Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
The Australian continues to display its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method. They've published this piece of AGW denial by David Evans. Last time I looked at Evans he was saying that new evidence since 1999 had changed his mind about global warming, with this new evidence including the fact that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. Apparently this was too silly even for the Australian, so he now offers us four alleged facts.
1 The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.
This couldn't be more wrong. Study the graphs below (from RealClimate). The left one shows the pattern predicted for doubling CO2, while the right one shows the pattern for a 2% increase in solar output.
 |  |
Both patterns include a hot spot. The difference between the two graphs is that the CO2 one shows cooling in the stratosphere, while the right one does not, so the "greenhouse signature" is stratospheric cooling. And guess what, that's what's been happening. Evans continues:
We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.
If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.
Actually we have found the greenhouse signature, so Evans should change his mind. I'm not holding my breath.
If the hot spot really is missing it does not prove that CO2 is not causing warming, but it would indicate something wrong with the models. (Which might mean that things are worse than what the models predict.) However, the radiosonde measurements have been found to be wrong in the past, and it looks like they may well be wrong again.
Evans continues:
2 There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.
This is pure denial. There is plenty of evidence and denying that it exists does not make it disappear. For instance, Figure 4 of the SPM. The blue bands show temperature changes modelled using only natural forcings, while the red bands include anthropogenic forcings as well. The black line shows observations. Clearly, we must include anthropogenic forcings if we want to match the observations.
3 The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).
Let's look at the lower troposphere trends from RSS:
Figure 7. Global, monthly time series of brightness temperature anomaly for channels TLT, TMT, TTS, and TLS. For Channel TLT (Lower Troposphere) and Channel TMT (Middle Troposphere), the anomaly time series is dominated by ENSO events and slow tropospheric warming.
The people who publish the data don't think that the warming trend ended in 2001, and if you look at the graph, it's only significantly deviated from the long term warming trend in 2008. Such short-term deviations have happened in the past without affecting the long term trend.
Evans continues:
Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979.
The land-based temperature readings are corrected for UHI, while the satellite readings have been found to be wrong in the past.
NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.
Study the title of the NASA temperature graph:
Does it report only land-based data, or does it include ocean temperatures as well?
4 The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.
This is wrong. The temperature rises started on average 800 years before CO2 levels rose, but most of the warming occured after CO2 levels started rising. Jeff Severinghaus writes:
Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.
The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data. ...
In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.
That's it for all of Evans' evidence. The rest of his article is more pure denial. For instance:
If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?
He has, but he just denies that it is evidence.
Environment
Comments
The Oz didn't print all those letters after his name in the hard copy version for nothing. He's a very important expert 'expert'. No way he could be wrong.
Posted by: Nexus 6 | July 18, 2008 9:25 AM
There is an obvious "hot spot" in the CO2 prediction. Tim must not know what a spot is. Aside from the fact that the two graphs are computer generated predictions, where is the reality based graph?
The graphs you are using to prove increasing temperatures all end in 2000. It is now half way through 2008 A lot has happened since the Millenium. The graph that shows temp from 70s to 82.5N gives an increase of 0.171 K per decade but the graph for 82.5s to 82.5N gives a decrease of 0.336 K per decade.
Posted by: kent | July 18, 2008 10:33 AM
Shorter Evans:
There is global warming but it's not carbon's fault...
...and there's no global warming!
Also, I'm a rocket scientist who does models...
...but models are meaningless!
Time for the mantra: The Alarmists Are Just As Bad... The Alarmists Are Just As Bad... The Alarmists Are Just As Bad... Clinton Did It... Clinton Did It... Clinton Did It... Om... Om... Om...
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 18, 2008 11:39 AM
Nice job.
Posted by: slickdpdx | July 18, 2008 11:53 AM
kent,
Tim didn't say there wasn't a hot spot in the CO2 prediction. He said that (a) both CO2 and solar predictions have that hot spot, so the hotspot isn't some unique "fingerprint" of CO2 global warming, and (b) the true fingerprint of CO2 warming (the way in which it differs from other kinds of warming) is stratospheric cooling.
Posted by: Ambitwistor | July 18, 2008 12:13 PM
David Evans.
I'm sure that you're reading this blog. No Australian journo worth his/her salt, and who writes about climate change, wouldn't take note of the traffic here. In fact they'd do so even if they not worth their salt, and especially when they are personally mentioned.
So come here and defend yourself.
Please.
My perverse curiosity would love to be sated by your input. If you have the testes, that is...
Posted by: Bernard J. | July 18, 2008 12:17 PM
The tropical tropospheric "hot spot" GHG fingerprint nonsense comes from our friend Christopher Monckton who misread figure 9.1 in the IPCC report.
Basically, the IPCC ran the forcings form the 20th century and showed a plot for each forcing. Since CO2 warming was the dominant forcing, it showed the hotspot and the others did not (Actually you can see a small hotspot in the solar plot, 9.1a). Monckton then ran with his false conclusions and the denialists have been swallowing it ever since.
BTW, I pointed this out to Ross McKitrick and he still didn't get it. Contain your surprise.
Posted by: Boris | July 18, 2008 12:40 PM
kent:
The NASA graph, for example, ends in 2007.
I think kent's statement is an example of what happens when someone is in denial.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | July 18, 2008 1:26 PM
And the RSS one goes to mid-2008. I wouldn't expect even Kent to argue the measurements ought to go past last month ...
Posted by: dhogaza | July 18, 2008 1:34 PM
And the RSS one goes to mid-2008. I wouldn't expect even Kent to argue the measurements ought to go past last month ...
Why won't RSS release all of their data. Why are they STONEWALLING??!1!
Posted by: Jon | July 18, 2008 2:38 PM
dhogaza and Jon, one way to tell that those plots are a fraud is their failure to show future cooling.
I listened this morning to Limbaugh's fill-in host, who was going on about the Gore speech. A critical part of the pitch is to tell the wingnuts that the reason they have this all figured out while people like Gore don't is because the wingnuts are just plain smarter. It was all "common sense" argumentation, without nary a mention of the science (although I didn't hear the whole thing).
Posted by: Steve Blom | July 18, 2008 3:31 PM
Boris says: "BTW, I pointed this out to Ross McKitrick and he still didn't get it." Yeah...I tried to point it out to McKitrick too (over in a ClimateAudit comments section). He did seem to sort of get it eventually but then just said something to the effect of, "Well, this still shows the models are mishandling the warming and thus I don't believe the positive feedbacks that lead to high climate sensitivities."
By the way, the hot spot in the upper atmosphere of the tropics is a basic result of moist adiabatic lapse rate theory, as Santer et al. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;309/5740/1551 , pointed out. This is basically just a statement that when a parcel of air traveling upward in the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor, the warmer the air is to start with, the less rapidly its temperature drops as it rises through the atmosphere (because as the air expands and cools, the water vapor condenses out releasing latent heat warming the air...and more water vapor has to condense out for the warmer air than for the colder air). Because the warmer air cools more slowly, the difference in temperature gets magnified as you go up in the troposphere.
The Santer et al. paper showed that this expected magnification is in fact seen in the data for temperature fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales. So, the observations on those timescales actually verify the model physics. It is only when one looks at the multidecadal trends in the data that one doesn't see the expected magnification (at least in some of the data sets). So, if there is any new physics coming in to mess up the agreement between models and observations, it has to come in on very long timescales...which seems rather difficult to imagine, since the convective processes that seem to be controlling the physics happen on much shorter timescales. (As a concrete example, the recent paper by Spencer et al. that purported to find some sort of negative feedback in the tropics was looking at timescales of days...so this mechanism can pretty much be immediately ruled out as a solution to such a discrepancy.)
A much more plausible explanation is that the observational data is good for measuring fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales but is simply not well-enough calibrated over long periods of time to get the decadal trends right. And, indeed the known problems and uncertainties with both the satellite and radiosonde data suggest that this is likely the case.
Posted by: Joel Shore | July 18, 2008 4:08 PM
Thank you for printing the Global Temperature Land-Ocean Index. The red line shows very clearly that between 1940 and 1976 there was no long-term upwards temperature trend. A steep rise did begin in around 1977, and it was based on that 11 years of warming trend that James Hansen went before Congress in 1988.
It is easy to see from the RSS graph that there has been no global warming trend for the last 11 years.
Posted by: Bernard Blyth | July 18, 2008 6:59 PM
I laughed so hard when I read this article, there's nothing more convincing than a convert is there? David Evans is in the Lavoisier Group so his claim to being a convert is somewhat... Wrong.
Posted by: Nathan | July 18, 2008 8:32 PM
It is easy to see from the RSS graph that there has been no global warming trend for the last 11 years. Bernard Blyth
You clearly failed Statistics 101.
Posted by: WotWot | July 18, 2008 8:53 PM
Bernard Blyth:
No, you're bullshitting us. James Hansen went with, among other things, many decades of scientific research on climate sensitivity.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | July 18, 2008 10:54 PM
Can anyone direct me to a point by point takedown of this?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24036602-5000117,00.html
In particular the graphs? Sorry if I sound lazy, but this is out of my field (biochem and biophys) and would take me quite a while to get to something that would be obvious to someone more informed. Anyway, I'm guessing someone has gotten to this already...
Posted by: MarChri | July 18, 2008 11:53 PM
Bernard Blythe.
Gargh! This name has been in my maternal grandfather's family for at least 8 generations - could you consider posting as, perhaps, 'Bozo'?
Anyway, to the nub. Do you try determinedly to make silly statements such as that at #13, or does it just come naturally to you?
Unlike WotWot, I don't think that you failed Statistics 101: rather, I think you've not even been within a bull's roar of a Stats 101 class...
Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on the 'process' that led you to your conclusions.
Posted by: Bernard J. | July 19, 2008 12:04 AM
The tropical troposphere "hot spot" can be seen in the Allen & Sherwood thermal wind analysis of radiosonde data:
http://cce.890m.com/models/images/allen-sherwood.jpg
More, here (under "A False Fingerprint"): http://cce.890m.com/?page_id=22
Posted by: cce | July 19, 2008 12:50 AM
Bernard J asks how I came to my conclusions. If he takes the last 135 months data from RSS he will find that the Ordinary Least Squares slope is very slightly negative. That means that there has been no trend of warming on the RSS data since April 1997. The downward trend is there if you begin your OLS analysis at any point between 04/97 and 04/98 and for all points from 05/2000 to this year.
Since April 1997 there has been no major volcanic activity to affect the trend so it seems reasonable to state that there has been no underlying warming trend on RSS for over 11 years. Using a mean of the four main global temperature measures the negative OLS slope can be found going back 130 months to September 1997.
Chris O'Neill is of course right in saying that it was because the previous 11 years had strongly supported Hansen's theory of AGW that he went to Congress. That does not alter the fact that, as the graph above shows, there had only been about 11 years of smoothed warming trend by 1988. Had 1977 to 1988 been as flat as the last 11 years then he would not have been able to claim with 99% confidence that his theories had been proved correct.
Posted by: Bernard Blyth | July 19, 2008 5:54 AM
Bernard Blyth:
Where the f**k did I say that?
The only one claiming proof of anything from 11 years of data is yourself.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | July 19, 2008 6:30 AM
Marchi, Bolt is doing his usual cherrypicking. Plus his graph that he claims shows falling sea levels shows rising sea levels.
Posted by: Tim Lambert | July 19, 2008 7:26 AM
Bernard Blyth posts:
Starting with the strongest El Nino year on record (1997-1998) and ending with the strongest La Nina in 20 years (2007), you get a negative trend, but between the fact that it's not statistically significant and the fact that you're cherry-picking the start and end dates, your conclusion is meaningless.
This has been explained to you before. Your continual posting of "no warming since 1998!" has gone beyond mistaken and is into the territory of intellectual dishonesty.
Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | July 19, 2008 7:44 AM
I often wonder at the recalcitrant ignorance of the proper application of statistics that occurs amongst the likes of Evans, Blythe and the cast of hundreds of others who see what they want to believe, rather than what the best numbers that science can produce can tell us.
And then I remembered Erik the Viking, and in particular, the sinking High Brazilians from whom Erik obtained the Horn Resounding. In one moment, both the movie and the psychology of Denialism clicked into their places...
Posted by: Bernard J. | July 19, 2008 8:54 AM
Chris O'Neill - it was Hansen in 1988 who claimed high statistical significance after just 11 years of strong smoothed warming trend.
BPL how can picking the last 135 months of data be cherry picking? I would understand and agree with the criticism that 11 years is not long enough to come to conclusions about longer term trends. I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen to temperatures in the future - but then neither has anyone else.
It is nonsense to say that doing an OLS on the most recent 135 months of RSS data is cherry picking. Firstly I could have chosen the last 134, 133, 132, 131, 130, 129, 128, 127, 126, 125, 124, 123, or 122 months and found a slight negative slope - so there is nothing special about 135 months. Secondly even if, for absolutely no good reason, you wish to ignore the period of the 1998 El Nino, you will find that there has been negative global warming trend when you start the OLS analysis from any month after April 2000 to December 2007.
Posted by: Bernard Blyth | July 19, 2008 9:21 AM
Bernard Blyth:
Bernard J is, of course, correct. You clearly have not even been near a basic stats class, let alone satisfactorily completed one.
And I am beginning to wonder about your basic honesty.
[KillFile]
Posted by: WotWot | July 19, 2008 9:38 AM
22:
Are you telling me the polar bear with a mortar board is wrong? If we can't trust our academically inclined wildlife, then who can we trust?
Posted by: Boris | July 19, 2008 11:26 AM
"In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway"
I think that's probably physically/conecptually impossible. It implies that warming increases CO2, and that CO2 increases warming. That being the case, how could it possibly be that starting with increased CO2 does not initiate the same cyclic positive feedback? such is the nature of feedback.
why am i lecturing you guys? it's not you i'm annoyed with, you all understand this stuff, it's that idiot who says that junk who needs to get an education or stop exporting ignorance to the masses.
Posted by: z | July 19, 2008 1:08 PM
oh, i see he's referring to the ice core data, specifically. ok, never mind. yes, he understands the concept of a loop.
Posted by: z | July 19, 2008 1:13 PM
" I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen to temperatures in the future - but then neither has anyone else. "
are you suggesting that this is impossible in principle, or only impossible by studying it?
Posted by: z | July 19, 2008 1:18 PM
"it was Hansen in 1988 who claimed high statistical significance after just 11 years of strong smoothed warming trend."
Utter bullshit. Hansen extrapolated future warming on the basis of the radiative forcing from estimations of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases and land use changes combined with natural variability over the last 150 years. Statistical correlation with just the 11 previous years had nothing to do with it.
Global warming is all natural variability to deniers except when there actually is natural variability.
Posted by: luminous beauty | July 19, 2008 2:02 PM
I got a D in Statistics 101, but I think I get the idea about how a proper linear trend is created.
IIRC, it is the Mean Average Slope of the Slope of the Point of a Curve of a Set of Points which are the peaks and troughs. Am I off?
Some good explanations on the subject are likely better than calling the other guy stoopads.
Posted by: Sam-Hec | July 19, 2008 3:09 PM
Hansen was 99% certain that AGW was underway based on the probability of an unforced control run (using 1958 atmospheric concentrations) producing temperatures as high as those measured in 1987/1988.
Posted by: cce | July 19, 2008 3:24 PM
Z asks whether I think that it is impossible in principle to make good long term predictions of global temperature.
I suppose it might be theoretically possible to know what is going to happen to the climate of the planet many decades in advance, but (following David Hume's discussion "On Miracles") to believe such an extraordinary claim I would like to have extraordinary evidence. At present all we have is speculation with little convincing evidence, and models with a rather poor track record of success at making predictions. Whether one looks at Hansen's projections in 1988 or the most recent IPCC projections - they can be rejected at the 95% level (see Lucia's Blackboard and her interesting discussion with Gavin Schmidt) - I am not given much reason to believe that the incredibly difficult task of working out the future of the world's climate has been achieved.
Posted by: Bernard Blyth | July 19, 2008 3:37 PM
"At present all we have is speculation with little convincing evidence..."
We know from controlled laboratory observations that the forcing of greenhouse gases is real and can be quantified. It is corroborated by real world observation. No speculation involved.
It doesn't take a complex model to understand that if one increases the forcing on a complex system like climate, the system will change. How much of that change will be in increasing surface temperatures or in disruption of weather patterns is what models attempt to simulate.
Regardless, change is going to come.
Posted by: luminous beauty | July 19, 2008 4:05 PM
Tim - this crock also made it to Jennifer Morohasy's blog
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003267.html
BTW she has yet to produce the graph showing warming stopped in 1998 - I guess she finds it easier to post crap like this.
Posted by: Ender | July 19, 2008 8:14 PM
RE: #35
"We know from controlled laboratory observations that the forcing of greenhouse gases is real and can be quantified."
Can you provide a link to site that describes the laboratory experiments that quantifies "the forcings of greenhouse gases...".
Posted by: Harold Pierce Jr | July 19, 2008 8:50 PM
Can anyone actually give reasons why believing there is a cooling trend means that you "don't understand stats". No one is saying why. People are just talking down to people with a different opinion. Both "sides" routinely do it. They shouldn't.
I want to know why people think their opponents don't understand stats. My only comment here would be to use an appropriate (cointegration) technique, not OLS.
Again, if someone knows why CI techniques aren't appropriate, they can tell me why instead of calling the son of a thousand fathers, etc.
Posted by: Mark Hill | July 20, 2008 12:32 AM
Because it's a belief, not a result of an actual calculation.
Ah, to bring Balance to the Force! But just a while ago you were criticizing just one "side".
Where are the calculations supporting the "side" you forgot to criticize? Let's see them shall we?
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 12:47 AM
"Because it's a belief, not a result of an actual calculation."
How do you know that? That is what I'm interested in.
Posted by: Mark Hill | July 20, 2008 1:54 AM
Mark Hill:
Because there are no actual calculations behind the so-called "global cooling" trend? Can it get any simpler than that?
Hill, your quest for "balance" is looking more and more "balanced" each passing minute...
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 2:44 AM
Can any of the inactivists answer the following questions?
When did global warming "stop"? 1934? 1998? 2002? 2007?
Why is it that the particular year you choose, unlike all the other years, is the true year at which global warming "stopped"?
How do you decide whether or not to include GISS and/or HadCRUT data, when deciding whether global warming "stopped" at such and such a time?
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 3:15 AM
Lucia's shown herself to be incompetent, starting with the basic inability to understand that the projections she claims have been "rejected at the 95% level" make no attempt to predict short-term weather variability.
It's like predicting the batting average in the major leagues will be 0.275 over the course of the season, only to have that prediction "rejected at the 95% level" due to natural variability causing batters to hit 0.301 for one week in July...
Bullshit.
Posted by: dhogaza | July 20, 2008 3:30 AM
"Because there are no actual calculations behind the so-called "global cooling" trend? Can it get any simpler than that?"
bi - you are saying you are a mind reader and anyone who questions your assertions has an agenda. I don't. I accept the AGW hypothesis. What is important to public policy is the degree of forcing that CO2 has. Do you really know that no one has done any calculations that support cooling? If so, how do you know that?
If you can say that cooling is falsified with some stats, fine. This is the kind of thing I'm looking for. The commentator @ 43 hints at this kind of thing.
Reading your opponent's mind isn't very convincing.
Posted by: Mark Hill | July 20, 2008 5:37 AM
I never suggested above that you have an agenda. I guess, as the ancients said, excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta... eh?
Anyway, now that you bring it up, it's abundantly clear even without mind reading that you do have an agenda -- your home page URL shows it clearly.
Why do you keep lying, Hill?
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 6:06 AM
Mark, you will find that anyone who does not give unquestioned support to every aspect of AGW becomes a target for abuse on this board. There is nothing worse than a back-slider who starts questioning the basic elements of the Faith.
The plain fact is that there has been no warming trend for a decade or so. To deny that is simply silly. However if sceptics use phrases like "global warming stopped" then they are overstating their case and should be criticised. We will not know whether or not that is the case for many years. It is certainly possible that soon temperatures could be rising again steadily and that in 2018 you will be able to put a long-term smoothing on a graph of temperature trends and show that the current lack of warming trend was not at all significant or important.
The personal attacks on people who point out that there has been no recent warming trend does nothing to help the AGW case. If you read Lucia's site you will see that dhogaza's typically crude criticism of her is very wide of the mark.
Posted by: Bernard Blyth | July 20, 2008 6:11 AM
As usual, no calculations.
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 6:14 AM
"you will find that anyone who does not give unquestioned support to every aspect of AGW becomes a target for abuse on this board."
It would be helpful if you could show us your detailed calculations of your claim of, "there has been no warming trend for a decade or so", using an actual linear trend.
Showing is more helpful in getting your point across than Telling.
Posted by: Sam-Hec | July 20, 2008 9:45 AM
I'm an interested spectator with no strong view yet given the complexity of the evidence, although I tend to lean with the weight of mainstream science as I generally trust scientists.
What is somewhat more clear fom this forum is that the "believers" here seem to resort to abusing the "skeptics" rather than providing strong answers. And the latter are admirably patient in their replies. Makes me wonder whether belief isn't more about faith (and persecution of heretics) than reason?
Posted by: jonno | July 20, 2008 10:03 AM
Good grief, another one.
Climate scientists are daily accused of making up their data, of committing scientific fraud, of suppressing "honest" science that would prove them wrong if they'd only allow the work to be published, try to get folks like Oreske fired, write to universities and journals to try to get scientists censured or fired, etc etc etc.
They come here and elsewhere and outright LIE about facts, physics, what scientists claim, etc etc etc.
And you have the balls to sit and accuse US of being "abusive"?
Posted by: dhogaza | July 20, 2008 10:13 AM
dhogaza:
It's the same "I have no opinion, but my opinion is that the inactivists smell better, and anyway I have no opinion" trope replayed for the zillionth time.
Posted by: bi -- IJI | July 20, 2008 10:40 AM
Mark, go read tamino.wordpress.com. Your question is dealt with in detail in many posts there
Posted by: Eli Rabett | July 20, 2008 10:48 AM
Bernard Blyth:
You can put up more bullshit if you like but I'm still waiting to be told where I said what's claimed in your statement:
I can't see where I said this so if I'm right then you are nothing more than a pathetic liar.
So lying is OK but if you tell them they are lying then you are abusing them. Amazing.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | July 20, 2008 11:03 AM
Mark, I think the issue might be the use of the word trend. A trend is not simply the joining of two points - what certain people are enjoying doing with 1998 and 2008. Also, for relevant trends to appear they have to include enough data to reduce the noise in a system - for climate that's usually at least 15 years and preferably 30. Once you do a proper trend, you see that it's still upward.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/garbage-is-forever/
"As for the rate temporarily seeming negative, it's not just possible for noise to make that happen, it's inevitable." - Tamino http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=554#comment-84353
Posted by: pough | July 20, 2008 12:29 PM
The fact is, there is no global warming. You liberals and leftist one-worlders want there to be, but there isn't. You have no facts, or logic, only bias and anti-USA-ism. We, who deal in realities, have the proof we need and do not believe your unscientific lies.
Posted by: Gary Ruppert | July 20, 2008 2:16 PM
Gary rupper at #55 wil be a deliberate troll then. THey really need to smarten up, we've seen their type before.
Posted by: guthrie | July 20, 2008 4:10 PM
It is very interesting, and also frustrating, that the same arguments always arise. Those who have been following this subject for years get a bit short tempered when they are asked to explain, yet again, things that have been addressed many times in the past. That is why there can be the occasional outbursts of name-calling.
So, when website links are provided, please attempt to read them instead of reacting to the tones of voice. Respond to the subject of the links if you don't understand what is being described, but do your homework first - this is a very important global discussion that has impacts on all of us, whatever your point of view.
Posted by: dikkon | July 20, 2008 8:35 PM
pough,
That would depend on whether this Gary Ruppert is Real Gary Ruppert or Fake Gary Ruppert.
Posted by: luminous beauty | July 20, 2008 8:59 PM
AS an unscientific journalist I am in no position to say what's right and what's wrong but two things in Tim's article intrigue me. The first is his opening sentence remark that even the Australian wouldnt buy Evans's claim that the earth had been cooling between 1940 and 1975. Then I scroll down to the NASA index, where tim gets all cute about it including the sea, and to these unscientific eyes the one interesting thing it shows is a cooling pattern of some sort between 1940 and 1975. Yes? or No?
Posted by: IAN | July 21, 2008 2:27 AM
Jonno at #49 seems to be rather confused. He has obviously not sampled the threads on Deltoid very well, or he'd see that his 'skeptics' give as much, and often more, than they receive.
If he'd actually perused the blogosphere more generally (the Bolt/Marohasy axis springs to mind), he'd find that his 'sceptics' are a virulent bunch that froth with vitriol, indignation and umbrage much more colourfully than the rather staid Deltoid crowd is capable of.
Most grievously Jonno doesn't seem to be able to discern the difference between a real sceptic, who queries the evidence and accepts the best that analysis can provide, and a Denialist who ignores the evidence, or distorts it, or selectively cherry-picks from it, to maintain an ideological position.
I consider myself a true scientific sceptic who accepts the current evidence for AGW. There are many such sceptics here, and there are several genuine sceptics on Deltoid who hold the opposite conclusion as is their right and as is healthy for scientfic development. If the evidence ever indicates that AGW is not in fact happening, I will be one of the first to acknowledge it.
The bulk of the non-AGW camp here though are denialists pure and simple. They wouldn't recogise evidence if it slapped them in their faces with a wet fish, and I will continue to refer to them as Denialists in spite of Jonno's apparent distress and obvious befuddlement.
Posted by: Bernard J. | July 21, 2008 2:36 AM
1.If someone (sceptics/denialists) is/are claiming there is two trends, one before and one after 1998, shouldn't a test for a structural break be done?
Posted by: Mark Hill | July 21, 2008 4:17 AM
Ian, the silly part of Evan's claim was that the cooling between 1940 and 1975 had only been discovered after 1999.
Posted by: Tim Lambert | July 21, 2008 7:09 AM
IAN asks: "...to these unscientific eyes the one interesting thing it shows is a cooling pattern of some sort between 1940 and 1975. Yes? or No?"
Ian, there was a difference in ocean temperature measurement techniques that apparently caused most of what you see on that graph. It was only reported in May 2008, and so no corrections have been applied to the data in Tim's graph.
See here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/edsumm/e080529-13.html
"An unseen measurement bias has been identified in global records of sea surface temperature. The discrepancy will need correction, but will not affect conclusions about an overall warming trend."
Posted by: SJ | July 21, 2008 7:29 AM
Mark Hill writes:
Because there isn't a cooling trend.
Ball
Reber
Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | July 21, 2008 8:46 AM
Bernard Blyth posts:
I don't think you're being silly, Bernard. I think you're being dishonest. I and others have explained to you in detail why there damn well HAS been a warming trend, and you simply refuse to accept the mathematical analysis which proves it. Your position is like insisting that 2 + 2 = 7 even after it has been shown to you, using rocks, that 2 + 2 = 4.
Whether there is a warming trend is not a matter of opinion. The trend line is the regression line of the variable in question plotted against time. When you do that for mean global annual temperature anomalies, you do not get a significant trend unless you use at least 13 years of data, and when you do that, the trend is always up, not down.
You're just flat-out, dumbass, pig ignorant wrong. It's very, very hard to believe that you don't know better. I find it more likely that you simply want to mislead people.
Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | July 21, 2008 8:52 AM