The Disinformation Cycle

Thanks to Drudge and Instapundit another round of “global warming stopped in 1998″ is making the rounds of the blogs.

It’s only been a few months since the last time and yet you only have to look at a graph of GISS temperatures to see that warming hasn’t stopped:

Falsehoods like this are able to survive and spread due to the efficiency of the disinformation cycle shown below. Notice that there is little chance of actual facts about the world getting in.

What is particularly disappointing about this particular case was that one of the nodes in the cycle, Counterpoint was produced by Australia’s ABC and violates the ABC’s Code of Practice, which states:

5.3 Every reasonable effort must be made to ensure
that factual content is accurate and in context and
that content does not misrepresent other viewpoints.

And here is where mainstream climate science has been misrepresented:

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. …

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

Rather than present to listeners the opinions of a climate scientist, Duffy allowed Marohasy to misrepresent the science. This is particularly striking because in the immediately preceding segment he had no trouble in getting an expert on nutrition to rebut Gary Taubes’ rather unorthodox claims about diet and nutrition.

But wait, there’s more. Ken Parish criticised Marohasy for her misrepresentation of the temperature record. In her response, Marohasy pointed to this article to support her assertion that the claim that global warming had ended was not even controversial. The second paragraph of the article states:

“Global warming has not stopped,” said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) climate program.

This seems to me to be both hard to miss and easy to understand. Marohasy surely knew that her assertion was false.

The ABC complaints page is here.

Comments

#1 Barton Paul Levenson
March 28, 2008

Tilo posts:

[[No, I'm under the impression that global warming theory says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing global temperature.]]

No. It says that CO2 is the dominant factor influencing the current global temperature increase.

[[ And I'm under the impression that the IPCC climate sensitivity number for CO2 forcing is about 3 times too high. Ten year flat spells and emperical evidence don't support the IPCC number.]]

They don’t calculate it from temperature observations, they calculate it from radiation physics. And three times too high verges on the physically impossible. Just from CO2 alone, without any feedbacks, you get 1.2 K increase from a doubling. With feedbacks it’s most likely in the 2.5-3.0 K range.
#2 climatepatrol
March 28, 2008

Hello

Looks like this is a hot spot here. 30 years at WMO and in statistics for linear trends such as climate, right? And there is supposedly a linear trend in the perturbation of the climate system by human influence.

Well, this is a 7-year graph that combines 4 temperature records by Lucia. It doesn’t have 1998 as the strongest El-Nino in it. It still shows a downward trend when you include the latest data (unlike in GISS graph). This downward trend is extremely likely naturally caused (“noise”). So my question is: How would you seperate such “natural noise” from a long term trend that starts in or before 1880?

I just love this paper by Syun-Ichi Akasofu and his claim that we are still recovering from the LIA. He underlines this with a straight line trend graph. (figure 1c). He suggests that AGW may only be a fraction of the warming. Which particular paper that relies on hard facts (not just GCM) has refuted such a claim? (I know one by a physical scientist who supports that claim – albeit in German).
#3 climatepatrol
March 28, 2008

Here is the link. Hug’s claim of just 0.7 K warming for 2*CO2 without H2O amplification and flux correction in models. +0.15 K per dacade will probably not persist.
#4 Chris O'Neill
March 28, 2008

climate..trol:

So my question is: How would you seperate such “natural noise” from a long term trend that starts in or before 1880?

Duh, calculate a long term trend.
#5 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 28, 2008

Re 88: “people who try to read something into variations over 5 years or even 10 years are just idiots”

Chris: you may have inadvertently insulted Phil Jones and colleagues at HadCRU, who not only pay attention to such variations but even to the impression they give in the graphs they produce, to the point of just having changed their methodology so that observers only get the right impression when looking at those graphs. Read the prominent warning they’ve felt obliged to include at the top of their famous global temp graghs: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ Getting a little nervous for nothing?

Anyway, I propose that we all do the following exercise:

1) Forget all the preconceptions we may have about GW, AGW, CAGW, etc.

2) Look dispassionately at the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above, paying special attention to the last portion of the curves.

I am sure that, by following the above instructions correctly, we will all come to the conclusion that, indeed, global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945. In fact they have recently gone below the reference 1961-1990 average (a curious thing to happen 30 years into the most unprecented warming the world is supposed to have undergone in many thousands of years).

Whether they will continue cooling or will again pick up, only time will tell. But at least now we all agree on the basics and have a common ground to carry on discussing without getting angry at each other. See how easy?
#6 cce
March 28, 2008

The HadCRU graphs were including partial years and counting that as an entire year. That was leading to numerous unobservant skeptics proclaiming overly huge temperature dropoffs because January and then February 2008 were overweighted by a factor of 12 and 6.

And only the uncertainty goes below the ’61 – ’90 average, which last happened just before the ’98 El Nino. I think this should serve as a warning for people who insist on comparing the weather to climate.
#7 Max Lini
March 28, 2008

The major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide, which causes 9-26%; methane, which causes 4-9%, and ozone, which causes 3-7%. It is not possible to state that a certain gas causes a certain percentage of the greenhouse effect, because the influences of the various gases are not additive. (The higher ends of the ranges quoted are for the gas alone; the lower ends, for the gas counting overlaps.)[3][4] Other greenhouse gases include, but are not limited to, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons (see IPCC list of greenhouse gases).
#8 climatepatrol
March 28, 2008

@Chris
You can’t be serious, Sir. Never mind your preoccupation with me as a person: Are you saying then that all the long term trend must automatically be 100% anthropogenic since 1880? This is a serious question, please!
#9 Eli Rabett
March 28, 2008

Max, the M in MSU is MICROWAVE, not IR. See the RSS or UAH pages for details.
#10 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 28, 2008

You’re right, cce. The negative global anomalies were only reported by RSS and UAH. HadCRU’s negative anomaly last December referred only to the SH, which had last happened…in 1994. Still, a 0.056 anomaly 3 decades after the GW masking effects finally unmasked themselves and the temps would continue rising unabated, according to the models, is still a curious thing to happen, isn’t it?

The other thing I find curious is HadCRU’s sudden change in methodology. Last year they were faced with exactly the same problem, when an anomalously warm January created the opposite impression in unobservant believers. Why didn’t they change their graphs then? If I didn’t know better, I’d think that they have some agenda

Anyways, if 2008 continues equally cool, all they have done is postpone the shame. At the end of the year the smoothed graph will look as it did before the adjustment. They’ve actually put the nails in their coffin, me thinks, by openly admitting that a mere additional 7 months like the last ones and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures “have dropped markedly in recent years”.

In the mean time, how about performing again the exercise I proposed above? Will you cce agree that we’re witnessing a period of temperature stasis (if not cooling)? Looking at your website, step 1 of my exercise may be a bit difficult to overcome, but step 2 is nothing more than believing your own eyes!
#11 bi
March 28, 2008

The temperature stasis over the last decade may just be part of the falling solar activity as part of the 11-year cycle — CO₂ and the sun are engaged in an arm-wrestling match.

No, it’s not some incredible “global cooling” magic pixie dust at work. And yes, I expect the arm-wrestling match will be over quite soon (say, within 11 years?).
#12 dhogaza
March 28, 2008

temps would continue rising unabated, according to the models, is still a curious thing to happen, isn’t it?

Do you think the IPCC has banned ENSO and other quasi-periodic natural variation in the climate system?

The models don’t tell us that temps will “continue rising unabated”, the figures you see are for the average increase over time.
#13 Max Lini
March 28, 2008

Thank you Eli. I was mistakenly talking about the GOES meteorological satellite range. For MSU, the microwaves measured are 4 channels from about about 5mm to 6 mm. So you are correct and they are measuring the oxygen absorption bands. And AMSU measure more channels or depths. Then RSS or UAH or whomever take the data and convert the channels according to brightness in various wavelengths, calculate an inversion and indirectly infer temperature.

I hear they are quite good at it.
#14 Max Lini
March 28, 2008

RSS is showing since 1980 a combined brightness index change in the lower troposphere with about +.18, middle at +.11, tropopause of +.03 and lower stratosphere of -.3
#15 Max Lini
March 28, 2008

That does not include the last 7.5 degrees at the poles.
#16 cce
March 28, 2008

No I don’t believe we are witnessing a period of temperature stasis. I think we are witnessing a period of La Nina, no more mysterious the anomalously warm El Nino of 1998. People are trying to ascribe “cooling” to periods too short to be statistically significant, and I think 30+ years of warming (0.14-0.18 degrees per decade) despite strong natural variability throughout is proof of this.
#17 Chris O'Neill
March 29, 2008

Mikel:

Anyways, if 2008 continues equally cool, all they have done is postpone the shame. At the end of the year the smoothed graph will look as it did before the adjustment. They’ve actually put the nails in their coffin, me thinks, by openly admitting that a mere additional 7 months like the last ones

I thought there were 10 months left this year (for the HadCRU record).

and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures “have dropped markedly in recent years”.

Where does this quote come from? Global temperatures have not dropped markedly in recent years before the last 2 months. In any case the drop in the last two months means nothing significant to the warming effect of CO2 which has changed insignificantly in the last 2 months. Global warming denialists seem to have a lot of difficulty with the concept that long term change (in CO2) only causes long term effects (as in long term average temperature). Long term change does not cause short term effects.

Look dispassionately at the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above, paying special attention to the last portion of the curves.

I am sure that, by following the above instructions correctly, we will all come to the conclusion that, indeed, global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945.

Let’s see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

So 0.2 is not unlike 0.02? I think you need your eyes testing. Or maybe you should take off those global warming denialist glasses.
#18 Tim Curtin
March 29, 2008

Dear Cretin O’Noall: Are there any FACTS that will refute your mad theories?
#19 P. Lewis
March 29, 2008

First, there were no GISS temp stations anywhere in the tropics in 1885 or 1900, contrary to Lambert’s dishonest GISS graph. What were the measured temps in Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby etc in 1885 and 1900?

Well, not exactly Panama, Kinshasha, Kampala, Port Moresby (and I can’t be bothered to check whether GISS or Hadley use any of their data — I’m sure you’ll check and get back to us if they aren’t, and then I’ll try to find a few more perhaps), but …

there were temperature/meteorological readings/stations in Darwin (~1882), Singapore (~1872), Colombo (1852), Belize (1887), and the USA had meteorological stations across the Caribbean in the 1870s. You could also pick a GB Empire 19th century outpost and look for meteorological observations.

Dear Cretin O’Noall: Are there any FACTS that will refute your mad theories?

Perhaps it should be Dear “Tim Cretin” then, should it? No, perhaps not. So don’t do it to anyone else!

What we “all” know is that “there are no FACTS that will refute your mad theories”!

*————————————————————————————–*

Brings to mind a very old joke:

Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtins. What can I do?

Pull yourself together, man!
#20 Chris O'Neill
March 29, 2008

climatepatrol:

Are you saying then that all the long term trend must automatically be 100% anthropogenic since 1880?

When you start talking about a “7-year graph” and within the context of this thread the impression I got was that you wanted to know how to filter out “7-year” natural noise. It’s good that you moved the issue to something that’s actually significant which is the relationship between long-term temperature change and long-term CO2 rise.

He suggests that AGW may only be a fraction of the warming. Which particular paper that relies on hard facts (not just GCM) has refuted such a claim?

If you want papers that don’t use GCM (i.e. they use empirical methods) to derive climate sensitivity then a list is here, along with a list that do use GCMs. The Annan paper (which is in the list that uses GCMs) also has an estimate based on just empirical information.
#21 Eli Rabett
March 29, 2008

Max, one thing that frequently gets lost is that the conversion of the microwave brightness to temperature is itself complex, but keeping all of the data on the same scale as the instruments and satellites move around, decay, are launched, etc is much harder. My attitude toward RSS/UAH and Prabhakhara (there are a couple of others too) is about the same as my attitude towards the surface reconstructions, e.g. there is a learning curve and you want to look at the whole group. Trends are more reliable than anomalies, and absolute temperatures are unreliable.
#22 Bernard J.
March 29, 2008

A little while back on another thread I made the comment that I recently met a professional economist who was previously paid to deny climate change. He now not only acknowledges that he did this whilst knowing that there was a valid basis to AGW, but took a significant cut in his salary to move ‘to the other side’ and take a position in climate policy in government, and he is very firm in reminding everyone that the ideas of denialists are marginal and continue to have ever declining relevance to government and policy.

Dano reiterates this point here, as well as providing some sage advice (which I need to follow more than I have thus far done) to not play whack-a-mole with the repetitive and discredited likes of the Tim Curtins of the world.

Someone else in the last day or so (sorry, but I can’t remember who it was) pointed out that Tim’s physics lunacy had been covered on earlier threads, and after about 5 seconds of searching I found two here and also here. It was at a time when I was between internet connections, so I missed the entertainment at the time, but reading these two threads brought both tears of laughter and shudders of bemusement to me.

All I will say Tim Curtin is that your blithe repetition of your loopy ideas, and your ignorance of repeated pleas to consider what you have said about so many things in the past, only continue to show what a fool you are making of yourself. Any half-alert reader will realise that you are more cracked than Humpty Dumpty after his Great Fall, and that you are an embarrassment to the denialist cause.

Most significantly, your completely beyond-the-pale ad homs such as those directed to Chris O’Neill above, and your effort from last year

Sod: I am (hopefully for the last time) breaking my self-denying ordinance not to respond to pseudonymous twerps like you, on the grounds that people like you and Dano and Jody et al are probably one or all of the following: (1) cowards; (2) wife beaters, (3) pedophiles, and (4) all of the above

are not a reflection of a person in control of his faculties.

Between your so-called science and your personal abuse of those offering genuine criticism you are only serving to show your ever-increasing irrelevance, and sooner or later even those who barrack for you are going to realise that this little emperor is wearing not a stitch at all.
#23 Andrew W
March 29, 2008

Would someone knowledgable care to comment on this part of the interview:

“…….What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled….”

Is the above an accurate representation of the Aqua data and how it fits in with expectations?
#24 climatepatrol
March 29, 2008

Chris #220
Thank you very much! That’s a precious link. I’ll look closer into Gregory 2002 (ocean heat uptake, climate sensitivity of 1.5K) and Tung 2007 (temperature response to the solar cycles, range 2.3 – 4.1K, and the sceptic Schwartz 2007 (1.1K).

To ALL
According to Folland et al. 2001, the global SST-LAT combined trend 1861-2000 is +0.61°C +/- 0.16°C uncertaincies due to data gaps, random errors, SST bias corrections, urbanisation and CA’s favorite: including uncertainties due to changes in thermometer exposures. The latter is not mentioned in TAR because the effect of the uncertainty is apparently considered miniscule on a global scale. So much for the trend and uncertaincies of GW (without A).

Anyway I like the tone and level of discussion in this particular thread. I didn’t expect that I must admit.

Best,
CP
#25 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 29, 2008

Dear Chris,

I knew it wouldn’t be easy for some but I see that, inside your reply, you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems. BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn’t happen?

Now let’s discuss the rest of your reply:

I thought there were 10 months left this year (for the HadCRU record).

You are correct. A typo from my side. But in fact I meant to type 9 rather than 7: March will also be cool, you’ll see.

Where does this quote come from?

Fom the HadCRUT3 link above, please read again the prominent warning on top of the page.

Global temperatures have not dropped markedly in recent years before the last 2 months.

The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.

Long term change does not cause short term effects.

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves,… you name it.

Let’s see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

I don’t know where you take those figures from. But you misunderstood my mention of the year 1945, I’m afraid. At that time some sort of regime change seems to have occurred that reversed the previous warming and a marked cooling ensued that lasted around 3 decades. I don’t know if something similar is going to happen now but, if so, we still have no figures to make comparisons.

In this respect, I find HadCRU’s explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming prizeless: they blame it on the more frequent La Ninas since 1998. In other words, we might be witnessing a regime shift in the PDO. This is quite remarkable for 2 reasons:
1) The PDO (and AMO and other poorly understood ocean cycles that strongly affect surface temps) would not be statistical constructs, as some have suggested (for example Mann) but real phenomena. This would make natural variability higher and thus there would be less to “explain” about the recent warming.
2) As a matter of fact, it could be argued that these cycles, especially the PDO, explain by themselves most of the observed temperature swings of the last century.

Or maybe you should take off those global warming denialist glasses.

But I am no such thing! I am very skeptic about CAGW and rather skeptic about any significant AGW as well but all main satellite and surface records show some warming in the last decades. It’s not me who argues with observed data.

Finally, a I suggest a second exercise so that we all come to an even deeper agreement:

1) As above.
2) Look carefully at the end of the HadCRUT3 curves for the Southern Hemisphere anomalies: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/hemispheric/southern/annual

Again, I’m sure that we’ll all agree that the SH has experienced a marked cooling in the last decade. Past that point, we may start discussing how this reoconciles with GCM predictions/projections.
#26 bi
March 30, 2008

If your metric is imbedded oceanic energy then warming stopped around 2003 or 2004.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the HadCRUT data, you could use the same methodology to conclude in 1995 that global warming stopped in 1990, conclude in 1988 that global warming stopped in 1983, etc. etc. etc.

Guess what? None of these things happened.
#27 climatepatrol
March 30, 2008

Tim Lambert lying about this is not particularly surprising. Since environmentalists are people who lie all the time.

Randalph, whilst I am on the same page with you regarding ocean heat uptake, may I suggest to concentrate on the wheat and not on the chaff. With regards to “lies”, I would be careful there. The same outdated temperature chart can be found at Giss Nasa. Tim is safe. But then, one can easily download the monthly tabular updates of temperature anomalies and make our own chart, chosing any other time period and smoothing. It is like a ping pong game… But there have been some very valuable contributions to the discussion in this thread – for both sides of the camp.

@Bernard J.
I addressed the issue of ad hominem attacks in my blog. Such public smearing happens on both sides of the camp.

Mikel Mariñelarena, you are my favorite. Thank you for your most valuable contributions – both in tone and content.
#28 bi
March 30, 2008

Such public smearing happens on both sides of the camp.

What’s this “camp” exactly, and what goes on inside the camp?
#29 climatepatrol
March 30, 2008

The camp: For instance the online community including politically active earth scientists (whether or not climatologists by modern definition) who either tend to be more on the side of the sceptics or rather on the alarmist side.
#30 bi
March 30, 2008

The camp: For instance the online community

Oh wait. So is it the camp, or is it a camp?

Or is it C�mp, Romania? By “politically active” do you mean there’s some sort of secessionist movement to turn C�mp into an independent country? That’s very bad, you know. That’s high treason, and as we all know, treason isn’t something you should try at home.

Anyway, how many cowards, wife-beaters, paedophiles, and coward-wife-beater-paedophiles are there in C�mp, I wonder? Probably quite a lot. They’re probably all concentrated in one side of C�mp, and on the other side are all the good people who aren’t either cowards, wife-beaters, paedophiles, or coward-wife-beater-paedophiles, or maybe some of them are cowards and wife-beaters, cowards and paedophiles, or wife-beaters and paedophiles, but not all three of the above.

And in the middle of C�mp, Romania, we probably have people who aren’t for or against paedophilia. We need balance, you know. This persecution of Galileo-like paedophiles has been going on for too long.
#31 Chris O'Neill
March 30, 2008

Mikel:

you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems.

Not that I noticed. He didn’t deny there were cool times. His point was about some people asserting significance of something that was insignificant. I think you should read him more carefully.

BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn’t happen?

Yes and it appears that he would have won the bet if Knappenburger had been honest about taking it. i.e. there has been no statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures from January 1998 through to December 2007.

and their own graphs will show that the global temperatures “have dropped markedly in recent years”.

Where does this quote come from?

Fom the HadCRUT3 link above, please read again the prominent warning on top of the page.

OK so it was a hypothetical statement based on the extremely unlikely assumption that every month this year will be like January. Not surprisingly, that’s already wrong for February.

The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.

I agree that cherry picking extraordinaire is done for spectacular effect.

Long term change does not cause short term effects.

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves

AGW is related to the long term probability of such events. Please try to understand the difference between weather and climate.

Let’s see, the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.

I don’t know where you take those figures from.

Well, you said:

the new adjusted graphs on the HadCRU page cited above

which was http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ . So I don’t know how you can say you don’t know where those figures are from. You’re the one who supplied the link.

I find HadCRU’s explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming prizeless

What “explanation of the current cooling/lack of warming”? HadCRU doesn’t mention any “current cooling/lack of warming”.

it could be argued that these cycles, especially the PDO, explain by themselves most of the observed temperature swings of the last century

Right, so all we have to do is go back to the same point in the previous cycle and temperatures were similar. Sure, just tell us when that was and what the temperature was then.

Finally, a I suggest a second exercise

I suggest you complete your first exercise first, since I have indulged you by doing it. And this time have a look at http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/ without wearing those global warming denialist rose-colored glasses.
#32 climatepatrol
March 30, 2008

bi, I suggest you have 3 choices:
(1) link
(2) shut up
(3) keep rambling and don’t expect an answer
#33 bi
March 30, 2008

Oops, I forgot that my attempt at humour isn’t among the Official List of Approved Humour Types Sent Down From On High By The Denialist Higher-Ups Such As Steven Milloy. Standard operating procedure demands that, when unapproved brands of humour are detected, the denialist’s brain should simply explode.

Bernard J. scripsit:

some sage advice (which I need to follow more than I have thus far done) to not play whack-a-mole with the repetitive and discredited likes of the Tim Curtins of the world.

Yeah, let’s not play whack-a-mole. Playing explode-a-brain is so much fun!
#34 bi
March 30, 2008

Following up on climatepatrol’s remarks on the “both sides of the camp”: Wikipedia tells us helpfully that C�mp in Romania can refer to either C�mp in Bihor County, or C�mp in Bistri?a-N?s?ud County.

Now this, clearly, is very troublesome… because if you don’t know exactly which C�mp is being “politically active” and trying to secede from Romania, the only thing you can do against this treasonous activists is to do nothing.

At the same time, though, high treason clearly demands an immediate response. But wait! Inaction is itself a sort of action! Ergo, the problem of treason is now solved, by performing the act of not acting.
#35 Barton Paul Levenson
March 30, 2008

Mikel M. posts:

[[The drop from January 07 to January 08 was pretty spectacular.]]

Nobody with a clue cares. Two months is not long enough to decide anything at all when you’re talking about climate. Try 30 years.
#36 P. Lewis
March 30, 2008

Mikel, whilst the Jan 07 on Jan 08 change (GISS land & sea) was large, it was also only this spectacularly large because Jan 07 was spectacularly out of line with previous years’ Jan anomalies (i.e. 2004: 0.52; 2005: 0.68; 2006: 0.44; 2007: 0.86; 2008: 0.12). It’s just monthly weather.
#37 trrll
March 30, 2008

So why do believers keep linking AGW to weather events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves,… you name it.

Because global warming is expected to increase the frequency of such severe weather events. So while no single weather event is evidence for or against global warming, they illustrate problems that are going to become increasingly common if global warming is not brought under control.
#38 Alex Deam
March 30, 2008

I expect myself to comment on some of the points that have been raised in this comments section soon but for now I will leave you with this link:

http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/comment.php?comment.news.56

Should work, if not I’m a n00b at this so sorry. That article is moronic at best and I left ten comments (just to be annoying really) showing why. I hope I did OK at putting the dog down fellow scientists, sorry fellow AGWists. If I didn’t do a good job I hope you can explain why, and I hope the antis can criticize my comments constructively too.
I’ve been reading this for a few days now and only really just found ScienceBlogs and it’s brilliant! I’ll comment properly soon.
Finally, can Barton Paul Levenson or someone else direct me to a website describing how the t test relates to climate change exactly and exactly how 30 years comes from this from tables of statistics I think you said (how do they calculate the tables etc). I’ve never studied the t-test (yet I will in due course I’m sure) and am intrigued by it.
#39 Alex Deam
March 30, 2008

Also why won’t it let me comment when I’ signed in with my new TypeKey? It’s says I can’t comment without a name and email, so I’ve had to do this pseudo-anonymously or something lol.
#40 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 30, 2008

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. Just to avoid going round in circles, let’s leave the readers pass their judgement on the substantial points made by each of us, shall we?

Only a couple of quick comments:

1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 – Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I’m correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that’s as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

2) Actually, I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It’s useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

May I also ask if you have performed the second exercise I proposed? You do not see any warming of the SH in the last decade, I hope, do you??

Best regards,

Mikel
#41 dhogaza
March 31, 2008

1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 – Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I’m correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that’s as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

So, you cherry pick a strong El Niño year, and you lose the bet, and you STILL insist that warming isn’t happening.

You’re just fucking dishonest.
#42 dhogaza
March 31, 2008

I expect myself to comment on some of the points that have been raised in this comments section soon but for now I will leave you with this link

I looked, and the first thing I noticed was the large bald eagle dominating the globe they use as a logo.

I would suggest that indicates an ultra-nationalistic point of view which isn’t worth bothering with.
#43 dhogaza
March 31, 2008

he past couple of weeks have brought more studies claiming we must quit CO2 cold turkey today or the planet is pretty much doomed. One such dire warming comes from a climate model study out of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology that states that we must totally quit releasing CO2 now to stop increased warming within 500 years. But are these climate models simply trying to prove the “Butterfly Effect”?

Well, I got suckered into reading the first paragraph of the site you linked to, and what crap.

No scientific studies say we must stop releasing CO2 into the atmosphere today or tomorrow, cold turkey.
#44 Ian Gould
March 31, 2008

“A little while back on another thread I made the comment that I recently met a professional economist who was previously paid to deny climate change. He now not only acknowledges that he did this whilst knowing that there was a valid basis to AGW, but took a significant cut in his salary to move ‘to the other side’ and take a position in climate policy in government, and he is very firm in reminding everyone that the ideas of denialists are marginal and continue to have ever declining relevance to government and policy.”

My own experience was somewhat different – while employed by the Queensland government part of my job was to look for credible anti-AGW arguments and to come up with high estimates of the likely costs of mitigation.

The key word in there is “credible”. I’m still looking.
#45 Gator
March 31, 2008

Andrew W. asks: _Would someone knowledgable care to comment on this part of the interview:…_

This is a great opportunity to learn something. JM is referring to a study by Roy Spencer et al. Do a search for “Spencer aqua satellite” or something like that until you find a recent paper. Then read. You should find that even the great Roy Spencer himself is very careful to qualify his findings and how relevant they might be to GW. This is a peer reviewed paper after all. For giggles, then compare to his 2007 congressional testimony. You can say anything to congress!
#46 Harold Brooks
March 31, 2008

Re: 240:
1) I just did a quick and dirty least squares fit to the RSS monthly data Jan 98 – Dec 07 and I get 0.0000030349 C (!) for the slope of the curve. OK, if I’m correct Annan may had barely won the bet in its literal formulation but in my book that’s as close to a flat trend as you can realistically get. Hardly what he expected, I suspect.

You apparently didn’t read the Annan post that you linked to earlier in the thread. WCM’s original offer was “we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures.”
Annan was willing to take the bet because of the incredibly small likelihood of the trend being statistically significantly downward. The bounds on a 95% confidence interval for the data are ~0.1 (RSS) and 0.15 (UAH) per decade. In order for WCM to have won the bet (they ended up refusing to bet when Annan contacted them), the mean trend would have had to have been -.1 C/decade or cooler. The result was essentially exactly what Annan expected. As he pointed out, the key qualifier that WCM included was “statistically significant.” It wasn’t even close.

Backing the starting point back a year to Jan 1997 gives statistically significant (p=0.05) warming in the UAH analysis.
#47 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 31, 2008

Re 241:

Hi Dhogaza,

Whatever is happening in the world you’re so angry about, it’s not my personal fault, believe me.

In fact, I’m also very unhappy about so many things. One of them, for example, that my children are being indoctrinated to hate the industrial civilization (and the western values, in general). But I’d never take it too personally with any blogger. Instead, I understand that you angry believers are simply victims of the same mass hysteria campaign.

As for the issue at hand, let’s face it. The world must start warming much faster.
We cannot continue in a stasis forever and see the AGW predictions materialize, it’s just arithmetically impossible. If they aren’t already, a few more years at the current levels and they will be falsified. Besides, the longer it takes for the warming to resume, the more difficult it gets for the GCM predictions to become possible: the warming trend would have to resume at unrealistically accelerated values.
#48 dhogaza
March 31, 2008

Whatever is happening in the world you’re so angry about, it’s not my personal fault, believe me.
…Instead, I understand that you angry believers are simply victims of the same mass hysteria campaign.

Whose fault is it that you lie, if it is not your personal fault?
#49 elspi
March 31, 2008

Brooks bringing the full metal stupid:

“As for the issue at hand, let’s face it. The world must start warming much faster. We cannot continue in a stasis forever and see the AGW predictions materialize, it’s just arithmetically impossible. If they aren’t already, a few more years at the current levels and they will be falsified. Besides, the longer it takes for the warming to resume, the more difficult it gets for the GCM predictions to become possible: the warming trend would have to resume at unrealistically accelerated values.”

Reality beating him like an ugly step son:

“The University of East Anglia and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre have released preliminary global temperature figures for 2007, which show the top 11 warmest years all occurring in the last 13 years. The provisional global figure for 2007 using data from January to November, currently places the year as the seventh warmest on records dating back to 1850.”
#50 Chris O'Neill
March 31, 2008

I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It’s useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

What I told you above which you would see if you weren’t blind, i.e.

“the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.”

which means that your conclusion that

global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945

is complete garbage. The last decade is nothing like the decade around 1945.

May I also ask if you have performed the second exercise I proposed?

That link had a table of numbers, not curves as you implied.

we may start discussing how this reoconciles with GCM predictions/projections.

If you believe that GCMs predict El Ninos/La Ninas then you have been sadly misled.
#51 Max Lini
March 31, 2008

Yes, Eli. My only point is that they don’t measure temperature.

As far as the arguments on time periods, I would hazard a guess that if you pick any month and get averages of longer and longer time frames, the numbers get smaller and smaller as you go back. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 years. It seems more an artifact of the averging process. Or maybe because it is because it is getting warmer. Does anyone know how to prove or disprove either?

My other question is if the 4 satellite bands of RSS add up to +.02 since 1980 what are we looking at? Or do they have to be adjusted or can not simply be added?

It seems all we really know is that greenhouse gases absorb infrared.

ML
#52 Chris O'Neill
March 31, 2008

Max Lini:

As far as the arguments on time periods, I would hazard a guess that if you pick any month and get averages of longer and longer time frames, the numbers get smaller and smaller as you go back. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 years.

Instead of guessing and indulging in idle speculation, why don’t you get hold of some data and work out the answer yourself?
#53 Mikel Mariñelarena
March 31, 2008

Re 248

It’s alright Dhogaza. You can get angry at me and call me a liar (!?) if you feel better. You can even believe that I’m being paid to come and post here, I’m OK with that if it helps with your personal frustrations (in fact I would be very OK with that being true). But at the end of the day hard facts are hard facts:

- IPCC warming prediction for the first 3 decades of this century (regardless of the SRES scenario): +0.2 C/decade
- Trend of the last decade: ~0 C.

Re 246

Harold,

Not sure if your numbers are correct but… wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

One of the reasons why I suspect he was not expecting a flat trend though is that he was also betting on the 1998 record being broken before 2010. But you can believe that the final result is “exactly” what he expected, if you want. Me, I believe in reading people’s minds as much as I do in New Yorkers drowned by a Greenland meltdown.

Re 249

Hi Elspi, hope you’re doing fine today.

You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not a native English speaker and I was totally unable to follow your first paragraph. Are you calling Brooks stupid or was that epithet meant for me? (It was me who wrote what you quote. Poor Brooks replied to another totally different part of my post). ??

As for your second para, a few comments:

1) You must be one of the very few people in the world who pays serious attention to the Hadley Centre pronouncements. Did you know that they predicted that 2007 would be the warmest year on record (inevitably translated by the media to “2007 will be the warmest year on record”)?

2) Let’s imagine that, after the record 1998 warmth, temperatures would have remained at exactly the same level every year since then. You’re among those who believe that the world would have experienced some further warming in the last decade, aren’t you?

3) Now, honestly, you must get acquainted with the concepts of autocorrelation and autocorrelated series. If you think that the global temperature of this year returning to a value close to that of 1850 is a plausible thing to happen, we’re both wasting our times by talking to each other.

RE 250

Chris: I can’t help noticing that you guys refuse to talk about the SH temp record. What’s so wrong about temperatures going down in that half of the world? Deeply concerned as you must be about the coming catastrophes, you should rather feel happy that the records show much less warming than anticipated, shouldn’t you?

Re ENSO, you’re right, GCMs are unable to predict or account for the PDO and other (I insist, poorly understood) ocean cycles. On top of that, these cycles are superimposed on each other and on other equally poorly understood phenomena (LIA, CWP,…). Bear in mind that it’s not me who claims to know what all the relevant forcings in the climate system are, it’s you believers who do that. Hence your shaky predictions.
#54 cce
March 31, 2008

This graphic compares GISS, HadCRU, and the two major satellite analyses, all adjusted so that the 1979-2007 trends intersect in January 1979.

The dip in the mid ’80s and early-mid ’90s are primarily the result of El Chichon and Pinatubo. Everything else is natural variation (which dwarfs the AGW signal over short periods), and it shows why you have to ignore the weather and look at the long term trend.

http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg
#55 cce
March 31, 2008

It wasn’t Annan’s bet. It was Pat Michaels’ bet.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/05/yet-more-betting-on-climate-with-world.html

“If we were of a betting sort (and there are some nasty rumors going around that we are), we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures”

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but RSS didn’t exist in 1998, so he has to be talking about the UAH analysis. Both of them are flat, but still positive for the period in question (0.01 degrees per decade for RSS, 0.05 for UAH), which is obviously not negative, nor is it significantly negative. And from the graphic I just posted, it shows just how anomalously warm 1998 was in the satellite analyses of the lower troposphere, which are more sensitive than surface measurements. 1998 was up to ~0.5 degrees warmer than the surrounding years in the satellite analyses. Annan knows these things. He wasn’t betting (assuming any bet was actually made) on a strong warming trend since 1998 in the satellite analyses. Only a fool would have taken that bet.
#56 Harold Brooks
April 1, 2008

Not sure if your numbers are correct but… wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

One of the reasons why I suspect he was not expecting a flat trend though is that he was also betting on the 1998 record being broken before 2010. But you can believe that the final result is “exactly” what he expected, if you want. Me, I believe in reading people’s minds as much as I do in New Yorkers drowned by a Greenland meltdown.

You said that Annan would have “barely won the bet in its literal formulation.” He wouldn’t have won it barely. It wasn’t even close and he would have won it easily. In the post that you linked to, he talks about how the trend is basically flat, if you start in 1998. That’s not reading his mind. That’s reading what he wrote.

He has put a 50% of the global temperature record (1998) being broken before 2010 (~75% if you include 2010) and, given the GISS analysis, it already has been broken (2005).
#57 Chris O'Neill
April 1, 2008

Mikel:

Trend of the last decade: ~0 C

An insignificant hard fact is still an insignificant fact. Being insignificant means it’s open to abuse by blatant cherry-pickers.

Not sure if your numbers are correct but… wait, was it no me who said first that Annan would have won that bet (according to RSS)??

This is what you said:

I see that, inside your reply, you agree with me that in the last decade or so there has been some cooling. Thanks for your honesty. Unfortunately cce is still having trouble with this, it seems. BTW, did you know that in 2005 James Annan was willing to bet that this wouldn’t happen?

To which I replied: “Yes and it appears that he would have won the bet if Knappenburger had been honest about taking it. i.e. there has been no statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures from January 1998 through to December 2007.”

So it was actually me who first said that Annan would have won that bet. So you appear to have a memory problem as well as your cognitive problems.

I can’t help noticing that you guys refuse to talk about the SH temp record.

I can’t help noticing that you have an overwhelming desire to “move on”. It’s like the guy who craps in your home and says “don’t worry about that, why don’t you move on like me”.
#58 Mikel Mariñelarena
April 1, 2008

Dear CAGW-believers,

A brief recap on the Annan bet saga. I mentioned that bet to illustrate a point in one of my posts. Chris pointed out that Annan would have won it, as there had been “no statistically significant negative trend”. I don’t know where he got that conclusion from but I suspected that he just drew a line from the Jan-98 to the Dec-07 values, not the best way to estimate a trend at all. I did the numbers for him on the RSS records and it turned out that the trend I got was just barely positive. I had no problem to acknowledge as much.

Since then, and far from welcoming my straightforwardness and engaging the substantial points I’ve made, you guys keep rejoicing like children on the apparent victory of your hero in that trivial bet.

Contrary to Chris’ speculation, I do not want to “move on”. I’d be delighted to discuss with mature people those points:

- Temperature stasis in the last years.
- Cooling of the SH.
- Natural variability, ocean dynamics and AGW predictions.

But let’s be realistic, the chances of this discussion taking place here are no bigger than the last decade temperature trend. Tough.
#59 Mikel Mariñelarena
April 1, 2008

Dear Tim Lambert,

I believe this is the first time I’ve posted in your blog. Thanks for letting me do it, it was fun.

But let me tell you a story. The other day I was having some wines with a Methodist friend of mine and we ended discussing religion. While he tried to convince me about life after death, I tried to explain my atheism but being careful not to convince him of my belief. What’s the point in spoiling a nice person’s faith in Heaven? It was useless. He finally got very troubled and we changed the subject to carry on having a good time.

Morale of the story: it’s seldom worth while having a discussion with believers of any dogma. They will often take a critique to their believe system worse than a personal attack. You try to respectfully express your opinions and they will call you a liar, stupid, dishonest, carrier of cognitive disorders,…

Perhaps you should think about what you are doing wrong to attract this crowd of global warming Talibans to your website.

Best regards,

Mikel
#60 guthrie
April 1, 2008

Mikel- you don’t win scientific arguments by wandering into someone’s blog, insulting the locals, and making some silly statements and avoiding actually discussing anything substantial. Now that you have decided we are not worthy of your presence, the sooner you leave, the better, rather than wasting time strewing pointless homilies in your wake.
#61 Dano
April 1, 2008

Guthrie et al., youze got snookered.

This is April Fool’s day, and Mikel is a parody character. Come now – GW Taliban? Haw.

Best,

D
#62 cce
April 2, 2008

Mikel,

Fact 1: It was Pat Michaels bet, not Annan’s bet. Michaels bet was “a statistically significant downward trend” from January ’98 to December ’07.” http://www.worldclimatereport.com/archive/previous_issues/vol4/v4n8/feature.htm
Fact 2: When Annan posted in 2005 (which would go on to be the second warmest year for UAH, RSS, and HadCRU, and warmest for GISS), the trend for UAH was still negative after 7 years. Now it’s essentially flat.
Fact 3: It was a least squares regression, not “drawing a line between two points,” as any glance at the facts will show you. http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/msu.gif
Fact 4: It wasn’t the RSS analysis. It was the UAH analysis. But no matter, Michaels would have lost either way.

Pat Michaels may still be a think-tank lackey, but at least he now predicts warming, which I’m sure went over well at the recent get-together put on by the Heartland Institute.

All of these facts can be drawn from the post on Annan’s blog, which you linked and are therefore capable of reading yourself. You claim to offer “straightforwardness” but all you have provided is distortion. If you want an example of ideological dogma, look no further than skeptics who, for the past 30 years, have denied there was any warming, and now that this has been established beyond all reasonable doubt, they shift the goal posts so that there’s no warming since “1998″ or “2002″ or “January 2007.” I will go out on a limb and predict that the next time a new record is unambiguously set, the clock will be reset again, and the same thing will start all over.
#63 Chris O'Neill
April 2, 2008

Mikel:

far from welcoming my straightforwardness and engaging the substantial points I’ve made

One point you made was:

I have followed your advice and taken yet another look at the HadCRU global graphs. It’s useless, Chris. Consistent with the result above, I keep seeing a stasis turning into a cooling for the last decade. What exactly do you see???

and:

global temperatures measured by HadCRU have plateaued/cooled in the last decade or so. Perhaps not unlike they did around 1945

To which I replied:

What I told you above which you would see if you weren’t blind, i.e.
“the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.”

At no point did you respond in any detail to this substantive point. So not only do you not engage the substantial points I’ve made you then have the cheek and hypocrisy to complain that I’m not engaging the substantial points you’ve made. It’s a good idea not to complain about others behaviour while behaving that way yourself.

BTW, I didn’t call you names. I was just describing your behaviour. There’s probably no point in asking you to try to understand the difference.
#64 climatepatrol
April 2, 2008

@ALL

What I told you above which you would see if you weren’t blind, i.e. “the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.”

Okay then. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K in the 1940, then the next decade (2008-2017) must have about +0.4K of warming in order to match the IPCC-projections of an average of +0.2K per decade. But with each month of temperature of whatever GISS, NCDC, Hatcrut, you name it, to be out, time will work for the sceptics. By that time, it will be too late though. The One World Order will be on its way with the minor “crisis” of CAGW encouraging its establishment. Remember: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the new world order.” David Rockefeller, speaking at the UN, Sept. 14, 1994. Source: Wikipedia.

I know this is not science. I don’t claim to speak science here. But after this “brain exploding” exercise of multiple F6 twisters by the pseudonyms bi and sod (and other warmers), making virtual landfall in my country, this is my response.

@ Barton
Sorry, Barton. But sometimes the common sense of an atheist is better than the errors of us christians.
#65 Boris
April 2, 2008

“One World Order”? “global warming talibans”?

The CLimateTruthers are out in full force this time of year.
#66 Jeff Harvey
April 2, 2008

“time will work for the sceptics”.

More comic level book analysis.

The sceptics may win the odd battle but they’ll lose the war. This is the crux of the matter. But so long as they can obfuscate and distort the underlying science, they and their well-financed brothers in the anti-environmental ‘brownlash’ crowd will continue to do everything in their power to ensure that business-as-usual is the only business. Meanwhile our planet’s ecological life-support systems will continue to go to hell in a handbasket.
#67 Chris O'Neill
April 2, 2008

climatepatrol:

What I told you above which you would see if you weren’t blind, i.e. “the drop in their graph in the 1940s was about 0.2 deg C and this decade about 0.02 deg C.”

Okay then. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K in the 1940, then the next decade (2008-2017) must have about +0.4K of warming in order to match the IPCC-projections of an average of +0.2K per decade.

Sorry, I couldn’t see any logic that required the use of “0.2K in the 1940s” in the above statement. However, I could make such a logical argument to make up for your deficiencies. i.e. If the past decade has a cooling 0.02K (1998-2007?) instead of 0.2K cooling in the 1940s, then the next decade (2008-2017) could likely have about 0.2K more warming than the 1950s. Since the 1950s had about 0.1K of warming (mostly in the last half of the decade), this means the next decade could likely have 0.3K of warming. BTW, there is no “must” involved in the IPCC projections when cherry=picking an insignificant set of data is involved. Anyone who uses the word “must” in that context simply reveals how ignorant and naive they are.

But with each month of temperature of whatever GISS, NCDC, Hatcrut, you name it, to be out, time will work for the sceptics.

Sure, if you say so. You’re infallible, like the pope.
#68 Chris O'Neill
April 9, 2008

In #225 Mikel said:

March will also be cool, you’ll see.

The GISS figure for March is now available. It was the equal 3rd hottest March on record, 0.4 deg C hotter than February and 0.55 deg C hotter than January.

Mikel can now apologize for blatantly lying to us.