Hot times in the Solar System

How exactly do you want to "kill" the apparent fact that the 0.65 C warming between 1975 and 2000 on Mars, faster than on Earth, was natural? Have you actually discovered Martians? Good luck, Lubos

I guess Lubos didn't bother to read the actual scientific explanation for warming on Mars. Typical.

RPSr for Martian State Climatologist

[Have you taken his "global warming metric" test yet? -W]

I have now read the Fenton et al. article. It's not a good article. The way how they randomly combine effects and claim that they have an "explanation" is just pathetic.

They neither give any evidence that they have determined the actual primary causes, nor they properly analyze what is the causal relationship between the observed features. Their result for the annual changes is about 25 times higher than what is observed statistically but this discrepancy doesn't bother them at all and they make no effort whatsoever to estimate what would be the expected cumulative change in 25 years and whether it agrees with the observations.

The people are obviously unable to do explanatory science. They should just do the mechanical observations and leave thinking to others who are more capable to think.

[Hi Lubos. Well with that logical coherence and your reputation, I think a letter to Nature is in order pointing out your cogent objections. Perhaps you could suggest that they send all climate articles out to review by string theorists in future? -W]

"It's not a good article" That's marvelous explanatory science! Lubos, combines shoddy writing with the always enlightening use of self-serving analysis. We shan't be leaving the thinking up to you, Lubos, thank goodness!

Dear William, I will not humiliate myself by communicating with that popular journal because it's a journal at your level and level of Mr Roark above.

Thanks for your understanding, Lubos

Dear William, I will not humiliate myself by communicating with that popular journal because it's a journal at your level

(combined sound of irony meter exploding and coke spurting out my nose.....)

man. this is going to have me chuckling for weeks!

('Nature' is a "popular journal"?! i.e. like 'Discover'? and 'Newsweek'?)

rofl

Wait--

So the Lubos Motl from the string theory blog wars is the same Motl that the climate change bloggers on SB have been arguing with all this time?

I somehow never made that connection before.

So can you sum up Lubos' contribution to the string theory wars for us then coin? It would save wading through it all.

"Their result for the annual changes is about 25 times higher than what is observed statistically but this discrepancy doesn't bother them at all and they make no effort whatsoever to estimate what would be the expected cumulative change in 25 years and whether it agrees with the observations."

This wouldn't have anything to do with the corrigendum, would it?

I've got some problems with this dudes article:

Moving on to the particulars, in the cases of Pluto and Triton, Neptune's largest moon, the observed warming is due to their current orientation to and distance from the Sun -- technically known as summer.

Uh, summer on Earth happens in the Northern Hemisphere at one end of the year and in the Southern Hemisphere at the other end of the year. Summer isn't a planet-wide phenomenon. If this process is different on Triton and Pluto then it shouldn't be called summer. I understand Pluto has a very elliptical orbit and its distance to the sun varies greatly over it's very long year (248 Earth years), but maybe "summer" is a bad name for it.

[Well spotted, but you've also found the answer - summer on Pluto is global -W]

And Triton's orbit is giving its southern hemisphere a particularly hot summer, boiling off frozen material from the southern pole and thickening the atmosphere, keeping in even more heat.

Well, is this cyclical or what? Does it happen in the North at another point in its orbit? Is it winter in the north since it's summer in the south? Since it's a moon, it's much more complicated, but the author brushes over this stuff too casually.

[I suspect we know rather little about it... which makes pinning it to GW on earth a bad idea -W]

So can you sum up Lubos' contribution to the string theory wars for us then coin?

"GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR".

It must be kept in mind that there are two factors responsible for the difference in seasons: the angle of the planet's axis and its distance from the sun. The former, if great enough (as is the case for Earth and Mars), will cause summer at one pole at the same time as it will cause winter at the other; the pole facing the sun gets more exposure, longer days, and so on, and the pole facing away gets the opposite. The latter, on the other hand, affects the whole planet at the same time: it is just closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. On Earth, these two factors actually work against each other in the northern hemisphere: NH summer occurs when the planet is farthest away from the sun. (This actually makes it warmer, since the planet moves more slowly when it is farther away, so that the NH summer lasts longer.) It is therefore important to be able to distinguish which effect is stronger for any given planet. Of course, the effect diminishes as one considers more and more distant planets, since the variation in exposure to the sun becomes less. I cannot think of a better term, though, for large-scale warming related to orbital phase, than "summer". Perhaps one could distinguish between "global summer" and "hemispheric summer", but either way, "summer" is the best term that we have.

Corrigendum, from the article web page:

"... It has been brought to our attention that there was some ambiguity in the wording of the first boldface paragraph of this Letter regarding our prediction of the change in temperature on Mars that would have resulted from changes in albedo. As is clear from Table 1, we predict a total change of 0.65 degrees Celsius over the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, rather than 0.65 degrees Celsius per year."

guthrie - So can you sum up Lubos' contribution to the string theory wars for us then coin? It would save wading through it all.

As a long time student of Lumology (and leading world expert), allow me:

(1)Anyone skeptical of string theory is a dog, an idiot, and has an IQ less than 80.

(2)LQG (loop quantum gravity) theorists should drown in their own blood. (this is more or less an actual quote).

(3)string theory = capitalism = right wing politics = AGW denialism = any crackpot who dislikes the AGW notion = good. Skepticism about string theory = communism = stupidity = global climate conspiracy = liberalism = evil = loop quantum gravity.

Oops, I forgot:

Lubos is a physics prof in the string theory group at Harvard and has written twenty some papers, mostly on string theory, and keeps a blog with a running commentary on new ST developments, not to mention everything else.

OK, thanks CIP, that seems a bit clearer.
I shall continue treating his comments on global warming etc with the disdain they require, and avoid commenting on string theory.

I find it interesting that warming on all other planetary bodies can be explained away as natural -- but warming on Earth absolutely cannot be attributed to the same natural forces. The answer is simple. Billions of dollars in research money is at stake, political power is at stake, and ramming liberal ideology down our throats is at stake. It's the trifecta for the libs. They will say ANYTHING to make this happen.

They will say ANYTHING to make this happen.

Uh, no. We don't use outdated ohsoyesterday feed-the-dupe marginalization phrases like 'libs'.

And we don't say things that right wing talking point dispensers say, such as: 'billions of dollars at stake'.

And we don't say things like: "simpleton delusionists have exactly zero hypotheses, evidence, data, ponderings, questions, papers, newspaper articles, scribbles on napkins, conversations with neighbors to explain why increasing atmospheric CO2 by 33% would NOT increase temperatures on this planet."

Oh, wait: yes we do. Never mind.

Best,

D

Opisthokont, thanks for clearing up my simplification.

>shall continue treating his comments on global warming etc with the
>disdain they require, and avoid commenting on string theory.

it appears string theorists also refrain on commenting on his "papers"
as evidenced by the lack of citations.

Thats interesting, bizdiets. I thought Lubos was at a fairly prestigious university and thus would be under some pressure to publish good quality papers?

Well, for one thing, I would caution everyone that the data we have for the Earth is a whole lot better than the data we have for the other planets and the modeling information is that much better also.

Of course, Eli. It's funny how "they" dismiss warming on Earth despite over a century of data from hundreds or thousands of points, and models painstakingly developed over 20 years, yet accept without question that warming is occuring on planets which we have not even 20 years records for, from one or two sources of data.

bizdiets,

Lubos uncited? I don't think so. A very casual check revealed a couple of his papers with over two hundred citations and more with over 100.

How many citations do your papers usually get?

[Odd. I find nothing like this. Which two did you find? And are you reading you gmail? -W]

Sorry to interrupt the flow of your blog, but I am trying to find answers to the following questions. Can any of you help me?

1. How did the IPCC register votes? Were ballots filled out? Does anyone have a copy of a sample ballot? I'm trying to understand the concept of "consensus." For example, if anthropogenic global warming was found to be "very likely" (or whatever the finding was), what exactly does this mean from the standpoint of how votes were recorded?

[Who said anything about voting? Consensus isn't done by voting -W]

2. Who were the IPCC representatives? How were they chosen? For example, was the skeptical environmentalist Lombard on the list? Were any known skeptics on the list?

[I don't know - have you looked at the IPCC web site? Do you mean Lomburg? Since he has no climate science expertise, it would be odd to include him -W]

3. How is global average temperature determined now versus 100 years ago? Are the thermometers the same and located in the same places? Going back farther, where were the thermometers located in the areas explored by the Lewis and Clark expedition? I'm being a bit facetious, but if temperatures have risen only 1 degree C in the last 100 years, how confident are we statistically that we are comparing apples to apples? I commute 20 minutes every day from a suburb to downtown, and the temperature often varies 4 degrees F or more. With this much variation in such a small area, if we did not have temperature- measuring devices of the same kind, accuracy, and quantity 100 years ago, can we really be confident that the proxies and methodologies we are using themselves don't account for the 1 degree C change? And if most of our measurements are taken in cement-jungle downtown urban areas, would it be any surprise that temperatures have risen in these areas relative to the farm land that was there 100 years ago?

[This comes under "please give professionals some credit for knowing their job". If you've noticed that cement-jungles tend to be warmer, do you think that others haven't? Try the wikipedia "urban heat island" effect article -W]

4. The strength of the Earth's magnetic field has declined at least 1% over the last 100 years, and therefore deflects less solar radiation and other cosmic rays. Could this have an effect on temperature, and (if so) have the existing models taken this into account?

[I suppose it might. Existing models can explain the 20C warming without it; and there is no clear mechanism for including mag field stuff -W]

Thank you for your help.

Kevin

>Lubos uncited? I don't think so. A very casual check revealed >a couple of his papers with over two hundred citations and >more with over 100.

In Google "Scholar" yes, but in the Web of Science and/or
Scopus you find a _very_ different picture.

Bizdiets,

LM may not be such a big name in the dead-tree literature, but he is a string theorist. One of string theory's immortal side effects is the way that it made the d-tl obsolete. Galileo didn't carve his stuff on clay tablets, you know.

I haven't checked WoS, but he has a substantial presence on SPIRES.

Now I think I understand. Let's see if I have it right: The "consensus" IPCC priesthood has impeccable climatology credentials to a person (no inquiry necessary), but "skeptics" like Harvard string theorist Lubos and former director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute Lomborg are per se unqualified to contribute to or participate in the debate. Actually, there is no debate, because if I would "please give professionals some credit for knowing their job," I would know there is no question I or any skeptic could possibly ask and no factor that the priesthood hasn't already thoroughly vetted and factored in to its computer models. There is no chance whatsoever that the IPCC priesthood was cherry-picked(comprised as it is in substantial part by academics and government officials with left-leaning, warmist tendencies)or that the "consensus"-building process employed by the IPCC was skewed or biased in such a way so as to deliver a foregone conclusion. And even though multitudes of proxies and assumptions have been piled one on top of the other, the 1 degree C increase in temperature in the last century is definitively CO2-caused.

Is this all I can know and all I need to know?

[I see other commenters have answered you. Most of what you've said appears to be a rant. But just in case you intended anyone to take it seriously: are you seriously proposing that string theorists should be part of the IPCC? It seems to be a bizarre suggestion. It also seems to me that you haven't actually bothered to read the AR4 spm - but its readily available at http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf -W]

Kevin said:

Is this all I can know and all I need to know?

I'm guessing you had your mind made up before you got here. In case you haven't, look up some of the IPCC authors if you want to see their credentials. Google is free.

Kevin,

Or you could go crazy and actually read the IPCC report.

Or RealClimate.

Kevin, you could start here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/index.html

At the UK climate change centre. Or go to
www.realclimate.org
or go to
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid

As for the temperature increases in the last century, what the IPCC actually says is that we are responsible for most of the increase in the last 50 years, not the last century. Do try and be precise, otherwise we won't take you seriously.

For a more independent view of the level of scientific honesty and openness amongst climate researchers, go to: http://climateaudit.org

I want to second that....climateaudit.org is a great resource.