. After all these years Victor still repeats his same old tripe with arrogance ignoring all feedback. He has zero interest in actual learning unless it supports his denial, In Victor’s mind, those on RC who futility attempt to educate him just suffer from conformational bias when ironically it is Victor that incorrectly only sees what he wants to see.
YES, Victor IS simply wrong on his ideas on statistical correlation. And regardless, what Victor fails to grasp is that statistical correlation analysis is simply a tool. His points are moot Everyone knows that correlation does not prove causation. But there IS also a flip side to that–lack of correlation does not prove a lack of causation. Correlation reveals literally nothing about causation one way or another, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it. Statistical analysis of any type is just a tool used with other tools, along with observational evidence and the application of other knowledge to help one form viable conclusions utilizing critical thinking skills. That’s science.
That greenhouse gases in the atmosphere slow radiated heat loss to space, hence being a major driver of surface temperature, IS an undeniable physical fact. Not only that–there IS a strong correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures over a period of 800,000 years of ice core data.
BPL: I told you how to measure a trend a long time ago, Victor. I’ll repeat it for the benefit of everybody else–you regress your datum against time, and if the slope is significant, you have a trend.
For Hadley CRUTEM4 dT against year 1897-1978 I get a slope of 0.00405 with a t-statistic of 5.779, significant at p < 1.39 x 10^-7, which is blindingly significant. So there is very much a positive trend over that time, and he's right and Victor is wrong. Surprise, surprise.
V: .00405 is a pretty meagre slope, Bart. Moreover, as a statistician you should be aware of the limitations inherent in any measure of "statistical significance." The p value tells you something about the likelihood of the "trend" you've found being due to random distribution of your sample. It is by no means a measure of the research significance of your result.
"The term significance does not imply importance here, and the term statistical significance is not the same as research significance, theoretical significance, or practical significance."
"In 2019, over 800 statisticians and scientists signed a message calling for the abandonment of the term "statistical significance" in science,[64] and the American Statistical Association published a further official statement [65] declaring (page 2):
'We conclude, based on our review of the articles in this special issue and the broader literature, that it is time to stop using the term "statistically significant" entirely. '" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
Up-thread, Victor the Troll was trying to throw ‘correlation’ under the bus with the Anscombe Quartet and now he attempts to throw the entirety of statistics under the bus using a quote wot he found in Wikkithing. The actual reference he quotes to support his bus-wreck is Wasserstein et al (2019)
Moving to a World Beyond “p<0.05” which tell us that “Moving beyond “statistical significance” opens researchers to the real significance of statistics, which is “the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty”” The troll is of course on a different road entirely, one where ‘learning’ is certainly absent and also one apparently full of deadly buses.
I feel in one respect, the troll is by chance correct to question a “blindingly significant” HadCRUT4 trend 1897-1978 of +0.00405ºC/yr. I find it to be a little higher, perhaps a “blindingly significant” +0.0051ºC/yr.
Of course the troll does not suggest what value he would consider appropriate. Perhaps he would prefer to see a humongously big number, something much much biggerer, like +7.3 (this of course being an identical trend to the troll’s “pretty meagre” +0.00405 but expressed in ºF/milennium). Or perhaps he would prefer his “pretty meagre slope” converted from a rising trend to the falling trend which is also possible: -0.0061ºD/yr (again physically the same result).
BPL: For Hadley CRUTEM4 dT against year 1897-1978 I get a slope of 0.00405 with a t-statistic of 5.779, significant at p < 1.39 x 10^-7, which is blindingly significant. So there is very much a positive trend over that time, and he's right and Victor is wrong. Surprise, surprise.
V: .00405 is a pretty meagre slope, Bart. Moreover, as a statistician you should be aware of the limitations inherent in any measure of "statistical significance." The p value tells you something about the likelihood of the "trend" you've found being due to random distribution of your sample. It is by no means a measure of the research significance of your result.
BPL: Classic example of moving the goalposts. Victor said there was no trend in this period. I showed that there was. Victor said the trend didn't matter.
We should reconsider how we respond to denial (like that from Victor the troll).
We shouldn’t be the least bit concerned with refuting his argument so that he can understand it; if he’s able, he’s not willing. Instead we should consider it a “teachable moment” for the readers (especially the lurkers) who are here.
So go ahead and refute him, IF that helps illustrate what’s really important for readers to know. If not, use the denier’s nonsense as a launch point, not only to assert that YOU choose the topic, but also to give some unexpected info and perspective to the general reader.
When deniers (like Victor) push their nonsense so hard, it really does give us a point of nonsense on which to focus. Sometimes it’s best to ignore it, but sometimes it’s just the thing to raise an important lesson.
In this case, it enables us to analyze the correlation between temperature and CO2, as well as the correlation between temperature and CO2 climate forcing. What a valuable lesson for the general reader!
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2022/05/05/correlation-between-co2-climate-forcing-and-temperature/
And how many long years is this to go on? Denying denial is by far the most column inches on these forums. By. Far,
How much is enough?
So, no, It’s time to treat denial as the maladaptive, intentionally misleading, psychotic, sociopathic behavior it is. It is one thing to be a dupe of the GOP and just parrot denial, it is another to repeat them for years and years and never alter your position an iota.
I.e., Victor us not a dupe, he’s not being led by the nose, he’s one of those who knows he’s doing propaganda and enjoys doing so. There used to be articles about denialist anti-climate farms of people paid to do what Victor does. We don’t hear about those anymore, but that does not mean they have disappeared.
I believe it is training for something else, that he cannot betray or confess, that is quite more serious to him. Call it sociopatic behaviour.
I tend to believe that he actually gives a damn to what he is discussing here. It is just a substitute for something else and quite more serious. If he could only tell us what that really is, then we might be able to help him and comfort him.. We could show him sympathy at least.
He wrote that he is or has been “left leaning”, which may have been a similar kind of impossible or odd man out- behaviour where he lives. Here in Norway the same is quite traditional and partly accepted and tolerated, but it really depends very much on how you can behave for the rest. Because If you are a strongly convinced Stalinist or Maoist, then avoid being simply mad or a Comical Ali for the rest.
There is another acute example performing now in addition to Putin. Precident Erdogan of Tyrkia.
He suddenly stood up and said categorically NO! to Finland and Sweden entering NATO.
It shows that he has some rather severe political problems at home in addition to being quite a charming strongman and a Tyrant. The Swedes have a lot of his own militant national enemy, the Kurd Socialist Labour moovement, on vacation in exile, as he is fighting continuous war with them. And the Swedes would not sell him weapons for that.
But that very stubborn and categoric denial of both swedes and finns is such a substitute affair or conflict to take revenge somehow or to exercize very hard for another situation that he cannot really tackle, namely the turkish people..
He is expected to loose next precidental elecdtion,
Cfr also King Donald Grozny and his peculiar behaviours.
Some people have called it Narcissism also.
Hr.Tamino
I can hardly believe thatb he is serious about any of our subjects. It looks to me that his being here is just an exsercize and training studio, a substitute, for something else more autentic vital and serious for him, that cannot be told officially.
It is said and he has said that he is “left leaning”. I have also leant to the left many times, as to the right. also. And even got to do with a few declared communists. Despite of that, it shows that we often have some common interests after all and can relate and cooperate on other professional and civil areas. But this seems not to be Victors case. Who hardly knows how to be a due Protestant and valuable Sceptic, not even in the United States.
Maybe he is a sociopat rather than an experienced leftist?
That is one possibility. But I keep it for more plausible that he is earni9ng fromj it in a rather stupid automatic way, or aspires all the time for such regular industrial cash.
It is quite much like Comical Ali, the Iraqui press and media talesman under Saddam Hussein, and today we have a series of new examples also in Russia. .
Carbomantaus, ok so maybe Victor works for a left leaning lobby group sceptical of climate science and opposed to mitigation. There are possibly such groups. Some on the left oppose things like electric cars and wind and solar farms, because they allegedly hurt poor people and enrich capitalists. For example look at the movie “Planet of the Humans” by Michael Moore.. Its a short step further to be sceptical of the science.
I lean left on several things, and a little to the right on a couple of things. .My criticism is not of left wing politics as such, but just the reaction of SOME on the left to the climate problem such as the people involved movie I mentioned.
That said there is definitely also something obviously unusual psychologically with Victor, but I’m not a expert do I don’t want to speculate too much. He is however clearly very stubborn.
I dug up following properly done scatterplots of CO2 versus temperature from 1850- 2009 and its OBVIOUS there is a moderately strong correlation between CO2 and temperatures for the period as a whole. They do it for both hadcrut and giss data:
https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=79&&n=504
Basic guide to scatterplots:
https://chartio.com/learn/charts/what-is-a-scatter-plot/#:~:text=A%20scatter%20plot%20(aka%20scatter,to%20observe%20relationships%20between%20variables.
Ray Ladbury:
“He doesn’t understand statistics. He doesn’t understand correlation. He doesn’t understand science. And he refuses to learn. No basis for discussion. He is wrong. Everyone who isn’t an idiot knows he is wrong.”
Funny but that’s more or less how I feel about you, Ray. You put up a pretentious front, but when it comes to critical thinking about basic scientific method or even the simplest logic you consistently prefer the crudest mud slinging to reasoned debate.
And no, you don’t understand statistics, which involves a lot more than putting a bunch of numbers into a black box and reading the output as though it were a pile of tea leaves. You don’t understand the meaning of “statistical significance,” which is NOT the same as significance in any other sense of the word. You see no problem with a scattergram that confuses a correlation lasting only 20 years with a long-term correlation of 100 years or more, a claim that is clearly erroneous as I very clearly demonstrated.
You dismiss the 18 years of 21st century climate hiatus, ignoring the work of literally hundreds of climate scientists who have taken it very seriously, and despite the very carefully researched conclusions of such highly respected individuals as John Fyfe, Michael Mann, Ben Santer, Gregory Flato and Ed Hawkins, not to mention the work of Danley Wolfe, whom you have chosen to denigrate simply because his evidence-based results conflict with what you prefer to believe. Finally you choose to ignore the 40 year 20th century hiatus, insisting it was due to the cooling effects of industrial aerosols, an unproven assumption which, as I have demonstrated, is inconsistent with the evidence,
You manage to get away with it because the commentariat on this blog is united in its dismissal of any evidence that fails to support the so-called “consensus” view. I’m reminded of the novel titled “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
V: you don’t understand statistics… You don’t understand the meaning of “statistical significance,”
J: Dead parrot
Re. “Funny but that’s more or less how I feel about you, Ray.”
You may well “feel” that. However the validity of said feeling has as about as much validity as your feelings about correlation and science in general.
Yawn. Boring, ineducable troll is boring and ineducable.
Here’s a suggestion. Analyze ocean heat content rather than just atmospheric temperature.
Congratulations on reaching a new, all-time low for scientific ignorance. Wow, you are absolutely clueless about statistics and the scientific method which includes data collection, data analysis and significance, and peer review. And yet somehow you think you know more than literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientists who have spent decades studying climate change and literally every major scientific society around the world (including the National Academy of Sciences). The funny thing is that even in your own words you show how in recent decades the warming has exceeded that due to basic natural causes. Yet you are so insecure about admitting how wrong you are, you double down on it. You could easily try to present your absurd analyses at one of many climate change meetings. But of course you don’t because your analysis is not only hog wash but you would be forced to answer questions about those things you do not know. And again, admit to being wrong. The fact that you are so defensive about it speaks volumes about your insecurity, sport. Yes, you would be laughed at at any scientific conference…because you do not follow the scientific method (let alone understand it) and you really have no clue about statistics. And btw, that hiatus you keep harping about has been address time and time again. Yet here you are dredging it up once again as if you are discovering something that has not been addressed within the peer-reviewed science community. You have failed to learn a thing. Which means that you never learned how to learn and use critical thinking skills appropriately. You make no effort to do so. Again,. it is evidence of your insecurity about admitting to be so wrong. Which you do easily while hiding behind your keyboard instead of actually presenting yourself at a major conference (sorry, the Heritage Foundation does not count for that). And finally, because you do not understand the scientific definition of statistical significance, you double down on your own personal definitions of it. And that is because if you followed the proper scientific and statistical analyses you would find your warped analyses are completely wrong. So you are left with being outed in public as being scientifically and statistically ignorant. Clue for you, sport: What you are doing is not even remotely close to the scientific method. You use the term to try to make it sound like you know what you are talking about. You don’t. Hint again: Publish a paper and have it peer-reviewed (the way science has been done for centuries) or crawl back under your rock and admit you are utterly clueless about the methodology. The “consensus view” is science. Consensus science is used everyday. Heck, I do it every day in my work.
There is absolutely no reasonable excuse for your continued flaunting of your scientific and statistical ignorance. And that includes your insecurity about not be able to admit you are wrong and have no clue while in front of others either at a conference or in a legitimate journal.
Someone truly failed when teaching you the basics. Seriously.
Hr. Grauer
There ain`t no such “Hiatus”,
And due, up- going autentic evangelical protestants never referre to anonymeous experts in plural such as “literally hundreds of climate scientists” or an equal number of anonymeous, peer rewiewed “papers”.
Donald Trump. King Donald Grozny and his friend Comical Ali and Vladimir Putin along with the martial art black belt Peoples Mandate on behalf of the heritage and the blood and inauguration perform that way. .
Beware of your memberships and employment and of your sub- sequent dopes and warrant protection that may betray you and cheat you.
V: you don’t understand statistics, which involves a lot more than putting a bunch of numbers into a black box and reading the output as though it were a pile of tea leaves.
BPL: But Victor, you can’t even do that.
Hr Levenson
Once upon a time I had to do that. I cannot remember which experiment, but it was probably shotgun on a target, meassure up that minutely in millimeters and sit for 1/2 day and a next one with a mechanical device that rattles and make the sum of the squares squares and the r0ots.
Thus I got vaccinated and immune to “statistics”. in mechanical time.
Friedrich Gauss was far much better than that. He knew how to simplify it all and get the answer in 10 minutes where the “workers” expect to earn their hourly vage at the assembly line, . and wrote:
“Durch nichts trägt sidh die Mangel an matematischer Bildung deutlicher zur schau wie durch masslose Genauigkeit in den Rechenschaften!”
I have found that in den Rechenschaften, some people read the numbers from right to left, and fail to see that 7.3890075 is more than 70 millions rather than 75 cents.
The “Dog” is normally buried in the second chiffer, the tenth of it all. Which is the area and eldorado for crooky cheating.
The embezzlement lays hidden in the second chiffer,, as a most practical rule.
Thus look over that first, what sums up and mooves mainly the secfond chiffer? That thumb- rule is an old and exper8ienced, REVISOR- accountant rule. If you find nothing suspicious there, you can mainly let it go, and you will loose nothing.
But allways be suspicious when the budget is delivered in terms of 7-8-9 irrational chiffers accuracy.
Because that is ûbertriebene Genauigkeit in den Zahlenrechnereien. For instance where you find
Debet …….. Credit
…
….
….
653987259 = 653987259
And a certain post “Balance” and “Eventual” under debet, that causes such an extreme honesty and accuracy on 10E 9- level. in a biological of physical account. Friedricyh Gauss had a good point to that.. They want it on the Penny but the federal debts are in the magnitudes of Phantacillions, and SATAN & CREDITOR is following them right from behind with long claws.
“Error bars” is another vulgar commercial conscept among experienced industrializaed thieves in such cases.
Whereas the critical and experienced QVÆSTOR- REVISORs point of wiew is that of the 2nd chiffer where, the “dog” is buried.
In that second chiffer or in the approximate 10th of the whole, is where you will find the fees to the precident guard and the private succle- straws in the corporative cash frinances. It is the level on which criookiy crime bluff and cheating and gloomy magics is normally professionally performed.
Take it from the 2nd chiffer that is so expressive, and that even threatens the 1st chiffer, , and people will get scared and ex- communicate you
Somewhere up-thread a denier made a comment which got a raft of responses, none of which made note of this:
And no, you don’t understand statistics, which involves a lot more than putting a bunch of numbers into a black box and reading the output as though it were a pile of tea leaves. You don’t understand the meaning of “statistical significance,” which is NOT the same as significance in any other sense of the word.
The problem with this statement is that it ignores the fact that RL and the other scientists here have studied statistics, were educated doing these kinds of calculations by hand, have done their share of programming, and know full well what statistics and probability are and how to use them.
When the commenter calls these programs a black box, he’s saying that HE has no idea what’s in them or what they do. The rest of his line of argument comes from Romanticism. It’s rooted in reactionary philosophy and has nothing to do with how the world actually works.
Arguing particulars with him is a complete waste of time, and I suspect that the reaction of the bulk of fence-sitters to all this is tl;dr. As for skill sharpening, this has been going on for years, the same thing over and over. How sharp do your skills need to be?
Let him take his time cube somewhere else and wallow there.
Hr. Grauer
There ain`t no such “Hiatus”,
And due, up- going autentic evangelical protestants never referre to anonymeous experts in plural such as “literally hundreds of climate scientists” or an equal number of anonymeous, peer rewiewed “papers”.
Donald Trump. King Donald Grozny and his friend Comical Ali and Vladimir Putin along with the martial art black belt Peoples Mandate on behalf of the heritage and the blood and inauguration perform that way. .
Beware of your memberships and employment and of your sub- sequent dopes and warrant protection that may betray you and cheat you.
Nothing new in the latest batch of personal attacks. Once again, the dunces have spoken. Knock yourselves out folks.
And FYI I worked for years on a project heavily dependent on statistics. I’ve collaborated with highly trained statisticians and never once did any of them have a problem with my take on their results. They understood very well that any statistical result must be subject to careful scrutiny and tempered by critical thinking to be valid or even interesting. The resistance of so many posting here to my very reasonable analysis of Grumbine’s claim says it all.
So Victor, let’s run through what you describe as your “very reasonable analysis of Grumbine’s claim.”
Correct me if I’m wrong Victor, but up-thread you tell us:-
❶ Looking carefully at (Grumbine’s) graph, we see, from the leftmost point to roughly 310 ppm on the horizontal axis little more than a jumble of randomly distributed points.
❷ From there till roughly 335 ppm on the horizontal axis, we see a vaguely horizontal pattern.
❸ Thus, it isn’t until 335ppm that we begin to see the diagonal rise suggesting a correlation between temperature and CO2 level. The diagonal continues from there until roughly 365 ppm.
❹ Finally, from there (365ppm =1998) to the end (2007) we see a levelling off.
Thus Victor, you reason, “prior to 1978 and subsequent to 1998 there is no diagonal, thus no sign of correlation.”
Evidently, Victor, you have unearthed a profound truth within the very basis of statistics.
A ‘diagonal’ which is a straight sloping line is somehow the same as a ‘linear correlation’ which is also a straight sloping line. And the power of statistics is that statistics can uncover a ‘diagonal’ (aka ‘linear correlation’) even when not very obvious and also check the strength of the correlation. So we can calculate how much “more than a jumble of randomly distributed points” a data set actually is; like Gumbine’s data 1850-1979 which is pretty-much as ‘diagonal’ as your 1979-98 with its “clear correlation.”.
Hr Grauer
“Never once did any of them have a problem with my take on their results……”
Honesty is the best policy, Mr.Grauer.
To live in approximate peace with “highly trained statisticians” there must be a minimum of undisputeable consensus of what it is about. There must be a common ideal accept of reality that will decide and that you are willing to r3espect, on some level,
And you show rather not able to find or to acheive that here.
At the risk of feeding Victor, who is some sort of troll whether he intends this or not:
“And FYI I worked for years on a project heavily dependent on statistics”.
What was the project, and what was your EXACT role in the project? Please provide details.
“I’ve collaborated with highly trained statisticians and never once did any of them have a problem with my take on their results.”
Name them, and state their degrees. What “results” are you referring to? In what way did you collaborate and very specifically please?
I get the feeling Victor has delusions of grandeur and overstates his role to himself.
“The resistance of so many posting here to my very reasonable analysis of Grumbine’s claim says it all.”
Grumbines analysis is poor quality. People like MAR who has done some advanced university level maths has explained why..
MARs fig leaf analogy sums the whole thing up. I will add a bit. You tried to argue that the low levels of CO2 early last century (compared to later in the century) means there cannot be a correlation with CO2 and warming. Its not the absolute level that matters. Its the relationship between “what CO2 there is” and temperatures. If your critical thinking skills were as wonderful as you claim you would have understood that. My advice: Stay within your lane which appears to be anthropology. You may be good at that, but you have shown an inability to transfer those sorts of skills to climate science and statistics. .
No, he is abs9olutely not good at antr9oåpology, being unable to understand himself.
But due to exactly that, he may have been disqualified and ex- communicated from that business, and trying to take his revenge for that on modern geophysics.
Am I right on this Hr Grauer?
ROTFLMAO. Let’s see…Victor who has absolutely no formal training in statistics nor science claims that legitimate concerns of his so called “reasonable analysis” expressed by those who do have formal training and considerable expertise are just dunces and these expressed concerns are just personal attacks on poor old Victor. Got it. So tell me folks, who is the real dunce here and who is making personal attacks? The experts or Victor?
Victor thinks that somehow his claimed “critical thinking skills” make up for his lack of statistics expertise and his admitted ignorance of the physics and chemistry behind our understanding of climate. He’s an arrogant and deluded troll.
V: And FYI I worked for years on a project heavily dependent on statistics.
BPL: And you weren’t fired? I’m flabbergasted.
Victor:
…The dunches have spoken….
Questionj: Is that a self- confessment Hr Grauer?
Do you really expect people to change their basic mind and understanding and accept your interpretation of the longtime temperature graphs?
“Nothing new in the latest batch….” what do you actually expect for news?
Theme here is the modern demarcation line… information ? misinf0rmation
Where and in which cathegories do you expect people to set the limits and draw their lines, and how and where do you whish that to be changed?
3 days ago I saw alarge and very high and very straight line system of clouds passing over here in the blue morning sky, it has not been raining for 2 months. “AHA!” I thought. The Polar vortex jet stream. = a typical and major demarcation- line in the weathers and the climate, and now it is raining and will probably rain for weeks even months and we can really need it now..
it was A major and very fameous change of weather- type.. the very NAO did change paralell to Finland and Sweden deciding to enter NATO. What a coincidence
I mostly recommend it to people to discuss such very typical and major, overwhelmingly visible, evident and fameous natural things Such as the very Midgardsormen Jørungandr for instance, that comes and goes and makes meanders all around the world biting itself in its tail. .
Dear Friends,
Somewhere out there is the next Greta Thunberg. She wants to learn all she can about climate science, so she’s a regular here — never misses a post and reads all the comments.
When “the troll” comes along to spread FUD, let’s not try to enlighten the troll (impossible), let’s find the “teachable moment” to enlighten the readers who actually want to learn, and just might turn this thing around.
Stop talking to Victor. Talk to Greta.
Tamino, excellent advice!
That’s more effective framing than your previous. Agreed. Add:
Don’t talk like a scientist if you actually want the public to come along. KISS it.
Like talking to the proverbial 6-year-old.
From wiki-p:
So I guess you are hoping for Victor to keep repeating the same nonsense as often as possible?
Hr Tamino.
How do we learn and become more wise?
Old rumors tell that , you learn as long as you live.
In Norwegian
Man lærer så lenge man lever.
From which experienced teachers say,
“Man lærer så lenge man har elever” you learn as long as you have pupils.
Which is quite true indeed. But for systematic reasons I have now and then asked, from what and from whom do I better learn and actually learn? That comes down to what and whoom I actually take for serious.
I hardly learn anything new from Greta exept maybe for her crossing of the atlantic . To my standards, she is such a quite normal and quite common local swedish “tjei” ( = Gypsy word for Bunny) of the smårips, (= small ribes-berry) ) class. from whoom I rather have nothing further to learn anymore. , And I would not be unpolite enough to try and teach her anymore. It is not my duty. anymore
Personally and on Masterclass- level being a Master myself, I hardly learn from colleagues in my own trade, because they are hardly Masters. But I seek up and study and learn a lot from trades that are far enough away from my own, given that it can or must or should be taken for serious.
How to administer the understandings and the learnings,……
That seems to be something that “Tamino” has to learn a bit more about. It is a very good time in our days to study it ; we have the very late soviet union and russia with Krjeml under observation and with Putin & al. We have further had King Donald Grozny over there in the states. And the turks. Mr Erdogan, member of the NATO at Bosporus for historical reasons, fighting Mt Ararat in Kurdistan, blaming the Finns and the Swedes for it..
How and when shall they learn?
.
At this very moment, scattered around the world, tens of tens of cranks are making naively inflated claims about their expertise, which of course are never going to be substantiated.
Irony challenged, they are also complaining about personal attacks while calling people dunces.
My teachable thought for the day.
The Disinformation Governance Board is history:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/18/report-disinformation-governance-board-paused-nina-jankowicz-considering-resignation/
Hilarious!
I can see how you might have felt threatened.
And this is what we can tell the next Greta: Tom Wigley is a respected climate scientist and a staunch supporter of the consensus. “He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his major contributions to climate and carbon cycle modeling and to climate data analysis, and because he is “one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline.”
So when Mr. Wigley is quoted as follows, “I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong,”
[Response: Whether she is or she isn’t will not be determined by convenient arguments-from-authority. Logical fallacies that support your opinions are still logical fallacies. – gavin]
Thomas Fuller. Just because Tom Wigley is a respected climate scientist does not make him an expert on the impacts of climate change on civilisation. They are two very different academic areas. This is why biologists, economists, geographers and sociologists look at the impacts of climate change on civilisation, and whether it is a threat or not. Plenty of such experts see climate change as a threat to civilisation.
Hi Nigelj
I confess I haven’t made it all the way through WG2’s AR6 report on impacts, but what I have read seems more to support Mr. Wigley than Ms. Thunberg. They do not project anything close to Thermageddon and seem to suggest that our efforts to other, longer established environmental concerns, should receive more attention.
From the SPM: “Since AR5 there is increasing evidence that degradation and destruction of ecosystems by humans increases the vulnerability of people (high confidence). Unsustainable land-use and land cover change, unsustainable use of natural resources, deforestation, loss
of biodiversity, pollution, and their interactions, adversely affect the capacities of ecosystems, societies, communities and individuals to adapt to climate change (high confidence). Loss of ecosystems and their services has cascading and long-term impacts on people
globally, especially for Indigenous Peoples and local communities who are directly dependent on ecosystems, to meet basic needs (high confidence.)
Non-climatic human-induced factors exacerbate current ecosystem vulnerability to climate change (very high confidence). Globally, and even within protected areas, unsustainable use of natural resources, habitat fragmentation, and ecosystem damage by pollutants increase ecosystem vulnerability to climate change (high confidence).
Future vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change will be strongly influenced by the past, present and future development of human society, including from overall unsustainable consumption and production, and increasing demographic pressures, as well as persistent
unsustainable use and management of land, ocean, and water (high confidence). Projected climate change, combined with non-climatic drivers, will cause loss and degradation of much of the world’s forests (high confidence), coral reefs and low-lying coastal wetlands
(very high confidence). ”
My overall takeaway so far is that, should their projected impacts befall us, the world will be a poorer place with many poorer people, and we will be spending lots of money and effort repairing and preparing when we could have more profitably spent on mitigation. It will be a great pity, more so because we can still do something to lessen those impacts.
But it won’t destroy the planet, it won’t destroy the human race, it won’t destroy civilization(s).
And that is the difference between Tom Wigley and Greta Thunberg.
Nigel, you rightly point out that specialists look at climate change through different and specialized lenses. But you don’t identify what specialism Ms. Thunberg has. Why anyone would give her story pride of place over Mr. Wigley baffles me.
TF: it won’t destroy the planet, it won’t destroy the human race, it won’t destroy civilization(s).
BPL: it won’t destroy the planet, it won’t destroy the human race, it very much will destroy civilization(s).
@Thomas Fuller – ” And that is the difference between Tom Wigley and Greta Thunberg. ”
— While Tom Wigley always seemed to do his homework, Greta Thunberg sat on the street with a cardboard sign and made her panic and concern public.
Physics, mathematics and geology in school lessons convey neither empathy nor other human-psychological skills and knowledge of humanism.
While Mr. Wigley is one of many largely unknown climate researchers without www. popularity – you will hardly find anyone who does NOT know Greta Thunberg.
An influencer who was in the right place at the right time with the right state of mind – and who should not be confused with a climate scientist.
She is a master at transporting her own panic into the whole world – and does so with every right that a young person can have with a view to the expected future. She achieves that IMHO much more successfully than all SPM of an IPCC could ever achieve.
When Mr. Wigley and you are not concerned about species extinction, loss of forests, coral reefs, whole ecosystems and much more. this is only due to your lack of empathy and basic humanistic education.
Unglobalized, associal egoists with a poor overview are unfortunately an integral part of this world. Their ignorance and stupidity is currently reproducing faster than intelligent, humble and caring people could compensate.
Maybe you at least respect A. Einstein, who recognized remarkably early:
First the bee dies – 8 years later the human being.
– In any case, I hope that you and other climate impact deniers get as high a number as possible when it comes to the count down of the species, because evolution in general has very strict laws in terms of adaptability and cleverness.
Well-said, for the most part.
(Specifically WRT “the most part”, I think it’s at best counterproductive to accuse TF of lacking empathy–you’re making a broad assessment on very little data, and even if you are right, it’s not going to be productive. Yeah, I know everybody does it online. Me, too, sometimes, though I hope less and less often.)
Yeah, Greta has had the impact she did because of her emotional honesty and uncompromising integrity. Doesn’t mean she’s always right, of course, but she’s always real.
While I am sure we all take great comfort from Tom Fuller’s assurances that “It’s all fine,” the fact is we simply do not know what is going to happen as the climate warms. It is true that there does seem to be some encouraging research–this week’s Science has a study of micro-fossils suggesting that plankton seem to be robust in the face of climate change. So no doubt, those few cetaceans that we have allowed to survive will be heaving a big sigh or relief, and we can at least be somewhat encouraged that we’ll still have oxygen to breathe.
What’s not so clear is the effect on the health of the food supply. The relatively minor shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised the possibility that we’ll face widespread famine by the Fall. And even in advanced economies, the disruptions from the pandemic have led to spot shortages and significant inflation in food prices across the board. All of this points to the fact that our agricultural system may not be as robust as the Fullers and Wigleys of the world think it is. And perhaps it ought to make us wonder whether it was such a good idea to try and support a global population of 7.5 billion on a planet that in a good century could maybe support 1 billion.
And that’s just the problem, isn’t it? We’re pretty much ensuring that the next century is not going to be a good one–not for agriculture, not for sea-level rise,…not for civilization. It’s not just climate change. Soils are being depleted–and phosphates are going to be a lot more difficult a problem to overcome than were nitrates. Precipitation cycles are being disrupted. Precipitation events are more likely to generate flooding and droughts and heat waves are getting more severe. Pollinators are under increasing stress. And climate change–even if it isn’t the prime cause of these adverse trends–is making all of them worse.
Now, civilization has survived famines in the past. Hell, famine was nearly a yearly event on the subcontinent ’til the ’60s. But things are different. For one thing, there are a whole helluvalot more folks who will be starving. They’ll also likely be a lot more mobile. And we’ve reached levels of income inequality that would make even Marie Antoinette say, “Whoa! Dude, dial back on the bling!”
It remains to be seen whether people will passively accept starvation under these circumstances. On the plus side, I suppose Faux News might have a real “alien invasion” to cover. All in all, I’m a lot less sanguine about the future of humans civilization than are the Toms.
So Wigley is an expert on the collapse of social systems?
On the other hand, there’s a kid who has done her homework and expresses generational concern for the planet in language that kids can understand….
Pedantically focusing on Thunberg while portraying her message as overstated based on one scientist’s interview, while acknowledging some of the impact of AGW, smacks of a luke-warmer’s way of minimizing the situation in order to blunt the message.
In that context sounding so reasonable compared to some of the attacks on her
( https://www.mediamatters.org/dinesh-dsouza/right-wing-media-launch-unhinged-attacks-greta-thunberg )
simply reinforces the debate tactic.
Others have said it better up-thread, but I’ll reiterate it here, climate change is a multiplier of just about every bad thing imaginable, including food insecurity, political instability, and armed conflict. We’re seeing it already. It shouldn’t be dismissed in such a cavalier manner.
The source of the quote made by Thomas Fuller is a 2019 Forbes article ‘Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong’ written by Michael Shellenberger who has since published a whole book on the subject.
While there is good reason to kick back against crazy talk of apocalyptic AGW, that is not to say all such talk is crazy. So the message from Shellenberger really should be carefully set out, something I feel he has failed to do.
Thus, as well as quoting Tom Wigley in the Forbes piece, Shellenberger also quotes hurricanologist Kerry Emanuel with this rather incredible bit of logic.
As for AGW “threatening civilisation,” I can easily see the current world order wrecked by unmitigated AGW. And while mitigation is now happening in that the carbon emissions have been flat(ish) for a few years and there is some rather deceptive talk from rich countries of more-than-halving emissions by 2030 (down to 43% in UK, 45% in EU & 49% in US), we are yet a long long way from safety and so I would suggest talk of the wheels coming of global civilisation is still valid.
Thomas, Gavin,
Or, in the spirit of reasoned debate and science rather than rhetoric, we could try to agree on the definitions of “civilization” and “threatens”.
I was looking at some pictures from Ukraine, and from that rare tornado in Michigan, and obviously, the rubble is being cleared, the injured are receiving medical care, and the dead are being buried, and none of it is being done with Killian’s hunter-gatherer technology and social structures.
So what shall we call it?
There is a lot of back and forth discussion about the temperature trend and correlation with CO2, but looking at this chart linked above https://tamino.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/correlation-between-co2-and-temperature/ is it not reasonable to say that between the 1940’s and the early 1970’s, the warming appeared to stall, since the trend over that period looks nearly flat? AIUI the reason was due to high concentrations of sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere from volcanic and industrial activity, which acted to counter the CO2 forcing:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11639-climate-myths-the-cooling-after-1940-shows-co2-does-not-cause-warming/
When the clean air acts were enacted in Europe and N America, sulphate aerosols declined (coal was phased out for domestic heating for one thing), and the CO2 forcing once again dominated.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-region-in-million-tonnes
As is evident from this chart, SO2 emissions from the Americas and Europe peaked around 1979, which would be consistent with the theory referenced above by Adam Lea. But the graph for Asia is totally different, as it shows a continual rise in SO2 emissions beginning in the 1940’s and persisting till the graph’s upper limit, 2010. If SO2 aerosols indeed have a cooling effect strong enough to counter the greenhouse warming alleged for CO2 during the years 1940-1979, then we would expect the growing volume of such aerosols in Asia to continue the same cooling trend well into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Is that in fact the case? Let’s look:
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1674927810500029-gr1.jpg
The graph linked to above is taken from a paper titled Comparative Analysis of China Surface Air Temperature Series for the Past 100 Years, by Guoli Tang et al. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927810500029
It depicts temperature anomalies for 5 different data sets measuring Chinese surface air temperatures. What we see looks very similar to the worldwide data that’s been so widely disseminated. Note the steep rise in temperatures from the early 80’s through the late 90’s. Clearly, temperatures in China have not abated due to the increasingly high levels of SO2 pollution produced by their many coal burning plants during this entire period.
“…we would expect the growing volume of such aerosols in Asia to continue the same cooling trend…”
Not if “we” noted that Asian growth in SO2 only partly offsets the historic reductions elsewhere, “we” wouldn’t.
Not necessarily.
SO2 emissions from Europe, America and Asia from the 40’s to the 60’s are sufficient to counter most of the CO2 warming.
America and Europe, collectively contributing a significant amount to SO2 emissions, enact clean air acts which results in a huge drop in SO2 emissions over a period of years.
Since SO2 emissions have dropped significantly, their cooling effect on the globe is now significantly less than the warming effect of CO2, so global temperatures start increasing more rapidly (again) as the CO2 forcing becomes dominant.
Note that CO2 when emitted has a long lifetime in the atmosphere, whereas SO2 is rained out relatively quickly, so it doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere at the rate CO2 does.
I have heard that if the Asia-Pacific region were to greatly cut down on their coal burning, whilst it would reduce global CO2 emissions, it would also reduce sulphate concentrations in the atmosphere so may result in an even more rapid rate of warming.
Interestingly, it seems that China has already started down the path of reduced aerosol emissions:
That’s from here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37304-0
I admit to being surprised at the magnitude of the change, given the well-known growth in China CO2 emissions, consequent mostly to the growth of their coal generation fleet. But it does make some sense–I already knew that the coal capacity had been rapidly and steadily upgraded in terms of efficiency, with small, very dirty plants progressively retired in favor of larger, relatively cleaner ones (“supercritical” and “ultra supercritical” technology.) It can make a difference of 40%. On top of that, and roughly at the same time, China implemented widespread use of SO2 scrubber technology, similar to that used in North America and Europe to clean up the acid rain problem.
On the other hand India hasn’t followed suit yet; their aerosol emissions are still increasing. That’s why their cities now often have the dirtiest air in the world.
Still, on balance the aerosol issue isn’t quite what we tend to think it is–the East Asian SO2 and CO2 curves have been decoupled to a significant degree, which should in theory somewhat mute the ‘rebound’ effect you note.
You Coors drinker be careful. May be up to 2 feet of the racist white snow in Colorado. No, this isn’t climate – its weather:
https://www.denverpost.com/2022/05/19/denver-weather-snow-storm-friday-saturday/
On the other side of the country, they have record heat, in some cases hotter than when it was REALLY hot back in 1880 – 142 years ago! Be careful – stay hydrated. Again, this is weather, not climate:
https://woodzog.com/northeastern-heat-wave-breaks-dozens-of-records-this-weekend/
Stay safe out there, whether it’s 2 feet of snow, or 95 degree heat – both can be dangerous.
Hr Knowitall
It is moderate here at the Oslofjord, hardly the way you describe it.
We stay hydrated. The beers are better than ever and we are beginning to get very superbe ciders also.in the climate. You need stoccavisso and peppers of choisest origine to it.
For Norge, Kiæmper Fødeland
vi denne Skaal vil tømme
For naar vi først faar Blod paa Tand
vi sødt om Frihed drømme.
Saa vogner vi vel op en Gang
og kaster Lænker, Baand og Tvang
For Norge Kiæmpers Fødeland
vi denne Skaal vil tømme!
SANN!
Just think of that. I could play it on the keyeboards and sing it for them outdoor at Chateau Sansoussi in the shadow of the big oak tree with outlook to the Bruuns (brown) right south that were masters of Pythagoreanism, poetry, and Divinity from anxient on.
Their houses stand but their ackers are ruined, but their cherries have obviously spread out and can be picked, which is quite an art.
We set as weell on apples, Malus x-domesticus which is really also quite an art in the climate.
Sorry, vaagner. That is wake up. presens.
Johan Nordahl Brun was toastmaster and poet in the Norwegian Society of København, and wrote that 1.st National anthem, later a quite liberal Bishop of Bergen. We are neighbours to their Chateau Tverrkjegla in Frogn pr. Drøbak. I could perform it again on 17. Mai.. constitutional day.
Try Norges skaal youtube. .
Weaktor has received far more attention than he deserves, because, somewhat ironically, the fact that he is posting bullshit makes his screeds on topic.
But the problem is that Weaktor has added nothing to the discussion here–not on this post, and not in his 8 or so years he’s posted here. It is just the same, recycled zombie denialist crap we’ve seen since the ’80s. He makes his argument. He’s told why he is wrong. He ignores the lesson or dismisses it with a profound “Nuh-uh!” and then makes the same argument again. Ultimately, that is the problem with the denialists–they offer nothing new. No new arguments. No new insights. No improved understanding. This is true of Weaktor, just as it is true of Aunt Judy or Uncle Roy or “choose your favorite Pielke”.
Scientific opposition yields new insights. Bullshit just lives forever, changing only through metastasis.
Yes, V. was really on-topic for this one. He illustrated most of the points in the original posting.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that unverifiability can be so hard to pin down in practice, especially combined with various other techniques. In this context, it’s more a style of argument than a clear-cut determination that something is unverifiable. Clear-cut propositions that are empirically not verifiable would concern such matters as what goes on inside a black hole, or what the climate will be like 3,000 years from now.
In this case, we have cherry-picking, shifting goalposts and definitions, qualitative dismissal of quantitative and testable propositions, etc. In some ways it’s like computer code. You can correct a few bad lines, but if it’s a long program, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve really programmed an infinite loop, or it’s merely taking a long time to come to a solution. Of course, if you come back, and your bad lines of code have reappeared, you know that there’s a bigger problem than you’re seeing!
Ray Ladbury,
It is as you say. The rather pathetic Victor is ever bouyed by his delusions and arrogant belief that he is entirely right and the whole world around him has gone mad.
I would perhaps describe the troll’s bullshit more fully. Thus folk will better understand when the step in it.
Thus in his latest pile of nonsense he asks a question about the growing SO2 emissions from Asia which can be seen growing at 0.75Mt/yr 1930-2010. (Graphic of World SO2 emissions by continent 1850-2010. The idiot troll proposes that if the 4Mt/yr global emissions 1935-70 were enough to cancel the CO2 climate forcing of that period, would the continuing Asian emissions 1970-2010 have some effect on Asian temperatures or would the three-fold increase in CO2 forcing (& other increases in total forcing) overwhelm the impact of these continuing Asian SO2 emissions?
So his question is
Of course, the answer is “No!!!” but the idiot troll has already decided the opposite is true, sets about looking for the fairies at the bottom of his garden and is delighted to proclaim to the world that the fairies are indeed absent.
MAR, paraphrasing Victor:
Not only do the GHG forcings increase, but while the *Asian* SO2 emissions do increase the *global* SO2 emissions decline from a high of ~155 million tonnes in ~ 1970 to a low of perhaps 95-97 million in 2010. There isn’t a year in that period showing anything but a *decrease* in global SO2 emissions.
But then, the poor dear compares SO2 with *Chinese* temp trends, not global ones, so presumably he hasn’t taken on board the fact that SO2 tends to rapidly disperse, and quite widely. Hence, it doesn’t create a strongly localized temperature effect.
We tried to tell him that, too, of course.
We tried to tell him that, too, of course.
Yes, the affects of aerosols have been discussed ad nauseam in the past yet Victor ignores the information and evidence provided and just comes back and repeats his same old debunked nonsense. It is so so tiresome.
Victor still has no clue as to how aerosols actually work and disperse in the atmosphere and how heat actually moves through the climate system. Aerosols work both directly, by scattering sunlight, and indirectly by increasing cloud formation, cloud life, and changing cloud properties. Aerosols do not distribute uniformly in the atmosphere, but they are generally NOT localized in the way that Victor assumes. Furthermore, the reflection of sunlight by aerosols and clouds effect the vertical temperature gradients and temperature gradients drive atmospheric circulation. Therefore, aerosols can effect the distribution of temperatures well beyond their areas of coverage. Victor thinks he knows how to do a proper analysis of how aerosols effect the climate and temperatures, but he really is clueless. It’s far more complex than Victor’s simple approaches and conclusions. Of course, Victor has been told this multiple times but he just doesn’t want to learn what the experts actually say about the subject, he’s so much smarter.
I will say, it all does make me curious to learn a little more about the subject. The aerosol forcings used in various model ensembles are mapped nicely here:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/trop.aer/
It’s interesting to compare the different model ensembles used. There’s a strong regional forcing in southeastern China in the NINT (non-interactive) model ensemble, while the TCAD(I) interactive suite shows the strongest forcings displaced southward (Indonesia) and, to a lesser extent, eastward (China Sea). More on TCAD(I) models here:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150023366
I don’t think any of that comprehensively addresses the effects on atmospheric circulation that you mentioned, though.
Here is a peer reviewed paper that reports on studies made by the authors utilizing various climate models on the effect of removing aerosols on regional and global temperatures.
Local and remote mean and extreme temperature response to regional aerosol emissions reductions
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/3009/2020/
Removal of regional aerosol emissions almost universally results in warming both globally and regionally, with some exceptions including perturbations of black carbon, an absorbing aerosol species. Surface warming is largest and most robust across models in response to SO2 emissions reductions, particularly SO2 from Europe and the US.
From this work, one can easily conclude that the radical reduction of emissions in the United States and Europe would have had a global effect on temperatures after 1978. However, future increases in emissions from China would not have the same global effect.
In addition, this earlier peer reviewed work studied the effect of aerosols on global temperatures and particularly looks at the period of 1958-1980 when aerosols were masking the warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions.
Impact of global dimming and brightening on global warming
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006GL028031
Our analysis showed that the decadal changes of land mean surface temperature as well as TMAX, TMIN, and DTR are in line with the proposed transition in surface solar radiation from dimming to brightening during the 1980s and with the increasing greenhouse effect. This suggests that solar dimming, possibly favoured by increasing air pollution, was effective in masking greenhouse warming up to the 1980s, but not thereafter, when the dimming disappeared and atmospheres started to clear up. The temperature response since the mid-1980s may therefore be a more genuine reflection of the greenhouse effect than during the decades before, which were subject to solar dimming. Unlike to the decades prior to the 1980s, the recent rapid temperature rise therefore no longer underrates the response of the climate system to greenhouse forcing and reflects the full magnitude of the greenhouse effect.
One of the interesting points of this work is that although aerosols were masking the global temperature rise during the period of 1958-1980, night time temperatures continued to rise. This is exactly what would be expected with increasing greenhouse gas levels restricting heat loss to space.
Who is right? The experts or a musicologist with no formal training in the sciences or statistics? I’ll go with the scientific consensus.
Kevin McKinney:
But then, the poor dear compares SO2 with *Chinese* temp trends, not global ones, so presumably he hasn’t taken on board the fact that SO2 tends to rapidly disperse, and quite widely. Hence, it doesn’t create a strongly localized temperature effect.
V: Actually it does: “Models estimate that aerosols have had a cooling effect that has counteracted about half of the warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases since the 1880s. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are not distributed evenly around the planet, so their impacts are most strongly felt on a regional scale.” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Aerosols/page3.php#:~:text=Models%20estimate%20that%20aerosols%20have,felt%20on%20a%20regional%20scale.
Moreover, we are talking about the effects of environmental controls in Europe and North America and the lack of such controls in Asia. Do you really want to argue that the LACK of aerosol emissions in Europe and America has spread wings and flown to Asia as well?
All this is for YOUR benefit, folks. Contrary to what you seem to think, none of this is about me. My expertise or lack of it has nothing to do with any of the evidence I post. NONE of it is dependent on my interpretation of the science and I can assure you that I have never claimed to know more than anyone else, either the experts or the amateurs commenting here.
Yet whenever I present evidence in these threads, the responses are largely directed at me personally rather than the data I have attempted to share. And all too often, as in Kevin’s unfortunate effort, the evidence is grossly misinterpreted.
H’mmm…Few remember regional Philippine cooling together with global non-cooling after the Pinatubo eruption. In point of fact, as your cited article points out above your cited paragraph, the event cooled the entire globe quite quickly for a short period, not just far eastern Asia. As well, the cited paragraph is from a discussion in that source of the relative effects of reflective AND absorbtive aerosols NOT any general regional effect at all. Finally, this report was TWO generations ago in terms of IPCC reports (AR4 vs. today’s AR6) where it was noted few models integrated regional data where now they are much more integrated. And oddly, warming even continues apace even in those regions with the highest sulfur releases.
Were one actually interested in communicating the science rather than propaganda, one would refer to Chapter 6 of the present AR6 report which notes that regional effects are now integrated into climate models and that warming continues and is likely accelerating.
To be scrupulously fair, the dispersion of sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere is pretty heavily dependent upon how they are injected–as well, presumably, as the details of local/regional atmospheric circulation at a given time.
That’s one moral of the infamous Sudbury superstack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inco_Superstack
Pinatubo, by contrast, pushed SO2 right into the stratosphere, IIRC. But given that there are indirect effects as well as direct ones (as we’ve discussed upthread), even a single anthropogenic point source can have effects spread over hundreds of kilometers or more.
The best information I’ve found is probably the CMIP forcings maps, here:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/trop.aer/
It’s notable that there are vast swathes of both the Pacific and the Atlantic that show significant indirect aerosol effects–cooling ones.
K: “Strongly localized” does not equal “most strongly felt on a regional scale.”
V: “Do you really want to argue that the LACK of aerosol emissions in Europe and America has spread wings and flown to Asia as well?”
K: No, I want to remind you that the topic was, and is, global temperature. Perhaps also that the fact that your source shows a very strong correlation between Chinese and hemispheric temps–you use it to argue that that ‘must’ mean that aerosols don’t explain global temperature trends, but it could just as well mean that my contention is correct. Or that you misapplied all-China T trends that aren’t congruent with the “regional” aerosol forcings. (Not much anthropogenic SO2 pollution in the vast stretches of western China, after all.)
You might also want to consider what I posted about China’s putative “lack” of such controls, and over what timespan, here. Though, to be fair, the transition noted starts in 2010, and so wouldn’t show up in your China temp graphs.
Victor. Sulphate aerosols are no longer able to flatten out temperatures, whether globally or in Chinas cities, because atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have now become so high and with such a powerful warming effect. That is the main issue.
“Yet whenever I present evidence in these threads..”
A. You present “evidence” that is cherry=picked. That is not science. That is an agenda.
B. The sources of your evidence are often not peer-reviewed.
C. You continue to maintain that somehow you know more or have discovered something that none of the thousands upon thousands of career, peer-reviewed climate scientists have not. That is pure scientific arrogance and ignorance, plain and simple.
D. Your “evidence” has often been widely debunked yet you continue to post it. That is a failure to learn.
@ Dan
“Evidence” was mentioned from the CATETER by Magister Jon Medbøe, in the introductional inauguratiou courses at the University. I dared to rise my hand on behalfr of myself and my recent aquations also with “american” linguistics, and informed the audience and the Magister of the US constitution. “We keep theese principle to be self evident…!”
He was shocked.
And asked back: “But, is that evident?”
No answer was given as I can remember.
It is very primary in the old greek philosophy situation about 5-400 years BC. On what is real and evident, REALIA and Apeiron, and what is not. Further on LOGOS and logics. What is thinkable and what is not thinkable.
Thousands of peer rewiewed articles hardly decide on that.
The Participants must learn cherry- picking first, and take that for serious.
I have told this before d/ o .
Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus,…. were they ever able to pick and to serve?
I could teach and educate the children because I have done the same before and I have been a most clever one.
They steel like ravens and climb up before you can forbid it. So I saw the basic problem and was ingenious again and could say: “Now, that you have become so rich, you must also be able to serve and to give some of it out again.” and then it has to be convincing quality. Choisest Spätlese Auslese mit Predicat.
Which is quite an art.
Victor says: My expertise or lack of it has nothing to do with any of the evidence I post. NONE of it is dependent on my interpretation of the science and I can assure you that I have never claimed to know more than anyone else, either the experts or the amateurs commenting here.
But Victor seems to think that breaking time series into sections and then looking at correlation is a valid use of statistics. Well it most certainly is not thus he IS claiming to know more than those versed in statistics. The idea that there is only one short period in modern history in which CO2 levels correlate with temperature rise is NOT evidence and actually not really true. Anyway, none of his claims make AGW any less likely. And, this claim is most certainly dependent on Victor’s interpretation of statistics for which he has no training nor expertise.
Then we come to the role of aerosols, specifically SO2, in masking the warming from the period of about 1958 thru 1980 along with the effect of aerosols emitted by China in more current times. Victor makes a simple analysis of regional temperatures and claims that aerosols cannot therefore be the cause of the lack of warming for the period of 1958 thru 1980s. However, expert analysis in the peer reviewed literature says otherwise. Is not Victor’s claim which is contrary to what the experts say a claim of knowing more than the experts? It most certainly is.
Then Victor goes on to say: Yet whenever I present evidence in these threads, the responses are largely directed at me personally rather than the data I have attempted to share.
This is laughable. Poor old Victor ignores the expert responses to his so called “evidence” and has to rationalize it as attacks on him personally; although, at some point, after eight years now, how can one not bring up Victor’s arrogance and unwillingness to actually learn what the science, in its entirety, has to say about the subject of greenhouse gases.
Ladies ande Gentlemen
Breaking news now in addition to the Ukraina situation where the truth is the first frallen victim at war….
….is the robotic cherrypicker or quite in general, berry- picker from Western Norway, that allways was in advance. (ask Rasmus Benestad of that)
During the years we hade to import berry and cherrypicker from Polen Ukraina and Balticum in the summers to pick all those berries, and it was cheap and could compete on the free market, just as Mexicans do cross the boarders and compeat on the freem market in Southern California and elsewhere where it never rains. They know better how to pick. . .
Now, picking ROBOTS of the Elon Musk- kind are to make the polaks and the litauanians and latvians estonians and the ukranians obsolete in Norway also.
But i have my doubts.
When we see how cherries are picked here on this website, then we reallize that it is industrial, blind, careless, arrogant ignorant robots under antropomorph camouflage and what they pick and serve is not convincing delicious edible at all.
I have had this and discussed this before in Ceskoslovensko CSSR where I came and saw ande picked apples and blackberries quite spontaneously at the roadside, and the ladies were impressed and said that they had a society of wild urban girls for doing the same.
The Russians are also autentic in that respect and pick the local, more or less wild and forgotten natural fruits and berries. In fact, the autentic russians are especially good at exactly that..
What we do not like and what we do not accept is blind robotic programmed industrial picking of the same and sales propaganda 0f such severely decadent and tasteless behaviours..
Now the wild strawberries, the autentic Fragaria vesca L. is blossoming. If only 5 or 10 of them thread ceremonially on a straw or finely administered on a cake, they are the very best, and represent the climate and our opinions.
Beware of robotic commercial political immitations and sales propaganda of the same. .It is not science, it is not climate.
And then we have the autentic blueberries shortly after, and the autentic original Prunus avium L.
Dan says
You present “evidence” that is cherry=picked. That is not science. That is an agenda.
V: Lol! Any evidence that doesn’t support the prevailing dogma is dismissed as “cherry picked” on these threads. Evidence is evidence, Dan, whether “cherry picked” or not. If it’s from a reliable source it needs to be taken seriously.
Dan: You continue to maintain that somehow you know more or have discovered something that none of the thousands upon thousands of career, peer-reviewed climate scientists have not. That is pure scientific arrogance and ignorance, plain and simple.
V: Once again, evidence is evidence. Are you saying it should be ignored simply because it calls a widely held theory into question?
Victor: “Evidence is evidence.”
K: Which is precisely why everyone has been telling you that you can’t just rationalize away selected portions of it.
Re. “Once again, evidence is evidence. Are you saying it should be ignored simply because it calls a widely held theory into question?” HERE’s a wonderful teaching moment graciously provided by the above poster who routinely posts his “understandings” (not) of science, stats, etc. And now we see said poster doesn’t understand the meaning of “evidence” either.
The thing to observe and learn from here is that “evidence” is defined as (per OED #5) “Ground for belief; testimony or facts tending to prove or disprove any conclusion.” Therefore, an important first job for any professional scientist/relevant commenter is to actually SHOW how the presented numbers/data actually constitute “grounds for belief” or “tending to prove/disprove”. For example, posting an out-of-context sentence from a paragraph that’s not even peer-reviewed research from generations ago in terms of the field as a whole in no way constitutues “evidence”.
More generally, factoids posted out of context, out of date, and beyond any relevance to the issue at hand–which are the above poster’s favorite form of factoids to post–are NOT “evidence” in any way. They provide no grounds for proof. They are at best distractions/reflections of poster ignorance or crankery . More likely, they propaganda tools designed to create FUD just as tobacco, asbestos, SO2, etc., etc. propagandists have done for decades.
What a scientist and/or honestly scientific-acting commenter does is to show exactly how a particular factoid actually IS or may be “evidence” or sufficient grounds for a belief or proof/disproof about a particular point. This, for example, is why cherrypicking is rarely “evidence”. Cherrying picking produces factoids yes. But they simply are NOT “evidence” unless shown to be in relation to the universe of other available observations..
“teaching moment”
But the responses keep coming, which is the whole point.
https://schoolsdebate.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/definitions.asp
But we’ve had endless column inches from Victor’s puppets, teaching the lurkers and visitors that there is apparently no clear criterion for demarcation, since every word or factoid must be addressed in great detail. Which serves the purpose of misinformation, creating the illusion that science and reason have no rules.
I think I commented early in this thread that, if you want to actually educate people by responding to trolls, you have to require that they (the trolls) commit to what they agree about before you can begin to disagree. That means asking questions. But instead, what we have seen here is exactly the kind of mockery mentioned… rhetoric, wordplay, fallacies, definition debate.
Victor wins.
V: Lol! Any evidence that doesn’t support the prevailing dogma is dismissed as “cherry picked” on these threads. Evidence is evidence, Dan, whether “cherry picked” or not. If it’s from a reliable source it needs to be taken seriously.
While Victor ignores the preponderance of overwhelming evidence that clearly shows that increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing the climate system to warm. Not to mention that the so called *evidence* that Victor presents doesn’t really call into to question the prevailing dogma. Victor is once again claiming to know more than the experts.
V: Once again, evidence is evidence. Are you saying it should be ignored simply because it calls a widely held theory into question?
What Victor calls *evidence* its really just his non expert opinion.
Victor. You don’t provide any evidence to support your many nonsensical claims. Instead you provide a combination of junk science articles, irrelevant studies, and cherrypicked data or you misinterpret studies. You are genuinely deluded.
To all and everyone
About Victor Grauer:
“V: Once again, evidence is evidence…”
I frind back into Arne Næss, Logikk og metodelære page 124 on evident statements. And have to translate it the best I can.
Næss did translate his things from Cambridge English, that was Royal Society, above you all in the grades.
” But, one of the most decisive — and maybe also most shocking- ( shaking) discoveries in human history, is that one cannot agree on what is evident and not so evident / obvious!”
I repeat,…..
The ruin of bloody Besserwisserei.
Meine Damen und Herren
As we are supposed to discuss the modern demarcation problem….
I feel that Matthias Schürle here should be quite better labeled and demarked.
Which is maybe your most accute problem.
Try and take that problem serious.
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is announced that the fameous Dr.Prof H. Svensmark will kee0p a lecture on “Exploding stars, clouds and climate, on research that is not politically convenient.”
So it is translated, and to be hold at Litteraturens Hus, Oslo Tirsdag 7. juni kl. 1900 2022.
I shall se if I can go there,. It is in the regiment of Klimarealistene.no, the hational Climate- surrealists. who I know from before.
Rasmus Benestad did take up the problem, “on simple physics in the climate” and I dared t contribhute under there with the keyeword “Cyanotypie”.
Thus you can find it.
Cyanotypie is John William Herschels method on shortwave- light. It exposes in sunshine and electrical arc light, but is safely handled in the darkroom in candle light or a moderate low voltage and temperature incadescent lamp. I learnt it in highschool from the classical photographers son who had the recepy. We could buy the remedies at the drugstore in thos days, but in order to serve this website and Benestad I had to take it again from the basics and bottoms, from a thrownaway soft iron strip on the road.
The principle is Fe+++ ligand to citric acid with exess of ammonium, pH as high as possible. That product is photosensitive and gives Fe++.
That is exposed by K3+Fe+++(CN)6 . giving prussian blue. = “Cyan”.
It did expose slightly in “halogen” light max temperature and voltage, and dramatically faster in daylight even in cloudy weather at sunrise. And not at all under the galaxy, the milky way at night ritght in zenith. Thus “galactic” was experimentally disqualified and the sun and common daylight verified. By John William Herschels method.
Albert Einstein and Max Planc later scored their nobel price on the same.
Elementary photochemistery and radiochemistery explains what youn need to know there about eventual white clouds and S6+ aerosols in the inner solar system. SO3 + H2O->H2SO4.
But, I may perhaps go and see how Svensmark is still being defended.
It is the Victor and the Schürle- syndrom.
It follows the daylight and solar UV as well as that, but when it does not match with the effect of CO2 that is to be denied, then they go to the Galaxy for help from somewhere severely popular and advanced, that people cannot control. It is Magics, professional, and that “higher spiritual” you see.
It is further the professional, extra- solar – Levenson- syndrome.
According to the surrealists, Svensmark is now being kicked from his paid position in Copenhagen. Where he was selling his severely majestetic expemnsive rainbarrels- cloud chambers and error bars. . .
I must add here an experiment that really ought to be known for the aerosol- discussion. I found it in the highschool textbook on chemistery for my wife. A quite ingenious arrangement in German.
Sulphur is lit and burnt on the desk S + O2-> SO2 that has a sticky smell.
Then the fumes are sucked into a glass- funnel with rubber tube….. over and down in a water flask where that bubbles, and the bottle is sucked from above again by a water jet vacuum- pump. See and hear that “Blublublublublub…” in the bottle.
When it has bubbled enough, thy that water with phenolphtalein.
Then empty the flasks and fill up again with some H2O2 hydrogen peroxide in the water, repeat the experiment, let it bubble enough and try again with Phenolphtalein.
describe what you see, smell, and hear….
Explain………..
It is first s + O2-> SO2 and then SO2 + H2O giving sulfurous acid H2SO3, diferent from H2SO4 that came from SO3 + H2O.
And thin hydrogen peroxide that was able to oxidize sulphur from its 4th to its fameous 6th state.
If H2O2 can do that, then we can guarantee that ozone and sunshine in moist air can do the same, and thus explain very acid rain and sulphate aerosols simply from burning fossile fuels, And that it will also eat ozone and give photochemical smog.
We need no “galactic” to explain it. It is as earthly and as solar as can be.
@carbonito: – ” When it has bubbled enough…”
— This must be the corbonito-syndrom —
When misinformation rises and turns into elitist-arrogant hot air.
e.g.
carbonito says: – ” white clouds with very high albedo do not cool down the earth ”
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/05/unforced-variations-may-2022/#comment-804244
Contrary to all the findings of an IPCC – https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter07.pdf
– this is a very bold thesis and a false claim.
I’d be happy to lay a stream line from your brain to your buttocks to handle future blistering through reactions between vital information and deadly misinformation.
Albedo is a physical property of bodies and molecules in climate physics that describes a radiative forcing. Defined as reflectivity, it certainly has metaphysical significance when it comes to brain power, cognition and wisdom.
With an improved stream line & mental albedo, you should then also be able to recognize the atmosphere as an “Open System” – and not falsely denigrate it (like@BPL) as a “Closed System”.
(just one of your other misinformation that you blurt out here every day)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Diagram_Systems.png/330px-Diagram_Systems.png
Well, this is news to me, maybe not you, but here’s one way to solve the demarcation problem. As opposed to both-sider fatalism where you can’t have anything, Alex Epstein has used his Schroedinger’s box of magic climate, where you can have things both ways at the same time, in order to prove that we need to double down on fossil fuels. So what do you call that? Extreme lukewarmist? He might as well have bought a magic 8-ball and saved the column inches.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/alex-epstein-fossil-future-climate-change-argument.html
Anyway, when it comes to inoculation, RealClimate has been a trove of meta-literacy over the years, and it has changed how I approach information glut. Thank you for that. If I’d been a little more on the ball, I would have recorded the the particular nuggets of wisdom that worked for me personally, and put them into a coherent collection.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Your remark about RC as a trove of meta-literacy is acute. As a regular reader for 15 years now, I’m more confident in my understanding of climate, a dauntingly complex natural phenomenon, than I am in any subjects including ecology and evolution, which I studied at the doctoral level before finding an easier way to make a living. It’s been fantastic to observe disciplined experts grappling with multiple lines of evidence to resolve ambiguities and reach their conclusions. A first-rate graduate-level education in its own right!
It’s just weather, not climate, but it is interesting. Currently -87 F at Vostok Station, Antarctica. Going to be a heat wave with a high of -52 F over the next 14 days:
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/antarctica/vostok-station
Good news: Up north, they haven’t started melting too much YET:
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/ca/resolute
Yeah, and in my yard in South Carolina it’s currently 92F, on June 1. I’m not sure, but it’s possible that the Vostok temp is actually the more seasonable of the two. But, hey–just weather, right?
As to Arctic melt, the Resolute report doesn’t tell you much. Better to look at JAXA, which shows the spring melt well underway. We’re currently above the 2010’s average, and way above both 2019 (which ended up 3rd-lowest minimum of all time) and 2020 (2nd lowest)–but ironically enough, only 70k above 2012 (lowest of all time), which is a bare whisker in this context.
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/extent/&time=2022-05-31%2000:00:00
CCHolley: What Victor calls *evidence* its really just his non expert opinion.
V: Expert opinion: “[Research] has shown that the temperature rise up to 1940 was . . . mainly caused by some kind of natural cyclical effect, not by the still relatively low CO2 emissions.” Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming
Evidence: 40 consecutive years of the 20th century during which there was NO sign of any warming trend despite a significant rise in CO2 levels due to the burning of fossil fuels. How is that an “opinion”? Please explain.
Evidence: No sign of any underlying warming trend during the above period in several regions where the generation of aerosols due to industrial activity was either minimal or non-existent. For the specifics see http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/2021/03/thoughts-on-climate-change-part-10.html
Expert opinion: “Models estimate that aerosols have had a cooling effect that has counteracted about half of the warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases since the 1880s. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are not distributed evenly around the planet, so their impacts are most strongly felt on a regional scale.” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Aerosols/page3.php#:~:text=Models%20estimate%20that%20aerosols%20have,felt%20on%20a%20regional%20scale.
Evidence: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-region-in-million-tonnes
Evidence + Expert opinion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927810500029
Expert opinion: “It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.” From Fyfe et al, https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2938
Evidence: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KfE5s-4q1s4/ScLVic4P0hI/AAAAAAAAAB0/IWBy3fClff8/s320/fig4.jpg
And by the way, the FACT that the above “correlation” is due solely to a 20 year warming trend is NOT an opinion, but evidence for a LACK of any long term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
Evidence: https://royalsociety.org/-/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/fig1a-large.jpg?la=en-GB&hash=14D5026DA62ADB4652A18BA13758F84A
Evidence: http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19418.jpeg
Evidence: https://www.globalchange.gov/sites/globalchange/files/seal_level_rise_052021.png
NB: As is evident from the 3 graphs linked above, both global and oceanic temperatures declined from ca. 1880 through 1910, while sea levels began their steady rise around 1880 if not sooner. This is not my “opinion” but evidence drawn from highly reliable sources. As is also clear from the sea level graph the rise has indeed been relatively steady from then to now, with no sign of any significant acceleration. Once again, this is not my opinion but evidence easily noted by anyone with the ability to read a simple graph.
So I’m sorry folks, but the “factoids” I’ve presented are not “factoids” at all but solid evidence drawn from reliable sources. If presenting such evidence, along with certain expert opinions means I somehow claim to know more than the “real scientists” constituting a so-called “consensus” that’s just nonsense. It’s not what I “know” that’s important, it’s what the evidence tells us.
Victor finishes: “So I’m sorry folks, but the “factoids” I’ve presented are not “factoids” at all but solid evidence drawn from reliable sources. If presenting such evidence, along with certain expert opinions means I somehow claim to know more than the “real scientists” constituting a so-called “consensus” that’s just nonsense. It’s not what I “know” that’s important, it’s what the evidence tells us.”
It has been explained here, several times in just the comments of this demarcation problem post, that: 1. The “solid evidence” you selected is a small fraction of all the evidence that is available to you. 2. You have drawn conclusions based only on the “solid evidence” you selected. 3. When all the evidence you ignored was introduced to refute your conclusions, you dismissed all the other evidence using an argument that was incorrect.
Your selection of only the “solid evidence” that you think supports your conclusions really is cherrypicking; you really can’t ignore any of the evidence you did not select, and your argument for dismissing aerosol cooling really is wrong.
But if you really believe your analysis is correct, write it up as a paper. I’m sure the scientists here will review it for you before you send it out.
Then someone actually interested in the true picture might reasonably ask ” ‘Evidence’ *for* or *about* WHAT??? Be specific.
To answer that: Let’s take your Fyfe et al cherrypicked “expert opinion”. you provide. You say their expert opinion is “It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.” That isn’t even an opinion. It is a statement. Their ACTUAL STATED OPINION is “We do not believe that warming has ceased.” They go on to note…
“modulation by internal variability is large enough to produce a significantly reduced rate of surface temperature increase for a decade or even more — particularly if internal variability is augmented by the externally driven cooling caused by a succession of volcanic eruptions. The legacy of this new understanding will certainly outlive the recent warming slowdown. This is particularly true in the embryonic field”
So–teaching moment here–their evidence and opinions are solely directed here at decadal prediction, not global warming. Odd how you missed that, isn’t it?
Second: Where I disagree strongly with Fyfe, et. al. –I’m an ex-professional stats person, btw–is here:
“These investigations have led to statements such as “further evidence against the notion of a recent warming hiatus”4 or “claims of a hiatus in global warming lack sound scientific basis. While *these analyses are statistically sound*, they benchmark the recent slowdown against a baseline period that includes times with a lower rate of increase in greenhouse forcing1, as we discuss below. Our goal here is to move beyond purely statistical aspects of the slowdown, and to focus instead on improving process understanding and assessing whether the observed trends are consistent with our expectations based on climate models.”
Here I get off as do many others with a professional background: It is quite easy, and I even posted the R script here years ago I seem to remember, to show by the simplest of bootstrapping procedures that 10-20 year hiatuses are completely expectable given a trend where the slope is on the order of .1x the sd of the trend. That makes Fyfe, et. al., arguing–as they clearly recognize in that section by noting that the stats reasoning is “sound” but gloss over/”move beyond”-that while error COULD (easily) have produced the results, so too could have physics. True, I guess, but NOT sound reasoning, IMO, at least. It _could_ be, however “embryonic” reasoning as they so state and I don’t have a problem with that. When signal to noise ratios are particularly low, differentiating the two is, in fact, difficult.
For the umpteenth time, learn how to read for comprehension and not cherry-picking data/papers. The evidence is clear. Unequivocally. Peer-reviewed over and over. Hard science that followed the scientific method. You are wrong but are simply too coward to admit it.
BTW, please learn the laws of thermodynamics too. Especially the first law.
Sea level rise due to climate change always lags temperature. Try boiling some water and note that it does not get hot immediately.
Goodness, what ignorance you display. Why the moderators continue to give you a soapbox for your drivel is beyond reason. smh
It’s your opinion that this is an appropriate–nay, a determinative!–test of the hypothesis. Despite the fact that it’s been pointed out ad nauseum that that 40 period had confounding variables seriously in play.
Similarly the bumph about regional aerosols, the hiatus, and the 20th-century correlation of CO2 & warming. All thoroughly debunked, prior to this latest ‘re-bunking.’ But ‘bunk’ it remains.
Hr Grauer:
” FAKTA!…DATA!: ..BASTA!…PRAVDA!…SVADA!…MAKTA!….!
Q: What is so frappingly similar in and between all those, 6 big words?
( The Answer will be given below. But try and guess first..)
You see, the substansial or thingly nature of reality is that real things allways have got more than one and only one form or property or way of being or…. as you are trying to teach us here, co- relations
This is a very basic and important way to checkup and find out wether things do exist or seem to be real. The electron for instance is very tiny minute, but it seems to have got even more than 3 properties, The fameous electron has at least got mass, elementary charge, and elementary spin . Thus we believe it to exsist and to be real.
It takes more than one and only one DATA or BASTA or PRAVDA you see.
It must be known and shown and further show to be appliciable in more than one and only one way or respect or for one and only one purpose.
This is somehow my main learnt facultary routine for finding out what I can believe in and set on and think of in the climate dispute.
Your CO2- global mean climate temperature correlation and causality was predicted and assumed quite early, but not taken so serious because of lacks of such further properties of that thing. And it was hardly shown and prooven by those curve relations or lack of relations by which you try and dis- proove it.
The works of Arrhenius were hardly taken serious, and a certain Candelars works are tather dubious. . Then Roger Revelle and Keeling did a very solid work in all that obscure data and empirical material and dared to conclude rather for sure. But not by the Victor Grauer DATA, BASTA, PRAVDA and MAKTA and FAKTA! arguments. What seems to have been taken really for serious by them is the pioneering Tyndall experiments, and Lavoisiers early pioneering experiments on the nature of heat.
Thus arguing and fighting your way by means of your own straw- men is being at class- struggle against the laboratory devices of Tyndall and of Lavoisier and what I have made and used in my own research on thermoluminescence, , the doubble beam detection technique (Keeling and Tyndall) And Lavoisiers permanence of energy and permanence of heat, the 1.st law.
By DATA-M;AKTA, PRAVDA, SVADA FAKTA, BASTA, & Cetera, you fail to see it because that mental dicipline causes you to fail to see the basic Nature of real things
Answer to the question above:
Everyone should see that those 6 big words d/o only do mean quite exactly the same alltogether.
Nullius in verba, so to speak.
The problem is Victors evidence doesn’t support his contention that there is no long term correlation between CO2 and warming. All he has done is provide links to various graphs of temperature that are not contested, and do not even include CO2 trends imposed over them, and his own rather unconvincing opinions about what it all means. This is not useful evidence.
Mathematical analysis shows a good level of long term correlation of warming and CO2. The following scatterplots also show a good level of correlation between warming and CO2 since the industrial revolution. The correlation is stronger later in the last century but at no point is it completely absent.
https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=60&&n=504
And his contention that there is no acceleration in sea level rise is easily proven wrong simply by putting a ruler on the graph, which immediately shows a shallow and roughly curvilinear trend, and thus an accelerating trend. All confirmed by a more formal analysis.
Another teaching moment. “Evidence” of what, exactly? He refuses to say, exactly preferring to simply spread bullshit.
As one example, The provided “evidence” above re Fyfe et. al. says ““It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.”
Now what does Fyfe, et. al. actually say they are providing evidence ABOUT (something our troll carefully ignores)? Oh, here it is: “We do not believe that warming has ceased, but we consider the slowdown to be a recent and visible example of a basic science question that has been studied for at least twenty years: what are the signatures of (and the interactions between) internal decadal variability and the responses to external forcings, such as increasing GHGs or aerosols from volcanic eruptions? ”
So, they are clear about what they are providing evidence of while our troll is anything but.
Evidence: 40 consecutive years of the 20th century during which there was NO sign of any warming trend despite a significant rise in CO2 levels due to the burning of fossil fuels. How is that an “opinion”?
What this information is exactly *evidence* for is an opinion.
Evidence: No sign of any underlying warming trend during the above period in several regions where the generation of aerosols due to industrial activity was either minimal or non-existent.
That this is evidence that aerosols were not responsible for the masking of the global warming effect of CO2 emissions is an opinion. An inexpert opinion at that. Expert studies of the effect of aerosol emissions from the United States and Europe show that they had a global influence in reducing temperatures. The peer reviewed studies showing this have been cited previously.
Expert opinion: “Models estimate that aerosols have had a cooling effect that has counteracted about half of the warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases since the 1880s. However, unlike many greenhouse gases, aerosols are not distributed evenly around the planet, so their impacts are most strongly felt on a regional scale.
Mostly strongly felt on regional scales refers only to the direct effect. This does not mean there is no global effect from SO2 emissions because there most certainly is as shown by the peer reviewed science as cited previously. In addition, aerosols are carried by air currents, so assuming that their greatest regional effect is the exact location of the emissions is an unfounded assumption. The direct effect is mostly down wind–that’s the region. In addition, it is an unfounded assumption and opinion that the increasing of urbanization and industrialization of China which mostly occurred much after 1978 and mostly on the coasts should cause the cooling of China as a whole. It would not–prevailing winds are to sea, not to the interior. This is also shown by the peer reviewed science cited earlier. It is also true that by the time China’s emissions grew to levels equal to the peak emissions of the United States and Europe, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were far greater with much stronger climate forcing than the 1958-1978 period making the warming much harder to mask. Models also so emissions from China have much less of a global influence. See sources cited earlier.
Indirect effects: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Aerosols/page4.php
And by the way, the FACT that the above “correlation” is due solely to a 20 year warming trend is NOT an opinion, but evidence for a LACK of any long term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
NO, it is an inexpert opinion that the correlation is only based on a specific twenty year period while ignoring the years that follow especially the years 2016 through present. In any time series analysis the more data, the more accurate the result. And BTW correlation analysis is only a tool used in conjunction with other evidence and knowledge to form conclusions–it takes experts in the field to form sound conclusions. With no context, statistics are meaningless. Thats what the experts know. FACT.
It’s not what I “know” that’s important, it’s what the evidence tells us.
NO. What is important is what ALL of the evidence tells us. Not some cherry picked *evidence* taken out of the context of the whole. And, there most certainly is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that Victor ignores and is unwilling to understand. Victor thinks he “knows” what his *evidence* tells us, but the musicologist with no formal training in the sciences nor statistics is ignorant and wrong.
“Victor thinks he knows”
Victor does know that he can continue to elicit a (detailed, TLDR) response with hardly any effort on his part, creating the illusion that there is really a scientific debate going on.
The point, for Victor and a substantial part of the population, is to have some control or power over others. If they achieve that while being ignorant and wrong, it’s a feature, not a bug.
So we have Victor, who keeps doing the same thing and gets the same result, which is his goal…..
And we have all the smart folks who keep doing the same thing and getting the same result… not changing what Victor is doing… which is not their goal.
Hasn’t one of those options been described as the definition of insanity?
Yes of course, Sigh….
Hr Zebra
On insanity
Do not forget the need of having control of oneself, that may be very difficult for many, but after all they are very proud of being successful in that respect at least socially , outdoor and on the websites. Not to speak of in the theater and in the climate..
Henrik Ibsen wrote: “Take the life lie ( vital illusion) from the everyman everyone, and he has got nothing left to live for!!”
Livsløgn life lie, Lebenslüge.
That was according to Dr. Relling, Rasmus Relling, in Vildanden, the wild duck, who diagnosed them.
Ask Rasmus Benestadc also of this if you cannot believe it, Benestad is due to have this also on Pensum.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Albert Einstein
Good luck with that…your odds are about the same as someone coming up with the single experiment proving Einstein wrong.
So, do you have an idea that you can state clearly enough that an experiment could potentially prove it wrong? Otherwise, it’s all unfalsifiable and devoid of scientific meaning. I’m talking about your own idea about how climate works, not your various reasons for dismissing others’ ideas.
Aaaahhh…the old “I’m a REAL scientist, just like Einstein bromide. Good Lord, just a little egomaniacal!!!
Teaching moment: For anyone who doesn’t know, an “experiment” is a contrived situation where the scientist has direct control over ALL explanatory variables and can manipulate them at will and in isolation under total experimenter control.
Note that Einstein did NOT say “any random and/or cherrypicked bit of observed natural variation which occurs which is not under experimenter control and therefore subject to confounding can prove me wrong.” But then he was an actual scientist and not a deluded crank.
According to you the oldest scientific field of all–and a large portion of modern fields–isn’t science, apparently, as experimental controls are not generally possible. Those little twinkly things in the sky that don’t move much might well be something else entirely from giant balls of fusing hydrogen at great distances like the scientists say. But I doubt it. However, NO feasible experiment will experimentally prove or disprove this contention for the foreseeable future even though the best route to follow now is that in fact the science is right enough even without a definitive experiment.
Should have added one further point:
Precisely ZERO of our resident troll’s “evidence” consists of an experimental results. So his Einstein quote, which he’s repeated before, is doubly clueless,
Single experiments have prooved you wrong now for the n-th time Victor Grauer.
The difference is that you are no Einstein.
The incredible irony that you post a quote by Einstein completely out of context/cherry-picked.
Please, everyone take a look at Weaktor quoting Einstein here and appreciate the thickly layered irony of the situation.
An Einstein quote is rather behind the times. These days, Feynman is the preferred source for out-of-context quotes.
However, in the spirit of (extreme) generosity, the quote can be interpreted as tacit admission that a simple Excel experiment demonstrates the absurdity of Danley Wolfe’s correlation “analysis”.
Very good section on the role of oceans and climate change this morning on CBS News Sunday Morning
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/this-week-on-sunday-morning-june-5-2022/
Made me wonder what Victor thinks of the correlation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to ocean heat content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_heat_content
Oh, never mind folks, I forgot Victor ignores all the evidence that doesn’t fit his deluded denialism.
CCHolley: “Made me wonder what Victor thinks of the correlation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to ocean heat content.”
Nice try, CC. Since atmospheric CO2 can only heat the ocean by heating the atmosphere first (duh!), then the lack of any long-term correlation between CO2 levels and atmospheric temperatures precludes any long-term correlation between CO2 levels and the heat content of the ocean.
https://youtu.be/mz1siP7pItc
Nice try, CC. Since atmospheric CO2 can only heat the ocean by heating the atmosphere first (duh!), then the lack of any long-term correlation between CO2 levels and atmospheric temperatures precludes any long-term correlation between CO2 levels and the heat content of the ocean.
Wow! This is one of the most ignorant statements made by Victor to date.
atmospheric CO2 can only heat the ocean by heating the atmosphere first
This is completely false.
The atmosphere is basically warmed by the earth’s surface be it the ocean surface or the land surface through conduction and convection along with latent heat through evaporation. Although heat can move bidirectionally between the oceans and the atmosphere through processes such as ENSO, long term heating of the ocean must come from either an increase in solar radiation or a slowing of heat loss radiated to space. Warming of the surface is NOT preceded by atmospheric warming, it is the opposite, a warmer surface precedes atmospheric warming.
The surface temperature is determined by the height in the atmosphere where the density of CO2 is such that the long wave radiation can escape to space unimpeded. The atmospheric temperature at that height per the Stefan-Boltzmann Law must be such that causes radiation at a rate that balances the energy out to space with that of the sun coming in. That temperature along with the lapse rate determines the surface temperature required for equilibrium.
Adding CO2 to the atmosphere raises that height in the atmosphere where the long wave radiation from the surface can freely escape to space. The lapse rate in turn determines the increased surface temperature required for new equilibrium. The surface must warm. It is the flow of heat upward that determines surface temperature, not the temperature of the atmosphere.
In other words, heat in the ocean is a more accurate indication of greenhouse warming because the ocean (and land surfaces) warm first, then the atmosphere. The steady increase in ocean heat content from 1968 to present is a much stronger indication of greenhouse warming than surface air temperatures because it is a direct result of increases in CO2 while the global surface air temperatures are an indirect effect.
It is similar to the denier meme that the global temperature increases are being caused by the warming oceans, but then there is no explanation as to what is causing the oceans warming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_heat_content#/media/File:Ocean_Heat_Content_(2012).png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#/media/File:The-NASA-Earth's-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared-radiation-fluxes.jpg
@CCHolley: – ” The atmosphere is basically warmed by the earth’s surface be it the ocean surface or the land surface through conduction and convection along with latent heat through evaporation. Although heat can move bidirectionally between the oceans and the atmosphere through processes such as ENSO,…
— Even trolls who cannot count to 3 should not be deprived of the 3rd, strongest and most important cooling component of the earth’s surface.
Thermal up surface radiation (~398W/m² ) together with evapotranspiration (82W/m²) , conduction/convection (21W/m²) = ~ 501W/m², which is in temperature imbalance (1W/m²) with solar absorbed surface (160W /m²) and thermal down surface (342W/m²).
2 arrows down – 3 up – makes a total of 5 arrows … and our poor troll Victor has already lost count.
Maybe he’s constipated and warming climate gases and the greenhouse effect just don’t fit into him anymore – I think he urgently needs a diet:
https://images.theconversation.com/files/140430/original/image-20161005-15882-13x0gd1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1
Nice try Hr Grauer.
For a thing to heat up by radiation it must have molecular absorption bands to the actual irradiation or be in molecular contact with the heat source. Sunshine hardly heats up the O2 N2- mixture of air, it heats up the ground or the waters that have got high light and IR absorption. That heats up the air by direct contact and convection. Seawater is efficiently heated under clear sky by high sun and daylight, and then heats up the summer air.
You can convince yourself of this by measuring air temperatures over large open water areas. Air temjperatures over land get quite much higher, sooner after sunrise, because the solid material and sandy material there has a quite much lower conductivity and heat capacity, and becomes quite much hotter than the air above, and heats up the air in the boundary contact layers. .
A minimum of physical learnings and respect for the same Genosse.
This is public school pensum of science allready for me., the theory of sea and land summer solar daily monsune- winds in the bathing season. Thus I can easily disqualify and resign on the ugly thinktank and Heartland expertise.
PS
I called it “solar daily monsune”
It is callede diurnal anabatic and catabatic winds in the Wikipedia and well known for bathers, sailing, hanggliding and glider airplanes. DS.
Victor writes: “Since atmospheric CO2 can only heat the ocean by heating the atmosphere first (duh!),…”
You’re thinking of conduction, Victor, the transfer of energy from molecule to molecule in a solid or liquid. The ocean is heated by radiation, not conduction. Photons of white light from the sun pass through the atmosphere and penetrate the oceans. They don’t heat the atmosphere on the way down.
@MS: – ” They don’t heat the atmosphere on the way down. ”
Solar light warms the atmosphere with 80W/m² – that`s more than nothing.
Macias Shurly writes: “Solar light warms the atmosphere with 80W/m² – that`s more than nothing.”
Is that number higher than it was before we increased the CO2, or is it the normal fraction of the global energy budget?
And is the m2 the top of the atmosphere?
@M.S.: – ” Is that number higher than it was before we increased the CO2…”
Soot, dust, O³, O², N², H²O in the atmosphere absorb 23% of incoming solar radiation TOA. Since a warmer atmosphere (due to CO²) also contains more water vapour, I suspect that since industrialization, with the increase in CO², the proportion of short-wave, absorbed radiation has also increased. Water vapor and water in clouds absorb ~ 3 times more than ozone in the UV range.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.svg
V: atmospheric CO2 can only heat the ocean by heating the atmosphere first (duh!)
BPL: No, it doesn’t have to do that (duh!). It can strike the ocean directly and heat the top of it, because water also absorbs infrared light (duh!)
Question: The data presented on the blog of Tamino appear to have been interpreted as indicating a period of an absence of a rising trend of the temperature anomaly in the period from 1940 to 1970. To my non-expert eye, this period merely indicates a regression to the mean underlying trend as shown in the graph of Tamino. The anomaly is simply recovering from the local maximum in the graph in the 1940-1950 period. It appears to me that a large scale oscillatory phenomenon resulted in a global minimum of the anomaly in ca 1910 followed by a rapid rebound resulting in the 1940 local maximum. I would guess that whatever caused this shift in this time period was of sufficient effect to obscure the underlying warming trend. It would be interesting to see data dating back to an earlier period, say 1700, to determine if similar oscillations are evident. So to my inexperienced eye this period doesn’t need any particular explanation. It’s just a quirk of the data. What do others think?
I have been especially interested of seeing it, and the rumors of “Natural cycles” have been especially popular and stable.
As far as I can remember, I have also been the first one to suggest and mention the milancovic- cycles, the annual cycles, the diurnal cycles, and the sunspot cycles in my discussions with denialism. And told people to check up eventual patterns and impacts of that first, just to get som ideas and trainings with cyclings first, that are obvious and easy to observe.
Then from my own profession and experience with radio electromagnetic and musical sound signals, I have told of and described practical fourier- analysis- methods.
If all this is not heard of and learnt and trained first on empirical signals and data, then shuttup pleace, and train that first. before you suggest and discuss mysterious natural cyclings for the ex0plainatiuon of anytyh8ing. Because tyhere is a waste lot also of further types of natural sounds and signals that must be taken serious first.. the mysteriously devine cycle is one of the least appliciable “models” of nature. and of material behaviour.
Obvious para- science and bluff similar to professional zodiacal astrology has been presented by Nicola Scafetta and a certain Harald Yndestad and also Ole Humlum & Jan Erik Solheim, Klimarealistene.no.
One takes the tuneable RC passive lowpass and highpass and bandpassfilter with adjustable positive feedback and the oscilloscope serious first, and mentions Fourier.
Biorythms along with moonshine, such as , moonshine sonatas and serenatas and festivals at fullmoon is easily explained by necessary light for eyesight for those fameous festivals, from higher verttebrate down to marine biology and microbiology- levels point of wiew,
thus easily explainede by Darwinism..
Jonathan David,
I would see an explanation for the apparently flat temperatures through those decades as a lot more complex than an over-warm 1940-50 returning to the underlying trend. For starters, the Temp/CO2-forcing plotted by Tamino ignores other forcing agents. And as the incidents of volcanic forcing are short and very sharp, it does need something more than simple correlation to account properly for their impact.
You are correct to say that if we had a lengthier temperature record, we could be more confident about what to expect from what you call a “large scale oscillatory phenomenon” but the global land records are pretty-much relying on data solely from Europe/E.USA prior to 1850 with just a single intermittent record in India elsewhere and zip in the southern hemisphere. Ocean data is also sparse but with more geographical spread. So I would suggest there isn’t enough accuracy prior to 1880 to be at all confident of global temperature wobbles, even if different records give similar answers (eg this WoodForTrees plot of HadCRUT4 & BEST with GISS) as they surely conform because they have the same data to play with.
As far as the 1940-50 record is concerned, there is a very evident wobble 1940-45 (particularly in GISS LOTI) and we can track that down to the SST data. (See the ‘Annual Mean Temperature Change over Land and over Ocean’ graph on the GISSv4 graphs page. Take away those six years and there is a pretty convincing linear rising trend in SSTs 1910-to-date. And that gets me thinking about the canvass-bucket/cooling-intake corrections required due to WW2 impacting the mix of shipping taking the temperature readings. Is the 1940-45 wobble a remaining artifact of the data corrections?
Mind, the land temperature and SLR data does show something was happening so the wobble in the SST record, dear liza, dear liza, isn’t all down to holes in the canvass bucket coverage.
Thanks for the response MA Rodger. Do you have any thoughts on what effects might have caused the global minimum at ca 1910? This is quite a striking feature of the graph. The sharp apparent rebound up to the 1940s local maximum (which is another striking feature of the graph to my eye) led me to speculate that these data points might be related causally in some way. Presumably you would conclude that this is not the case? In any case, this is not my field so my comment is purely based on observation and speculation.
As MAR says, if the temperature record prior to 1880 was more reliable, we could be more confident about attributing global warming to “large scale oscillatory phenomena”. It’s OK to look for decade-to-millennium-scale global oscillations we think we see in the record, but our first goal should be to confirm their existence by domain-specific statistical tests (Tamino’s expertise). If the data aren’t adequate for testing, we should ask why we”d assume there’s a set temperature curve to “rebound” to. The ups and downs of global mean surface temperature are understood to have multiple geophysical causes, some periodic and some not, operating at different timescales. If we can confirm a century-scale oscillation statistically, we could begin to look for a geophysical explanation for it. But why try to explain something if it doesn’t actually exist?
Mal and Jonathan,
I would apply Mal’s last sentence in reverse. Why think that there is “something” if you can’t think of an explanation for it?
We’re not talking about spooky QM or reality-bending Relativity here. As Mal says, we are aware that variations in this particular quantity have physically mundane (if often complicated) causes.
My issue with ‘seeing’ longer-term periodicity is that there has to be an underlying mechanism (or a synthesis of shorter-term variations with their own mechanisms). Any suggestions?
Let’s hear some physics before rushing off to consult with Tamino.
This point, I think, is actually on the original topic for this thread, because I still see people ‘debating’ the Denialists about wiggles in the data without starting from the established role of CO2 in increasing the energy of the system.
Jonathan David,
This NASA page on climate forcings provides a number of graphs of net forcing since the 1800s. The big negative forcing just after 1900 is the eruption of Santa María in 1902. Volcanoes have to be close to the equator to have a big impact on climate (so Mt St Helens didn’t leave its mark on climate in 1980) and I’m sure I’ve read that asymetiric (not equal NH & SH) forcing is the most effective forcing so volcanoes a little away from the equator (like Santa María) have a bigger impact for the same size.
One description of the driving of the early 20th century warming is often that the period saw no significant volcanic forcing, so in that respect, much of the early 20th century warming is a sort of “rebound.”
As for perceiving oscillations that aren’t there, we should perhaps think back a quarter century to the AMO identified within the work of one of our hosts (alongside the famous hockey stick graph). It has now been declared that the AMO “doesn’t actually exist”.
I won’t attempt a response to CCHolley’s explanation of how greenhouse warming works as he (she?) clearly knows more about this topic than do I. My reasoning was based on an assumption that is apparently erroneous and I apologize.
Nevertheless I can’t help noticing that the graph referenced by CC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_heat_content ) begins with the year 1960 and the level doesn’t begin to rise very much until the mid 70’s, a picture consistent with what we see in so many of the surface temperature graphs. It would be interesting to see whether the temperature “hiatus” beginning in the 1940’s is reflected in the heating data, but most of that period isn’t covered by the graph in question.
As far as temperature is concerned, the picture for the ocean surface strongly resembles that for global temperatures generally, as is apparent from the following graph — http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19418.jpeg. Note the extreme temperature dip from 1940 to 1950 and the following period of relative stability until the mid-70’s. Note also the slowdown apparent from ca. 2000 through 2015, consistent with the notorious “hiatus” so apparent in the global data.
Nevertheless I can’t help noticing that the graph referenced by CC begins with the year 1960 and the level doesn’t begin to rise very much until the mid 70’s, a picture consistent with what we see in so many of the surface temperature graphs.
Measurement of temperatures at depth which is required to determine ocean heat content was minimal prior to 1960 so the data is incomplete.
As far as temperature is concerned, the picture for the ocean surface strongly resembles that for global temperatures generally,
That’s because sea surface temperatures are used as a proxy for air temperatures over the oceans and since the oceans represent 70% of the Earth’s surface these temperatures obviously have a significant impact on global temperatures.
Note also the slowdown apparent from ca. 2000 through 2015, consistent with the notorious “hiatus” so apparent in the global data.
And yes it would for surface temperatures per above.
However:
Ocean “heat” content determination is based on water temperatures at multiple depths.
When looking at ocean heat content there is no indication of a warming slowdown from 2000 through 2015 and given that the data for this period is very robust due to the implementation of the ARGO float system, it is clear that the warming of the climate system (90% 0f which is ocean heat) actually continued through this “hiatus” period unabated.
From Wikipedia: “Since at least 1990, OHC has increased at a steady or accelerating rate.”
Again, ocean heat content is a better indicator of greenhouse warming than air temperatures due to the constant and variable exchange of heat between the oceans that contain most of the heat and the atmosphere that contains far less. That heat exchange is what results in global temperature natural variability about the greenhouse driven norm.
From Wikipedia: Ocean waters are efficient absorbents of solar energy and have far greater heat capacity than atmospheric gases. The top few meters of the ocean consequently contain more thermal energy than Earth’s entire atmosphere.
Yes, this is very fine..
“(she)” miss Victor:
Again there is sulphur dioxide and coalsmog also in the climate, not to be ridiculed, not to be denied, and there are crunches in fossile fuel digging and pumping and shipping for instance when Donbas is invaded and made into peoples republics, and Mariopol and Azovstal is shelled and blocked as with Stalingrad.
Try and find Admiral Kuznetzov on the net. That is a combination of Azovstal, Black Carbon, and stinky heavy crude resins after the gasolines and kerosenes are destilled off.
Sniffdogs, Canes domesticus are dangerously good at finding recently killed and buried and hidden dead bodies in suburban areas, and central stimulants and hypnotica sedativa in the ruins and the still living mooving and performing bodies.
PS
Yes, I found it on Wikipedia in Entglish also, really very well described. Https:/WWW. Brunnmigi.
There are some of them here on this website. DS.
PPS
if there shall be dematcation lines, then against Brunnmigi first of all.DDS.