Tamino has the scoop on the latest attempt to revive the old UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer argument. Eli Rabett has more.
Advertisment
Tamino has the scoop on the latest attempt to revive the old UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer argument. Eli Rabett has more.
ABSTRACT
A bunch of people took random photos that we categorized ad nauseum and pretended were of import. These photographs we then showed to Heritage and CEI. They provided guidance, tips for using key phrases that invoke emotion, and gave us their list of media-ready phrases that outlets like the Globe and Mail will use to bash liberals and spread envirohate to a small group of small-minded wankers. Oh, and they helped us write an official-sounding paper.
[content of about 5000 words expressing outrage over a few stations and describing the groundbreaking Garmin GPS unit that tracks everywhere I wank to pictures of Pam, sweet Pam.]
CONCLUSION
There MIGHT be an issue with temperatures at particular sites. But since we didn't take any measurements of anything, all we can do is infer, inveigh, cluck our tongues at liberals and harrumph in loud, false outrage while we dine on Heritage catering. And Chris DeFreitas, Bob Carter, RP Sr, Singer, See-oh-too, Richard Lindzen and the same 55 others from the well-known cast of characters spread our vague, evidenceless message.
Oh...
Whoops.
Have I leaked someone's draft study plan?
Best,
D
Hi all
Looking at some of these sites you do have to wonder about how representative they are of local temps.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
These sites should be wiped from data sets until rectified, but hell they show warming so they will stay.
Regards
Peter Bickle
Dano,
Notice how they bleat that a picture is evidence of...something unless it's a picture that shows something they don't like, then it's evidence of nothing. Like a photo of a mosque with a destroyed roof is evidence of nothing, but a photo of a station in a parking lot is evidence of gross incompetence or a terrible conspiracy. A lot of "science" in that sort of audit, eh?
Peter,
Pictures like those are worth much more than a thousand words, they're worth millions, most of them mendacious. Did you even read Eli's post?
Thank GOD we have intelligent people like you to tell all those stupid commie scientists how to do their job.
Because clearly, in the chapter on "climatology" in Mao's Little Red Book, there is no subsection teaching these poor, clueless, stupid conspirators against western wealth that "individual stations might give bogus data". There is, however, an excellent subsection on "how to doctor weather stations to make it appear that it's warming, even though it's not". And another on "how to melt glaciers worldwide without being detected", yet another on "how to persuade birds to migrate earlier in spring and later in fall", etc etc etc.
All techniques used by conspirators who have dreamed up this global warming scam in order to put in place the New World Order.
Do you have any idea how silly you people appear to anyone with any sense of how science works?
Oh -
Perhaps, but a picture isn't an quantifiable data point, so is useless for data analysis. Note that number crunchers, ummm, crunch numbers, not words, not pictures.
Putting on my sensible hat for a minute.
There may well be some well intentioned people involved in this, who want to ensure that the USA has an effective network of observation stations.
Therefore, I wait to see what their response will be when they have written their report.
I can think of several alternatives.
A) concluding that many stations need to be improved, with possible staff retraining, and reccomending further research on the problem.
B) Pointing out that this means that the USA temperature record is damaged, so many results might be uncertain.
C) Claiming that the USA network is so unreliable that global warming is not occuring, contrary to all the other data showing that it is. (Or perhaps the USA is immune?)
Furthermore, I understand that it is unethical and poor practise to release results of investigations before they are complete, otherwise you end up with many distortions being made. I hope the well intentioned people involved in this can ensure that they can achieve the high standards they set for others.
I'm sure there are some, even - or perhaps especially - among the "global warming is a left-wing conspiracy" crowd who are not technically sophisticated and therefore easily swayed by meaningless arguments.
They (well-intentioned volunteers) aren't going to be writing the report.
Go to surfacestations.org and it shouldn't take you more than a few moments to pick out distortions, inaccuracies and downright lies. This leads me, at least, to believe that the people who put the effort together aren't interested in the truth. And tamino's exercise with the "good station/bad station" graphs adds some solid empirical evidence in support of that conclusion.
I really can't see how photographs are going to tell anyone anything that's not known. It's no secret that there are stations that could be improved. It's also no secret that the problem of deriving accurate results despite this is being vigorously attacked via statistical data analysis. Though the surfacestations.org people don't seem to want you to know this.
B doesn't follow from A. Think!
Bingo! This will be the claim. Correction: it is ALREADY the claim. The photo effort is mean to SUPPORT that claim.
Awww, you've spoilt it now. I was fishing for answers from denialists, not from people like yourself. I do read a certain rabbits blog you know.
Don't wait!
Participate!
Validate
Envirohate!
Take a picture!
Snap snap snap!
Assert bias!
Just like that!
Rah rah sis-boom-bah!
Yaaaaaaaay!
Best,
D
Even better, work for more funding for the Global Climate Observing System stations. One of the most frustrating things to me over at RPSrs. blog is that he keeps moaning about how ill treated his State Climatologist buddies are, and I keep saying that what the US needs is a fully funded State Climatology program under NOAA, not a bunch of free lancers getting their support from here and there and nowhere, AND THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING.
They are not serious.
My guess is that they know that if the program were funded under NOAA, there'd be a serious attempt to establish some meaningful criteria for credentials for those hired as state climatologists. The Oregon "state climatologist", for instance, holds what's essentially a communications job with OSU, has an MS in metereology, no credentials in climatology, yet very visibly claims that AGW isn't real.
And when our governor said "quit calling yourself the state climatologist, we don't have one of those" the rightwing blogosphere went apeshit.
Bickle: "These sites should be wiped from data sets until rectified, but hell they show warming so they will stay."
Ironically, as Eli points out, the sites subject to UHI are effectively wiped from calculation of long-term warming trend. So whether they show long-term warming or not they don't stay anyway.
the sites subject to UHI are effectively wiped from calculation of long-term warming trend. So whether they show long-term warming or not they don't stay anyway.
Even more interesting is that RP Sr et al found that some sites under ag (such as in N CA [Gov't report]) were subject to cooling due to LU/LC changes. But we knew that.
So Peter wants to get rid of rural stations with a cooling bias too, presumably to make things look alarmingly warmist.
Best,
D
OK, so we shouldn't be concerned about the quality of the sites because....
a)A dozen or so sites (so far) with AC units, BBQ grills, asphalt parking lots and jet fighter exhausts, etc. doesn't mean they are all bad.
b)Qualified climate scientists know how to "correct" the data.
c) The debate is over and only "denialsts" demand to actually see the data and where it comes from.
So far these are the responses of the AGW faithful to an inquiry into data collection sites that were used to make the claim that the "planet has a fever".
Pretty pathetic. It indicates to me that you warmers realize how shaky is the ground beneath your feet.
Are you actually OK with shoddy collection sites? Shouldn't you welcome an open examination of these sites upon which your whole theory rests?
What are you afraid of? Oh, I can guess.
This surfacestations tourist program is idiotic. Anyone who has ever worked with noisy data would realize that you will never have perfect measurements, but when you're fitting 10000 points with a 100 degree polynomial, a few moderately bad points make no difference whatsoever. RealClimate does a typically good job of pointing this out (provided you can understand them in the first place).
However -- it's idiotic like a fox. The purpose is to get a few good pictures which can be laundered to anecdotally disprove global warming in the usual ideological venues. Embryonic as the effort is, I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up in a major way by the right-wing press yet.
Images, not data are the stock-in-trade of many "professionals" -- journalists, photographers, architects (like occasional Deltoid troll Peter Bickle).
For those people, I imagine the crux of the case in "An Inconvenient Truth" would be the glacier photographs, not the CO2 data, not the temperature data. (I'm surprised they're not sending people out to take photos of the glaciers in winter.)
So the question I have is, how do you convince people who work with anecdotes all day to stop and think about data?
Lance--you and others need to put up the quantitative analysis to support your qualitative assertion.
1% of the weather stations have been identified as having this issue. Can you demonstrate how conditions at 1% of a population can sufficiently alter the measurements at the other 99%, given that the 1% are likely not outliers?
Is it the accurate measurement of temperature or the precise measurement that matters? Your argument seems to center on the precision, when it is the accuracy that matters. It is the variability between annual measurements that gives a trend, not how closely the measurment of temperature is to the true average ambient molecular velocity.
Since the data is available, put up or shut up.
Mike
Shorter Lance parroting the Cheer Squad credo:
Lance, the chinstrap under your tinfoil hat is untied.
Best,
D
Lance: "Shouldn't you welcome an open examination of these sites upon which your whole theory rests?"
What part of "the sites subject to UHI are effectively wiped from calculation of long-term warming trend" don't you understand? As I've already mentioined,Eli has pointed this out. This means that the long-term trend of areas subject to UHI are reset to the long-term trend of nearby rural stations. So when the global long-term trend is calculated, it depends only on the long-term trend of rural stations and completely disregards the original long-term trend of stations subject to UHI. Unfortunately I have the feeling that this concept is too difficult for credulous peope to understand. (Not that it's a difficult concept of course, it's just that credulity interferes with people's cognitive skill.)
Hi all
All I am saying is that these sites should be stood down while they are not to standard, this applies to cooling sites as well. I love being slagged off as a non scientist as well as I was once one, a chemist. I know about data collection and degrees of confidence etc. What I am saying is that the degree of confidence of data from these sites will be low despite this being taken into account by other calculations. Would be interesting to see what a control experiment will bear out, in a feild say 200 meters away.
Theo points out 'Images, not data are the stock-in-trade of many "professionals" -- journalists, photographers, architects (like occasional Deltoid troll Peter Bickle).'
So what, the photos reflect that data from these points is not worth the paper they are recorded from. Too many un-natural distortions.
Regards
Peter Bickle
The "wiping" part.
It appears that "lights=0" sites are used to do the wiping of other suspected UHI sites, but the "lights=0" stations have microsite problems of their own. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1850 . So it can be like wiping with a dirty cloth.
It also appears that at least some rural sites that show cooling (like Orland, CA) are "reverse-UHI adusted" by this same "wiping" method. Bizarre.
A two by four is useful
Classic argument from a false premise. Start there, and the rest of your post is meaningless.
There's a great deal of concern about the quality of the DATA collected by the sites, indeed a great deal of effort goes into making sure that the overall analysis is accurate.
The people doing the statistical analysis claim otherwise.
PROVE THEM WRONG.
Bald-headed arguments from assertion don't counter carefully constructed analysis based on widely-accepted treatments of data.
Sorry 'bout that.
Other than being accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, which might be a good look for me, I don't see any cogent responces to my post from the AGW supporters.
Here is what I would have considered a logical reply.
"Yeah, those sites do not comport with the standards as set out by NOAA. Let's wait and see what the complete survey shows and maybe we will have to exclude some of those sites."
See, your whole world wouldn't have collapsed.
But no. The orthodoxy must be defended from heretical assault. Sheesh! I casually logged back in and was surprised by the rapacity of the replies. You'd a thought I had pissed on the shroud of Turin!
Dano, I haven't heard a childish verbal assualt like that since
"Lance eats ants
and puts them in his pants,
and does a little dance.
CHA CHA CHA!"
sent me home crying in the second grade.
Perhaps the most ludicrous responce was from dhogaza. That somehow exposing shoddy data collection sites put the onus on me to "PROVE THEM WRONG".
As an actual scientist if someone showed that my data collection might have some systematic error I would be thankful for the insight and look to see if removing those data points affected my conclusions.
But hey, maybe the chin strap on my tin foil hat is too tight.
But no. The orthodoxy must be defended from heretical assault. Sheesh! I casually logged back in and was surprised by the rapacity of the replies. You'd a thought I had pissed on the shroud of Turin!
Here now. Let's just standardize the typical cheer squad bot comment, shall we?
Heretic, heretic, lunatic!
Socialist, scientist, what's the diff?
Orthodoxy! Robed climate priests!
Calling us all hairy beasts!
Don't wait! Participate!
Validate Envirohate!
Take a picture! Snap snap snap!
Assert bias! Just like that!
Note the last two lines have changed from the previous cheer for the hockey stick totem.
Maybe we are seeing the creation of a thermometer totem?
Best,
D
PS: Lance, drop the 'ferocious assault' shtick. It's sooooo 2004.
Peter Bickle said - "These sites should be wiped from data sets until rectified, but hell they show warming so they will stay." This is a very serious implication/allegation - that there is a deliberate conspiracy to use distorted data. Is there any evidence that this is the case? I don't see any. In response I will say that the pictures on surfacestations.org are faked using graphics software. Can anyone prove otherwise? I certainly wouldn't accept that they are real, or that if real there is any proof the results from them are distorted or if they are distorted that the corrections process is inadequate or if it is inadequate that the whole of climate science is fundamentally flawed and anyway the pictures aren't real. So there!
Bickle: "All I am saying is that these sites should be stood down while they are not to standard, this applies to cooling sites as well."
How do you know they are not to standard for the purpose that they are used? The only purpose that matters in a global warming context is their long term trend and as I've already pointed out, for this purpose they are effectively stood down. Bickle's statement is a strawman.
Bickle: All I am saying is that these sites should be stood down while they are not to standard, this applies to cooling sites as well
O'Neill: Bickle's statement is a strawman.
If I may correct Chris: Bickle's statement is bullsh*t. There is no evidence their temp measurements are substandard.
This is what they are reduced to: argument from false premises. They got nothin', as usual.
Best,
D
sucks: "but the "lights=0" stations have microsite problems of their own"
i.e. 1 station that may or may not be relevant may or may not have a problem relative to long term global warming. As the thread title says, cherry picking stations.org.
Lance: "Let's wait and see what the complete survey shows"
i.e. let's wait and see and in the mean time assume there is no global warming.
Known as a wedge argument.
Bickle: "All I am saying is ..."
For some reason when I saw this phrase I envisioned a time in the near future when Climate Audit holds a march. And they are all singing: "All we are saying is give heat a chance"
False premise. It's not being exposed, it's known about.
The scientists working with this data work hard to make the resulting analysis robust despite KNOWN problems with some of the site.
The claim on your side, then, is that their efforts to do so are insufficient, and yes, it is up to you or others to PROVE THEM WRONG.
As an actual scientist, if you already were aware of the problem and had taken it into account in your analysis of the data, I suspect your response would be polite and something like this:
"Thank you, but I've been aware of this for years, and have taken it into account, as is clearly explained in my publications" etc etc.
Again, you argue from a false premise, that those analyzing the data are unaware of problems and need to be "informed" of them.
This is your suggestion? A variety of tests of this sort have been done.
Now, in detail - why doesn't this satisfy you, given that you're suggesting it yourself?
"Peter Bickle said - "These sites should be wiped from data sets until rectified, but hell they show warming so they will stay." This is a very serious implication/allegation - that there is a deliberate conspiracy to use distorted data."
Good think climatologists aren't as litigious as Trent Lott.
Hi all
Trolling again. I just love being the centre of attention, I feel I am the pretty boy in a gay orgy with all your muscular comments, and I just love being called Bickle. Bring it on big boys, I surrender to your superior interlect.
XXXXXX
Peter Bickle
Dano,
I do so enjoy your little poems, but how about answering a point or two. Also if you are going to quote me do so correctly. I never said "ferocious asualt". I was just surprised how angry and insulting the responces were. Of course it is to be expected when you question the underpinnings of peoples religious beliefs.
The whole of AGW rests on the shaky premise that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is responsible for the whopping 0.6-0.8 C increase in the surface temperature record over that last 100 years. (Lets put aside that correlation doesn't mean causation for the moment.)
Now if it can be demonstrated that some of the data collection sites are not in compliance with standards outlined by the organizations responsible for the collection of the data one can rightly ask "Is the data reliable?" Maybe it is, but to mock the effort to verify the compliance of the sites to the standards is counterproductive at best and reflects poorly on the objectivity of those deriding the effort.
As for the efforts of scientists to "correct" for these deficiencies are concerned that is another qustion entirely. Why don't you address this point first?
If you'll permit a few corrections, Lance. To begin with, I don't recall that the IPCC is blaming 0.6- 0.8 degrees of warming in the past 100 years on humans, I'm pretty sure it is merely the last 32 years.
Secondly, the USA does not comprise the world, and no matter what you make of data from it, the other confirmatory data is not damaged, hence you cannot legitimately draw the conclusion that AGW doesn't exist based upon a number of temperature stations in the USA.
The causation is basic physics. Go read a textbook.
Bickle: "I just love being called Bickle."
Love calling you Bickle.
Guthrie, the last 10 years have shown no increase in temperature.
Also, I wasn't trying to make any over all conclusion on the data. I was making the reasonable assertion that if data comes from sources that are not in acccordance with the standards set forth by NOAA it should rightly be called into question.
Dhogaza, the IPCC projections for temperature increase in the next hundred years are based on climate models not straight forward physics equations. The actual radiative forcing due to a doubling of the concentration of CO2 would result in rather unspectacular increases in temperature since the absorbtion of infrared radiation of CO2 is a logarithmic function of its concentration. More and more CO2 gives less and less warming.
The models that predict large increases rely on unproven positve "forcings" whose magnitude is unkown and indeed unknowable. These forcings are based on purely speculative and "tunable" parameters that are iterated many billions of times in computers by the unpublicized code of theoretical climate models.
As a physicist I have seen no convincing evidence, from a textbook or otherwise, that indicates we face temperature increases that would lead to a "climate catastrophe".
Having done some wotk with systems of coupled non-linear differential equations I can tell you that they are highly unpredictable by definition. The system I worked with had only three equations and was so sensitive to initial conditions that it proved to be almost impossible to even predict time depedent phase variations let alone specific outcomes.
A system as complicated as the climate of our planet is several orders of magnitude more difficult to correctly model. Even if you did construct a reasonable model there would be no way to initialize all the parameters to correctly simulate the actual eigenstates of the current climate system. Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of the physics involved or a liar.
Which are you?
Oh God, it gets better and better.
Do you read *anything* other than right-wing denialist sites?
Dhogaza,
Below is a table of the yearly average deviation from 1961-1990 temperatures as taken from IPCC data.
Year Average
1996 0.205
1997 0.462
1998 0.817
1999 0.487
2000 0.361
2001 0.553
2002 0.661
2003 0.641
2004 0.612
2005 0.745
2006 0.658
While the average temperature deviations are all positive from the 1961-1990 averages, you can see the peak was 1998 and temperatures have remained essentially flat since then.
So my statement that " ...the last ten years have shown no increase in temperature" is supported by information obtained from that "denialist" source known as the IPCC.
Neither, Lance. Setting up a false dualism does not help your case.
To take it from the top:
THe last 10 years of warming, if you look at the NASA GISS data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif
Shows that from 1997 to now, the trend has been consistently upwards. Oh, wait, did you mean from 1998? But that is 9 years ago. Also, nobody with any sense plots a trend on something which you claim is incredibly complex as global climate, with only 2 data points. RIght?
Then there is the CO2 doubling- can you provide a reason to think it's not around 3 or 4 degrees C? CO2 does not saturate out anywhere near as much as some people like to think, the reasons why are explained here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy…
AS for your being a physicist and having experience with non-linear systems, you are aware that at the moment you are arguing like a Creationist? THey use similar arguments- "I can't understand why this should be so, therefore it must be wrong."
If you want to convince anyone you are correct, you'll have to raise your game.
I admit to just jumping in at the end here, but there are a couple things that seem goofy. First, dhogaza, I'm not sure, but I think that 1997 is still considered the warmest year in the last 1000 years. That would imply that since then, there have been no years that are warmer. That would imply that there has been no increase in temperature. Maybe I'm wrong...
Lance, you said: The actual radiative forcing due to a doubling of the concentration of CO2 would result in rather unspectacular increases in temperature since the absorbtion of infrared radiation of CO2 is a logarithmic function of its concentration. More and more CO2 gives less and less warming.
Actually, that is right. That is why climate scientists refer to a 'doubling of CO2' causing a specific temp increase. If CO2 didn't have this logarithmic effect, then they would refer to a specific CO2 increase. Say, an increase of 100ppm would cause a temperature increase of X degrees. So, if the concentration doubles from 200ppm to 400ppm, that is an increase of 200ppm to get a temp increase of (roughly) 2-4 degrees. Then, to get that increase in temp again, the CO2 concentration would have to go from 400ppm to 800ppm. In that case, that is an increase of 400 ppm to get the same increase that the previous 200ppm caused.
Now, all of this may or may not actually cause that temp increase, and it may or may not account for all feedbacks, positive and negative etc. But your assertion that CO2 increase can't account for the temp increase doesn't follow.
guthrie, sorry, I may have not refreshed since you posted, so I think I missed a post in between. Anyway, your link to the temp data looks like it is just a link to an image that is a plus sign. Could you repost that temp data. Thanks.
Guthrie, your remarks are incoherent. As oconnellc points out including the 1997 figure only reinforces my argument. As for the CO2 and climate model discussion, you make only a naked appeal to the alleged authority of RealClimate, and then fire an ad hom parting shot about me being like a "creationist". Both comments sink below the level of credibility requiring a response.
Occonnelc, I'm not sure where your last remark is going. Are you saying that a doubling of CO2 from say the supposed pre-industrial level of about 280ppm to 560ppm is adequate to give the temperatures predicted by climate models without other positive "forcings"? This would be a highly controversial point and contrary to the positions I have read on the subject even from types like James Hansen.
If so I'd be interested in how you get there from here. I have no "faith based" opposition to AGW theory. I just haven't seen evidence to back it up. I didn't like quantum mechanics at first but damn if all the evidence doesn't line up behind it. Incorporating AGW into what I consider a list of best explanations of the world we live in would be nothing compared to accepting the counter-intuitive freak-fest that is quantum mechanics.
1997 was a strong ENSO year. El Niño events are known to have a strong positive influence on internal climate system temperature variability. For this reason 1997 should be considered an outlier when estimating short term climactic trends. An anomaly on top of the anomaly, as it were.
My understanding is that the noise from such observed internal dynamics is overcome in the overall temperature trend signal by a frequency of about 18 years, given the indeterminacy of any periodicity in these oscillations, so drawing any statistical conclusions from any particular 10 year period is a bit of a stretch.
Lance, It is precisely because climate change is calculated from stochastic trends based on observation derived physical models and not extrapolated from coupled non-linear differential equations that it is much less susceptible to initial condition chaotic indeterminacy than, say, weather prediction. Much like the difficulty in predicting a single coin toss compared to predicting the net outcome of 1000 coin tosses.
Lance, when I included this, I thought I made it clear that I had no idea if the prediction was correct or if it included the correct forcings or not: Now, all of this may or may not actually cause that temp increase, and it may or may not account for all feedbacks, positive and negative etc. But your assertion that CO2 increase can't account for the temp increase doesn't follow.
However, the point I was making that you missed is that you made an argument about CO2 reaching saturation. Because of this, you said that "More and more CO2 gives less and less warming." Right. If my explanation wasn't clear, look at this: http://www.ipcc-data.org/ddc_reporting.html
The concept that because the affect of CO2 is logarithmic results in statements that refer to doubling CO2. They don't refer to an absolute increase in the amount of CO2. Therefore, you get the same effect going from 400 to 800 that you got going from 200 to 400. You appeared to make the point that increasing CO2 concentrations would have less and less impact. Everyone agrees with you. You then state that because of that, CO2 increases could not cause predicted temp increases. Well, I don't know if the predicted temp increases are correct or not. I actually doubt it. But that is irrelevant to your argument. The "logarithmic" thing is already accounted for in the statement 'doubling of CO2'. Don't try to argue a point that no one is making.
Excuse me. 1998, not 1997, is the warmest year on record and an El Niño year. To be absolutely clear, one year does not a trend make, Lance. You do understand a trend, right, Mr. Physicist?
Oconnelc- your right. I can only assume, in my lack of knowledge about how it works, that they don't allow you just to open that graph.
Ahh well.
Maybe this will work, it's the page before, with the various graphs:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Mind you, the site itself doesn't seem to be loading up, so who knows what is going on.
"My understanding is that the noise from such observed internal dynamics is overcome in the overall temperature trend signal by a frequency of about 18 years,"
Indeed, we need to average over 14 years to get an average that rises continuously since 1976. The 14 year average since 1983 (i.e. average of 1970 to 1983 for the 14 year average to 1983) has been the highest on record every year since then.
Idiots who think they're going to overturn thousands of person-years of research into climatology ought to really try harder.
1. It was 1998, not 1997, and it was an ENSO year, which are always warm years.
2. There are two years since that have been as warm or warmer.
3. One year does not a trend make.
4. Multiple factors impact climate, not just CO2 concentrations. One of those factors is the ENSO cycle. ENSO warming piled on top of the warming trendline is expected to create a very warm year. No one argues that CO2-induced warming magically makes the ENSO cycle disappear. Nor do other climate impacts magically make the impact of increasing CO2 concentrations disappear.
> That would imply that there has been no increase in temperature.
No, it wouldn't. Global temperature is variable, it's the trend that matters. You don't compute a trend by throwing out all years before and after 1998.
There is, of course, dispute over "the warmest year", not that it matters, since trends are all that matter, and not trends cherry-picked to fit preconceptions (such as starting with a strong ENSO year like 1998).
However, NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/2005_warmest.html) has called 2005 the warmest year ever, warmer than 1998.
I should add that the reason you're wrong is very, very basic to any analysis based on data that has a lot of variability.
Golden eagles in the intermountain west have a natural 10 year cycle, for instance. If I pick a peak population year as my start point, and five years afterwards as my end point, I can always "prove" that the golden eagle population is declining.
The technical term for such trickery is "lying out one's ass".
In order to avoid doing so, we measure wildlife population trends over periods which span as many natural population cycles as possible. A famous instance of this was provided by Rachael Carson with peregrine falcon populations, using migration count data gathered over several decades in the eastern United States.
The ENSO phenomena is also cyclic, though its period is not as stable as we usually find in population cycles. The technical term for cherry-picking within one cycle that I offer above applies to anyone who uses 1998 as their starting point for computing the global temperature trend.
"even from types like James Hansen".
So much for your attitude towards highly-respected scientists. You have a problem with scientists with proven track records?
Of course, no climatologist claims the CO2 alone is responsible for observed climate change, and any claim that they do would be dishonest. Shouldn't even be on the table.
I'm glad that "even a type like Lance" understands this.
Lance: "Below is a table of the yearly average deviation from 1961-1990 temperatures as taken from IPCC data."
That data actually originates from CRU which means it has left out most of the Arctic and consequently does not include the rapid warming that has occurred in the Arctic. If you consider data that includes the whole Arctic, such as NCDC or GISS, then 2005 was hotter than 1998.
BTW, the last 7 months were the globally warmest 7 month period ever recorded (Dec-Jun).
Here's one for Chris "I have never been wrong" O'Neill with his unique ability to lie with statistics:
1. The GISS data are not "global"; Egypt is known to have had a slight cooling trend and is therefore excluded on the specious grounds that Cairo Airport allegedly no longer records temperatures; worse than that, Lyman, Willis, & Johnson (Geo.Research Letters 33, L188604, 2006) report on "Recent Cooling of the Upper Ocean". But of course, I forgot, for Chris "global" means only terrestrial, even though the oceans cover a larger area than the land mass. Just like the weather stations in the US, if they show the wrong trends, invert them.
BTW, why are there seemingly no collated data from the amazing records of every merchant and navy ship of seawater temperatures in their engine rooms daily since 1880 if not before in every ship's log?
2. Selecting just 2 stations at random from a country I know well, South Africa, namely Uppington (rural) and Pretoria (urban) we have rising trends for both since 1945 but much faster for Pretoria (but of course there is no UHI as Quiggin assures us), and for the 14-year averages since 1970, both logarithmic, i.e flattening, i.e slowing down, pace the immaculate O'Neil.
3. I have previously noted here without response that with CO2e emissions rising by at least 1.4% p.a. since 1980, but atmospheric CO2 rising by only 0.5% pa (and as fast as that only since 2000), there is a gap of (say) nearly 1% p.a., which must have been taken up by terrestrial and oceanic absorption. With Stern calling for emissions to be only 20% of the 2000 level and soon, and UK, EU, and Rudd calling for 40%, it is possible to show that with terrestrial and oceanic absorption continuing apace, the reduction in emissions and atmospheric concentration will return us surprisingly quickly to levels of around 270-280 ppm by as early as 2070. The outcome (including the reverse logarithimic effect) would be a return to the Little Ice Age with its concomitant low crop yields (from their highest ever level during O'Neill's warm 14 year averages) and much lower life expectancy. Brave New World!
Which no one who wants to be taken seriously would do.
People probably don't bother responding because it's known that there are CO2 sinks as well as sources, and that it will take a long time for the oceans in particular to catch up.
"I say the sky's blue, no one comments on it, therefore global warming is false".
Is that the best you can do?
Let's see if I understand ...
Tossing of bogus data is proof that global warming's a fraud.
On the other hand, this thread's based on a claim that the inclusion of bogus data is proof that global warming's a fraud.
That's pretty much the denialist game, isn't it? Argue that global warming's a fraud no matter what, right?
Dear dhotripe:
The point is that the terrestrial and oceanic uptakes are obviously FASTER than the atmospheric, which is why the latter lags the emissions. There is no reason why the former should slow with reduced emissions, at least for some time. Why is this beyond your arithmetic capacity?
dhotripe again: trying to help!. With the following stocks and flows (according to Pope John 25th, aka John Houghton, inventor of Global Warming (3rd edition, CUP 2004,30):
Atmospheric carbon = 760 GtC + annual increase 3.3; Fossil fuels 6.3+/- 0.6 (@ 1.3% pa since 1980, IEA); terrestrial 0.7 (+/-1.0) and oceans (2.3 (+/- 0.8), and atmospheric CO2-e growing at less than 0.5% p.a. since 1980 (Mauna Loa); if we reduce fossil fuels by 60-80% of the 2000 level as proposed, and the terrestrial and oceanic uptakes continue to grow at the observed rates of the last 25 years, by 2050 the stock of atmospheric carbon could be as little as 50% of the current level, with catastrophic consequences for any of us still around then.
Ah yes, the majic of the fictional market. Postulate exponential growth and we are all worth a zillion in ten years. Ain't Kapitalism great!! The Germans tried that in the 1920s. For better or worse the carbon cycle is constrained by physical laws.
Just let me get this straight; is Tim Curtin arguing that increased oceanic CO2 absorption is independent of atmospheric CO2 concentrations? That is, that there is some process going on in the oceans that is gobbling up CO2 and will continue to do so even if atmospheric CO2 levels return to pre-industrial levels?
Tim C.,
Ooops!
Yes, that's exactly what he's arguing.
Amazing, isn't it?
Eli,
Ain't economists cute! 'Specially when they make bonehead remarks about physical systems.
Robin,
I think you're right, but Curtin's high degree of incoherence makes it difficult to distinguish the noisome noise from the rest of the noise.
Would this be a good time to point out that potential "UHIs" make up a good fraction of all the cooling spots on the globe, and deleting all urban weather stations would probably make it look even more convincing regarding "is it getting warm in here"?
http://global-warming.accuweather.com/blogpics/map_blended_mntp_02_2007…
"UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer" and anyway, it's been definitely proved that lack of cosmic rays is heating the planet. What? Why can't I believe both of those simultaneously? Typical liberals, trying to restrict my freedom to believe two completely opposing things simultaneously.
Hi all
Another from climateaudit.com:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1860
The title says it all really.
I know as a naysayer I will be condemmed for showing this as all the correct calibrations have been done to show this is a bonafide measuring site, but you have to start admitting this is just another low class site where data is gathered from.
I am not a climate scientist and I cannot say so called climate scientists are scientists at all if this is the type of set up they allow, you see, one part of being a scientist is set up of experiments/systems and ways data is gathered. Do you think this would pass ISO crediations, I doubt it. I am a chemist and I have worked as a drug synthesis chamist (high tech) and as a 'bucket chemist' (low tech) and I can honestly say the bucket chemistry was of a higher standard than the set up at these sites.
Also, how are the results from these sites affecting the models used to estimate climate change? If they are used this makes models even more useless.
Also, just because someone says the corrections used are correct does not necessiarly mean this is true.
Since this site is called scienceblogs it would nice to see some science, not wholsale beleiving in what is posted. At this site it is like talking to Johovahs Witnesses, if it says that in the bible it must be true, no wonder GW is called the new religion.
Regards from New Zealand
Peter Bickle
(Bickle to McNeill:))
Hi all
Ian Gould wrote:
"Peter Bickle said - "These sites should be wiped from data sets until rectified, but hell they show warming so they will stay." This is a very serious implication/allegation - that there is a deliberate conspiracy to use distorted data."
As I have said before, the data gathered from these sites is not worth a pince of shit. So I am saying, not alledging that there is a conspiracy if these 'high quality' sites are used. Crap info in = crap info out.
This is not science at all as science is all about coming to a conclusion after gathering/analysing data and analysing this againt the original hypothesis, not gathering the data to suit a politically driven conclusion already set in stone.
Shall I supply contact details for a high court hearing, I would like a free trip to the USA.
Aside from the irony-challenged Tim (atmospheric mass is conserved) Curtin's cherry picking in a thread pointing out the hazards of cherry picking, one other howler hasn't yet been pointed out. Just because x is growing exponentially doesn't mean x+y is also growing exponentially.
"The title says it all really."
Unfortunately the title doesn't mention that there are 17 other rural stations less than or equal to 190 km from Odessa, Washington, not to mention probably a lot more within 500 km. Doesn't look like a shortage of information for quality control purposes to me. Obviously some people are unaware that weather bureaus etc. do quality control of their observations or of what it means.
"it would nice to see some science, not wholsale beleiving in what is posted"
Pity he doesn't ask the same at the egregious climateaudit.
Regards from Chris O'Neill (McNeill to Bickle)
1. Climate models have never been right once, ever. Not even close.
2. Surface station temperature data used to create the models seems problematic and seems to incorporate a rural-city bias of an unsurprising 0.7C for the 20th century.
3. Climate scientists need to incorporate whatever background forcing drove us out of the LIA, which would then ascribe less warming to humans, of course, but they then might get closer to reality.
4. If climate models can't get precipitation correct (currently they're all miles out) then stop telling us we're doomed based on their predictions.
Chris error free O'Neill: I did not say what you say I did. To repeat: we have exponential growth of emissions of CO2-e, at about 1.3% p.a., and exponential growth of atmospheric CO2-e, at just above 0.5% p.a. since 2000, less before. Houghton of IPCC infers that terrstrial and oceanic take-up account for about half of total emissions, which implies that they too are growing exponentially. Startng with an initial stock of c.760 GtC, reducing the emissions to 20% (or even 40%) of the 2000 level, and holding them there, then since there is no direct coupling between emissions and uptakes, the latter will predominate and reduce the stock, perhaps for many years, until indeed there is none left. By then our successors will be dead of starvation if not already frozen to death, by 2050 if we use Stern's emissions target of 80% below 2000. All I have done is apply basic arithmetic to Houghton's very own data and climate model. Modestly, I propose to write to Bush as Einstein did to Roosevelt in 1939. Will you co-sign?
" "UHIs-mean-it's-not-getting-warmer" and anyway, it's been definitely proved that lack of cosmic rays is heating the planet. What? Why can't I believe both of those simultaneously?"
Next thing you know they'll be telling you it's inconsistent to believe global warming stopped in 1998 and that warming on Mars since 2001 proves global warming is caused by solar activity.
"...since there is no direct coupling between emissions and uptakes, the latter will predominate and reduce the stock, perhaps for many years, until indeed there is none left."
So Tim you think its purely coincidental that uptake and emissions are rising at the same time.
You don't think that higher atmosphere concentrations result in higher uptake by plants or oceanic absorption?
Peter Bickle makes some outrageous and unsubstantiated claims, all based on some pictures on a website, including a couple of graphs that have different scales but that actually show similar recent rising temperature trends when examined closely (but that look to be very dissimilar at a quick glance). Very poor quality, definitely not worth a pince of anything ie we have a clear case of crap in = crap out. And still Peter brazenly asserts of temperature data collection and presumably climate science in general-
- remarkable! Assertions based on nothing trump the considered opinions of all the peak scientific bodies in the world. Peter Bickle says so.
Oh well, it has generated some interesting discussion.
Peter Bickle "As I have said before, the data gathered from these sites is not worth a pince of shit. So I am saying, not alledging that there is a conspiracy if these 'high quality' sites are used. ...
Shall I supply contact details for a high court hearing, I would like a free trip to the USA."
Careful Peter, the verdict in the Joe Gutnick case established that material on a US server was "published" in Australia for the purposes of defamation law if it could be read by Australians.
Australian defamation laws are, of course, much lmore favorable to the plainiff than Australian law.
Fortunately for you though, few people are as litigious as Dr. Lott.
Has a rightwingnut fruitcake *ever* said anything that is not an out-and-out lie?
Tim gives no reason why the process will stop when there is none left, since there's no coupling.
After uptake processes empty the atmosphere of all CO2, Tim, why won't those processes continue, giving us an atmosphere with negative CO2 concentrations?
dhogaza, you wrote not long ago on a different thread:
Can't help but notice that JC isn't responding to points raised by Ian, myself, or anyone else but is taking a rather, mmmm, more personal approach.
And then on this thread, you wrote as a direct response to something someone said:
Has a rightwingnut fruitcake ever said anything that is not an out-and-out lie?
Huh. Kinda funny, isn't it?
Not really. I wasn't lying when posting to JC. Right or wrong, I was making an honest effort to engage him in dialogue, and his response was to ad hom me (and others).
On the other hand, this statement:
Is an out-and-out lie. I have a hard time understanding why it's wrong to point out this fact.
Tim Curtin:
Earths CO2 uptake is closely linked to global CO2 emissions and the amount of excessive CO2 in the atmosphere. Uptake is increasing because emissions and CO2-levels are increasing. And the ratio of annual increase of CO2 to global emissions, the airborne fraction, has been 60% on average last 50 years and show no decreasing trend.
Tim
I'm not a climatologist, but a lawyer - but even with my secondary school scientific education I can tell you that you are simply wrong. You do not seem to understand that climatologists do not, as economists do, make guesses at mechanisms from their models, but build their models from known mechanisms.
If I emit CO2 into the atmosphere, I increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Because of Henry's Law, sufficient of that CO2 will dissolve into the upper layer of the oceans to reach a new equilibrium between atmospheric and upper oceanic CO2 levels; that equilibrium will be at a higher atmospheric concentration than before. Essentially, increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration drives more CO2 into upper oceanic layers.
That CO2 will disperse downwards into deeper layers, allowing more atmospheric CO2 to dissolve; but the eventual equilibrium atmospheric concentration will be higher than originally, simply because there is more CO2 in the overall system.
That will result in increased temperature, all other things being equal - again, this follows from the physical characteristics of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
There are however two problems with this scenario; firstly, driving CO2 into the oceans makes them more acid - which has all kinds of effects on marine life, as indeed does warming the oceans as a result of atmospheric warming. The warming, however, may render the acidity a short term problem by the second issue. The Henry's Law equilibrium between gas in solution and above the solution changes with temperature. As you heat a liquid you drive gases out of solution. At some point, therefore, the oceans will return the CO2 they are currently absorbing - with interest.
Do you understand the physics at this level? Do you now understand why simple arithmetic extrapolation is irrelevant? Do you understand what will happen if we heat the oceans to this point?
"Just because x is growing exponentially doesn't mean x+y is also growing exponentially."
Can we see a demo of this statement in action? I suspect some limitations are required.
Do the surfacestations.org fans understand the difference between meteorology and climatology? Specifically, do they understand that the climatologists studying climate change are interested in trends, not absolute temperature levels, at any given station.
If a station is sited poorly so that it consistently measures temperatures X degrees high - or even if it measures temperatures X degrees high in the summer and Y degrees low in the winter or even something in between - it is probably pretty useless for meteorology; but it is fine for discerning temperature trends year on year.
What matters for this purpose surely is whether there is anything about the station that has changed so that the errors in its temperature measurement vary; hence a single set of photos at one date is useless for this purpose. If there is anything about the site that means it is not measuring with a consistent (year on year) error, then this needs to be demonstrated by showing temperature readings showing that fact.
Robin, you may be a good lawyer but your wrong. Climatologist put assumptions all the time for water (clouds), sulphates, black carbon, orgianic carbon, biomass burning, mineral dust, aviation, land use, solar all which per the IPCC are at the low to the very low level of scientific understanding. Why, because they do not know the science behind the interactions with climate.
It would be nice if there was a neutral site that actually talked about the science of CO2 AGW but there is not. RC likes to pretend that they are but they refused to discuss the hard issues that reflect the underlying problems with the theory of CO2 based global warming.
What surfactstations.org has show is that many sites are not compliant with WMO and NOAA's own guidelines. That Hanson's lights=0 approach does not reflect reality and that the data has issues. I have read no where that the data is all bad, just that there are easily seen issues with the sites that unlike the AGW faithful, most of us think some time needs to be put into determining if the data is correct. If the data is not correct, then a scientist should do the study to determine what stations are giving good data and what the corrections should be for urban and rural sites. There two problems that the site survey are showing, first, that many sites are not installed standards and second, that the sites used to determine the urban heat island offset are not correct, urban and rural are being mixed to show no urban heat effect when if the stations are done correctly, then I suspect, based on living near an urban center and seeing the different temperatures, that there is an urban heat island effect and it is much more than Jones and Hanson believe it is.
Finally, what no CO2 AGW proponent wants to talk about is the fact that the proxies and the direct instrumented readings do not agree. The proxies all show that global temperatures peaked in the early 20th century and have been lower since then. The direct instrumented show that global temperatures have taken off at the end of the 20th century. Only one of them is going to be right, but together they show that we do not know that the present heating is not ordinary. If the current warming is not out of the ordinary, then why are we looking at changing the world and society when we do not have any evidence of a real problem?
I'm eagerly awaiting citations from Vernon. Again.
As I said about rightwingnut fruitcakes above ...
Vernon, you showed yourself to be ignorant of the most basic facts about climatology and data analysis over at RC. Do you really want your lifelong google legacy to be nothing but documentation of your ignorance? Is this why you keep posting the same shit over and over again?
Vernon
Tell me then exactly what in my post is incorrect science?
As for your claim that
perhaps you could back this up with at least some citations? Specifically, given the point of this part of my post, you could show that any of the assumptions you say are made are based upon simply arithmetically extending trends rather than making best estimates of the mechanisms applying where the science is poorly understood?
Vernon
On the issue of surfacestations.org - would you please deal with the point I make? It doesn't matter if a given stations reads temperature high or low (for the study of AGW, as opposed to meteorology); what matters is whether the error changes over time, year on year. Do yo not understand that one set of photographs taken at one date cannot show that errors have changed over time? Is it really that difficult an idea that to show change a before and an after photo - at least - are necessary?
Apparently educating Vernon is exceedingly difficult, as folks spent literally hundreds of posts trying to educate surfacestation folk who showed up at RealClimate (including Vernon). The effectiveness of that effort can be estimated by noting that Vernon's starting here with the same points he made there.
dhogaza, you wrote this:
++On the other hand, this statement:
++++Climate models have never been right once, ever. Not even close.
Is an out-and-out lie. I have a hard time understanding why it's wrong to point out this fact.++
Well, maybe if you had actually demonstrated that it was wrong, your post might have been meaningful and added something to the conversation. This would have probably included a reference to a website/paper/something showing that a particular climate model was correct. Instead, you implicitly called him a rightwingnut and a liar.
Whats really funny is that later, you responded to this statement the same way: The proxies all show that global temperatures peaked in the early 20th century and have been lower since then...
once again, one would expect that your reply to this would be to site a reference about proxies. Instead, you called him a rightwingnut, ignorant and referred to his post as shit. Normally, I wouldn't be too bothered by this, but you started out with the condescending tone by calling out someone else for doing the same thing you do. You also then did it to me on a previous post, calling me names while at the same time refusing to actually refer to a single fact or reference the entire time you claimed I was wrong. You also refused to answer point blank questions about vague claims you made. All this in the same thread you called out someone else for not responding to actual points but instead responding in a personal matter. Priceless...
Why bother? Denialists have no interest in truth.
Robin, It is good to see your going with the pro CO2 AGW mantra, but the fact remains that there is one basic problem which leads to multiple other problems. First that the stations are not sited IAW established standards and NOAA has not bothered to classify each station. This matters because the stations are being used at some point to either determine the urban heat island off-set (the CO2 proponents say there is almost none based on studies using these stations) and they are used to show the trends. These numbers are used to determine the current global temperature. Only by knowing how good the data is (how it is sited)or what kinda of data it is (urban or rural) can the data have any use at all. The data has to reflect something and if you don't know what it is reflecting (it's site) then no amount of statistics is going to make the data use full.
This is why the divergence between the proxy reconstructions and the direct measurements matter so much. The cites:
Timothy J. Osborn and Keith R.Briffa (2006), The Spatial Extent of 20th-century warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years - see the graphs at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006.html
Low-frequency Temperature Variations from a Northern Tree Ring Density Network, Journal of Ge3ophysical Research, 106 D3 (16-Feb-2001) pp. 2929-2941 K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H.Schweigruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, and E.A. Vaganov. Please note plate number 3 here at:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/briffa2001/briffa2001.html
As can be easily seen, at the end of the 20th century the proxies had declined from a peak in earlier in the 20th century. Only the instrumented readings show exceptional temperatures at the end of century, not the proxies. If the proxies are not showing the same temperatures as the instrumented now, why do we think they did in the past.
If you look at the proxies, there is nothing exceptional about the current warming and it is not accelerating. The other point used to prove CO2 theory is Arctic warming and sea ice melting but a UC Irving study you can read about here: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1621 which shows that 35-94 percent of Arctic warming and melting of sea ice is due to dirty snow (black carbon) not CO2 warming. In the Antarctic, we know that the Antarctic is not contributing to rising sea levels from:
Mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet (2006) by Wingham, Shepherd, Muir, and Marshall which can be found at: http://bowfell.geol.ucl.ac.uk/~lidunka/EPSS-papers/djw3.pdf
Further there are problems with using satellite and tide gauge records. These are discussed in Interannual sea level change at global and regional scales using Jason-1 altimetry Cazenave, Minh, Cretaus, Cabanes, and Mangiarotti. This can be found at http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/invest-cazenave.html
The problems with tide gauges:
Additionally, Scharroo and Miller found that sea level rise is not increasing but rather that some are not adjusting for barometric pressure.
Global and regional sea level change from multi-satellite altimeter data (2006) Scharro and Miller can be seen here:
https://earth.esa.int/workshops/venice06/participants/607/paper_607_sch…
As to how the accelerating sea levels were devised? Per Cazenave, the satellite record is modified by using the trend from tide gauge reading to 'adjust' the satellite data. So while the sea levels are rising and have been since the end of the LIA, there is no evidence that the rise is accelerating.
So the proxies do not show exceptional warming, the sea levels do not show exceptional warming, Ice mass is increasing in the Antarctic and Antarctic sea ice is increasing, and a significant amount of Arctic warming/melting is due to dirty snow. That leaves the only proof of exceptional warming is the surface stations and the fact that stations are not sited correctly, that no study has been done to determine either the quality or accuracy of the temperature data of great importance.
I am not going to point to the IPCC report since if you have any kind of opinion on this subject, you should have read it. However, the IPCC 4th report is the source for current levels of scientific understanding of climate drivers. According to the IPCC we understand greenhouse gases and not much else. I tend to think the much else appears to have very significant impacts.
I hope this has enough cites.
Oh, and the reason I do not post at RealClimate anymore is that:
1. They ignore direct questions and let the fan boys flame you, which I could live with but,
2. They will not post anything that has the cites attached that support the reasoning.
If I could have been allowed to post what I did in my last post at RC, I would still be there trying to get some answers but they are a promotion site, not a science site, and they muffle anything that cannot be flamed.
That is why I am posting in alternative sites. I may get flamed but at least I am allowed to cite the studies that allowed me to form an opinion.
Veron
Please try to stay on point; is it so hard?
Firstly, you claimed that my post about the linkage between emissions and uptake was wrong; I asked you to identify what was wrong with it, and you have not answered it. Would you please do so?
Secondly, you claimed that:
and I asked you for cites showing that:
You haven't provided those cites, but gone off on a frolic of your own about what you call proxies (and others less educated than yourself might call direct effects of climate change) such as Antarctic ice mass.
Would you please answer the question I asked by providing cites about the assumptions you claim are made by way of purely arithmetic extrapolation of trends?
Thirdly, I asked you whether it was difficult to understand that photographs taken on a single date could not determine whether at some point in its history the errors in temperature measurement at a given station had changed over time. Is that difficult to understand? Or have I got that wrong?
I saw you throw a strop at RealClimate; I also saw you continuing to claim that the fact that Urban Heat Islands exists is in some way relevant to whether global warming exists - despite being told multiple times that removing urban stations has no effect whatsoever on the trend. Gavin told you that no matter how many times you repeated the same misconception it didn't get any more correct, and that doing so risked deletion - I am not really surprised. But perhaps you could demonstrate that you are not under a misconception, and answer this; given that there is an urban heat island effect on absolute temperatures, which appears in the data, do you argue that there is an Urban Heat island effect upon the trend, despite the fact that that effect does not appear in the data?
Robin, which part of the IPCC's report that says water (clouds), sulphates, black carbon, orgianic carbon, biomass burning, mineral dust, aviation, land use, solar all which are at the low to the very low level of scientific understanding. don't you understand? The line that Gavin puts out that the GCM is based on known physical science is most likely true, but the fact remains that for everything but green house gases, we do not know the physical science, the relationships, etc. and the models use a wag for what best fits the makers assumptions and the past.
I explained why the surface stations mattered so much because they are the only thing that shows an exceptional global temperature increase. The temperature proxies, sea levels, Antarctic ice mass increases, etc. all go against there being an exceptional warming.
There are guide lines to siting stations. The stations are not following the guide lines. Some stations that are listed as rural are in very urban environments. It is not up to surfacestations or me to determine how the badly sited stations are affecting the results, but rather, it is up to NOAA to get its act together and actually classify the stations and fund the research to determine what the actual adjustments needed at each site are, if any.
You are using a circular argument, namely that we know the stations are right because of the fact that there is little or no UHI effect, but the UHI studies use these stations to determine what the UHI effect is.
Finally, I do not have to prove that the sites are good or bad. I can look at the pictures and see that the sites do not meet NOAA and WMO siting guidelines. If the NOAA and WMO think that station siting matters, then why are you blowing it off?
Oh, and it is not cherry picking data when the goal is a census. You do know the difference? A census is when your going for the entire population not just a random sample. Nice misdirection there but no win.
dhogaza, I think we are finally coming to some clarification. In you post, you wrote this:
++++ Well, maybe if you had actually demonstrated that it was wrong, your post might have been meaningful and added something to the conversation
Why bother? Denialists have no interest in truth.++
It sounds like you are saying that despite the fact that denialists are not interested in truth, you aren't interested providing any truth to anyone. It helps me understand why I think you were saying in a different thread that as long as the DoA (for example) remains operationally efficient, it doesn't really matter that the results of their operations are the distribution of funds to dead people.
Should we assume that all of your posts have this same basic goal of not providing any truth to anyone who reads them? It would help in making a decision about replying to a post of yours or not. Or, if this is not the case, maybe you could put a disclaimer at the top of all posts that are meant as noise. In the meantime, though, perhaps you could agree to not be bothered by others who post only to make noise and aren't interested in siting references/facts/etc.?
Vernon said:
------
I explained why the surface stations mattered so much because they are the only thing that shows an exceptional global temperature increase. The temperature proxies, sea levels, Antarctic ice mass increases, etc. all go against there being an exceptional warming.
--------
No they aren't. Global temperature increase is seen in everything from increased coral bleaching due to warmer oceans to satellite measures of atmospheric temperature. INcreases in Antarctic ice mass in some areas are due to increased precipitation, which is itself due to temperature changes. Meanwhile lower level glaciers retreat due to higher temperatures, whilst some higher level ones increase in mass due to greater precipitation. Here in the UK everything from peoples garden diaries to insect life show that temperatures are increasing, as winters get less cold and spring begins earlier. Sea levels are continuing to rise right on schedule for the predicted warming.
You can't get much more wrong than you have just said, Vernon.
I did not say it is not warming Guthrie, I said that the call to panic is based on exceptional warming. The only thing showing exceptional warming is the instrumented readings. The temperature proxies, the sea levels, etc are not showing exceptional warming.
You cannot be much more wrong about what I said. Read the studies I cited, see where there is no acceleration of warming going on except in the surface temperatures which based on the NOAA and WMO, there appears to be a significant number of station that are sited poorly, but then only the first 200+ of the 1200+ stations have been visited.
So for the record, I believe we are currently warming. I do not believe based on the studies that we are doing exceptional warming and if we are not, then that put the whole panic of CO2 based AGW in doubt. That is not to say that I doubt that CO2 has an effect, just that the climate may not be a sensitive to CO2 as some would have us believe.
Did you believe the satellite data disproved global warming right up until the satellite data were corrected and showed the same warming as the surface data, Vernon? It's very notable that you haven't referred to them at all. Do the satellites show warming?
Dopey, I think you have the facts wrong. The satellites do not record surface temperatures they record atmospheric temperatures. The problem was that the satellites did not see much in the way of tropospheric warming, and they still do not. What warming they do see is at the very least that the GCM's predict. This leads to doubts about the GCMs, not the satellites.
If you take the very bottom of the predicted warming by the GCMs, the results are within the error range for no warming. So, while I believe it is currently warming, and have for a long time, I do not believe the modelers have enough knowledge of the climate, the drivers, and the interactions to make good policy decisions with. The IPCC happens to agree that we do not know much about the climate other than green house gases but their position is panic anyway and lets start making policy.
I hope that answered your question but to summarize:
-No I did not believe that satellites were indicating no warming.
-No I do not think based on my reading of other experts (i.e. studies) that the measured warming indicates exceptional warming but rather the lower end for any warming.
-I believe I indicated that the satellites show some warming in the Troposphere.
Vernon were you in favor of the Clean Air policies that have given us breathable air in western cities today, where we were living in an atmosphere of our own filth until less than 20 years ago?
Veron
You see, this is the bit for which you haven't provided any support. Would you please do so? And saying it is self-evident from what you say about the IPCC report doesn't cut it; it isn't. You are claiming (if you are contradicting me at all) that these factors are the subject, in the models, of purely arithmetical extrapolations of trends. Your reference to the IPCC report doesn't support that claim.
And on the UHI issue you appear to be confused. The stations do show an UHI effect on urban stations - it is an elevation in absolute temperature above that recorded by surrounding rural stations. The urban stations do not, however, demonstrate an UHI effect upon the trend. On your case - that the UHI effect is leading those who accept AGW to believe there is an upward trend to global temperature when there isn't one - the urban stations within the network would have to show anomalously high warming (not absolute warmth) by comparison with the rural ones. It is for you to show that. It doesn't matter whether the urban station are well or badly sited, or whether they read high or low. Your claim depends upon showing that AGW proponents are relying upon a spurious signal - to show which you must show that the figures upon which they rely have that spurious signal. They do not, which is demonstrated by the fact that the rural stations alone show the same warming trend as the whole network together - as indeed do the urban stations taken alone.
If you were correct, the position would be the opposite to the one that exists.
Alternatively, if you claim that the trend that is demonstrated in the urban data - which ties in with the rural data - is spurious because of UHI effects, and that the true trend is zero or close to, then you have to explain why the rural stations show the same trend. It can't be UHI effects causing it - so what is it?
By the way; why do you claim that Antarctic ice-mass increases go against there being exceptional warming? Simple commonsense suggests that warming in the circum-continental seas would result in increased precipitation over the colder continental areas, and an increase in iceshelf breakup. What do you think we are seeing?
Robin, did you read the studies? If not then go read them and then read the IPCC report which says we low understanding of all the climate factors but green house gases.
I am guessing this is pushing it for you but if we have little understanding of the climate drivers, then what do you think they put in the models? You have not pointed out where my cites are wrong or that I am wrong.
The claim is that surfacestations is not cherry picking, which if your doing a census, is not possible. They do not even claim that what they have found so far is representative of the whole but what they have found indicates that there are problems with station siting and that it needs to be addressed.
What is it about the proponents that you will not read the cites and then refuse to admit that there are issues?
Vernon
The Antarctic ice-mass balance reference you used ends with the sentences:
Do you think the authors think their paper supports your claim that the Antarctic does not show a warming trend?
Briffa (2001) uses data series ending between 1960 and 1990; and two of those series show a sharp uptick at the end of the series.
The UCI study is behind a subscription wall; Osborne and Briffa (2006) can't be found on the site; Sharroo and Miller (2006) can't be found either.
Do you have any evidence available for your position that the warming exists (but not too much of it) but isn't going to be a problem?
Vernon
You haven't answered a single one of my questions; would you please do so?
Vernon,
You bloviate real well, but reason poorly and research even less well.
For example:
Shephard and Wingham have changed their minds about Antarctic Ice mass balance.
You make an obvious error in assuming that the scientific understanding of land use, albedo, aerosols, etc. is poor because we don't understand the abstract mechanics of these problems rather than we lack the real world mapping to make precise adjustments to the models. We do know enough to make rough estimates and these are reflected in the error bars in the IPCC graphs.
One thing I think you might be missing is that the closer one gets to the limits of error bars, the less likely that degree of error is true.
The bottom ranges of GCM predictions are for conditions where GHGs are drastically reduced. Without looking them up, I think the outlying error rate, >5% likelihood, is still about +.5C over the 21st Century, not 'no warming'.
If the satellite measurements showing a rise in ocean levels of >3mm/decade calibrated against tide gauge measurements since 1992 are an artifact of crustal movement, then the continents must all be sinking by 3mm/10y, no? Explain that, please?
""Just because x is growing exponentially doesn't mean x+y is also growing exponentially.""
"Can we see a demo of this statement in action?"
Yes, y=constant. exponential plus constant is not exponential.
I direct you all to compare this program with the Galaxy Zoo project. The relevant differences are:
(a) Galaxy Zoo begins with standardized pictures taken from known orientations and known equipment. The equipment and orientation involved in each weather station picture is not necessarily known, nor is there any effort to standardize these aspects.
(b) Galaxy Zoo has identified salient characteristics that can be reliably identified by ordinary people with trivial training. I don't see the met station picture people doing anything similar.
(c) The Galaxy Zoo people have reason to believe deliberate bias is rare (not many people think counter-clockwise spiral galaxies are a left-wing conspiracy), yet they are prepared to use statistical methods and sampling by observers of known reliability to detect and compensate for bias. (This is similar in spirit to the GISS and Hadley Center methods for compensating for known biases such as the urban heat island effect.) The met station picture people seem to encourage bias.
(d) Galaxy Zoo uses pictures of everything recognizable as a possible galaxy, and randomly assigns pictures to analysts. The met station picture people however seem to have left their system wide open to those who ignore stations which appear to be correctly situated.
Although the comparison with galaxy zoo is obviously an apples-to-oranges comparison, I believe it shows that at met station picture survey could be useful as a check on frequency of poorly situated stations (there are already other useful methods for detecting poorly situated stations), but these met station picture people do not seem to care how such a study ought to be set up.
Vernon posted a cite to the abstract of a paper in defense of this claim over at real climte.
"LOOK AT THE GRAPH IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME!"
(the abstract reference was augmented with a graph)
The graph Vernon used to "prove" his point doesn't plot temperature trend. Someone with access to the entire paper (which lives behind a subscription wall) checked, there's no plot of temperature trends in the paper. This person read the paper. The authors of the paper in no way make any claim that their analysis supports Vernon's claim.
He never acknowledged his error while I was following the thread, at least.
He was caught out on other points, as well. There's a huge thread over at RC to be read if you don't believe me.
It's a waste of time talking to him.
Inherent in the claim is that it's not CURRENTLY addressed in the analysis of the data, and a small but highly competent number of people patiently explained to you over and over and over again why this assumption is incorrect.
And here you are again, ignoring everything that was told to you.
Another stunner.
No, the problem was that Christie and Spencer claimed they showed COOOLING, and the two staked their reputation on the claim that their satellite-derived temperature reconstructions were far more accurate than ground station data, and computer models.
The result was, according to the Wall Street Journal, a "wooden stake through the heart of the AGW hypothesis".
It turned out there were at least three large errors in the analysis that I'm aware of, including one that was very, very simple, an 8th-grade algebra error - the sign of a constant was reversed.
The claim was they show cooling. The fact is, the data shows warming within the error bounds of the results coming from the GCMs.
What kind of world do you live in where a claim is made that there's cooling, the GCM people say that the satellite analysis must be wrong, severe errors are found with the satellite data, when corrected the sat temps fall within the error bounds of the GCM predictions, and you then claim "this leads to doubts about the GCMs"?
Time for oconnellc to step up to the plate and defend your idiocy, which I'm sure he will.
Regarding satellite temperature measurements (particularly Vernon).
The following is from a US CCSP report authored by, none other than, John Christy (among others):
"Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies."
The executive summary can be downloaded from:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/
Errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been corrected, and are now in broad agreement with the many other global temperature data sets now in circulation.
I am awed by the fact this is still making the rounds. The three main papers that dealt with this discrepancy, Santer et al (2005), Mears et al (2005) and Sherwood et al (2005) have been in the domain for years and were discussed at length in AR4. The discrepancy between satellite data and the GCMs has largely been resolved, and has been for quite a while.
To continue to harp on about this makes you seem ignorant with the state of science at present. As I've stated on other blogs, please read the literature before wading into these debates. You'll be far more convincing that way.
According to Tim (atmospheric mass is conserved) Curtin:
"exponential growth of atmospheric CO2-e, at just above 0.5% p.a. since 2000, less before."
To repeat: Just because x is growing exponentially doesn't mean x+y is also growing exponentially. Exponential means the growth rate of the function is always proportional to the size of the function. Constant + exponential (which Atmospheric CO2 approximately follows) does not have this property.
Chris C - one problem has been that Christie has tended to distance himself from that report in public discussion, while his co-worker Spencer hasn't, to my knowledge, made any such acknowledgement at all (though Spencer, who doesn't believe in evolution, has had time to write in defense of intelligent design).
Vernon, you said:
I explained why the surface stations mattered so much because they are the only thing that shows an exceptional global temperature increase. The temperature proxies, sea levels, Antarctic ice mass increases, etc. all go against there being an exceptional warming.
I see no mention of panic there, or indeed in IPCC and other scientific reports. You are presumably ignoring the fact that the exceptional warming under consideration is that of the last 30 years or so.
So, do you have a clue what is meant by exceptional warming? Do you have any idea how stupid you sound just now? Can you actually find any data at all that agrees with your statement? Go on, find us some data that disagrees with the surface temperature record.
Robin, surface stations are not just used for trends. They are used in studies to determine what the urban heat island off-set is and they are used to determine what the global surface temperature is.
The data is not just used for trends but to compute the global temperature. This is seen at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
So it is not just used for trends.
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE INSTRUCTION 10-1302 OCTOBER 4, 2005
Found here says: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/010/pd01013002c.pdf
While not all of these can be determined from a picture, enough can to cast doubt on the quality of many stations. This matters because according to An Overview of the Global
Historical Climatology Network Temperature Database Peterson and Vose found here:
http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:XhzhaPn6R20J:www.earthsca…
The metadata approach is to determine if the station is rural or urban (without going to the site) and then make adjustments. The only problem with this is that a good percentage of the stations checked in the census show that they do not meet NOAA/WMO guidelines. As an independent verification:
MICROCLIMATE EXPOSURES OF SURFACE-BASED WEATHER STATIONS -
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LONG-TERM TEMPERATURE TRENDS Christopher A. Davey and Roger A. Pielke, Sr. which can be found here:
http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:6TiH_vGYFowJ:blue.atmos.c…
So, it is not up to surfacestations.org to determine the extend of the problem, or for me to do it either, they a merely pointing out that the station siting does not meet the standards set.
dhogaza, you wrote: Time for oconnellc to step up to the plate and defend your idiocy, which I'm sure he will.
Actually, I haven't been trying to defend anyone. Merely trying to be explicit when you find yourself incapable of not acting like a jerk. Why you felt the need to mention my name in a post about temperatures is beyond me. Perhaps you felt there was too much 'signal' in your post, and wanted to bump up the noise level a bit? In any case, I suggest you not get so upset about someone reading your own words back to you. You obviously feel like you need to either defend yourself or retaliate for something. They are your words. If you don't like getting them tossed in your face, don't use them.
luminous beauty (#106 ), thank you for pointing out that article, I missed it but it was a good read however, what it says in the body and not just the abstract is:
Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets (2007)
Shepherd and Wingham Science 16 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1529 - 1532
DOI: 10.1126/science.1136776 which can be found at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/5818/1529
Basically, Antarctica is providing almost no sea level rise and the difference between the 2006 work and the 2007 is still within the margin of error. Greenland is providing some sea level rise but once again that is addressed in the UC Irving study on dirty snow in the Arctic. This ties back into the fact that the models are not doing a good job of showing forcings or making predictions based on actual results. (This is also for Robin #102 and #104)
Can current climate model forcings explain the spatial and temporal signatures of decadal OLR variations? (2002) Allan and Slingo GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO. 7, 10.1029/2001GL014620, 2002 which can be found here:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/csrl/publications/pub_exchange/Allan_Slingo_2…
Which pretty much says that the models are not handling the forcings we do not understand that well since something must make the models wrong. The IPCC says that we have low or very low scientific understanding of almost everything but GHGs.
Oh, and I am sorry about the type in the Osborn (2006) link, it is actually at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html which shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping. The direct instrumented measurements show temperatures rising dramatically during the time that the proxies show temperatures dropping. I merely question which one is right. If the proxies are wrong, then we have basis to assume that current warming is out of the ordinary, and if the instrumented readings are wrong, then we are not having warming out of the ordinary.
As for accelerating sea level change, the satellites are not showing it. We know that from Shepard (2007) Greenland and Antarctic add about .35 mm per year. The following study shows that the sea level rise is not due to thermal expansion.
Sea Level Rise During Past 40 Years Determined from Satellite and in Situ Observations
(2001) Cecile Cabanes, Anny Cazenave, Christian Le Provost Science 26 October 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5543, pp. 840 - 842 DOI: 10.1126/science.1063556
This basically leads back to the problem that if thermal warming is not driving sea level rise, melting in the Arctic and Antarctic is not driving the sea level rise, and that the satellites are not showing an accelerating sea level rise, where is the evidence of out of the ordinary warming? Only at the surface station measurements (well, tide gauges that that have problems telling tectonic changes from sea level changes).
dhogaza #109. I did not claim any such thing. I said that the lower error bound for the GMCs and the upper error bound for determining the global temperature overlap. This means that there could be warming, or cooling, or no change and still be within the error bound overlaps. I personally think there is warming. Oh, and I have access to the paper behind the subscription wall and it does have a graph that shows a peak before the end of the century and a downward trend at that point. Now I do not know who put the graphic with the article, but I suspect it reflects the article or the authors would have had it removed.
Chris c #110. Don't put my name with this one... this is strange stuff from Dopey.
Guthrie #113 Since the whole bases of the CO AGW theory is that man is causing warming that is out of the ordinary cycle, I am pretty sure that the fact that the proxies, sea levels, and direct instrumentation do not agree matters. The panic I refer to is the social/political movement to restrain economic growth based on a theory that does not have much empirical evidence to support it.
I'm pretty sure this is a replay of what went on at realclimate, in which case people can copy and paste their answers.
To begin with, I don't see where the Osborn paper says what you say it does. You are aware of the different readings and normalized values etc?
Secondly, I don't see how thermal variation can't be driving sea level rise when the sea is in fact warming up. One paper does not a paradigm make, at least in the field of Earth sciences.
Bascially, what you are doing is putting up two or three papers that say what you want them to say, against the entire IPCC TAR. Those who know more about this area will be able to show where you have missed a few things.
Hi Chris O'Noall. Your are talking nonsense; the sum x + y^5 is exponential if not at the same rate as y^5. And it is also unlikely that your car exhaust has an immediate measurable impact on your roses' uptake of CO2, although anything is possible in your own cosy unexponential world. So the fact remains that the stock of CO2 (x) plus net emissions (y) minus net uptakes (z) will definitely fall as we move to 80% reduction of emissions as of 2000, where the latter fall by say 5% pa to reach the 80% target by around 2050, and z keeps it up at today's rate while there is still some CO2 around.
"Oh, and I am sorry about the type in the Osborn (2006) link, it is actually at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html which shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping."
The graph in that abstract has a set of curves that shows the fraction of Northern Hemisphere proxies with a particular property, e.g. light red shading shows the fraction of proxies that are more than one unit above long term average. This means that at the end of the record, 70% of proxies were more than one unit above long term average. This was the largest fraction of proxies in history that suggested one unit's worth of warming. Similarly at the end of the record, 40% of proxies were more than two units above long term average. This was also the largest fraction of proxies in history that suggested two units' worth of warming. What Vernon has been taken in by is that 30% of proxies are not showing recent warming which is a well know phenomenon called "divergence" and is caused by factors including a drying of climate in recent years. This does not mean that "all the proxies show temperatures dropping". Far from it, even if you ignored all other factors, it could still only mean that 30% of proxies suggested cooling, not "all" of them. Next time Vernon, put your brain into gear before reaching a conclusion. You won't look quite so credulous.
<>
OMG Can you believe he just wrote that?
The drapes covering my windows know more math than this. The function $f(y)= y^5$ is polynomial in $y$.
The function $f(y) = 5^y$ is exponential in $y$.
By definition, an exponential function is a function $f$ such that for some constant $c$,
$f' = c f$. Notice that $h(y) = e^y +10$ is not exponential. That is $h'(y) =e^y \neq
c(e^y +10)$ for any constant $c$.
Apparently you're redefining "exponential" to mean whatever you want it to mean. For those of us who know math, exponential functions all satisfy the differential equation y'=Cy (of course, there are equivalent definitions we give our precalc students).
Guthrie #117 What those papers show is that the proxies show a peaking in early 20th century and end at a lower point that the peak value for all the proxies studies they used. The direct instrumented readings show no such drop but rather an accelerating rate of increase. It comes down to which is right the proxy's or the instrumented readings. Either way, if the proxies and the instrumented readings a diverging now, there is no way to know that the current warming is out of the ordinary.
The sea is warming up, what the study showed was that the amount of thermal expansion does not explain the sea level rise. The other articles show that changes at the poles are not driving the sea level rise. The question is what is driving the sea level rise and except for tide gauges, does anything show any acceleration? The answer I found reading many papers is no.
So yes, I would love for some one to explain why there is a divergence between proxy and direct readings. I would love to hear the answer for the sea level rising that answers the question of what is the source of rising sea levels.
Let's see, 5y^4 = constant * (x+y^5)
We could call it Curtin's Law of Exponentials, a companion law to Curtin's First Law of Atmospheric Physics.
Chris O'Neill (#119) did you bother to read both the studies? Did you happen to notice that in Briffa (2001) where he plotted those studies results that they are all lower at the end of the century and in Osborn (2006) the mean from the studies was lower than they were earlier in the century? Did these just fly by you?
Please cite me a study that shows current warming is causing the proxies to behave differently than they did in the past. Because the early 20th century. Please, give a cite for your opinion.
The instrumented readings accelerate upwards, the proxies in Briffa (2001) that temperatures are lower, and Osborn(2006) shows the trends were declining. They are two different things which is why I posted both. That is divergence and you have not cited any study that explains divergence yet.
I will not bother calling you names.
Vernon,
It is amazing the alacrity with which you draw false conclusions.
"This basically leads back to the problem that if thermal warming is not driving sea level rise, melting in the Arctic and Antarctic is not driving the sea level rise, and that the satellites are not showing an accelerating sea level rise, where is the evidence of out of the ordinary warming?"
The Topex/Poseidon satellite data are a measure of thermal warming in the oceans. It is from measuring ocean temperature that the steric component of thermal expansion is calculated to give an estimate of 3mm/yr. rise in sea level since 1992. That would not be happening if there was no oceanic warming. The tidal station data, however, show a trend in recent decades of ~5mm/yr. Cabanes, et al. assume all significant sealevel rise has been steric. Based on this assumption they infer that sealevel rise from tidal stations for the 20th century is over-estimated, hence the century long average must have been less than 1.7mm/yr., indicating that relative warming in the second half of the 20th century is even more significant than previously thought.
Meier/Wahr 2002, on the other hand, argue that the 5mm/yr figure is consistent with the steric component plus eustatic addition of water to the oceans from melting glaciers, Greenland ice cap, etc.
Flanner/Zender et al. do not show that black carbon albedo effects, mostly from human sources, can explain all warming, but only a likely 12% and a likely 50% of Artic snow melt. This does not mean that anthropogenic warming is diminished, but increased by black carbon feedbacks.
Yes, it is, down to pasting misunderstandings of the same friggin' papers.
People tried to teach him what the papers were really saying over at Real Climate, he's just moved over here to repeat the same misunderstandings.
It's not really worth discussing with him.
I am going to repeat.
Sea Level Rise During Past 40 Years Determined from Satellite and in Situ Observations (2001) Cecile Cabanes, Anny Cazenave, Christian Le Provost Science 26 October 2001: Vol. 294. no. 5543, pp. 840 - 842 DOI: 10.1126/science.1063556
Our study has demonstrated that the global estimate of the thermal expansion component is substantially smaller than the value obtained if the same field is subsampled at the tide gauge positions used to compute the 20th century global mean sea level rise. It is generally assumed that spatial variation of sea level rise is caused by nonuniformity in thermal expansion, other contributions leading rapidly to uniform sea level change. Thus, the reported difference may reflect an overestimate of the sea level rise for the past decades, caused by the uneven distribution of the tide gauges and limited geographical sampling available from historical records. Even though the global tide gauge network has been considerably extended during the 1990s (16), recent sea level rise estimates based on the tide gauges still substantially depart from the global mean measured by Topex/Poseidon (17).
and
Interannual sea level change at global and regional scales using Jason-1 altimetry Cazenave, Minh, Cretaus, Cabanes, and Mangiarotti. This can be found at http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/invest-cazenave.html
The problems with tide gauges:
1. their geographical distribution provides very poor sampling of the ocean basins, especially when studying the climatic signal over the past century, and 2. they measure sea level relative to the land, hence recording vertical crustal motions that may be in the same order of magnitude as the sea level variation.
Additionally, Scharroo and Miller found that sea level rise is not increasing [accelerating] but rather that some are not adjusting for barometric pressure. Global and regional sea level change from multi-satellite altimeter data (2006) Scharro and Miller can be seen here:
https://earth.esa.int/workshops/venice06/participants/607/paper607schar…
So which part did I get wrong, that tidal gauge trends are being used to 'correct' satellite readings? That some are not adjusting for the barometric pressure? That while the tide gauge records indicates acceleration, the satellite data that has not be adjusted by the tide gauge trends does not show acceleration?
dhogaza, RC would not let me post cites to even have this discussion. Talking about the divergence issue or the issues found with models is not allowed there.
That is why I moved here. Because I can post the cites and then maybe someone would post a study to back up their point of view. Not really seen that yet, mostly it is, your going against dogma so you must be misreading the study.
Take the Osborn (2006) and Briffa (2001). One shows that temperatures dropped the other showed that the trends dropped at the end of the century. Now you can keep saying I am not using the data as the author intended but you have yet to show that I am not correctly reading the studies and my conclusions are not based on what the studies actual report.
So, with the lack of any argument or cites to back up your position, just go back to name calling.
re 114 - Vernon.
uhhh, dude.
You say:
"The data is not just used for trends but to compute the global temperature. "
Wrong. I assume you are referring to this sentence in the paragraph you cite:
"Our analysis includes results for a global temperature index as described by Hansen et al. (1996). " You follow that by saying:
"So it is not just used for trends."
Hansen et al 1996 is easily found using Google Scholar. If you look at Hansen et al 1996, you see that the index is an anamoly index - that is, it is referring to CHANGES IN TEMPERATURES. It is NOT "computing a global temperature," it is analyzing changes in temperature. Vernon, you are not just wrong here, you are silly wrong, "didn't understand the paper" wrong.
For temperature trend purposes, it simply does not matter whether bad siting means that the absolute temperature is 4C warmer than it would be if the station were over in that grassy field instead. What matters is if something in the HISTORY of the station has overlain a spurious trend on the temperature record.
A single picture at a single time, by definition , can not tell us a single solitary damned thing about the history of a station. One must look at the history to determine the history. One would think this is so basic as to not even need mentioning, but apparently not.
The quantitative history of those stations is contained in the temperature record. The QA of the HISTORY of the data is done by looking for "jumps" in the signal, by looking at spatially related stations and see if some of them are anomalous, and by a number of other methods. This is done on the data that contains the quantitative part of that history, that is, the temperature record.
All the squirming in the world is not going to turn a picture of a station taken on a single date, into a QA analysis of the HISTORY of that station. It simply makes y'all look silly to try.
Lee, you make a good point. A single picture does not say anything about the history of a site. However, I have read that for at least one site, the person who went out to find the site couldn't find it. It seems that the site was reported as moved, but it really wasn't. It was found at the original location that according to the site history was supposedly abandoned.
Also, a photo of a site may give an indication that it is currently not reporting temperatures accurately. This inaccuracy may not be a static thing. The size of the nearby parking lot is increasing, the tree nearby is growing and providing shade for a longer period of time during the day, etc.
This survey is probably a good thing. If nothing else, we are learning that some sites are not being set up properly. This may lead to an examination of the rules regarding setting up sites and realizing that they are not necessary. Good, then maybe people will be more willing to set up more sites because it may be cheaper to set up a site without all those rules. Whatever... A lot of fudd is getting strewn about what may or may not be done with information about the sites once the census is finished. None of it helps, from either side. How about we get it finished before we collectively wet ourselves?
Five minutes spend reading threads at Real Climate will be enough to make clear to any lurker that you are simply lying when you say this.
They do have a spam filter enabled which holds up posts which contain too many links, which may've happened to you if you submitted a post with a lot of them.
That's not censorship, that's site management.
You were also warned against endlessly reposting the same blatant inaccuracies because they're a waste of time.
No, we don't. We already know that. You don't "learn" something that's already known. This is why researchers have been working hard to make sure the results are robust.
We know what the partial set of photographs being gathered is already being used for. Why do we need to wait until they're done to "wet ourselves", as you put it?
The partial set of photographs is being used to declare that global warming isn't real, but merely an artifact of "bad data".
It's bullshit, it's dishonest, it's blatent lying, but it doesn't matter. Denialists are using it in an attempt to undermine a large body of science that, in the end, doesn't even friggin' depend on the dataset being challenged.
"A lot of fudd is getting strewn about what may or may not be done with information about the sites once the census is finished."
oconnellc, what is ALREADY being done with that 'data' is that it is being used to argue that the surface temperature record is useless. Taht was the point of the article Tim wrote to start this thread. It is visible in the choice of photos and cherry picked temperature records on the front page to the site in question. It is the argument-of-choice these days over at CA, where the proprietor is bemoaning the lakc fo the 'promised' a by the climate people - implying that all the analysis of the actual HISTORICAL part of the data is not QA of HISTORICAL data, but this one snapshot is. Macintyre is smarter than that - he must know better.
Especially, this intent is apparent in the unstated assumption by the surfacestations organizers that a badly sited station perforce mean that the temperature anomaly data must be assumed to be bad. Otherwise, why the choice of Marysville/YubaCity on the front page? Why not an acknowledgment of the methods by which the climate analysts actually do their QA on the ACTUAL HISTORICAL DATA, with the implication that these pictures prove they don't do any QA?. The FUD is being shoveled by surfacestations people, and pointing that out is not contributing to FUD, it is resisting FUD.
There appears to be nothing in the TOPEX/POSEIDON data that contradicts global warming...
Anything you don't understand about the word DOMINATED, Vernon?
As far as your cherry-picking the authors' stating of problems with tidal gauge data goes, harumph.
They go on to say:
Far from saying that the tidal gauge data is inaccurate, despite known problems. What they're saying is that tidal gauge data is used to calibrate the satellites!
If using tide gauge data to calibrate satellite instruments is wrong...why do they do it?
They don't even claim the satellite measurements are more accurate, indeed they mention that tidal gauge data has led to the identification of instrument drift reflected in the satellite data.
hmmm ... I wonder how a linear transformation of the coordinates would fit into the scheme of things?
dhogaza, you wrote:
++++If nothing else, we are learning that some sites are not being set up properly.
++No, we don't. We already know that. You don't "learn" something that's already known. This is why researchers have been working hard to make sure the results are robust.++
Personally, I had no idea this was done. Could you post the link to the reference. I'm guessing that they have a list of the sites that don't meet the specs? Maybe a breakdown of the types of problems, the impact of each type, how often each problem exists? Stuff like that.
You also wrote this: ++Denialists are using it in an attempt to undermine a large body of science that, in the end, doesn't even friggin' depend on the dataset being challenged.++
Then why wet yourself about it?
Lee, I looked at the article that Tim pointed us at (the Tamino blog). If you read the Tamino blog, there is a bit of FUD there. For example, he decries that they only have 200 of the more than 1200 sites surveyed. Well, if you go to the surfacestations website, they admit that. They also claim they need lots of help to actually finish. Tamino sure does his best to make it sound like they got the 200 they wanted and then stopped. He also complains about the choice of which ones get displayed on the front page. I have read from folks involved that the ones on the front page were chosen because they were in the first group that got photographed.
You are also mischaracterizing what MC says at CA. Maybe Mc is trying to fool people by acting rational (an accusation I have had lobbed against me, that somehow acting rational is all part of the plot). But he has repeatedly said that the fact that all of the calcs done by GHISS can't be replicated is a problem and that it is fishy that certain trends can be drawn. He is right. The GISS calcs and methodology ought to be public domain. They ought to be verifiable. GISS claims that they have figured out how to handle all the errors. However there doesn't seem to be any record of what the errors are or how pervasive they are (unless dhogaza is able to post his reference. However, I doubt that his reference will mention that the 'lights out' method for checking for rural stations is looking in the wrong spot). In addition, the methodology for handling the errors seems to be a secret as well. I'm sorry if this seems ideological to you, but I think that anyone, even crook like Mc ought to be able to download the source code and data that Hanson has developed on the public dime. I know, the argument is that if Mc can get the source code, then Hanson will have to spend his time responding to 'invented' problems with it. Maybe. But I prefer that to the alternative.
So, now I guess you will start calling me names. Go ahead.
No, they attack it on the data analysis end, which is why people endlessly point out that you need to show how their efforts to ensure the robustness of the analysis falls short.
"pictures prove statistical analysis wrong" doesn't quite cut it.
Why would you *assume* they wouldn't know they're working with a dataset that's imperfect in the first place?
Why?
Makes no sense.
Why not be concerned when lies of this magnitude are used to try to influence governments to take no action on global warming?
You don't have a problem with decisions being influenced by outright lies?
Why am I not surprised?
dhogaza, despite your own protestations on other threads, you don't appear to have a problem mischaracterizing things that other people say, then arguing the mischaracterization not what the person really says. Can anyone else still reading this do me a favor, and if you thought I was saying that I don't have a problem with decisions being influenced by outright lies, please speak up?
You put this in quotes when addressing a post I made: "pictures prove statistical analysis wrong". Did I say that? I must have missed something.
You also said "Why would you assume they wouldn't know they're working with a dataset that's imperfect in the first place?". I guess I didn't say that either, exactly. I guess I did imply that there could be problems with the data network that they don't know about (you know, some they do know about, some they don't know about). Some of the examples that we have had shown to us don't seem like the kind of thing you could deal with statistically (like the fact that a site has not moved when you think it has). The reason that I think like that is because that is the correct way to think when you want to cover your butt. Ever heard the phrase "Expect the best, prepare for the worst"? Sort of like assuming that the DoA is very operationally efficient, but still double checking to make sure that they aren't writing checks to dead people. It ends up costing a little more in the short term to always require that people prove that they are producing high quality, but in the long run it is actually the more operationally efficient way to run things.
You have talked about writing software. If you wanted to write some new high quality software, wouldn't you set up things like continuous integration, automated testing etc. It slows you down up front, but you end up with objective, quantifiable evidence that you are dealing with defects as soon as possible.
Let me ask you a question right back... Why would you assume that they do know that they are correctly dealing with an imperfect dataset? Just because they are dealing with it, doesn't mean that they are doing so correctly.
Finally, the reason I say not to wet yourself about it is because I would think that the correct way to deal with the sort of criticism raised by surfacestations is to come right out in the open and show that it can't be wrong. Admit that for 6 months people should just ignore all the surface temperature data. Argue about other data instead. Then, do the following: Make public all the mechanisms in place to keep sites gathering trend data correctly. Show how your calculations are dealing with errors correctly. Get it audited by a prominent statistical group or professor (someone named Wegman comes to mind, but pick your own if you prefer) with a fantastic reputation and CV. The reason I suggest all of this stuff is because I think it is stuff they should be doing anyway. Just think about how long we wasted counting on bad satellite data before someone was able to figure out there were errors in dealing with drift!
Alright, call me names again.
oconnellc, drop the faux-upset invitation to call you names, or I might start taking you up on it for solely that reason.
Once again, the fact that a site is not in accordance with siting rules, does not in itself tell us diddly squat about whether a spurious trend has been contributed to the data for that site. And for climate purposes, that is the ONLY issue of relevance - is a spurious trend being added. The surface stations project is not going to add one scintilla of data relevant to that question. Not one picture so far has identified for me or anyen else a trend or lack of trend, spurious or otherwise, or a discontinuity, spurious or otherwise.
Inhomogeneities and spurious trends are detected by data analysis, internal and by comparison with spatially related sites. inhomogeneities are sometimes caught using metadata - the time of day issue is an example. They are caught by looking at the ONLY QUANTITATIVE RECORD of the effects of history on the actual data at that site - which is of course the actual temperature data at that site. A picture taken last week don't add squat to the analysis.
The picture MIGHT contribute to understanding of why an inhogeneity or spurious trend occurs _ IF there is such a problem. It cant find that problem in the first place.
Lee, you mean you seriously think that because we disagree on how to determine errors in the data, that is an invitation to call me names? I suppose you smack your kid when he spills milk dinner, right?
oconnellc, you said, and I quote:
"So, now I guess you will start calling me names. Go ahead." THAT, not your argument, is an invitation to call you names. THAT is the invitation I might take you up on - and SOLELY because you are being an arsehole by issuing that invitation, NOT because of your argument.
Now, back to the actual discussion - would you please lay out for me how a picture of a site taken in July 2007 on a single date, is going to be used by you to determine quantitative errors in the trend of the temperature data at that site over the last decades? And how that picture invalidates the QA analysis as outlined in Hansen et all 1999, and Hansen et al 2001?
First, Lee, if you have been reading this site, you will have noticed that dhogaza has taken every opportunity to call me a name when he had the chance to site a fact instead. And I'm not alone. He's been happy to personally denigrate lots of people here. For you to be so obtuse about this is more than a little disingenuous. You must be a lot of fun to work with...
To answer your question, how about if the metadata listing the site location is wrong? How about if over the course of 30 years an empty field has slowly become a small grove of trees providing shade over the temperature equipment and the surrounding area? How about if an empty field has become a single parking lot, then a small office building, then a large business campus? Strictly speaking, you are right. A single picture in July of 2007 won't tell you any of that. However, the picture might tell you that what you thought was a properly sited temperature measuring station is in fact not that at all. And, it might give you the impetus to then examine that site and its history in detail and find out what in fact has been happening there over the history of the site. Maybe even go find where the site really is, so if you are trying to count the lights in the area to determine if it is rural or not, you count in the right area.
You appear to have taken it upon yourself to so narrowly define what the folks at surfacestations are trying to do, you then are able to prove they can't possibly do anything of value. I've been trying to find anything on the surfacestations site that says anything about using the pictures for quantitative analysis. I can't find anything. They do keep talking about evaluation of the network to see if it is as good as the people using it think it is. No one with any sense is saying that after they are done they will be able to count the pictures and say that the UHI is really .2degrees/decade. I admitted that some people on the 'denier' side are throwing fud. Please at least be fair enough not to argue an unreasonable point. I've already said the same thing to Lance in this thread...
first off, oconnellc, I am not dhogaza - although he makes some good points. If yo have a problem with him, deal with it with him. If you're gonna make that kind of nasty insinuation to me (I am not dhogaza), then be prepared to deal with getting called on it by me. Or perhaps I should react in kind, and start attacking you for things JohnA has said to me? Not that dhogaza is a johnA - but then
And again, what they are doing is examining the DATA over the life of THE DATA. You keep implying that the history of the sites has not been examined, and that is simply flat-out wrong.
The one thing you mention that might actually add to and alter the analysis that has been done, is the issue of some small number of sites that might perhaps maybe not be where where they were listed, and therefore maybe, perhaps misclassified as rural or urban. Maybe. Perhaps. How many, out of over 1000 sites, ar ein a different place than listed, AND therefore change classification?? What impact would that have on the overall analysis if that happened at one or two stations? Not much.
The fact is, the surface station work is ALREADY, RIGHT NOW being used to argue that the surface record is bogus, and surface stations itself is contributing to that. Among other things, by linking the uncorrected data at the marysville/yuba city sites, for example. Or by pointing out the presence of air conditioners, without even linking the temperature record and no attempt to see if there is any divergence between that site and neighboring sites. And by continuing to implicitly assume that badly cited records mean bad historical data WRT trends.
Lee, my apologies. I accidentally confused a post by you with a post by dhogaza. Your respectful, well reasoned reply has shamed me.
I spent more time on the surfacestations website. I think the reason that they point out things like airconditioners, grills, asphalt etc. is that it is a website dedicated to performing a survey of the quality of these stations. There is a discussion on CA about this very topic and just what the standards are. They are a bit vague, but they do mention artificial heat sources. If these things are in fact violation of those standards, then aren't air conditioners etc. the sort of thing you would expect them to circle?
As far as the effect of the misclassified sites goes, I would expect that Hason would have very obviously and publicly explained what calculations are involved in accounting for those things. Perhaps even have his math checked by a professional statistician. This is not sour grapes on my part. I want Army Colonels audited by accountants. I want civil engineers to have their bridges inspected. I have no problems with climate scientists being audited by statisticians. In fact, that is all something I would be glad to pay taxes for.
While we are asking unanswerable questions, while the ss folks are about 20% of the way through their census, what % of the sites do you suppose would have to be in violation of guidelines without the Hanson error correcting software being able to correct for it? One reason I ask is because I assume the guidelines are in place because there is a possibility that if station is in the middle of a parking lot, it could be reporting spurious trends.
So, what % of out of guideline sites would still be ok, and then what % of sites would you guess are actually out of guidelines? Personally, I have no idea what the answer to either is.
connellc-
The guidelines are not in place for any purpose having to do with climate or temperature trends. That temp network wasnto placed for climate analysis over time - it was palced to give weather forecasting ability,f ro ag and industrial purposes. Teh siting guideliens are desigend to give day-to-day temperature data taht are cosnistent fro site to site. The historical siting guidelines have NOTHING to do with the climate analysis those data are now being sued in.
A dreadfully sited station might produce data in perfect accordance with the actual temp trend at that station. A perfectly sited station might have a large spurious trend - perhaps from a thermometer change, or from moving the recorder from one side of the box to the other, for example. Or from an upstream dam project and reservoir causing the summer water temp of that largish river 300 yards over there, to drop 40F between 1930 and 1940. One CAN NOT TELL from looking at whether that station is sited in compliance with the guidelines. Not even a little bit.
hansen et all ASSUME there is homogeneity in the trend data. Tehy then go to look for heterogeneities, and remove them by correction. They do this by looking at the data, where the inhomogeneities show up, because ONE CAN NOT TELL simply from looking at a station whether there is an inhomogeneity, much less the sign and magnitude of that inhomogeneity,a dn over what time period it occurred.
Lee, I went to the first page, and here what they say their goals are:
To provide a standardized method for site survey and reporting so that interested individuals can gather site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history of climate recording sites worldwide, and upload for screening
To provide a repository for screened and approved qualitative and quantitative site survey data, pictures, and anecdotal history
To provide a searchable database of such information for USHCN and GHCN climate station sites
To photographically document good sites that have been well preserved and maintained through their history
To photographically document poor examples of sites that may introduce biases and errors through faulty siting, encroachments, or maintenance issues, and to identify specific issues when possible
You seem determined to redefine that as "a picture", and then state that since all they want is a picture, what they gather cannot be of value.
You stated: Teh siting guideliens are desigend to give day-to-day temperature data taht are cosnistent fro site to site.
If they aren't consistent from site to site, how can sites be compared to determine heterogeneities? For example, if one site is covered with trees and another is not, what will the trend be to a long term increase in cloud cover? Which will show a spurius trend? What if 30% are covered with trees?
"how can sites be compared to determine heterogeneities? "
One more time - BY EXAMINING THE FRICKING TEMPERATURE DATA FOR INHOMOGENEITIES!!!!
btw, I have also been posing on this over at Climate Audit today. I am now being censored over there by SteveM, and having my posts edited without any notice in the edited post.
And I'm being imped.
Lovely.
"did you bother to read both the studies?"
I could ask Vernon the same thing. He said " http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html .. shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping."
No Vernon they are not all lower at the end of the century. Only 30% of them are. Could you read the figure carefully and stop being so credulous? I am not calling you a name, I am describing your behaviour.
Lee, when I said "how can sites be compared to determine heterogeneities? ", I didn't mean it in the sense of "Gee, how in the world do they manage to do that?". I meant it in the sense of "Why is that still considered the correst thing to do?".
If you read the sentence right after the one you quote, I give an example that I thought clarified my point. I'm sorry it wasn't clear enough for you. I'll explain in more detail. If the guidelines are designed to give day to day consistency from site to site (your words), then if the guidelines are not followed, then you would presumably end up with data that was not consistent from site to site.
So, the procedure you describe of assuming that all sites are consistent, and then looking for heterogeneities is a good one if a great majority of sites actually are consistent. If 95% of the sites show a trend, and 5% show something else, well... I would be inclined to trust the trend that the 95% show. So, there comes a point on the other end of that scale where if the sites themselves are so inconsistent with each other that any trends are due to randomness, not to real world trends. So site inconsistencies can mask what trends are real and what trends are not.
So, you can see, at this point, I'm not really asking "Gee, how do they do that?", but really asking, "At what point do the site inconsistencies begin to dominate the temperature trends?". I don't know the answer. I guess that is why I asked you if you would be willing to guess. I also was wondering if you would be willing to guess how far along that point the US network is? Another interesting question might be, would the worldwide temperature networks be more or less likely to be consistent then the US temp network? Another interesting question occured to me... What if there were a slight trend that was detectable, but that there was actually a bias in the types of inconsistencies that occur? Instead of being inconsistent, what if the deviations from the guidelines instead mistakenly showed a particular kind of trend? What if there was a cooling trend in the real world, but the systemic biases in trends made it seem like the cooling trend was greater than it really was? That sort of heterogeniety might be very difficult to detect.
Sorry for any confusion in my last post.
When folks like oconnellc keeps repeating something like this over and over again, despite the obvious being pointed out to him over and over again, they shouldn't be offended when their honesty is questioned.
The stakes in this game are high, worldwide.
One side lies, misrepresents data, calls peer-reviewed science "fraudulent" and those who study climatology "frauds" and worse, attempts to classify observations and theories or hypotheses which explain those observations as being "right" or "wrong" using ideological criteria, etc etc.
All in an attempt to convince citizens of the world that scientists are wrong and can be ignored, so that their corporate sponsors can continue to do business as usual, the future be damned.
It's really time to stop being so polite to these people.
Meanwhile, speaking of trends:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/n_plot.png
This is summer sea ice anomaly with July data used for 2007. Arctic sea ice minimum doesn't happen until September. I've read but not confirmed the claim that "pretty much all of what's left of the thicker multi-year ice is piled up against Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, meaning that there much of the remaining pack is eminently meltable thin first-year stuff."
And the two lowest winter ice packs were last winter and the winter before. The ice is melting away in summer, and not recovering in winter.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20070402_timeseries_thumb.png
Must be badly sited surface stations at work.
Vernon
Three quick comments for you - I'm just about to leave for work.
First, if you don't want to answer my questions, please say so up front - its frustrating reading through a long-ish post that claims to answer my questions but doesn't do so.
Second; Briffa (2001) did not show that trends dropped at the end of the century for two reasons: one, that the data series they used didn't go to the end of the century - only one went into the 90s, and most of them cut off at 1980 - see my previous post; two, that each of the later trends is on the uptick when it ends.
Third, Wingham, Shepherd, Muir, and Marshall (2006) clearly identify the mass increase as a short term trend, but the mass loss as a long0-term trend; which means they see the long term Antarctic ice-mass trend as downwards. They also identify the mass increase as resulting from increased precipitation over inland Antarctica, which is exactly what you expect from warming of the Southern seas.
For all of those that say I did not read Briffa (2001) and Osborn (2006) correctly, well even the IPCC AR4 agrees that there is a divergence issue but:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch06.pdf
So, now what do you say?
Oh, and in the IPCC as my last post shows, they truncated Briffa (2001) so as not to show the divergence as it says in the previous post. If you go to the Briffa papper itself, you can see out to the end of the century and the divergence.
So there is a divergence issue between the proxies and the direct instrumented, the IPCC even has to admit it.
"For all of those that say I did not read .. Osborn (2006) correctly"
That's right. Vernon says "Osborn (2006) shows ... ALL the proxies show temperatures dropping" while Osborn (2006) actually says 70% of the proxies are rising. Maybe he has some bizarre meaning for the term "read correctly".
Chris O'Neill (#158) You ignore my follow up that explained what I meant. What I said was that Briffa (2001) shows that all the proxies had lower levels at the end of the century than at early century high and diverged from the direct instrumented readings. That the Osborn (2006) shows that the proxy trends are going down from a high earlier in the century. One is actual temperatures and the other is the trends.
Lads, society is learning how to debate adaptation and mitigation. Corporations are acting, countries are acting, states are acting.
Society is no longer engaging in the non-action of quibbling over totems.
Best,
D
When it comes to Briffa and the IPCC, Vernon's just parroting climate audit ...
And of course they repeatedly accuse the IPCC, and by extension, climatology as a scientific endeavor, of fraud ...
Vernon, you should read Briffa's earlier work which discusses the divergence issue. There are several problems with your reading of this not least of which is your insistence that it be turned round to attack the veracity of the temperature record. I'd like to explain where you're going wrong:
Firstly, you don't see the divergence issue post 1960s in many of the tree ring data. Briffa's study is partially unique in this regard. The phenomena has been identified in a few other datasets but it seems to be limited to high latitude regions.
Next, there is a very good correlation between local temperature and the width of tree rings in the calibration period (excludes the data post 1960 due to divergence). You are asserting that the divergence occurs because the temperature record is broken due to UHIs and microsite problems, and that the proxy record shows the real trend. Let's ignore for a moment that SteveM likes to use this to bash proxies and concentrate on those local temperature records from the high latitude regions. Given that UHI and microsite issues seem to be related to urbanisation in populated regions, why are we to believe that these issues are going to effect temperature records from the high latitude regions? You see my point? High latitude regions are less populated and have have experienced less urbanisation, so how can UHIs have effect the local temperature records in these regions? These are the same local temperature records which don't match the proxies in the latter part of the 20th C. You maybe want to start asserting that UHIs have affected the higher latitude regions, so how can you explain that the secondary evidence is perhaps strongest in those parts of the world ie. thawing of permafrost at unprecendented rates, thinning of arctic sea ice, decreased northern hemispheric snowcover etc.
Final point, there are more plausible explanations for this divergence phenomenon. Having spoken to Keith Briffa about this, having become interested in it, and having read the papers in question it is clear that there are other plausible explanations. For instance, in Briffa's 1998 and 1999 papers there are several plausible hypotheses. Namely, that increased pollution has effected plant growth in the latter part of the 20th C. Two forms of pollution are discussed, ozone and sulphate particulate pollution. Both have been proven to be a direct cause of limited plant growth, and so both could thus explain this discrepancy.
Paul H, if you read all I posted, thawing of the permafrost and thinning or Arctic sea ice, etc has either a partial or complete answer in UC Irvine's study on the effects of dirty snow (black carbon) in the Arctic. It is responsible for 35 - 94 percent of all warming and melting.
This is my whole point! The proxies do not match the instrumented readings. The IPCC agrees to that. No one know the cause, the IPCC agrees to that. If you do not know whether the proxy record or the direct readings are correct, then how do you draw conclusions from them?
The sea levels are rising, they have been for 11-14 thousand years, but there are problems with how sea levels are being measured. I listed some of those and pointed out that the raw satellite data does not reflect an acceleration. I also pointed out that based on current studies, no one can actually show where currently accepted sea level increase is coming from. Thermal expansion is not enough, Arctic and Antarctic melting is not enough, the IPCC could not identify where the water was coming from. It is in the report.
That is why I am saying that while CO2 will raise temperatures, there is no evidence that that sensitivity is 3 degrees for doubling. That figure is based on models that cannot correctly show the radiant budget for 20N to 20S. That use guesses for all the less than fully understood climate drivers (again per the IPCC).
This is why I have issues with using the current understanding of CO2 based warming to drive policy.
Robin,
Your basic argument is that the climatologist use statistics to 'weed out' the bad data by using surrounding stations in the grid.
your argument falls apart with the following logic.
1. There are standards for siting a station.
2. The standards must matter or there would not be any.
3. There are stations that do not follow the standards.
So, how many stations have to be non-compliant before the signal is lost in the noise? Don't know. What is the effect of being non-compliant? Don't know. That is not questions that surfacestations.org is trying to answer. They are trying to identify the number of compliant and non-compliant stations.
What is the sample size of a census - I believe it is the whole population! Therefore the entire concept of cherry-picking cannot not apply and is at best a misdirection.
"This is why I have issues with using the current understanding of CO2 based warming to drive policy."
Vernon were you in favor of the Clean Air policies that have given us breathable air in western cities today, where we were living in an atmosphere of our own filth until less than 20 years ago?
Dopey, how many times are you going to post that and what does it have to do with the discussion?
Going to claim that CO2 is a pollutant now?
dhogaza: It's really time to stop being so polite to these people.
It seems difficult to imagine anyone even accidentally mistaking your posts as polite. I'm curious how you plan to "stop being so polite".
I asked what I thought were pretty straightforward questions. I thought that they should be easy to answer. I've made that mistake with dhogaza in the past. Lee, you typically respond to things I say right away. Do you not plan to address my questions? They seem like the kind of thing that you can address in a straightforward way, with citations or some kind of reference. There doesn't seem to be any room in them for me to be lying. It does seem odd that you would refer to surface temperature stations when talking about ice cover. I'm not sure I see the relationship. Would you mind explaining?
So? Who cares if you know or don't know?
And, of course, if you really care about honestly finding out, the first thing to do is to LEARN THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION.
Instead, like so many denialists, you 1) don't know 2) assume no one else knows, or if they do know, are lying about it 3) therefore presume you've proven climatology to be false.
Just look at your response to Robin:
How do those three points contradict the first claim? It's a handwave, nothing more. Those three points argue towards making a better instrumentation network. All well and good, but it says nothing to whether or not the current instrumentation network is good enough to support the claims made by those who analyze the data.
Before arguing that someone's point falls apart with three points you make, you better check your own sadly deficient logic to make sure you don't make a fool of yourself.
Oconnellc missed the fact that I wasn't speaking to myself. I can speak to myself without the aid of the internet.
This, of course, is exactly what Pielke Sr and those running the surface station project claim. That the biases are towards warming and that temperatures are actually cooling.
So it's a bit hard for me to believe you're asking this question in all innocence, that you made it up all on your own, and aren't simply copying the idea from agenda-driven denialists.
I should clarify, in that though oconnellc is using "cooling" rather than "warming" in his quote, the logical structure is the same as used by the "surface station data is no good" people.
One thing that argues against systematic bias in the surface temperature record is, of course, the fact that it matches other data very well, fits model predictions, etc etc.
And of course we don't need thermometers to watch artic ice melt, migration seasons shift, food web interlocking which have taken ages to evolve rapidly drifting apart due to differing responses to increasing temperatures, etc etc.
Going to claim that CO2 is a pollutant now?
This is the quality of their argument - recycling old talking points from years ago.
In Murrica, yes it may very well legally be.
This is the best they can do. The patheticality makes the mind reel.
Best,
D
dhogaza, that would be the same models that do not model 20N to 20S correctly, that use the same surface stations to model trends that do not match the proxies? Well, gee, if I am getting my model trends from the very data in question, then how do you use that to justify the data? Answer, you don't. That is why the proxies are important, they do not match the trends shown in the models or the instrumented readings.
Must be nice to be a denier like your self. Don't let facts get in your way of your beliefs.
The fact remains that there are station siting standards for a reason. I some how doubt you know how not being in compliance will affect the readings and how many stations within a grid have to be out of compliance to affect the grid results.
Ahhh, Dano, read the article you posted. It says that the EPA must say why CO2 is not a pollutant, not that CO2 is a pollutant.
sarcasm warning!
You do know that too much oxygen will be fatal? Therefore oxygen must be a pollutant and we should have laws to regulate all those nasty plants! I know, we do away with CO2 and both the oxygen problem and the CO2 problem goes away.
Vernon,
Have you even read Flanner et al 2007? This paper is the basis for the press release that you linked to. I've just read it and I couldn't find any mention of the heralded 35-94% temperature increase solely due to BC. Having read the paper I'm left with the conclusion that the press release author botched it. For starters, the press release claims that tha Arctic warmed by 1.6oC, but in actual fact it warmed by between 1.5 and 3.4oC depending on how generous we're feeling when we describe "Arctic". See here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/2005cal_fig1.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/
Flanner et al actually runs two main sensitivity experiments using a GCM, one for 1998 and one for 2001. They run their model both with and without black carbon present. When BC is present they get an enhancement in temperature of 1.6oC in 1998 and 0.5oC in 2001. This is all they did in their experiment.
Given that the region that they compare warmed by up to a maximum of 1.6oC in one of the two years they looked at in their study how can you, or anyone else, claim that the warming anomaly of between 1.5 and 3.4oC was caused by BC by as much as 94%. I can see that it could have caused an increase of up to 1.6oC compared to a scenario without BC, but I can not see how anyone could arrive at the same conclusion that you did, unless they only read the press release. Another point, the GISS temp anomaly I've shown compared 2005 to the 1950-1981 average, not to 200 years ago, so 1.5-3.4oC is a conservative estimate for how much this region has warmed since before the beginning of the 20th C. 1.6oC is starting to look like a small number now.
Can you explain, other than with your opinion or assertions as a basis, why we are to believe that the artic warming trend is merely an artefact of urbanisation? The Arctic, that highly populated part of the world, why would the temp. signal there be affected by urbanisation? This seems to be your thesis, so why don't provide some meaningful support for it. Misrepresented citations don't count as support they merely serve to undermine your position.
Another point, permafrost is frozen ground. Why would black carbon cause dark coloured frozen ground to melt? Oh yes, permafrost is melting at an unprecedented rate.
Vernon,
Here's some more information that comes out of actually reading Flanner et al 2007. BC seems to have three sources:
1. Fossil fuel combustion.
2. Biofuel fuel combustion (biomass burning mainly in wood burning stoves).
3. Boreal forest fires.
Sources 2 and 3 have been with us for most of the 20th C., source 2 may have increased with rising population but 3 has always been present. Flanner attributes much of the increase in 1998 (1.6oC due to BC) to the more intense boreal fire season in that year. So it seems that boreal forest fire BC can play cause a whole 1oC temperature shift. Boreal forest fires have been a feature of this planet for some time now so the 1.6oC figure is starting to look pretty shaky as a comparison to pre-industrial times given that a significant cause of the BC has always existed. But this is the point, the Flanner et al 2007 study was never designed to make such a comparsion, yet this is what you tried to use it for. Maybe you're a victim of the press release, but you should have least read the paper before jumping in two footed.
Paul H, so your saying that using a GCM is not a good way to do this? They did not use GRISS but ok, I will do the math for you and plug in the GRISS numbers - if BC was responsible for 1.61 +/- .322 and the GRISS model says 1.5 to 3.4 then BC was responsible for at worst (1.61-.322)/3.4 =~37 percent, and if you go the other way (1.61+.322)/1.5=more than 100 percent. This give the results that BC is reponsible for 37 - 100 of warming above 66.5N. I imagine that the author, with the scientist help, did the same thing but used the numbers listed in the paper.
Oh and it can be found: http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:rzwapBPF7lUJ:dust.ess.uci…
Why urbanization affects the Arctic, well, if you did any research you would know that there is a condition known as Arctic haze which consists for aerosols from Europe and Asia (slightly urbanized) being pulled up into the Arctic. This is, from what I read of the study one of the major goals, to determine the effect of pollution from Europe on the Arctic.
Once again on the permafrost, if you read the paper you would know that dirty snow melts faster than clean snow. This uncovers the ground and water, both of which absorb more thermal energy than snow. So warming and melting in the Arctic.
dhogaza, it is tough to respond. It looks like you write an entire post directed towards me, but in the middle, you quote a post by someone else. I guess I will only respond to those things that I think are towards me.
++And, of course, if you really care about honestly finding out, the first thing to do is to LEARN THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION.++
I thought asking here might be a good place to start. I've seen claims that the statistical analysis of the data is able to weed out the errors. Some people here seem to know a bit about things. Why wouldn't I ask here if I wanted to learn the answer to the question?
You then quoted someone else, so I will let them reply.
You then said something about posting to yourself which I didn't understand.
You then said: So it's a bit hard for me to believe you're asking this question in all innocence, that you made it up all on your own, and aren't simply copying the idea from agenda-driven denialists.
What does that have to do with anything? I'm not sure you really care, but I haven't visited any blog other than this one, a brief post by Tamino and about 30 minutes on CA last week. Does that affect your desire to either answer my question or not? I'm certainly not parroting Pielke as I have never read anything from him about SS.org. Are you now going to scour the web looking to see who I might have taken my question from? Is it possible that two people who both happen to be a bit skeptical just come to the same question independently? You can either answer or not. If you choose to answer, you can provide a thought filled response or throw up a lot of noise.
Oh and Paul H, if you have read the article, you would notice that only 80 percent of the BC is man made. The rest is due to biomass, i.e. forest fires anyone?
What does it have to do with anything?
Well, for one thing you've just admitted that you've not visited any blog with information from climatologists. You've visited CA (run by a proven liar), this blog (Lambert posts interesting stuff and does a good analysis but doesn't claim any special knowledge in climatology), and a post by Tamino (physics/statistics background apparently but not a climatologist).
Now, which of these three sites would be the source of the information you uncritically repeat here?
It's easy to guess that it's climate audit.
Have you bothered to look to see what scientists working in the field might have to say about climatology?
Apparently not.
Why not? Blinders on?
Climate audit is only useful for measuring the current state of denialist claptrap, not for learning about climatology. Vernon's cutting-and-pasting a great deal he's learning there, misrepresenting papers that they claim refute the AGW hypothesis (though they don't), claiming climatologists are involved in a world-wide conspiracy, etc etc. Same shit creationists spew about evolutionary biology.
"Paul H, so your (sic) saying that using a GCM is not a good way to do this? "
No, I never said this. I just that that is what they did in their study.
"Why urbanization affects the Arctic, well, if you did any research you would know that there is a condition known as Arctic haze which consists for aerosols from Europe and Asia (slightly urbanized) being pulled up into the Arctic. This is, from what I read of the study one of the major goals, to determine the effect of pollution from Europe on the Arctic."
Urbanisation = UHIs or micro site problems. I thought that was clear, sorry. If you want to assert proxies are correct and that arctic temp records are wrong you need to invoke some kind of bias into the temp. record. This is what A Watts and co. are doing in the USA, Steve M has already targetted the rest of the world I was just moving things along for you. You have asserted that the temperature record is broken in the Arctic, what is your basis for this?
Arctic haze is a photochemical phenomenon that occurs in springtime. It leads to elevated ozone in that region and amongst oher things the formation of lots of secondary organic aersol which on the face of it appears to be a negative forcing agent, yet we still have this nagging, and whopping, positive temperature anomaly.
Read Flanner carefully. They say that much of the difference between 1998 and 2001 can be attributed to increased boreal forest fires. 2001 was, itself, a year of minor note wrt boreal forest fires. This should inform you that boreal forest fires can make a big difference to BC. Yes, overall/globally, most of the background BC comes from fossil fuels and wood burning, but if you read the paper it makes it clear that boreal forest fires were instrumental in the temperature rises in the Arctic during 2001 and particularly in 1998. The last thing Flanner et al can be used for is to claim that man made BC has caused most of the warming in the Arctic in the 20th C.
Due to the GISS graphic I was unable, earlier, to get the precise Arctic temp. anomaly, this didn't stop you making some kind of half assed comparison between 1.6oC (which is absolutely not a comparison between pre-20th C BC levels and present BC levels it is merely a GCM experiment with and without BC - something totally different) and the range of 1.5-3.4oC. Let me emphasise, Flanner et al offers no comparison between pre-industrial BC and present BC values. It is merely on and off. More important is that the BC affecting the Arctic, seems to be largely dominated by a natural phenomenon - boreal forest fires. These fires have been occurring well before human industrial activity. Let's get a better estimate of the temperature anomaly, looking at my earlier link I think that the anomaly looks close to 2.2oC.
And if it wasn't abundantly clear already what Flanner's conclusions were lets emphsise it with some quotes from Flanner et al as they discuss the Arctic warming and the BC that contributes to it:
"Applying biomass burning BC emission inventories for a strong (1998) and weak (2001) boreal fire year, we estimate global annual mean BC/snow surface radiative forcing from all sources (fossil fuel, biofuel, and biomass burning) of +0.054 (0.007Â0.13) and +0.049 (0.007Â0.12) W m , respectively. Snow forcing from only fossil fuel +
biofuel sources is +0.043 W m (forcing from only fossil fuels is +0.033 W m ), suggesting that the anthropogenic contribution to total forcing is at least 80%. The 1998 global land and sea-ice snowpack absorbed 0.60 and 0.23 W m , respectively, because of direct BC/snow forcing."
So 1998 is a strong year for boreal fires and we get a temperature response in the model of 1.6oC in the Arctic, and 2001 was a weak year for boreal fires and has a temperature response of 0.5oC for the Arctic. The high (94%) estimates aren't looking to hot at the moment.
"With climate feedbacks, global annual mean 2-meter air temperature warms 0.15 and 0.10°C, when BC is included in snow, whereas annual arctic warming is 1.61 and 0.50°C. Stronger high-latitude climate response in 1998 than 2001 is at least partially caused by boreal fires, which account for nearly all of the 35% biomass burning contribution to 1998 arctic forcing."
They are attributing the really big response in the Arctic to boreal forest fires. They go on to repeat this several times during the paper. They also note that there is an unusually large model response to the forcing and speculate that some dynamical interaction caused the 1.6oC figure to be even larger. They also say part of the remaining temperature anomaly is attributed to some non-BC effects. The man made BC contribution in the Arctic would appear to be closer to 0.5oC, at least according to what they say.
dhogaza, an endless source of insults but no information of worth.... yet another troll. Troll, I do not misrepresent any papers. I take the information from many sources and put it together to get questions which no one seems to want to answer. I read most the climate sites, I read a lot of the papers, and I draw conclusions on my own.
I did not understand Briffa (2001) or Osborn (2006) but shazam, the IPCC just happen to agree with me.
I am wrong to think that doing a census to determine the quality of the surface stations when compared to the siting guidelines would be good for the science. An yes, I read this at CA, but Hanson's method for determining the Urban Heat off-set is to look for light=0, but if the survey shows what the sites actually are, how is this bad?
That I did not understand Flanner (2207) but yes, I can do simple math.
That if you look at the world graphics of sea level rise, the most dramatic rise is where the land is sinking... err which is being measured the subsidence of the land via tidal gauges or the sea level rise, or well, both and no knowing which is which mixing them. I mean, we have major sea ice melting in the Arctic which according to Gavin over on RC should cause sea levels to rise, but the Arctic Sea's levels are dropping.
That there are studies that lay out the issue of IPCC's approved sea level rise numbers and the sources for sea level rises do not match. The IPCC is careful not to attribute a source to this per the paper, but sea level rise has issues.
So, please quit implying garbage about me and if I am wrong, produce some cites and arguments for a discussion, not worthless trolling.
I am not suggesting that you've failed to understand Briffa 2001 and Osborn 2006. I am saying that you clearly haven't read Briffa's earlier papers from 1998 and 1999. In those works he explicitly discusses causes of the divergence problem ie. ozone and sulphates. Why are rising tropospheric ozone and sulphate concentrations not plasible explanations of the divergence issue?
Thus, you have failed to understand the issue at large (divergence) by virtue of not reading relevant materials.
Paul H, please in one line or so state what you disagree with?
I understood that is was that Flanner (2007) did not put the actual words 35 - 94 percent into the paper? All I did was demonstrate how to derive them. I do not claim that all the warming is due to BC and neither does Flanner et al. What was said by Flanner is that more work is needed. What I said was that based on Flanner et al's early work, the affect of CO2 warming is could be less, much less, then presupposed.
I am not trying to prove that there is no AGW... I am pretty sure there is. What I question is how much. The more I read, the more I study, the more it seems that there is very little data to back up the CO2 sensitivity of 3 degrees.
So, to keep from going round and round, please state what I miss quoted. Oh, I always thought urbanization and urban heat island (UHI) effect were always two different things, is that not true for climatologist?
Paul H, if Briffa's suggest causes to divergence were supported by fact, then would not the IPCC say that was the reason for the divergence effect rather than:
dhogaza, I don't get it. You state that I must be parroting someone and that is why you won't answer me. I said I wasn't parroting anyone. You now decide that you won't answer me for some other reason. Presumably because I'm not learning the right things from the places I visit... You decide to guess that I must be just parroting something from someone else. If you don't want to answer me, thats fine. Don't. Just tell me if that is the case or just don't respond to me. I think that is what Lee decided to do, and that is fine. It's like we are discussing operational efficiency all over again.
You can't compare the late 20th C Arctic anomaly values to the GCM ouputs in Flanner et al. Apples and oranges. They carry out sensitivity studies using BC on and BC off. The delta T is the difference between no BC and some BC. Pre-industrial times weren't "no BC" thus using Flanner et al to make such a comparison is wrong. The press release does this, but at no point in Flanner et al do they state this. It is simply BC on vs. BC off. Add into the mix that boreal forest fires (a natural and persitent phenonenom) are a significant contributor to the Arctic forcing (as demonstrated by comparing 1998 and 2001) and it becomes obvious that GCM output anomaly from 1998 of 1.6oC can not be used to make a comparison to pre-industrial times because pre-industrial times had boreal forest fires too.
You can not still keep using the upper bound figure of 1.6oC. A seemingly more sensible comparison (to get the man made BC contribution to the anomaly in the Arctic) is to compare 0.5 to my derived figure (disagree if you will) of 2.2oC. Thus 22% from BC seems a bit more likely. That still leaves the majority of the anomaly unexplained if you discount CO2's contribution. If you include CO2' input it becomes a lot easier to rationalise all of the obs.
Paul H, I am not comparing them. I was merely pointing out where the 35-94 came from. You may disagree but I guess short of asking the authors, we can disagree. What I read showed that they took the with BC and compared it to the without BC and got the 35-94. Do you disagree that is what they did. Have you run their model to see if it gives those results? I know I have not.
Anyway, it seems you disagree with them more than how I read them. Would you be happy if I just said 1.61C +/- .322C for a given year represented the warming due to BC?
Vernon, it seems that what you are missing is this.
That paper showed that in the models, black carbon causes the arctic to be warmer, and they quantified that, comparing no BC, to a scenario with BC included.
But that result on its own SAYS NOTHING WHATSOEVER about the causes of a warming TREND in the arctic. For BC to be causing a warming trend, one must show that there is a trend toward increasing persistent BC levels.
There is a lot of natural BC in the arctic. The natural level fluctuates year to year, causing year-to-year variation in temperatures (if the model result is correct). But, unless one can further show a trend in BC in the arctic, this result does not even imply that BC is causing a trend toward warmer temperatures.
Lee, do you know what the BC trend is in the Arctic? I do not and reading the paper, the authors do not either. That is why they say more work is needed.
However, since BC is one of the things that the IPCC says we have low scientific understanding of... like most climate drivers. I could be wrong but I though that they had a way to actually model BC was the main point of the paper? Am I reading it wrong?
If not, then it would just be like GRISS being run with BC on and off then only show the predicted influence of BC as a drive (which is assumed) and not actually modeled the BC as Flanner's team did.
Vernon
I know you don't like answering questions, but do you know what "low scientific understanding" means? And when you say that the IPCC says we have a low LOSU of "most" climate drivers, do you mean by number or by influence?
Robin,
I believe if I read correctly, take clouds for example that we do not fully understand the life cycle. We have no way of modeling the lifecycle (which is why best guess is used), and we do not fully understand how it drives the climate, and what the true sensitivity is. So while we know what cloud are, we know that water vapor becomes clouds, we know if it a low cloud it does one thing, or if it is a high cloud another, there is still a lot we do not know.
Why, do you think it means something else?
Vernon
You've only answered half the question; you have to answer the other half to get your marks.
My. Dano mentioned
So if a bunch of pro or anti agw folks want to take pictures of sites that show if they meet standards or not, it's meaningless at best. If the goal is to show pics and say "look these are bad and it invalidates everything" first who's going to believe it that's not already not believing agw? They could probably stop now and do that anyway. I've never seen so many people get upset! Or say the same things over and over like some insane ping pong game.
If I may comment on some of the talk of ocean surface temperatures, I believe the data you can get for the ERSST data set at NOAA shows a mean of 13.82C for 1961-1990 and a .016C change, from .06 in 1854 to .22 in 2006 So the temperatures are rising, but not all that much for 152 years. Forgive me if .016 is a large amount and I've underestimated its importance.
Excuse me, it went up 0.16 over the 152 years I had the decimal point in the wrong place.
ohmigod
Will the fraud never end? I just went to investigate one of the mysteriously melting glaciers in the Rockies, and just look!
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/gzuckier/detail?.dir=/b506re2&.dnm=7a34re…
I wonder how many more of these "victims of global warming" are in a similar situation?
Hah!
z, do you mind if I post that over at CA?
"do you mind if I post that over at CA?"
Sure. Might as well start to establish that the evidence of melting glaciers is just as phony as the evidence of warming weather stations. And besides, all this warming that's not happening is the fault of the sun.
Robin,
I do not see what your trying to prove but water (clouds), sulphates, black carbon, orgianic carbon, biomass burning, mineral dust, aviation, land use, solar all which per the IPCC are at the low to the very low level of scientific understanding. What is your point?
Lee and z,
Since you seem to already know the answer, what is the adjustment if any for a station that does no meet NOAA/WMO siting guidelines? How many stations that do not meet these guidelines can be in a grid before the noise hides the trend?
I was just wondering since you seem to already know the answers.
Vernon,
What is your justification for assuming that a station that does not meet METEOROLOGICAL guidelines needs a trend adjustment?
What is your justification for assuming that a station that does meet METEOROLOGICAL guidelines does NOT need a trend adjustment?
You won't learn anything relevant about climate science by visiting climate audit, so yes, you've pretty much nailed it.
You are parroting what you've read there, whether you'll admit it or not, and you've done so without taking the time to learn *anything* about the science.
You're in the position of someone arguing against evolutionary biology and when questioned about the sources of information they read saying "look, I've never spent any time reading biology sites, but I did spend 30 minutes learning about evolutionary biology by reading Uncommon Descent".
So Vernon you're calling CO2 "life" while the people you're arguing with believe that in the context of your argument it's a "pollutant". You can look up the meaning of that word if you like but that's what CO2 is in a discussion of anthropogenic climate change by CO2 emissions.
Being a bit careless with the language is the liberals' typical debating tactic. For example the Bible's not the word of God to them they think you can be nuanced with your reading of it - and here you are doing this yourself.
Vernon if you've never yet seen a government policy you liked what chance would there be of you now accepting a policy on climate change?
Vernon doesn't understand why "no consensus" does not imply "unsupported by fact".
Ignorance of the basics seem to be a big part of his problem.
Of course, at the same time he's quoting the author of ONE paper on the effects of black carbon in the artic as though there's no possibility the paper's wrong, despite the fact that there's NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS on the matter (climatologists know black carbon has some effect, but there's no consensus on the magnitude).
Oh, oops, Vernon actually misunderstands what the paper's saying as well. Too bad for Vernon.
Regardless. For the sake of consistency, since there's no scientific consensus regarding the magnitude of warming caused by black carbon, Vernon should be claiming that the paper's claims are NOT SUPPORTED BY FACT.
Or is there some reason why Vernon might apply different standards to a paper which he believes supports his cause and to one which he believes undermines it.
You wouldn't do that, would you, Vernon?
Vernon: "You ignore my follow up that explained what I meant."
You mean the Alice-in-wonderland, my-words mean-what-I-say-they-mean style argument?
"What I said was that Briffa (2001)"
But question wasn't what you said about Briffa (2001), was it?
"That the Osborn (2006) shows that the proxy trends are going down from a high earlier in the century."
How many times do I have to tell you? 70% of proxies in Osborn (2006) finish at record highs and are trending up.
"I did not understand Briffa (2001) or Osborn (2006) but shazam, the IPCC just happen to agree with me."
If you don't understand Briffa (2001) or Osborn (2006), how do we know you understand the IPCC? If you shoot your own credibility it would be rather foolish for anyone to just believe you.
Vernon
This was the other question:
Would you please answer it?
And, at the moment, I'm trying to clarify the point you sought to make.
Chris O'Neill,
Since it appears that you did not read Osborn et al(2006), the full version that is found here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5762/841
The objective of the study was:
Further the conclusion reached by this study was:
Which if you look at their graphs, they show that trends dropped at the very end of the century, which is what I have been saying. What your saying is meaningless for this study. This is not 70 percent do this and 30 percent do that, it is that the overall trend based on all the other studies show this.
Vernon sez, stupidly:
While the authors say:
which correlates with the fact that the graph, despite Vernon's spewing, plots how many proxy records show significant warming (70%), not a temperature trend.
Vernon was told this on RC numerous times. He didn't listen. He repeats his bullshit here. He still doesn't listen.
Oh, damn, I'm supposed to be polite to him, because in oconnellc's world, the polite person who deliberately repeats the same tired lies over and over again is to be preferred to the person blunt enough to call that person a liar.
(meanwhile, oconnellc says nothing about the fact that it is inherently impolite to imply that an entire field of science is fraudulent, as Vernon and his ilk do)
Robin,
I am not sure what your asking but I will try to answer. If the IPCC says we have LOSU of a given driver, then I do not see how we can make an assumption on what the level of influence is, if we could then we would understand it. As to the number, then, yes I would have to say based on what the IPCC report says, we do not know much about most of the drivers. Of the 13 listed drivers, we have high understanding of ghg, medium of two more drivers, and low to very low on the other 10. Is that what your asking? If you want you can read it in the IPCC SFP.
Gee, dhogaza, I guess going by what the authors of the paper say is not good enough for you. Bye troll.
Lee,
Since I was not the one that did a studies based on these stations, it is not up to me to validate if the stations are providing good data or bad data. However, based on my reading, no climatologist has ever bothered to actually inspect a collection station. They take the raw data an adjust it. Well part of my reading indicates that one of the adjustments is for UHI. So I read some more to find out how they determine what the UHI off-set is and found three means:
1. The satellite method - checking for lights at night
2. The census method - based on population
3. The metadata method - based on site metadata
So why does METEOROLOGICAL guidelines matter? Because if the station is not sited properly then the above methodologies may not work. That is the question which you do not seem to want to be answered, what is the impact? Because this census is casting doubts on the validity of all three methods of determining the UHI off-set and if the off-set is wrong, then the trends could be wrong.
Ummm ... you don't understand what they say. Not my problem ...
Vernon and Lance, the faces of the scientific revolution that's going to put those gol'darned fradulent climate scientists in their place, ya betcha!
This is astonishing. If we know the major forcings and feedbacks we can easily put an upper bounds on the influence other factors might have.
Military types built accurate firing tables for artillery using Newtonian mechanics, even though they didn't know the level of influence of relativistic effects (indeed, even though they were unaware that Newtonian mechanics was flawed). Sometimes what you know is enough to get the job done.
Is this really so hard to understand?
dhogaza,
now you are making an unproven assumption. The whole CO2 AGW theory is based on this assumption - namely that we know the major forcings and feedbacks. I have to ask, how do we know this when most of the drivers and feedbacks are have LOSU?
However, there are many discrepancies between the theory and reality. Such as the instrumented trends diverge from proxy trends. Or the fact that there is no proof in the past that CO2 has ever driven warming. When there is fact that the climate has cooled despite CO2.
Why should I believe you when climatologists not only say the opposite but have reams of peer-reviewed science going back over a hundred years to back up their claim?
Then you move on to a false statement ... and, yes, I know about ice ages and how solar forcing LEADS CO2 forcing by a few hundred years (which is not the same as saying there is no CO2 forcing, a fact you seem to be conveniently forgetting).
dhogaza,
While normally I do not care what the current theory of the week is because it does not normally affect me, CO2 AGW does. So while string theory is now out of favor to 11-dimension theory, policy is not going to be made based on either. CO2 AGW theory is being used as the basis for making massive changes to socity and economies.
So if you have a problem with people like me that take the time to read the literature, both for an against, read the studies, and come up with questions, then too bad.
I have a problem with the fact that the proxies and the instrumented trends do not match. This indicates to me that one of them is wrong.
Part of what could be wrong is the fact that climatologist are using data from ill-sited stations to both determine adjustments to the raw data and to determine grid trends. No one has done any studies to determine the effect of poorly sited stations - yet here and many other places (RC) - the answer is to plug your ears chanting, the data matches the trends, the trends match the data... which is a circular argument.
So, before I support major changes I am going to keep reading the ongoing work and asking the questions that I do not see an answer for, whether you like it or not.
Some proxies don't agree with the instrumental record, only some. Those highlighted in Briffa's papers are good examples of this divergence phenomenon. There is evidence to link decreased tree growth to certain types of pollution. The true effect needs to be verified by the good people who study trees in special tents loaded with the pollutant of interest. Given that most proxies match the temperature record of the 20th C. are we therefore left believing that you have no problem with the parts of the meteorological network that overlaps with the proxies that seem to show a warm late 20th C?
No one has a problem with that. The problem is with the fact that you:
1. Either don't understand or lie about what the papers you quote say, which is a classic science denialism tactic used by creationists, HIV deniers, etc.
2. When corrected, refuse to acknowledge your mistake. Another classic science denialist tactic.
3. Move to another venue (i.e. from RC to here), and repeat your mistakes once again, another classic science denialist tactic.
4. Accuse experts of being incompetent or fraudulent or driven by ideology. Another classic science denialist tactic.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive...
The paper you've cited over and over again doesn't make this claim, as the previous post (and many other earlier ones) point out.
You've been told both at RC and here that this statement is incorrect. Your constant repeating of it, after having been corrected, is a lie.
No, that's not what's been said. Either you're obtuse beyond belief or lying.
You can ask if the world's flat as often as you want, but don't be surprised if people don't take you seriously when you refuse to listen to evidence that it's not.
Paul H,
I question why the proxies match and why they diverge. I do not know which is correct. If the proxies are correct, then even if there is a point that the trends overlap, we have less to worry about due to CO2. If the direct readings are correct, then there is no proof that past warming was less than the present warming. This is too important to just guess. It should not be to hard to put measuring stations near proxy sources and measure humidity, air chemistry, cloud/clear weather, weather data, and determine which one of these is actually being measured by the proxy. Then at the same time, duplicate the conditions and change the humidity and air chemistry to see if that is truly the cause. However, where are you going to get the instrumented or proxy record of the humidity?
Basically, I have problems with both parts until someone does the work to determine which is correct.
Also based on what I read in the Wegman report, it would be good if all the data, processes, and procedures were made available to statisticians since it appears that some climatologist have issues with statistics.
dhogaza,
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I was told I was wrong about the divergence issue until I quoted the IPCC's position which was the same as mine.
I keep being told that Osborn (2006) does not show that the overall trend at the end of the 20th century less than it was earlier in the 20th century, but the chart shows I am right.
1. You lie, I give the cite and the quote for a specific fact from the study. I may draw a different conclusion than the study's author but the fact is the fact.
2. Nope, when pointed out that I typo'ed a cite, I corrected it. What I have not gotten are studies that contradict the facts that I have presented. Oh, I am sorry, having you call me names is a presentation of fact for you.
3. I quit posting at all on RC. They refuse to publish posts that actually have cites to back up the position, well, unless your a fan boy. I looked for a pro-AGW site that might answer my questions... you are not a source of answers. The ones that told me I was wrong about the facts got real quite when the IPCC said the same thing.
4. I have never accused anyone of anything. I do wonder how good the science is when the data, processes, and procedures are not made public. I am part of the old school, if you have a finding you present to information needed for others to duplicate your work. That does not seem to be the way it is done in climatology.
About poorly sited stations, how about a cite?
And finally your real position. Your a believer and will not accept any questioning.
Uh, no, it's not, and it's been explained above.
The reason why you draw a different conclusion than the study's author is that he understands the data he's presenting, and either you don't or you're lying.
Again, this is a classic science denialist tactic (we see a lot of claims of the sort "the author claims his data supports an evolutionary hypothesis but it's really supporting intelligent design, he's just not smart enough to realize it!"). You're doing the same thing with this author's data. The problem is, we can look at the author's graph, read the author's conclusion, and see that he's right.
Who do you expect to convince with this dribble?
And this is a lie that's easily refuted by anyone who takes the time to read a few threads on the site.
Why do you bother lying in a way that's easily disproven by someone who takes a few minutes to visit the site?
When talking about the proxies vs. the temperature records you should mention that most of the proxy records derived from tree rings actually correlate with 20th century temperaure records. Only some of the records don't correlate beyond 1960. It would appear that about 30% of the proxy records don't correlate. When you discuss them you should acknowledge that the divergence issue is limited to a relatively small subset of the data. The way you're talking about gives the impression that all proxies diverge and this is not true. Given that the divergence is limited to higher latitude regions you should look at the secondary evidence of warming from that region. Yes, we know that you think that BC is the cause of the warming in the Arctic. This begs a question because you appear to be being very inconsistent. Your original response to my post included mention of the Irvine BC paper. You said "thawing of the permafrost and thinning or Arctic sea ice, etc has either a partial or complete answer in UC Irvine's study on the effects of dirty snow (black carbon) in the Arctic. It is responsible for 35 - 94 percent of all warming and melting." Aside from that being a poor assessment of Flanner et al 2007, you say that there was a warming in the Arctic using this press release as your source. So, you won't believe either the high latitude proxies or the temperature record yet you'll cite a paper which tries to attribute some of the mythical Arctic warming to BC? Like I said that's inconsistent.
Let me explain my position. The proxies at high lat. (a small subset of all proxies) prior to the 1960s correlate extremely well with the temperature records but fail to correlate after 1960. I think that some other factor is at work after the 1960s to prevent a decent correlation. Briffa seems to agree with me, the IPCC acknowledges this too. Thus, I believe that the proxies are possibly to likely correct before 1960 (this is because I think a non-climatic effect influenced the record post 1960 and there are plausible candidates for this hypoth., Briffa agrees). Post 1960, I believe the temperature records in the higher latitudes because of the supporting secondary evidence of thinning ice and permafrost. I never even mentioned the causes, yet surely if you cite a cause (BC) for something then that cause must have had an effect. In this case its either BC, GHGs, or both causing the Arctic to warm and melt anomalously.
Since Vernon ignores what I say and does nothing other than throw up smoke-screens, all I can do is repeat the assertion he made, i.e. " http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html .. shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping" and repeat the explanation of the graph in that abstract that shows that his assertion is blatantly wrong. i.e.
"The graph in http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html has a set of curves that shows the fraction of Northern Hemisphere proxies with a particular property, e.g. light red shading shows the fraction of proxies that are more than one unit above long term average. This means that at the end of the record, 70% of proxies were more than one unit above long term average. This was the largest fraction of proxies in history that suggested one unit's worth of warming. Similarly at the end of the record, 40% of proxies were more than two units above long term average. This was also the largest fraction of proxies in history that suggested two units' worth of warming. What Vernon has been taken in by is that 30% of proxies are not showing recent warming. This does not mean that "all the proxies show temperatures dropping". Far from it, even if you ignored all other factors, it could still only mean that 30% of proxies suggested cooling, not "all" of them.
Paul H,
Please post, with approval, what Flanner had to say. I read the paper and the press release and if I made a mistake, I would like to know.
I have not misrepresented Osborn (2006). Osborn et al study was for the purpose of:
I looked at his results and the graph of proxy variability from the mean declined (shows a negative slope in the graph) for the very end of the 20th century. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe this shows that the line indicating the number of records with a normalized value >0 has a negative slope, that value >1 has a negative slope, and that >2 has a negative slope, so there are less of them and on the other side for <0 has a negative slope so there is more cooling trend.
Since Osborn et al is looking at the aggregate of all the records from all the proxies that meet their window, then what some individual proxies increase or some decrease is not the issue, the issue is what the aggregate is doing, which is what I have repeatedly stated.
Which part did I misrepresent?
Chris O'Neill,
Why don't you contact Osborn and ask him if I am not reading his published results correctly. For the record:
I said that Briffa (2001) shows that proxy temps at the end of the chart (end of 20th century) are lower than earlier in the century, not that they are trending down.
I said that Osborn (2007) shows that the trends are moving downward at the end of the century, not the temps. There is a difference.
From this I draw the conclusion that proxies are not showing accelerated warming as the instrumented readings do. This is known as divergence, which even the IPCC concedes exists.
Today we find out that Hanson and GRISS had some errors and 1998 is no longer the hottest day, it is back in the 1930s. How is this going to affect a lot of studies? What does this say about instrumented readings?
It tells us something we already knew - the instrument record isn't perfect.
It doesn't change squat about the overall picture.
So what if 1998 isn't the hottest year on record? (I'm taking your statement at face value, though given your track record, I won't be surprised if you're misunderstanding the magnitude of the correction). If the warmest year on record arrives in 2007, or 2010, or 2015, this will disprove global warming how, exactly?
Vernon, this quote provided above from one of the papers you repeatedly quote directly contradicts your claims about the proxy record. I've bolded a few things to make it easier for you to read.
As to the 30% of proxies that don't suggest accelerated warming, as has been mentioned earlier there are plausible hypotheses which might well explain it, backed up in the peer-reviewed literature. There is not CONSENSUS in the community as to whether or not these explanations are correct, but your statements above that IPCC says they're "unsupported by facts" or whatever is clearly false.
Consensus always lags research in science. There are time lags involved in publication, the time it takes other scientists in a field to decide to do independent research to verify or shoot down new results (and the time it takes to secure funding to do so), more time to publish these follow-on results, etc etc.
I still find it curious that you blindly accept the non-consensus view regarding the importance of black-carbon deposits in the artic for melting, based on one recent paper, while rejecting explanations regarding proxy divergence in recent times as being "not based in fact".
Your political inclinations aren't playing a role in this, right? I can't imagine you'd be so foolish as to apply a double standard to research based on a philosophical or political litmus test. You wouldn't do that, would you, Vernon?
dhogaza,
your a lier and a troll. Could that be due to your political leanings?
Hmmm, so accepting consensus science makes me a "lier" and a troll, eh?
An interesting world view, indeed.
But I guess it makes sense if one starts out with the premise that climatologists are engaged in fraud, are lying about their data, etc etc.
No, I am guessing it is an innate characteristic for you.
You're also guessing that you know more about climate science that professional scientists. Thus far your track record on guessing is quite poor ...
I have not disagreed that some proxies used in Osborn (2006) or that in the 20th century there was a lot of warming. What I seem to be challenged on is my reading of the end of the chart, the end of the 20th century. What I see is that the trend is not accelerating (it is moving down) from what it prior to the end of the century.
Do I disagree that the proxies show a lot of warming in the 20th century, nope. What I do see is that at the end of the century where the instrumented readings show accelerated warming, Osborn (2006) and Briffa (2001) do not. This is one basis for divergence.
Now since I posted that even the IPCC agrees with divergence and does not have an answer for it, the calls that I was misreading the Briffa study has ended. Now the big thing is to say that 70% of the proxy records for Osborn show warming and 30% show cooling. Since that is not the goal of the paper, I do not see where that matters. What matters is that the trend is not accelerating upwards but is actually dropping.
I've asked Mark, we'll have to wait and see.
Looking at Figure 2 of Osborn 2006 shows me that the trend lines with the least statistical significance are those which have strong negative trends at the end of the series. Do you want to put your faith in that over the more significant trends? Yes, the dark red shading area has a negative trend at the very end of the series but it also has the largest peak of its series in 1986 (measured from fig. 2) and the slightly less significant (light red shading) trend had a positve trend and the highest peak at the end of the series. With reference to the dark red trend and the query as to why it doesn't match the temp. record exactly you should read the final part of the paper which says:
"Each of the proxy records undoubtedly includes some variance that is unrelated to local temperature variations, and the characteristics of this "noise" determine the extent to which the signal shown by the counts of threshold exceedances and their differences will be expressed. The slight underestimation by the proxy results of the early 20th century rise and the absence of a further increase at the end of the records could both be examples of the expected consequences of noise in the proxy records. Virtually every grid-box instrumental temperature series in the NH exceeds its 1856 to 1995 mean level by the end of these records in 2004."
Another plausible explanation from the authors for what you claim are contradictory proxy observations. It seems they disagree with you about the temperature record being faulty too.
Paul H,
I am saying that Osborn (2006) shows trends that are not reflected in the instrumented readings. I do not believe that I have claimed that either the instrumented or the proxy record are wrong, I said that one of them must be since they do not agree.
I think, and we will have to wait and see, but the changes GISS has just made based on findings of ClimateAudit and surfacestations.org may change some of the instrumented readings.
Personally, I am leaning to the instrumented readings being wrong. But that is just because if all that was needed to determine the trends, then collecting the raw data, doing the stats to normalize should give a trend. But since that is not what happens I have to wonder why all the adjustments are made to the raw data before the normalizing process takes place. Anyway, I am waiting to see what the correct answer is.
So Paul, is Flanner (2007) about their GCM BC model? I understood that is what it was about and that it shows more of an impact due to BC than the other GMC models that do not model BC? Bug them some more please.
If you want to ask Mark questions do it yourself. The email address isn't that hard to find.
Here you go with your pre-supposed conclusions, that surfacestations et al will find major problems with the temp record. Osborn 2006 explicitly explains why the proxy records that they examine do not match the temperature record in some cases. They explain that noise likely disrupts the signal. Even then you have you have to be extrememly liberal with which trend line to believe. You seem to be selecting the trend lines with the least statistical significance which has to be some new absurd form of cherry picking. If you look at the dark red and light red shaded areas you will see that one shows a strong temperature peak in 1986, and the other shows the peak in temperature at the end of the series. Noise can easily account for the downturn at the end of the dark red times series. Statistical significance ought to discard the outlying trend lines in favour of the inner more significant trends. Can you explain why you want to discard Osborn's explanations of noise? And, why you are seemingly putting greater faith in the trends with least significance?
Osborn 2006 only supports your interpretation of events and observations with a highly selective reading coupled with a bizarre set of selection rules for which trend to follow.
If the high latitude temperature records are broken why is Arctic sea ice melting and why is permafrost melting? Oh yes, you say that BC caused the warming, but hang on, you think the temperature record is broken so why propose a mechanism for that warming if it doesn't exist. As I've said before, inconsistent. But of course, this is the classic progression of arguments from denialists. No, there is no warming, ah maybe there is but it can't be caused by greenhouse gases. Normally you don't see the same person using both arguments at the same time.
Hopefully, if Mark agrees, more of this folly and bizarre thinking will be exposed.
Vernon
I haven't looked at Osborne (2006); but I've already pointe dout that this is flat-out wrong. None of the Briffa (2001) measures go to the end of the century; the latest data series goes to the early 1990s, and most of them finish in 1980. So your comment above is either an alarmingly obvious, but wholly irrelevant, statement of fact - they couldn't show warming to the end of the century because they don't go to the end of the century; or (given that I have already pulled you up on this) an attempt to deceive. There is a thir dalternative - that you neither bothered to read my post or Briffa (2001), but only you can answer that.
Again, the later data series in Briffa (2001) are on an uptick at the end.
Paul H,
Now your calling me names. So much for adult discussions. Why don't you address the real issue and not how you disagree with my using Osborn (2006) to show divergence.
DIVERGENCE
It means that one of the two sources for temperature trends are wrong. You have offered arguments for what caused the divergence but I do not see any studies being cited.
I read Flanner (2007) and under stood that they are actually developing a model for BC and their model shows BC has a much greater effect than previous. The article said 35 - 94 percent. I saw nothing in the paper that indicated that that could not be right. Even the low end is over 50 percent more affect than your 22 percent.
BC, sulfates, and aerosols all have LOSU per the IPCC. Saying that sulfates are hiding the affect of CO2 based warming, or much of anything else without a cite is pretty worthless.
I have listen to you and others try to pull apart my arguments. I presented cites to support my argument. Now, if anyone wants to actually present cites to discuss why I am right or wrong, fine.
However, I am getting tired of told I am stupid, a denialist, etc. for not worshiping at the alter of CO2 AGW.
Here are a few more questions I have:
-why does the US raw data not show an accelerating warming trend?
-why does the US with the most rural stations show less warming than the rest of the world that does not seem to have many rural stations?
-why do climatologist refuse to meet basic scientific procedures to present data, methods, and procedures for independent varification and validation.
And I think that what just happened with Hanson and GISS just put to rest the whole argument bad data is captured and corrected. If a data splice with a .2C error cannot be captured, then what makes anyone think that errors from poor station sitings are being corrected?
Call me names if you want but cite some sources that actually backup your arguments.
Robin,
let it go. The IPCC agrees with me on this one and they point to the Briffa (2001) study.
Let me put it in language you may agree with. Briffa (2001) shows that the maximum temperatures for proxies happened in the 20th century but before the end of the chart for proxies. The temperatures that are to the right of the maximum proxy temperatures and at the end of the proxy chart (towards the end of the century) are lower than the maximum temperatures. These temperatures diverge from the instrumented readings.
Now you want to tell me and the IPCC that we were wrong and there is no divergence?
Vernon: "Correct me if I am wrong but I believe this shows that the line indicating the number of records with .. a normalized value >1 has a negative slope,"
Wrong. In http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html the normalized value >1 finishes with a positive slope that lasts about 25 years.
"and that >2 has a negative slope"
Wrong. The normalized value >2 has a positive slope for about 50 years except for a small drop in about the last 10 years. This short small drop doesn't mean much on a curve with a 20 year low pass filter.
The composite analysis in Osborn 2006 doesn't show divergence unless you selectively choose the trend lines with the least amount of significance, or if you somehow manage to ignore the peak in 1986 for the most significant trend (dark red). I am still waiting for the justification for this. If you think Osborn 2006 is about divergence or shows divergence perhaps you could explain the complete lack of the word "divergence" anywhere in the article.
"I read Flanner (2007) and under stood that they are actually developing a model for BC and their model shows BC has a much greater effect than previous. The article said 35 - 94 percent. I saw nothing in the paper that indicated that that could not be right. Even the low end is over 50 percent more affect than your 22 percent."
Just wait for Mark's comments and then you should see. Or, you could email him and ask for yourself what the origins of the 34-95% are in the press release article. His description completely refutes any basis in fact for this estimate. His description agrees with my first reading of the paper which was that the model runs that he carried out could not be used to address the question seemingly raised in the press release.
I'm sorry if you don't like being called a denialist, but you are acting like one. You are directly contradicting and ignoring the information in the papers you have cited. This has been explained numerous times and there are numerous examples of it:
* Flanner et al can't be used to make comparisons between pre-industrial Arctic climate and present day as you have done repeatedly. Flanner's reply to my email deals with this.
* Osborn et al 2006 doesn't deal with divergence and the composite can't be used to show the existence of divergence, but you have done this.
* Briffa's 2001 paper does show divergence and you were directed to read other papers by Briffa which discuss it and offer possible explanations, but you aren't too interested in that. You've ignored that in those papers those scientists offered unequivocal support for the thermometer record at the expense of their proxies post 1960. You did this for Osborn 2006 too because they state "The proxy records indicate that the most widespread warmth occurred in either the mid- or late-twentieth century, but instrumental temperatures provide unequivocal evidence for continuing geographic expansion of anomalous warmth through to the present time." (Let's get it straight, read the bit in Osborn 2006 about "noise" because this is how they explain what you wrongly call divergence in their paper)
* You presented a response to my first post which contains a whopping inconsistecy i.e. the temperature record is wrong -> the divergent proxy records are right -> there is no Arctic warming -> BC causes warming in the Arctic and caused snow and permfrost to melt and caused a rise in temperatures. To which I respond, uhh?!
At the moment you are the one who disagrees with Flanner, Briffa, and quite probably Osborn too.
And if you didn't know it you are inadvertently playing out an age old game:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/05/logical_fallacies.php
In case you hadn't guessed, I see very little point in continuing the discussion because it basically hasn't moved on from the first post. I will post Mark's comments if he permits because it will contribute positively to the discussion.
Ok, I have reached the conclusion based on Osborn (2006) that your clueless. Since none of you seem to be able to read the paper and see what is going on I will explain it so we can get past Osborn (2006).
Here is what Osborn et al did.
Step 1. Picked some proxies.
Step 2. Smooth and normalize the individual proxy studies.
Step 3. Compare the raw data from all the proxy studies to the mean of the 14 smooth and normalize proxy studies.
I hope you followed that because if you did you would realize that the light blue, dark blue, light red, dark red do not mean anything for determining the trend. The statement:
Is a red herring. It may be true but has nothing to do with the overall trend. The >0 and <0 show the actual trend in temperature and that trend is down.
For those of you that got lost at the last bit. Osborn et al took the 14 results from the 14 different proxy studies and determined the mean based on the 20 year smoothed individual studies. They then took that mean and compared the original raw data from the individual proxy studies. To get the blue stuff, they multiplied by a -1.
That means that the blue line and the red line, trend wise match. That means that the red line or the blue line is the trend of the 14 individual proxies.
Which means that the trends at the end of the chart are going down for those of you not bright enough to figure out what is going on. Therefore, for what ever reason, Osborn (2006) shows cooling at the end of the century, not warming.
Paul H,
The only trend line is <0 or >0, both are the same trend line and the only real trend line. If you do not understand this then ask some one that has a math back ground.
My question to Mark: Am I right in saying that you believe that the majority of BC forcing and resultant temperature rise in the Arctic in 1998 is due the high frequency of boreal fires in that year? I am also wondering how anomalous 1998 is in the context of the 20th century?
His responses:
"Given the level of understanding, we can say that about half of the Arctic BC/snow forcing in 1998 was due to boreal forest fires. We do, however, observe a much greater temperature response (3x greater) in the climate model with this forcing than with the 2001 forcing (even though 2001 forcing was much greater than 1/3 of 1998 forcing). Why the non-linearity? Things are too uncertain to say definitively, but it looks like the greater forcing in 1998 (due to fires) was sufficient to kick snow-albedo feedback into a higher gear than the 2001 forcing. Our simulations indicated a major decline in the amount of snow on top of sea-ice with 1998 forcing, exposing the bare, much darker sea-ice, and driving greater Arctic warming.
How anomalous was 1998? Well, we were only looking at a 1997-2005 satellite-derived timeseries. But... look for a paper in Science Online tomorrow about an excellent timeseries of BC in Greenland ice, dating back to 1780. Although industrial BC dominates the annual signal from 1900 on, there are occasionally huge, short-lived spikes in BC (much greater than 1998, even in the 1800s) that are attributed to conifer wildfire. There is still debate in the literature, however, about whether boreal wildfire intensity and frequency increased or decreased in the 20th century. Also, we are now looking at 2003 - when there were huge Siberian fires in April and May. The fire timing is critical for BC/snow forcing, and Apr-May is the optimal period when sunlight and snow-cover are maximal. A preliminary analysis I've done suggests even greater forcing in 2003 than 1998, even though annual boreal fire emissions were greater in 1998."
Thanks to Mark for letting me post his comments.
Responding to the question what is the source of the statement made in the press release that stated that "In the past two centuries, the Arctic has warmed about 1.6 degrees. Dirty snow caused .5 to 1.5 degrees of warming, or up to 94 percent of the observed change, the scientists determined."
Mark replied:
"Our experiments were not exactly set up to address the question: "how much of the observed Arctic warming is due to dirty snow" (although it is an immensely important question that needs to be pursued further). There are a couple of reasons. First, we performed 'equilibrium' climate simulations, whereas the real system has not fully responded to the real greenhouse forcing. Hence, because there is still "warming in the pipeline", the equilibrium temperature response from CO2 is likely greater than what has been observed so far. We need to do transient climate simulations (which are much more expensive) to really address this question. Secondly, we did not examine Arctic climate response to the other anthropogenic forcings (some of which may have a cooling effect, like changes in cloudiness) to assess the relative model responses to the different forcings. (Also note that because some anthropogenic effects may be cooling, it is possible in theory, for, i.e., CO2 and BC/snow forcing to both produce 90% of the observed warming.) We should also perform an ensemble of simulations to improve the statistics. In short, we need more simulations, and with different models. But, not to detract, I still think BC is an under-appreciated driver of Arctic climate change that rivals greenhouse forcing in that region, and more research needs to be done."
Thanks again Mark.
Paul H,
Thanks for posting that. However, it does appear that Flanner et al is working on modeling carbon. His position that BC is a "driver of Arctic climate change that rivals greenhouse forcings" is supported by:
20th-Century Industrial Black Carbon Emissions Altered Arctic Climate Forcing(2007) McConnell et al.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1144856v1.pdf
McConnell further went on to say that the BC is climbing and the source appears to be from Asia. Total anthropogenic CO2 increase in the year 2006 was ~1.7 W/m2 for comparison.
He also makes clear that this is his opinion, and nowhere is he claiming that AGW due to CO2 increases is not a problem.
And, as he states:
Do you understand what this means? Do you understand the implications?
Nothing he is saying supports your position.
You did not read 20th-Century Industrial Black Carbon Emissions Altered Arctic Climate Forcing(2007) McConnell et al. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1144856v1.pdf which I used to expand on Flanner's work.
Have you read McConnell closely? I don't have access to the article itself, just a summary, but here's a quote:
At it's maximum a century ago. Your own quote shows that the median forcing before 1951 was twice that since 1951.
Also the data's from Greenland, so it's a bit disingenuous for you to state these facts as though they apply to the artic as a whole.
Are the authors overturning anything basic in climatology?
No.
All they claim is this:
Perhaps the result of this will be that the models will no longer UNDERESTIMATE the rate at which the northern ice cap is disappearing.
It's certainly not going to overturn any current thinking with climatology, and it is clear the authors know this and are making no such claims.
Please to link for the studies determining the effects of poor siting so I may read them.
dhogaza,
What this shows is that BC has a greater impact on the Arctic then the current models show. If the poles are warming IAW the current CGM's that do not correctly reflect BC's impact in the Arctic, what does that say about the model. Nothing good it would seem.
Karl Voliene,
There are none. That is the issue. The sites do not meet NOAA/WMO site guidelines and no one has done any studies to determine the impact.
You know what the scariest part of all this is... that the raw data from the sites with out the 'black box' adjustments (named that way since NASA will not release what they are) do not show massive warming... some warming, but not the levels that we are lead to believe.
When some one comes along to do a census to show which stations are meeting the guidelines and which are not, the proponents are up in arms.
We were being told that there could be no bad trends because the process would detect and correct any errors, but what do you know, surfacestations.org and SM found an error and now the hottest year in the USA is 1934. But the system did not catch this one and I do not see any press announcements saying the hottest day is now 1934.
In fact, the big thing in the news is that there is now a GCM model that actually uses real climate information and does not just ignore what nature is really doing and plug in a fudge factor.
Of course this model shows that we are not heating right now, but we will in the future.
Vernon,
I cant read the full Osborne paper, just the summary and one graph linked to above. But based on that - the graph shown does not have any temperature data. It COUNTS data sets.
It is a COUNT of the number of data sets above or below the baseline, expressed as a percentage.
At the end of that graph, 70% of the data sets have normalized values above baseline, 70% (ie all of those above baseline) are at least one unit above baseline, and 35% are at least 2 units above baseline. This tells us that the 70% of data sets above baseline are moving more and more strongly above baseline. Since about 1850, the number of data sets at least one unit above baseline has increased steadily from near 0 to 70%. Since about 1900, the number of data sets at least 2 units above baseline has increased from 0 to 35%.
At the end of that graph, 30% of the data sets are below baseline. This is an increased number compared to about 1950 - ie, it is true that 30% of the data sets show cooling. Of those, NONE are more than 1 unit below baseline. ie, the cooling in those 30% is much, much less significant than the warming in the 70% still showing warming.
The "trend' in that graph has nothign to do with temperature per se - it has to do with numbers of data sets increasing or decreasing. 70% are increasing strongly. 30% are decreasing weakly. This is the divergence - 30% are showing divergence, weakly, against a backdrop of 70% still showing strong increase.
Now, if 70% of data sets are increasing strongly, and 30% are decreasing weakly, I would venture to say that if one calculated temp trends from that data, one would see an increase.
Actually, greenland only, since that's where their data's come from, and as I said earlier - though clearly you didn't listen - the peak was during the late 1800s to the very early 1900s.
Back when coal was king here in the US and eastern CA.
It's not a global picture, and it's not a recent picture. Recent BC effects are 1/2 of those.
I already told you. The artic ice pack is disappearing more quickly than predicted. If this work holds up, it might lead to inserting MORE WARMING into current GCMs.
Since
Vernon, the NOAA/WMO guidelines are for weather accuracy - they are designed to ensure that the daily temperature at those sites is indicative of the local area.
For climate, we don't give a damn if this station is reading 2C high or low compared to that field over there. We care if a spurious trend has been overlain on the record over time. One CAN NOT tell that from looking a pictures. A badly sited station might have no spurious trend, if altering factors haven't changed or have balanced over time, and a perfectly sited station might have a huge spurious trend if irrigation practices have altered, if the thermometer has been changed, or moved inside the shelter, and so on. This is known, and it is the reason that current attempts to extract climate trends from that extant historical data, have tried to use all the stations, and have used regional comparisons to identify spurious steps and trend. t is also the reason we are building a new network of rigorously sited stations, already well under way, to gather better data going forward.
Documenting the stations is fine. Pretending that the pictures tell us much about the trend, in and of themselves, and even worse, putting that blatant propaganda pair of pics on the front page of surfacestations, is not fine. In fact, it is dishonest.
Vernon: "Here is what Osborn et al did.
...
Step 3. Compare the raw data from all the proxy studies to the mean of the 14 smooth and normalize proxy studies."
Where did Osborn and Briffa show "the mean of the 14 smooth and normalize proxy studies." Give us the quote in their text.
Vernon: "I hope you followed that because if you did you would realize that the light blue, dark blue, light red, dark red do not mean anything for determining the trend."
There's only one problem with this statement, the word "trend" does not appear anywhere in "The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years" by Osborn and Briffa. This is yet another smokescreen by Vernon in an attempt to hide the fact that he said: Osborn and Briffa (2006) "shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping." This is totally, utterly wrong. You can even look at the individual proxies in Osborn and Briffa (their figure 1) to see which proxies are undoubtedly increasing at the end of the record. They are: W USA (regional), N Sweden (Tornetrask), NW Russia (Yamal), and East Asia (regional). Others are fairly steady or increasing until very close to the end. There is no other description for it, Vernon's statement that "all the proxies show temperatures dropping" is totally, utterly wrong. I'm waiting for him to repeat it. So far there has been no repeat, just smokescreens.
"I cant read the full Osborne paper"
You can get free registration to access papers more than one year old. Go to www.sciencemag.org and click on "Previous Issues" to get to the registration link.
Can anyone remember what Deltoid post had a graphic of about 4 or 5 temperature graphs all side by side, showing the records from difference sources like the oceans etc?
dhogaza,
Sorry, I did not realize that Greenland was not in the Arctic or that sea ice would last longer than the Greenland ice sheet.
Chris,
All the proxy studies that are used to determine the 'global' trends show that temps were lower towards the end of the century and do not match the instrumented readings.
Lee,
As has been pointed out before, there is no way to know of the trend your measuring is a real trend if you have garbage in. The reason that there are station siting standards it to make sure the individual stations are measuring the same thing. Surfacestations.org is do a census that shows that not all stations are meeting the guidelines and if you can present a cite from a study that proves this does not matter, good, otherwise, your just making noise while plugging your ears.
The fact remains that there is a divergence between the instrumented readings and the proxy measurements. One is right and one is wrong. Making a guess as to why there is a difference without any studies to back up the guess is worthless.
So ignoring Osborn (2006) please explain point me towards a study of the divergence that explains why one is not wrong?
http://www.baltimorereporter.com/?p=4309
Says it well:
Vernon wants us to believe him when he says: "All the proxy studies that are used to determine the 'global' trends show that temps were lower towards the end of the century and do not match the instrumented readings."
Based on past experience, I can't think of any reason to start believing Vernon. I still haven't heard any repeat or explanation of Osborn and Briffa "shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping".
Chris,
Did you try reading the IPCC AR4 or even Briffa(2001) which is used in IPCC AR4 where the IPCC talk about divergence? Did you ever look at the data or the graphs. The proxies are lower at the end of the graph (near the end of the century) then they are earlier in the graph (earlier in the century). I guess I will not get any explanation out of you since you show your self to dumb to even read the IPCC report that you believe.
I at first though maybe you actually knew something but some one too dumb to read the IPCC AR4 Go look at 156 for the quote and the link.
Is there any one at this site that both knows anything and can keep from call people names when they are loosing the discussion.
Chris, please come back when you have a clue.
Vernon:"I guess I will not get any explanation out of you"
What a hypocrite. Come back when you want to explain why you told us garbage.
Sorry I do not think your can learn. The IPCC says there is divergence and they reference Briffa (2001). I cannot help it that you cannot comprehend. As a proponent of something, I would think that you would read the on going work.
Now, since GISS had to admit to messing up once with data, and the fact that there is no warming trend in the US. That brings to question how Hansen did the UHI. His methodology was to take the station data and determine if there was urbanization by measuring lights. Surfacestations.org is now proving that is not a correct assumption. Even Hansen admitted in Hansen et al, (2001)
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_etal.pdf
I will check back to see you deny this.
"Sorry I do not think your can learn."
I've learnt something alright. I've learnt that Vernon is a shameless peddlar of misinformation. The boy-who-cried-wolf could only get away with misinformation for so long.
So Chris, you are now saying that the IPCC is wrong? That I produced a citations for what points I am making but your not producing any, and even further, disclaiming any citation that does not agree with your position!
Now Hansen in his 2001 work says that he depended on the accuracy of the stations for his UHI work. surfacestations.org is showing that Hansen's work is not supported by the stations. GISS's policy of hiding the actual stations, processes, and procedures used further calls Hansen's work into question. Hansen's UHI off-set could be wrong. Please note that unlike you true believers, I freely admit that Hansen could be right, but more work needs to be done to prove it.
Your position is that anyone that disagrees with you is a shameless peddler of misinformation. How about you back up you personal attacks with some facts!
Chris, you do not seem well read on the subject your supporting. Are you reading the studies? Are you reading the IPCC reports?
"Your position is that anyone that disagrees with you is a shameless peddler of misinformation."
No, my position is that anyone who says: "All the proxy studies that are used to determine the 'global' trends show that temps were lower towards the end of the century and do not match the instrumented readings" and that Osborn and Briffa "shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping" and who keeps ignoring what he wrote after being reminded over and over again is a shameless peddlar of misinformation.
So your saying that the IPCC is wrong and Briffa (2001) does not show that the proxies at the end of the chart are lower that the proxies earlier in the century, and further that the proxy values for all the proxies do not reflect the accelerated warming shown by the instrumented?
Osborn (2006) which uses a subset of the proxies used in Briffa (2001) also shows that the correlation divergence, which is an artifact of the methodology, is trending down.
Other than calling me names, you have yet to show where I am wrong. Why don't you try putting what Osborn (2006) into your own words so I can see what we disagree on rather than your continued... wrong wrong wrong 70 percent! Which has nothing to do with the discussion as far as I can tell.
So other than calling me names, how about some facts, cites, etc, to back up your arguments.
So other than calling me names, how about some facts, cites, etc, to back up your arguments.
Why.
Society has moved past this atomistic quibbling. Society is debating adaptation and mitigation. Societies in Europe are moving to alternative energy sources. Societies in Murrica are mandating emissions reductions, development that considers climate change in its impacts, energy savings, carbon markets.
So who cares about your old-school, dinosaur-like denialist quibbling when the rest of us are having a conversation about what to do about man-made climate change.
Best,
D
Is that the prevalent opinion of the alarmist? That just because the data and facts are in question... who cares, let take action even if the problem and the extent of the problem are in question?
No Vernon. THe extent of the problem is not in any question at all, and you keep failing to provide any scientific evidence to think so.
Is there any scientific evidence that would affect your belief? The facts do not seem to have any impact other than to get your worthless little homily as your ignore either the scientific evidence or the logic while presenting nothing of your own.
The fact remains: The chant from the pro CO2 AGW camp is that errors in station siting did not matter because the GISS process detected and corrected the errors. The fact that a major data error was completely missed by GISS for... oh seven years shoots that argument down. You have proof that argument is false - there is no proof that bad data is detected or corrected.
This matter because per Hansen:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001Hansenetal.pdf
In conjunction with the siting issues indicates that Hansen was wrong in his methodology, namely that his lights=0 does not always indicate rural sites (his resolution was over 2km). Further, as shown by GISS ongoing error that just got corrected, the failure to meet guidelines indicates he was using data that did not meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards for accuracy. This throws his UHI off-set in question, by his own words!
If the UHI off-set is wrong, then the divergence noted by the IPCC and Briffa (2001)would be partially explained as the accelerated warming shown only in the instrumented readings may be an artifact of Hansen's error.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1PubCh06.pdf
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/briffa2001/briffa2001.html
Is that enough scientific fact for you guthrie? Please now quite the personal attacks an actually address my arguments and evidence.
"Why don't you try putting what Osborn (2006) into your own words so I can see what we disagree on"
Already have. As per usual you ignored it. Here it is again.
Vernon: "Here is what Osborn et al did.
...
Step 3. Compare the raw data from all the proxy studies to the mean of the 14 smooth and normalize proxy studies."
Where did Osborn and Briffa show "the mean of the 14 smooth and normalize proxy studies"? Give us the quote in their text.
Vernon: "I hope you followed that because if you did you would realize that the light blue, dark blue, light red, dark red do not mean anything for determining the trend."
There's only one problem with this statement, the word "trend" does not appear anywhere in "The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years" by Osborn and Briffa. This is yet another smokescreen by Vernon in an attempt to hide the fact that he said: Osborn and Briffa (2006) "shows that at the end of the century all the proxies show temperatures dropping." This is totally, utterly wrong. You can even look at the individual proxies in Osborn and Briffa (their figure 1) to see which proxies are undoubtedly increasing at the end of the record. They are: W USA (regional), N Sweden (Tornetrask), NW Russia (Yamal), and East Asia (regional). Others are fairly steady or increasing until very close to the end. There is no other description for it, Vernon's statement that "all the proxies show temperatures dropping" is totally, utterly wrong. I'm waiting for him to repeat it. So far there has been no repeat, just smokescreens.
Vernon, if your ability to understand the written word is as poor as your actual writing ability it is no wonder that you have so much trouble in interpreting scientific papers.
Please do yourself, and everyone who reads this blog, a favour and make sure that what you write makes sense from a basic literacy point of view. Also, reread the papers you keep quoting very slowly and a number of times. Then you may see the errors in your interpretation that a large number of people keep pointing out to you.
Ian Forrester
Chris, I was wrong, I meant to say 'normalized mean' and as to the trend, the values of 11 of 14 are lower end of the graph then earlier in the century, there for the trend for the end of the century is towards cooling.
Ok, ignore Osborn (2006), we can agree to disagree about what can be taken from that study. It does not invalidate the fact that divergence is an issue. The argument that errors in station siting did not matter because the process detected and corrected the errors has been disproved. There is no proof that bad data is detected or corrected.
This matter because per Hansen:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001Hansenetal.pdf
-The siting issues indicates that Hansen was wrong in his methodology, namely that his lights=0 does not always indicate rural sites.
-Ongoing errors are not being detected or corrected.
-Failure to meet guidelines indicates he was using data that did not meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards for accuracy.
This throws his UHI off-set in question, by his own words!
If the UHI off-set is wrong, then the divergence noted by the IPCC and Briffa (2001)would be partially explained as the accelerated warming shown only in the instrumented readings may be an artifact of Hansen's error.
(I'm back - real life (in the form of a holiday) intervened)
Vernon -you said:
The IPCC agrees with me on this one and they point to the Briffa (2001) study.
I've not yet seen your citation of this agreement; perhaps it's forthcoming?
Let me put it in language you may agree with. Briffa (2001) shows that the maximum temperatures for proxies happened in the 20th century but before the end of the chart for proxies. The temperatures that are to the right of the maximum proxy temperatures and at the end of the proxy chart (towards the end of the century) are lower than the maximum temperatures. These temperatures diverge from the instrumented readings.
Since Briffa (2001) does not include any data up to the end of the century, you certainly cannot say that the maximum temperature for proxies happened in the 20th century. You could say (if it were true) that the maximum temperature for the proxies in the period covered by the charts happened before the end of the chart; but that says precisely nothing about what has happened since the end of the charts, which in the case of half of the proxies is twenty years ago and counting. To clarify that point; out of six proxy data series, one ends in 1960; one in 1980; one in 1987; one in 1990; one in 1991; and the last one in 1993.
Half of the data series end, therefore, at least 20 years ago. Allowing for inter-annual noise, the data series ending latest appear to show an upward trend, matching the instrumented tend.
The instrumented readings show that 9 of the highest annual temperatures have occurred in the last 3 years - since the end of the last of those series.
Now you want to tell me and the IPCC that we were wrong and there is no divergence?
Do I? Produce the cite for the IPCC and we can talk.
Robin, try using the citations I gave in #270. Do a search on divergence in the IPCC report chapter six, or read the citation I presented in #156 when I answered you the first time you asked this:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1PubCh06.pdf
Back in #238 I answered this argument again from you with:
Now with that in mind. How about you explaining:
So, while I have answered your questions repeatedly, how about answering mine?
Vernon, seems to me your questions have been dealt with. Bottom line seems to be: if you aren't happy with the result, do the calcs yourself. If you can then explain the results of your calculations in terms of a model that describes climate trends, please do so.
RealClimate Comment by Vernon -- 22 August 2007 @ 3:13 PM
"Gavin, why don't you want to post what this really proves, namely that all the 'station temperature error would be detected and corrected as part of the process.' This is blatantly not true or the rather large errors that have been carried for the last seven years would have been detect. Also, even though you do not want to admit it, in Hansen (2001) he specifically say he is relying on the data from the stations to be accurate, but we now know that per WMO/NOAA/NWS guidelines, the stations are not sited correctly. This means that there is no way to know the accuracy of the data. This means that Hansen UHI could be wrong which would significantly change the whole instrumented picture! That is why this error is so important, it shows that errors are not detected or corrected!
[Response: You are simply mistaken. Jumps in stations temperatures are indeed found in the NOAA data processing and are incorporated into the GISS analysis. However, GISS does not do that analysis, NOAA does, and the error in the processing was at GISS. Therefore, NOAA had no chance to find that error and your claims that this shows that the NOAA analysis is lacking, have no merit whatsoever. The bottom line remains, do the calculation to show that your issues have a practical effect. - gavin]"
RE: 276 Richard, It was not answered at RC. Gavin nicely uses misdirection, but the fact remains that no one was talking about an jump in the NOAA data. We are talking about the data that GISS gets and uses. NOAA is not doing the GISS comparison, GISS is and they did not detect the jump. Why is this a GISS issue, because GISS takes the NOAA data and runs algorithms to get trends which are not based per Gavin at RC on the individual stations. This indicates that GISS cannot detect and correct data errors. Gavin just did a little misdirection to keep from admitting that, oh, and not posting follow up comments also helps him win arguments.
Further, either the station siting matters, one has to expect it does or NOAA/WMO/NWS would not have standards, or it does not and no one has produced any evidence that siting does not matter. It would appear that no one, NWS or NOAA, bothers to check the quality of the individual stations in the networks or the quality of the data produced.
This is secondary to fact that Hansen says that he was depending on lights=0 and accurate data from the surface stations to determine the UHI off-set. The fact that the stations are not sited properly per the governing authorities means that no determination can be made to the accuracy of the data they produce. Further, surfacestations.org is showing that lights=0 is not a good methodology as long as the stations are poorly sited.
I do not doubt that there is warming, but it would appear at this time the only source of evidence for accelerated is the instrumented readings. Since Hansen's UHI off-set may be wrong and if it is wrong it would explain the accelerated warming that does not match the proxies and answer part of the divergence issue.
Gavin is just playing stupid to keep suggesting that every time someone finds a fault with a work he agrees with, that those that find the fault have to go do the work to find out what the right answer is and that the unsupported answer he likes is good until they do. That is not the way it works. Well, anywhere but in climatology.
Quick!
Somebody tell these decision-makers that Vernon thinks there's still a problem with the way he reads the science, so therefore they should be doing nothing instead!
Shucky darns.
Another indicator that society has moved on and is debating adaptation and mitigation, rather than listening to dupes parrot ideological positions.
IOW: denialists, the decision-makers caaaaaaan't heeeeear youuuuuu.
Best,
D
Hey Dano, ever tried addressing an argument rather than telling us that eco-freaks, anti-capitalist, and almost any politicians that wants more power love the idea of restricting everything they don't agree with or gives them more power?
Never yet seen you do anything but ignore the arguments, science, or logic. Let me guess, charter member eco-freak?
"That is not the way it works"
Well, that is exactly how it works in science.
If you have an alternative hypothesis, lets see it. If you have another analysis of the data, lets see it. Try the tried and true route of peer-reviewed science. Otherwise, you don't have an arguement. You can critque all you want, but in the end you have to come with explanations that match the data at least as well as existing hypotheses. If you and your colleagues can't do that, then you don't have much to offer.
Richard, first you do not address either my argument. No one here does on the pro side. I guess you cannot. Second, WRONG, once someone, like Hansen, presents his work, he has to defend it. It is easily seen that based on what he says, his work is not supported by the facts. Neither I or anyone else are required to come up with another analysis of his data (since he will not actually release what stations or how his 'process' works).
Basically, it is not a 'I presented x' and it is good until you someone else comes up with 'y'. It is 'I presented x' and anyone is allowed to try and shoot it down and if it does not hold up, then 'x' fails. DUH!
"It is 'I presented x' and anyone is allowed to try and shoot it down.."
Yes, that is how the scientific method works. Over the past few hundred years it has proven to be extremely robust. If you have an alternative hypothesis, present it. If you want to exclude certain datasets, then proceed by making a case to do so, then re-analyze the remaining data. Collect additional data if you wish. Unless you are willing to do at least some of the above, you do not have a leg to stand on.
So richard, your saying that Hansen is wrong?
"So richard, your saying that Hansen is wrong?"
No, I am saying you need to put up or shut up. What is your alternative hypothesis? The fact that there has been no real attempt to contruct alternate GW hypotheses using the same or other datasets suggests that Hansen and others have presented a strong case for AGW.
Which part of this is wrong?
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001Hansenetal.pdf
Surfacestations.org has shown that many stations do not meet NOAA/NWS/WMO standards. No one knows what the impact of failing to meet these standards are. (This is where you can cite a study that proves me wrong, or not since there is not one that I could find.)
-His is lights=0 does not always indicate rural sites.
-He assumes a level of accuracy that the evidence does not support.
-That errors in station data may not be detected or corrected.
This throws his UHI off-set in question, by his own words!
Hansen says the accuracy matters. The sponsoring organizations says that siting matters. A significant portion of the stations already surveyed in the census do not meet the standards.
This means that any GCM results using Hansen's UHI off-set is now in doubt.
Which part do I need to put or shut up about? Which part did I get wrong. How about addressing my argument or logic instead.
"Which part do I need to put.."
Why you need to put up an alternate hypothesis, of course. You must have an alternate explanation for the several streams of data referred to in the IPCC don't you? I suppose you could start by omitting US temp data from the global data sets and re-doing the analyses. If you come to different conclusions, and a sufficient number of climatologists buy your rationale for dumping the US data, then you would have a case.
Sorry Richard, there is no requirement for me to do that. It does not work that way. Still you refuse to address either Hansen's words or my argument. It would seem that your only defense is - nah nah nah.
"there is no requirement for me to do that"
Quite right, there is no 'requirement'. But if you expect people to take you seriously then you have to present an alternative hypothesis with supporting data. The fact that you and other 'skeptics' are unwilling to do that says a lot about your case. In the absence of competing explanations for the various datasets pertaining to AGW, the scientific community and policy developers will move in the direction of the explanations offered by the apparently uncontested hypotheses.
richard, how about addressing what I am saying. DUH! sorry, forgot that you cannot or you would not being using the stupid argument that I have to:
Is that something speical for climatology because it does not in any other science? So, time for another ad hom or some other attempt to ignore my argument.
"Is that something speical for climatology because it does not in any other science? "
Well, thanks for clearing things up. You just don't understand how science works: if you do not accept someone's conclusions, it is up to you to present an argument in the peer-reviewed literature. Neither Hansen nor anyone else is required to address any concerns you raise, unless you do so through the science literature. If you think you have a case, make it the way real scientists do: publish in a peer-review journal. Please explain why you can't do that. "DUH" is not an answer.
richard, your clueless. I do not doubt that Hansen can measure UHI off-set. What your missing is that Hansen made certain assumptions and listed them in his paper. surfacestations.org is showing that his assumptions are wrong. He needs to do the work to ensure he has the accurate data he says he needs to have an accurate UHI.
There is no requirement that publish anything just to prove Hansen wrong. All I have to do is point out his errors, which I have done so.
Vernon,
Richard has a valid point. You need to construct a hypothesis and do some investigation to test its robustness before you can declare that Hansen et al are wrong. What you have presented in comment #285 is not a hypothesis it is merely a bunch of ideas and limited observations. You, nor anyone else, has bothered to test the impacts that any of these things have on the measurement of temperature or upon the GISS estimates of global temperature anomalies. Somebody would need to do this work in order to develop your bunch of ideas into a credible hypothesis. You can't come up with some completely untested ideas and expect everyone to listen to you, to emphasise: this is not the way science is done. If you, or someone else, can actually show that microsite effects have biased the lights equal zero stations and that this impacts upon the US tempearture record (and the whole globe) then maybe people would give you more credence. As it is, we have a credible explanation of the observations and a credible dataset, you merely have ideas and assertions. If you want to make any progress you have to realise this point. If you want to advance knowledge you need to do some work and research, not cling to something that hasn't been tested.
Let me summarise it for you:
In #285 you lay out your untested ideas and very limited set of observations, you have a bunch of assertions. The assertion from Gavin and Hansen, and many of the posters here, is that these issues have been dealt with. Ummm....two sets of competeing assertions. If you decide to look at the literature and information on the climate reference network you will see that there has been some considerable effort put in to test these assertions. I therefore put significantly more confidence into what Schmidt and Hansen say, in fact I would go as far to say that since their work has been tested in the manner which they describe they have a hypothesis, which trumps your bald assertions in my book. Next, do we have any other independent sources of evidence to support a general warming trend on the order of magnitude descrbed by GISS and CRU? Yes, at the risk of re-opening an old debate; if you examine Arctic sea ice, glaciers around the world, the Antarctic peninsula glaciers, and responses in the biosphere to temperature you have a compelling story of global change. Given this extra evidence I think your untested assertions are looking pretty flimsy on their own without any testing. You need to take a look at the competing theory in some detail to realise that you have a hell of a long way to go before you can put any confidence in your assertions. This is how science works. Given the level of secondary evidence and existing testing of what Hansen says why should we listen to mere assertion?
Do some work, do some testing, come up with a theory and people will listen. Continue playing disingeneous games, refuse to expose your ideas to scrutiny and merely assert problems, and no one in the climate community is going to give this any notice.
Paul, your wrong. Why, because NOAA has already done the station site work and surfacestations.org is doing the station census.
You feel that micro climate errors are random and therefore should be removed via statistical processes. I find that this position is not supported by the facts. Now my train of though is to first show that failure to meet site guidance will introduce errors. NOAA shows that failure to meet site guidance will introduce 1-5+ degrees C error. Further they state that "Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface" are class 5 sites. Class 5 sites inject 5+ degrees of error and the error is all warming. Using the station census underway at surfacestations.org, it is easy to pick out the stations that are not in compliance and further to identify the class of the station, hence, to know what the sign of the error is going to be.
The second point of contention is that you feel there is no basis for micro climate having the same trends as urban heat islands. That is not supported by the facts. The main cause of the urban heat island is modification of the land surface by urban development; waste heat generated by energy usage is a secondary contributor. Once again, going back to the NOAA, class 5 sites have been 'located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.' These modifications of the land surface are reflections of urban development on the micro climate scale.
'This is how science works.' I am presenting facts and drawing logical conclusions. All richard ever does is say "you must publish or what you say does not matter." If you want to join his club, more power to you, but I though more of you since you would actually argue to facts and logic. How about you address my facts and logic.
Site Identification, Survey, and Selection FY 02 Research Project for the NOAA Regional Climate Centers (RCC) (2002) found at: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/site_info/CRNFY02SiteSelectionTa…
"surfacestations.org is doing the station census"
No, they are taking pictures. This does not invalidate data from the sites; you would have to analyze the data from these sites and demonstrate that they need to be further adjusted or discarded. Why can't you do this?
"I find that this position is not supported by the facts."
Provide some facts, not assertions.
"I am presenting facts and drawing logical conclusions. "
You have not presented any facts. You have made assertions. These are not the same.
Tha data sets are available for re-analysis. Why can't you do that?
Hey Vernon,
It looks like some guys over at Climate Audit have partially done what we were asking you to do. You could use the information to test your hypothesis. Here you go:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/cherry_picking_confirmed.php
As you can see GISS-Temp looks pretty good afterall and it agrees with the CRN1 and CRN2 plots pretty well.