Open Thread 44

Further SwiftHack weirdness: E-mails in the mailbox of CRU's Sarah Raper were processed differently from other e-mails?

Jo Nova appears to have been responding to comments about her article on the ABC's The Drum blog. On a large and mostly irrelevent comment-chain regarding the greenhouse effect on Venus I found this gem:

"Jo Nova :
05 Mar 2010 7:44:02pm

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

@2: Are we sure she's not a Louis Hissink sock puppet?

The Met Office has scrapped its seasonal forecasts and it may be time for BOM to do the same.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8551416.stm

Sad to hear of the death of blogger Jon Swift.

@6: Not before time. They set themselves up for an Epic Fail by issuing them publicly in the way they did. But it's important to note two things:

1: They've only stopped issuing them, not stopped activities in the area (as mentioned in the article). They will continue to develop the tools for generating these forecast products (there continues to be a high demand for them among their stakeholders), so they will presumably bring them back when they get better at it. Although I imagine it'll be a long time before they let their press office use the term 'barbecue summer' again.

2: To remind everyone who seems to have conveniently forgotten (because denialists have this odd habit of doing so), weather is not climate and that goes for seasonal forecasts just as much as short-term forecasts.

Sorry, that last post was supposed to be directed at gordo's. Damn my Saturday morning typing...

Stop Press!

A prediction of AGW, one I think every climate scientist hoped would never happen, may be coming to pass. A paper in Science states that methane frozen in the Arctic seabed and permafrost is venting into the atmosphere is inceasing quantities. CH4 is a worse greenhouse gas than C02 by a factor >30.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/New-observations-find-underwater-Arctic…

JamesA

We have had it drummed into us that weather is not climate, but as my seasonal forecasts are consistently correct I would like to apply for the job.

Here are the 4 questions everyone should always hit the denialists with at every opertunity:
The earth is about 33K warmer than its blackbody temperature. This is called the greenhouse effect. True or false.
CO2 absorbs in the infrared spectrum, so it can transfer upwelling infrared radiation into thermal energy in the atmosphere, that is to say it is a greenhouse gas. True or false.
The level of CO2 has been increasing over the past 200 years, this increase has been measured directly since the late 50s and by other proxies before, these proxies (most especially the ice cores) indicate very strongly that we have the highest levels of CO2 in the past 800 000 years. True or false.
There has been a long term increase in temperature over the past 150 years. True or false.
The basic physics is our home turf, letting the denialist set the debate with there quibbles and only ever reacting not going on the offensive and seizing the initiative at every opertunity is why we still have a debate.

Answer their quibbles but at every opertunity turn the debate on them.

dorlomin

Don't stress, the big boys are planning a fight back.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2010/03/05/climategate-reloaded-scientists…

Hey dromloin (#10) : quibble quibble quibble !

1. There still ain't no evidence that the current rate of 'warming' is unusual.
2. There ain't no way to attribute any 'CO2 caused warming signature' to anthropogenic effects alone.
3. There are more important things to worry about.

Billy Booboo Hall:

There still ain't no evidence that the current rate of 'warming' is unusual.

When was the last time this "usual" rate of this much warming occurred?

There ain't no way to attribute any 'CO2 caused warming signature' to anthropogenic effects alone.

Srawman.

There are more important things to worry about.

Yes, this isn't a worry for 15 million people in Bangla Desh at all, or at least, not the ones with webbed feet.

Shorter Billy Bob Hall:

I see your questions on climate science, but I won't answer them, instead I'll just spew my usual inactivist talking points. Therefore, I'm open-minded. Victory!

* * *

By the way, the cracked/leaked NAS e-mails share one uncanny similarity with the cracked CRU material. Hmm.

Over the past few months the weather has been interesting, but it has nothing to do with climate.

Climate tells you what clothes to buy and leave in your wardrobe, weather tells you what to wear each day. This is a pro AGW site and they have the best explanation of what is happening with the weather.

http://sites.google.com/site/whythe2009winterissocold/

A vacuum stops energy loss quite well...

Ouch! That's priceless!

I missed that - I stopped posting on that thread when I went away for the weekend and haven't bothered looking to see how much crap has been appended while I was away.

I was thinking about the hacked CRU & NAS e-mails the other day and it occurred to me that the simpliest way to carry out the attack would be to distribute malware via e-mail in a load of other similar uninfected e-mail, such as a flood of FOI requests. It would probably be informative if the various agencires were to check their anti-virus software and see what e-mails it found that were "infected." It might provide a pointer right back to the source.

@Billy Bob:

1. Seeing as there is no record anywhere of it ever having happened this fast before, I say there is.
2. Who said anything about 'alone'? There are, however, ways of quantifying the relative importance of the forcings and CO2 is the biggest in all the credible sources I've seen.
3. Sez you.

Erm, El Gordo,

Are you by any chance the same WUWT poster who said, earlier:

"They will clutch at straws, with methane venting becoming prominent as a way to scare the bejesus out of us. This has to be hit on the head and fast.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5970/1246"

Trying to rally the troops, by any chance?

That's me and I stand by it, but don't fear, the wuwt crew will just ignore me.

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

After five attempts to draft a response to this piece of mind-numbing stupidity from Jo Nova, I gave up. Now my head just hurts.

el gordo: Seems you don't have to worry. Realclimate's post on the topic is very anti-alarmist, I think you'll find.

> For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earthâs climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

@21 - Her grasp of basic logic (not to mention physics) appears to be atrocious yet she dares to put herself up as some sort of authority on climate science? It's just stupifying!

Presumably on her blog she can just do a sneaky edit if she makes such an obvious gaffe. I can't prove the posts were actually made by her of course but going by some of the other posts under her name it certainly seems likely.

I can't prove the posts were actually made by her of course but going by some of the other posts under her name it certainly seems likely.

I concur on both points.

Presumably on her blog she can just do a sneaky edit if she makes such an obvious gaffe.

That's precisely why I was willing to spend time telling people to "follow the evidence", as she helpfully wrote in her post, on *that* post rather than spending time at her website. It's a lot harder to bamboozle the rubes when you don't have editorial control and people keep posting inconvenient evidence and logic.

JamesA

Thanks for the insight.

>>*Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."*

>*After five attempts to draft a response to this piece of mind-numbing stupidity from Jo Nova, I gave up. Now my head just hurts.*

I guess that explains why the moon doesn't lose heat and justs gets hotter and hotter?

I wonder why physicists bother with IR+ telescopes? Any excuse to con funders and leach for grants.

In another online forum I recently came across a level of denier stupidity heretofore unparalleled. These are direct quotes.
1. Denies that CO2 concentrations are increasing, and will continue to increase.

We canât even forecast weather for 1 week, nor a federal budget, and you want scientists to forecast long term trend in CO2 concentration?

2. Thinks that because "CO2 is heavier than air", it can't get into the stratosphere.

CO2 is heavier than Air ... how does it get up into the atmosphere to "insulate" the world? It doesn't. [...]
CO2 is heavier than air, it requires energy which fights gravity in order to climb into the stratosphere and cause issues. Additionally laboratory experiments have proven that doubling the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere simply reduces the distance traveled into the atmosphere where relevant solar radiation would be collected. It does not insulate and the science behind Global Warming is not only faulty, it is fraudulent.

3. Denies that ocean acidification is occurring.

Ocean acidification is a FRAUD! These fraudulent scientists are using hydrochloric acid in to test the effects of CO2 on ocean biology as directly linked to increased acidity. As you said before, EQUILIBRIUM IS IMPORTANT! With CO2, it is in equilibrium with carbonate, which improves marine growth and shell production. Surprise HCl does not! Oops.

Example of doing it wrong.
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid2.htm#cca

The guy is like the young-earth creationist of climate deniers.

[Spencer post](http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Feb_10…) and a thousand climate widgets are sent to the widget bin, until the next La Nina.

@26, yeah I sat there and stared at the comment for several minutes sifting through my limited knowledge of radiative physics, yet afterwards I found myself none the wiser as to how an atmosphere of greenhouse gas will allow a planet to radiate heat into space quicker than an atmosphere without greenhouse gas.

Could the world's brightest scientists indeed have it all back-to-front? Could there be some hitherto undiscovered physics at play here which Jo Nova has stumbled upon?

Roy acknowledged that 'the warm January 2010 anomaly IS consistent with AMSR-E sea surface temperatures from NASAâs Aqua satellite.'

Graeme Bird is commenting that we're living in a brutal ice age right now.

I'd suspect he was doing it as performance art, except that in many many comments he appears to be serious.

Steve Goddard has pulled some of the usual stuff at WUWT to try and make light of the methane issues and to discredit a scientist.:

He highlights what is obviously an erroneous [report in the NY Times]() which quotes :

Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million.

In another [release which is clearly more scientifically based]() and easily googled, Shakhova is quoted:

Shakhova notes that the Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

Another story linked by Goddard also makes the correct reference to historical geological levels:

Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods.

But the "funny" thing Goddard does is grab a very small part of the [global methane time series](http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/images/methanetrend.jpg) which leads people to suspect there's no trend.

A [longer time series](http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/methane-2008.gif) tells a different story.

Why would he do that?

And then Goddard does what all water-muddiers do: provides a host of irrelevant statistics that are meant to distract from the issue, including this:

She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.)

Sounds like a big number â except that burping/flatulating cattle produce ten times more methane than the Arctic. According to the EPA:

Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually.

So what? Something that is already of great concern is being added to by something else of great concern!

Was it really that relevant to [this](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/nsf-mrf030410.php):

These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.

Also like Goddard's "look, a unicorn" at then end where he puts up the arctic sea ice extent plot. What is that meant to prove? Laughable.

Forgot to provide a [link to the WUWT post](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/07/methane-the-panic-du-jour/).

I have a suspicion that someone else is posting as "Jo Nova" on that thread at The Drum. But as Poe's Law indicates, it can be hard to tell...

It's probably just a blip, but the Arctic sea ice is behaving badly.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php

Yes, the sea ice [trend is worrying](http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100303_Figure3.png).

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

I too sat, eyes agog, staring at the Jo 'Nova' interpretation of physics. I wasn't sure that this wasn't actually a parody, but apparently she is serious. "The irony" was not ironic...

So, what do we have - New Physics? New New Physics? Nova Physics?!

Whatever it is, it explains why the sun is so hot - being surrounded by the vacuum of space, and having no greenhouse gas atmopshere, the poor star has no way of shedding its heat...

Who'd 'a' thunk it?

Quite frankly, this exquisite example of scientific illiteracy on the part of 'Nova' should instantly disqualify her from commenting on anything scientific. It's such an egregious scientific faux pas that even a science 'communicator' should flinch with embarrassment and consider a career in night-soil collection instead - at least there is a justification for the spreading of shit in the latter...

Leave her alone guys. I, for one, would love to hear more about her Thermos Theory of Physics.

Well, Nova would be correct if Venus was nothing but atmosphere...

Whatever it is, it explains why the sun is so hot...

That was the stunning thing to me - complete lack of internal logical consistency. The vacuum is a great barrier to heat energy emission ... **except** when it's a GHG doing the emitting.

I feel confident a Nobel Prize is in the offing once this exciting new insight is explained and confirmed.

And I did feel moved to a reply ;-)

I also wrote a comment noting that her webpage on the "missing hotspot" appears to cherry-pick the graphs for comparison, asks readers to eyeball the "lack of hotspot" when they use different colour scales, illustrate no uncertainty bounds despite the source document going into some detail - and that the conclusions she draws on that webpage ("no hotspot kills AGW") are inconsistent with her position on The Drum. That comment seems stuck in moderation - hopefully it comes out.

Another boringly predictable editorial from The Australian. Apparently time scale doesn't matter when discussing sea level rise. Ho hum.

The vacuum is a great barrier to heat energy emission ... except when it's a GHG doing the emitting.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I see how wrong I was. As we know from constant repetition Lindzen is the world's top climate scientist, and sheesh - bad luck with his version of the adaptive iris - but this just proves his genius because he was intuitively *on the right track*. All it took was some blog "scientist" to stand on the shoulders of his giant...er, insight and complete the picture.

Clearly, the vacuum can distinguish IR that would be emitted from the surface of the earth from IR that would be emitted by CO2, and refuse to accept the former by ... (underpants gnome) signaling back in time to make sure the earth won't have turned out to emit it, but not signaling to the CO2 so that it does. Gack, tachyons mess up English, but you know what I might have meant had I actually said it.

Or maybe the vacuum is the ultimate black non-body, and because it's a non-physical object (or is that a physical non-object?) and therefore can't have a temperature of its own (h/t Hissink) it has sufficient free parameters to create an adaptive absorbtivity that is radiation source-dependent.

I'm sure there's enough here for climate scientists to dig into, but clearly we've shown **the vacuum** is the adaptive iris that Lindzen was looking for - and thus that AGW is a total crock! Business as usual...

Elsewhere in The Australian, Andrew Trounson acknowledges the War on Science, sort of:

THE head of the peak university body has denounced "tabloid" attacks on climate scientists and called on researchers to better communicate with the public.

Addressing the National Press Club in Canberra, Universities Australia chairman Peter Coaldrake said scientific researchers were always vulnerable to attack when identifying "uncomfortable" trends such as climate change.

but of course:

The release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit fuelled allegations that data was being manipulated to support the theory of man-made global warming. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also been embarrassed by mistakes in its 2007 report on climate change.

well if you repeat it often enough it must be true, but anyway:

Professor Coaldrake said the resulting debate had amounted to little more than a "tabloid-style decimation of science".

What? Where? Who? Not The Australian of course.

David Archibald has a post up at Watts, which claims the buildup of CO2 is not linear but logarithmic.

There is only one comment up at the moment, so I strongly urge you to go over there and make your mark.

That thread on The Drum is a train wreck of Denialist ignorance.

There is too much to summarise succintly in one post, but several gems merit repeating...

According to Eddy Aruda (05 Mar 2010 11:05:02am):

The Earth has never had life before the advent of an oxygen enriched atmosphere.

Oh, really?!

Or this at 05 Mar 2010 11:11:23am:

The reason CO2 causes warming on Venus is because the atmosphere has so much more weight and therefore pressure. It is the pressure, not the fact that it is CO2 that causes the heat.

Eddy Aruda has obviously never dived, or he'd know what happens when one fills a SCUBA tank, and what happens afterward... Graeme Bird actually uses (incorrectly) that example, but the underlying physics seems to escape him too!

Eddy continues (05 Mar 2010 7:34:37am):

The reason Venus is so much warmer is because the atmosphere is over 90 times more dense as [sic] Earth's atmosphere. It is the pressure created by the atmosphere that causes the hear [sic], not the CO2.

For a moment I thought Eddy might be getting it, but he rapidly assures one and all of his cluelessness.

RayS valiantly tries to educate Aruda, Bird, and other scientific giants on the thread by pointing out that there is a difference between pressure and compression, but he is forlornly fighting the increasing gradient of Stupid that exists between their monitors and the centres of said individuals' brains.

Evidence that Stupid itself has pressure?!

Jo Nova makes regular and (for anyone with a clue) embarrassing comments, inluding (oh, the irony!):

I loved that Science Communication course, except that like most science courses in Australia it doesn't teach logic and reason, and that's a travesty.

[04 Mar 2010 10:32:39pm]

Soon afterward the thread rapidly decends into the vapidity of extreme ignorance, with Lotharsson, RayS and jakerman heading several others in trying to keep Teh Stupid from escaping and thence engulfing the planet.

I have wondered how 'Nova' managed to get away with spouting as much scientific tripe as she does. Seeing the bottomless pool of ignorance that infects the Australian public, as exemplified on The Drum, I have my answer...

Bernard,

I just had a peek at Nova's site (for the first and last time I may add) and I have to admit that it is indeed cringe-inducingly awful. What gets me about Aruba's nonsense is that from my perspective he presents himself like some kind of scientific authority. Most of the rest of the comments of other contributors were equally gumbified. But, hey, those who are ignorant wallow in their ignorance. The Dunning-Kruger effect is on display there for all to see.

As I have said before innumerable times, weblogs like Nova's are, in my opinion, aimed at masticating science in order to promote a political world view. I am sure that most of the contributors there are far right libertarians. Some of the discourse there is so infantile that it has to be read and re-read to be believed. And they have the audacity to attack Deltoid. Quite remarkable.

Jeff & Bernard, on The Drum (and not only on the Nova thread but the previous 8 days on climate change), there are also endless calls for "empirical evidence" from several commenters. It's apparently the only tactic some of them have for debate.

When some is posted they generally don't understand that it *is* empirical evidence, or they dismiss it because it is deemed up front to be fraudulent or biased or something, or they don't like that it's coming from (say) skepticalscience or RealClimate or Deltoid...

It was sadly amusing to see Nova at The Drum state exhort following the evidence (which I applaud), and then have a whole bunch of people (including Nova when pressed) not do so.

And it was interesting that Nova (and/or someone pretending to be here) brought out the ad homs (which she had said should not be used) and tone trolling when I pushed back on some of her ... less well supported assertions - including failing to bow down to the wisdom of Spencer, and pointing out reasons why others might be ignoring his work. I didn't notice any concerns expressed over the tone of commenters calling for scientists to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and the like.

If you've nothing better to do it's worth visiting the "missing hotspot" post to check out the misdirection - she snips the bottom one out of a larger figure that doesn't support her point as well when shown in entirety, places it against the top one which uses a *different colour scale* - and then asks her audience to *eyeball* them to verify for themselves no hotspot - never mind statistical analysis in the original report. Mendacious or clueless? I report, you decide ;-)

s/pretending to be here/pretending to be her/

Since this is an open thread, I've been practically dying to have a conversation somewhere on an idea I've had. I don't know if anyone's had this idea before (goodness knows someone probably has), but has anyone pondered getting rid of genetic disorders by simply making eggs and sperm that carry alleles for them unviable?

'...masticating science in order to promote a political world view.'

Nice one Jeff, it's obvious you have been to the Science Communication Course.

>*Nice one Jeff, it's obvious you have been to the Science Communication Course.*

Of course el gordo is writing from his chair in the school of assertion without evidence.

Hey Jeff (#47) What's your problem with 'far right libertarians' ? Libertarianism is good - regardless of the color.
The opposite is not necessarily the case however.

And, don't hold back on your 'evidence' either jakerman (#52). It's always good to have a laugh now and then.

In answer to an earlier point - the temp recovery from the The Younger Dryas cold interval was greater than the warming today. [eg. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland - Richard B. Alley - Geosciences and Environment Institute, The Pennsylvania State University.]

Hombre... it's hot here today... :-)

For those who might be curious... last night, on Late Night Live, [Phillip Adams interviewed James Hansen](http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2010/2839864.htm).

Billy Bob:

>*What's your problem with 'far right libertarians*

They keep calling for extremist deregulation. A level of deregulation and ownership of government would herald the new ruling of either feudal lords war lords.

Oh, and they generally very stupid that is if they are not filthy rich or both. You wouldn't be one would you Billy Bob?

What's wrong with far-right libertarianism?

A lot of it amounts to "I've got mine, and my freedom to crap on the commons, so screw you". That's no way to run an effective society, but it's pretty good for certain privileged individuals.

Billy Boo Boo Hall:

What's your problem with 'far right libertarians' ? Libertarianism is good

If Libertarianism means you have to adopt an anti-science strategy then it can't be all good. BTW, anti-science is a losing strategy in the long run.

the temp recovery from the The Younger Dryas cold interval was greater than the warming today.

The temperature recovery in Antarctica from the Younger Dryas took more than 1000 years and amounted to around 4 degrees C at the ice-cap. The global average rise was considerably less than 4 degrees C, maybe 2 degrees C.

So the recovery from the Younger Dryas beat the current warming so far, but the way things are going, the next century should easily beat the Younger Dryas recovery, and in only 100 years rather than more than 1000.

@53"Hombre... it's hot here today... :-)"

Unlike during the Younger Dryas ;)

Any idea what caused the Younger Dryas? Volcanic eruption, asteroid impact or something else?

What's your problem with 'far right libertarians' ?

Can't speak for Jeff, but my problem with far right libertarians is that they all seem to be like you, Billy Bob.

The 'left' is more tolerant on life-style choices, while the 'right' is tolerant on economic choices.

Libertarians can come from both sides of the political spectrum and they are truly tolerant individuals. Why not check out where you stand in this short political quiz.

http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html

Anyone seen this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18618-highcarbon-ice-age-mystery-…

Some research shows CO2 levels at the start of the Ordovician ice age were actually low, not high.

>The 'left' is more tolerant on life-style choices, while the 'right' is tolerant on economic choices.

erm, who cares?
This is a science blog.

Not sure I agree with that quiz - it appears to be saying that Libertarians support Nike's right to exploit child-slave-labour in Bangladesh.
I think the mistake they make is thinking that Libertarians don't support the use of Law to protect Liberty.

And we should definitely bring back conscription - reduce the amount of "post-normal" idiocy I have to deal with.

>*Libertarians can come from both sides of the political spectrum and they are truly tolerant individuals.*

Especially the the Libitarian far right who are very tolerent of socialist plots, such as taxes, government regulation, and scientific conspiracies. And you can spot the scientific conspiracies, they are ones with findings that conflict with far right libitarian ideology.

I agree with you, Paul. It's not my fault that Tim has turned it into a political science blog.

The ABC might have has started enforcing their [editorial policies](http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/documents/EdPols07_updateFeb09_FIN%20to…) on issue of accuracay regard [unleashed denialist](http://australianconservative.com/2010/03/their-abc-gags-bob-carter/).

>*7.4.2 (a) Every reasonable effort must be made to ensure that factual content is accurate and in context.*

>*9.4.10 Accuracy and corrections. The ABC cannot reasonably be expected to verify the accuracy of UGC or to correct all inaccuracies in UGC, other than for UGC that is used by the ABC in another content category (see section 9.1.6). However, where the ABC is satisfied it is necessary or appropriate, it may exercise its discretion to edit, remove or clarify UGC that contains an error or is otherwise false or misleading.*

The denialsit are outraged that they can't ballance scientific debate with known falshoods.

We must be in tune, Janet, I just posted the same story on another thread, but I digress. Does anyone have a clue why the southern hemisphere temperatures have remained steady for the last 30 years?

http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20TropicsAndExtratropicsMon…

An example of misinformation in the [Carter essay](http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/03/hansenist-climat…):

>*On the heels of revelations about meteorological data tampering overseas, irregularities have also been discovered in the way that Australian temperature data have been manipulated. And, across the Tasman, NIWAgate is developing apace, as the N.Z. National Institute of Water & Atmosphere battles to provide a parliamentary accounting for its historic temperature archive, which may yet prove to include the âdog ate my homeworkâ excuse for the apparent absence of some records.*

Revelations of data tampering? How nice to have such strong findings provided by the [NZCSC](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co…) and [Willis Eschenbach](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying…).

>*Does anyone have a clue why the southern hemisphere temperatures have remained steady for the last 30 years?*

Yes, its cos you're eyeballing rather than fitting a trend. Plus SH has more ocean, and oceans take more energy to heat than land.

Bob Carter modestly fails to point out that "Senator Fielding's four science advisors" include Bob Carter.

@69 "How nice to have such strong findings provided by the NZCSC and Willis Eschenbach."

Especially when Carter himself is a member of the NZCSC!

Foram(#42) - I know it's a bit late, but I did try to post a reply to the last comment on The Australian's story ("where does all the water come from to make sea level rise?") but it appears that comments need to be vetted before appearing and mine didn't pass the test (I used numbers and stuff). Censorship? At the Oz? Perish the thought....

Oh dear, seen [this](http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/10/2842322.htm)?

[Michael](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2338…).

[Yep](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_australians_war_on_science_…).

;-)

There's a new Times (UK) [article](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7055…) about how the IPCC is going to get an official UN review, ostensibly because in thousands of pages of information it had as many as 3 (3!) errors.

The first one mentioned is the Himalayan glacier issue, which as far as I know really was a dumb error. The second mentioned is about North African crop yields, and I admit I don't know anything about that. The third one, however, is one I was just recently reading and laughing about: the [Dutch Irony Event](http://www.pbl.nl/en/dossiers/Climatechange/content/correction-wording-…).

I signed up just to comment on how that error came to the IPCC via the Dutch government. So far my comment hasn't been accepted, but it might eventually be.

Can someone explain to me why the guy responsible for the non-thermometer-based temperature record can [say the following](http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/03/the-global-average-urban-heat-islan…) with a straight face?

The UHI effect leads to a spurious warming signal which, even though only local, has been given global significance by some experts. Many of us believe that as much as 50% (or more) of the âglobal warmingâ signal in the thermometer data could actually be from local UHI effects. The IPCC community, in contrast, appears to believe that the thermometer record has not been substantially contaminated.

Does having a lovely moustache help?

Whoops! Christy's the one with the lovely moustache. In my defense, I think about Ned Flanders whenever I think about either of them. It's not a good defense, but it's a defense.

>[[Maurice Newman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Newman)] resigned from the board in 2004 in a protest about the position of the staff-elected director.

>*[Mr Newman says](http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200612/s1811540.htm) he is an old friend of the Prime Minister, but he has had no discussions with John Howard about either the abolition of the staff-elected director position or his appointment as ABC Chairman.*

I've no idea what Newman is like as a chair, nor if he was for or against a position of staff elected director. Yet I do know that claim of the ABC being in the pocket of socialists and greens is difficult to support with a chair like Newman, and a board that included Janet Albrechtsen and [Keith Windschuttle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(magazine)). That is 3 out of the [6 on the board](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation).

But contrary evidence is easily dealt when one practices denialism and continually resort to conspiracy theory.

It appears the humble clam shell will help us put climate in perspective. The full story is up at Watts, but here is a graphic to go on with.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/clamatologyfig3_muss…

I warm to the keyword - paleoweather.

Speaking of what's wrong with libertarianism (depending on which flavour you mean), there are no libertarians in airplanes.

Stratospheric warming overall is a cooling signal, not warming, for the troposphere.

[el thicko](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2343…):

As usual you haven't a clue what you're talking about. Warming driven by the sun would cause warming of the stratosphere. Warming driven by greenhouse gases would cause cooling of the stratosphere. The stratosphere has been observed to be cooling through the recent period of global warming -- as expected from greenhouse gas forcing.

Check out what Watts has to [say in relation to the closure of climagegate.com](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/12/climategate-com-shuts-down/)

The owner/author complains that the site isn't making him the money he'd like - although it's all in the name of "the case".

Watts boasts in response:

Heh. He doesnât know the meaning of hard work.

WUWT:

2,639 Posts 310,303 Comments

Alexa rank:

* Alexa Traffic Rank: 13,680

* United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 6,654

* Sites Linking In: 3,114

2,639 Posts 310,303 Comments

Not a good look Mr Watts.

>The owner/author complains that the site isn't making him the money he'd like - although it's all in the name of "the case".
Watts boasts in response:
>*Heh. He doesnât know the meaning of hard work.*

So Watts is making a tidy return on his investment?

Sorry, "the case" should read "the cause".

Not enough money return = close the site, hence we can deduce what "the cause" is for him.

I thought ClimateGate.com was about spreading the "truth" about the scam of global warming. Who could have guessed it was driven by selfish interests.

Oh the shock of it all.

Meanwhile, the world's climate keeps getting warmer. The boiling frogs won't notice but we've just had the third-warmest 12 month period on record after 2005 and the 12 months beginnining in August 2006 (which were tied). The way March is going so far, we are about to have the equal warmest 12 month period on record and if April is only a tiny bit warmer than last year then the 12 months to the end of April will be a new record for the earth's surface.

Easterling and Wehner brought out a paper last year with the heady title 'Is the climate warming or cooling?'

The team suggests that part of the reason for the flatness in temperatures deals with the amount of water high-up in the upper troposphere, the tropopause, and the lower stratosphere.

They clearly state âWater vapor is a highly variable gas. Tropospheric water vapor increases in close association with warming and this represents a major climate feedback that is well simulated in global climate models. In sharp contrast, current global models are limited in their representations of key processes that control the distribution and variability of water within the stratosphereâ.

Furthermore they note âCurrent global climate models simulate lower stratospheric temperature trends poorly and even up-to-date stratospheric chemistry-climate models do not consistently reproduce tropical tropopause minimum temperatures or recently observed changes in stratospheric water vapor.â

[Easterling and Wehner](http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf):

Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the natural
variability of the real climate system can and likely will produce multi-year periods of
sustained âcoolingâ or at least periods with no real trend even in the presence of longterm
anthropogenic forced warming. Claims that global warming is not occurring that
are derived from a cooling observed over such short time periods ignore this natural
variability and are misleading.

Apologies, the quotes belong to Susan Solomon et al. Here's an article explaining what it's all about.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100128_watervapor.html

Lovelock makes a U-turn?

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162506/How-carbon-gases-have-saved-…-

> Watts boasts in response:

> Heh. He doesnât know the meaning of hard work.

Yep, the climategate.com authors was too busy writing original nonsense rather than simply propagating links to other people's nonsense. (Granted, it was still nonsense, but at least it was original nonsense.)

Remember, Tom Nelson, Marc Morano, and Anthony Watts are good at their "hard work". That's why they're succeeding.

Urgh, Nils-Axel Mörner has also submitted 'evidence' to the parliamentary committee:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/…

But it does contain a funny quote:
"Tuvalu in the Pacific is often said already to be in the flooding mode. The tide-gauge record (Fig 7) for the last 25 years does not show any rise, however. The truth seems to be that a Japanese pineapple industry had subtracted too much freshwater by that forcing saltwater to invade the subsurface."

(Japanese) Pineapple industry? Tuvalu? Seriously?

>*Lovelock makes a U-turn?*

No, just quote mined.

Marco,

He's wrong. I'm in shock again.

It would be very interesting to find out where Nils-Axel Mörner got his information from. I just looked at Tuvalu on Google Maps. If there are pineapples being grown anywhere on it, there can't be more than several dozen of them. Was there an actual plantation in the past?

No, just quote mined.

Bowatergate?

The writer of the Daily Express is called Donna Bowater. ;-)
I thought it was Jonathan Leake at first. I don't know why.

So, Bowater is Leake-ing?

I reckon anyone with expertise in the area should feel free to contact the inquiry with some corrections to Mörner's submission. I recall seeing someone else doing that (for McIntyre?) An inquiry is a lovely vehicle to point out people who make stuff up and draw unwarranted and overhyped conclusions - and that those characteristics are common to almost all "skepticism". Once they've seen a couple of blatant examples, they might apply some skepticism of their own to submissions...

On the "The Economist calls a lie a lie" thread [I posed this to LuboÅ¡ Motl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/the_economist_calls_a_lie_a_li…):

Permit me to ask you this - given the noise inherent in the temperature signal over the twentieth century, after any long-term warming trend is removed, how rapid would future warming have to be in order for a statisitcally "significant" signal to be observed in less than a 15 year period?

Motl was unable to respond. Over on Watts "[March of the Thermometers](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/on-the-march-of-the-thermometers/)" thread the same "no statistically significant warming since 1995" meme has legs, so I repeated (23:22:41 10 March 2010) the question there; specifically to someone called "Amino Acids in Meteorites", and later to Jan Pompe.

Their responses thus far have been entertaining, but completely absent of any understanding.

I'll be interested to see if any of the WUWT crowd actually attempt a serious defence of their acceptance of the distortion of Phil Jones' comment.

David Hathaway thinks this deep solar minimum is due to the speeding up of the Great Conveyor Belt. It makes a lot of sense.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/12mar_conveyorbelt.htm?list35621

Bernard J. (102) :

Im not sure what youre driving at.

If there is as much noise as you are talking about then how can warming or cooling ever be detected.

There is clear cooling in the temp record since 2005.

Do you see it?

Shorter John:

Either we can deduce everything about the climate from 5 years' data, or we can deduce nothing at all.

Follow Bernard's link to Watts, Frank.

John:

Ah, my bad.

Mine too, I forgot to "blockquote".

Frank and John.

For a few moments there you guys were messing with my head!

On the matter of the posting over at WUWT though, I can't believe that I am not being moderated away. I've posted much tamer stuff than that in the past, only to have it removed within a day, but this time it's being allowed.

More amazingly, I can't believe that I have actually engaged in a discussion with some of the WUWT crowd. Up to now I've sworn off punching that tar baby...

I guess it's just too hard to resist the lure of seeking an answer, from the denialists, to my question. I'm not sure how long I'll persist in the effort, but I am archiving every post, complete with time-stamp, as I submit them!

Gawd, does this make me a troll?! I really am trying not to be one!

BJ

Being a resident troll on Deltoid has been of great benefit in arguing my case in the wider world. I no longer get upset and fly off the handle when someone says CO2 causes global warming. Admittedly, it has taken a lot of ad homs to keep me in check.

From my perspective, with the fall of Copenhagen, the war has been practically won and now it's only the mopping up to do.

Just got a response from Jo Nova on her web-site.

She has confiormed that she made the quote I referred to near the top of this thread.

See post number 222

She also made this rather stunning statement:

"GHGâs convert kinetic energy of collisions into Infra red, so they effectively steal the heat out of the other molecules in the atmosphere and fling half of it off the planet."

It's all so stupid I honestly don't know where to start...

Peter Pan, in the light of that evidence and the absence of further evidence to the contrary, I withdraw my hypothesis that someone else was impersonating Ms Nova on that The Drum thread.

Which makes it even more interesting since she touts all the principles in her "How Do I Know" (who to trust) thread, but appears to go against them herself when people push back on her line of argument. (For one thing she's big on "follow the data/evidence" which in practice means "believe any paper I cite that supports my position", but not so big on "how do I know the *data* is good"? And she blatantly cherry-picks and ignores uncertainty to mislead her readers, which doesn't seem congruent with her stated scientific principles.)

Her reply on the thread you linked to half makes sense. But (surprise, surprise) she failed to explain her most astonishing claim - that an atmosphere with CO2 would cool a (no longer externally heated) planet faster than a pure O2 atmosphere. That might be because unless I'm mistaken, she is dead wrong - but dead certain she's right. Follow the evidence, anyone?

el ghoulo:

with the fall of Copenhagen, the war has been practically won and now it's only the mopping up to do.

Exactly, the tragedy of the commons has been set-up. Nows the ghouls like el whatever can sit back and watch the tragedy play out.

an atmosphere with CO2 would cool a (no longer externally heated) planet faster than a pure O2 atmosphere

Ah yes, those CO2 molecules only radiate towards space, not the ground. Clever molecules, CO2!

Ah yes, those CO2 molecules only radiate towards space, not the ground. Clever molecules, CO2!

It's just fabulous that these days one can make swear by one's preferred laws of physics.

All these years physics was just so prescriptive and uptight but now, with our resident agnosophists it's all in the POMO mix as competing narratives.

Personally though, I'd like the circulators of "CO2 would cool the planet" to fill out the narrative. How does Co2 remove more locally sourced heat than is there?

I think it has the makings of a rollicking potboiler of a story.

Peter Pan.

Nova's next paragraphs are collectively a gem or irony:

Sorry if you thought the mocking derogatory comments about my physics knowledge on the ABC board indicated youâd found a point I'd made a mistake on. Never underestimate how arrogant and uninformed supporters of AGW can be.

PS: Oh I see that you were one of the commenters who declared my knowledge of physics was poor.

From the drum site:

GHG's in an atmosphere can only radiate directly into space if theyâre in the very top layer of the atmosphere. So Venus would not cool "mainly thanks to CO2" Do you understand now why youâve got it completely backwards?

That "top layer" of atmosphere you refer too is our "ultra thin" stratosphere which is around 40 kilometers thick eh? The climate models all project cooling in the stratosphere, so youâre going against the consensus here. Rather than being "backwards", it seems Iâm a step ahead of you...

I would love to see a "Nova Physics: a collation of the works of Joanne Codling, physicist extraordinaire". I'm not sure which of her discoveries would take pride of place at the top - the heat pump that defies the (obsolete) laws of thermodynamics (quick, tell CERN - they can throw away all that inconvenient liquid helium and use CO2 instead!) or the amazing vacuum insulation that helps to keep heat in (cold moons, asteroids, distant planets and sundry other stubbornly rebellious celestial bodies notwithstanding).

Nova's arrogance is astounding, and I never thought that I would say it, but I believe that she eclipses Marohasy's efforts at the Old Bog. Jen at least was circumspect in how she presented her denialist science - she obviously had more regard for the plausible deniability of her denialist canards.

I think that Nova must surely be a finalist for the March award of the Interweb's Dunning-Kruger Super-Genius Expert of the Month, if not for the DKSGEotY for 2010.

...gem or of irony...

...the amazing vacuum insulation that helps to keep heat in...

See, the cold moons and other bodies just prove it. The vacuum insulation has scared the heat away from the surface because it can't escape, so it's burrowed deep inside...er, spread out through the entire body by conduction, which has lowered the surface temperature because it correspondingly warmed the cold interior.

Or something.

I'm still amused that Ms Nova invited me to her website on that Drum thread to learn. That really took the cake.

[Lotharsson](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2351…).

Joanne Codling's extraordinary self-delusion (it's either that, or it's deliberate misrepresentation) about her grasp of physics really does take the cake, as you say.

I have some news for the dear girl, if she cares to pay attention...

Joanne, I too "declare [your] knowledge of physics [to be] poor". Further, I declare it to be so poor as to render absolutely useless, and in fact dangerous, your capacity to comment upon matters relating to climate change.

As I always do, if you disagree with me I challenge you to prove me wrong. It would be simple to do so. In this case you could start by using a few basic equations and straightforward steps of scientific logic to support your comments about CO2 and its capacity to cool a planet faster than would a similar atmosphere, but one that is composed of oxygen.

Your time starts now...

I've posted a response to Jo's comment on her blog.

I doubt it will get any serious consideration by her one-eyed fans. Let me know if you spot any glaring errors - my physics is a bit rusty after all these years :)

In an article published in the February issue of Hyrdocarbon Processing magazine, Dr Pierre Latour writes:

"CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in earth's atmosphere. The first 50 ppm [parts per million] of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, [and] each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm, there are almost no absorbable photons left. CO2 could triple to 1,000 ppm, with no additional discernable absorption-emission [warming]."

There is no need to be alarmed, CO2 follows temperatures with a lag and is not deserving of the bad press it has received over the years. It is a harmless trace gas.

@121 So a petroleum industry magazine fails to mention the changes in the sbsorptive properties of CO2 at different temperatures and pressures and repeats an argument that was debunked back in the 50's. That's hardly surprising.

The question is - why are you so gullible that you believe them?

Fatso,

It isn't the insignificant incoming solar IR that is of concern. It's the upwelling IR from the Earth's liquid and solid surfaces, whose peak energy is in the 15 micron band, that matter.

You really do post here for comic relief, don't you?

I wonder how long it will take the denialoids to pick up on and misinterpret this one:

Solar 'Current of Fire' Speeds Up
03.12.2010

March 12, 2010: What in the world is the sun up to now?

In today's issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun's Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/12mar_conveyorbelt.htm

Jimmy

'I wonder how long it will take'... beat you to it at #103.

Hathaway might be right, the speeding up of the conveyor belt reduces sunspots.

Apologies el gordo, missed your comment. Good to see that you are interpreting it the correct way.

Given the poor coverage of science in the media, I imagine that a paper like the Oz would just see the headline or the "running at record high speeds for the last five years" and conclude that the current warming trend is entirely due to the sun. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Is it true that hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements have failed to find a pattern of upper troposphere heating predicted by the models?

127 el gordo: "Is it true that hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements have failed to find a pattern of upper troposphere heating predicted by the models?"

Have a read:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot.htm#4616

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png
You need to be brave for this one: http://www.scottchurchdirect.com/docs/MSU-Troposphere-Review01.pdf
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/msu/

And take your pick of these papers:
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/papers-on-tropospheric-temp…

Thanks JB, I'll give them a look over.

'There is general agreement among the worldâs climate scientists that the Earthâs global average surface-air temperature is now increasing at rates that are without precedent during the last 1000 years...'

The quote is from the Church paper, someone should tell them that they recently rediscovered the MWP.

"that they recently rediscovered the MWP"

who rediscovered the MWP? Some shills on a denial web site? The current rate of temperature increase at the global scale is certainly faster than at any time in the past 1,000 years and probably a lot, lot longer than that.

Taking in the big picture, I'm not alarmed?

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_a…

>The quote is from the Church paper, someone should tell them that they recently rediscovered the MWP.

And that the MWP had lower temperatures than [our current](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/pcn/) and we're just getting started.

jakerman @ #132,

Exactly. As I have said before, el gordo is an expert at gleaning information from third parties. It appears he spends too much of his time reading excerpts from abominable web sites like WUWT, CA, Climate Depot, CO2 'Science' etc. etc. etc. *ad nauseum*.

But, then again, what do expect from someone with no expertise whatsover in any relevant field whose personal opinions simply mirror the agendas of the denialati?

el gordo,

I assume you were refering to [this post](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/historical-video-perspective-our-…) on Watts?

Have another close look at the timeline axis, it ends [a century ago](ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/i…) close to 1900. They are not comparing the anomaly with the current warming, pretty clever hey?

The current Greenland [temperature anomaly](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/2010vs2005+1998.pdf) has already blitzed the MWP, and were just getting started.

Give El Gordo a break, eggheads. The simple fact is evidence doesn't matter to him because he knows The Truth and we are too stupid and ignorant to see it. All El Gordo knows is that one day he will finally link to something that will destroy the AGW theory for us forever and ruin all our communist fun. Until that day though, he'll keep trying.

Poor El Gordo, I note no-one answered your question @59 - what caused the Younger Dryas?

I also note that you still don't seem to be able to look stuff up for yourself. No matter, it only took me five seconds. The prevailing theory is that a massive glacial lake in North America emptied suddenly into the North Atlantic, slowing the thermohaline circulation.

There is some evidence of an asteroid impact around the time too. . Other people don't see it though.

The ET impact theory of Firestone et al. looks dead in the water, while the fresh water melt closing down the 'conveyor belt' has more promise.

'The most spectacular aspect of the YD is that it ended extremely abruptly (around 11,600 years ago), and although the date cannot be known exactly, it is estimated from the annually-banded Greenland ice-core that the annual-mean temperature increased by as much as 10°C in 10 years.'

Now that's what I call global warming, none of your piddling 4 degrees over a century.

"The ET impact theory of Firestone et al. looks dead in the water, while the fresh water melt closing down the 'conveyor belt' has more promise."

Good to see we have our best mind applied to analysing the literature on this issue!

If it's not the "YD", it's the "MWP" or the "LIA".
Fuck knows what point these dolts think they're making every time they apply their amateurish understanding of history to their amateurish understanding of science.

Personally, I would think that a period of global warming causing an interruption to the Atlantic thermohaline circulation and resulting in sudden massive temperature drops should be of concern.

âI think you have to accept that the sceptics have kept us sane - some of them, anyway. They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for sceptics in science. They shouldnât be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasnât without sin.â

James Lovelock
March 2010

>*Now that's what I call global warming, none of your piddling 4 degrees over a century.*

Typical, *'that's what [el gordo] calls calls global warming*", [a non-global event](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epica-vostok-grip-40kyr.png).

El gordo, are you aware of the likely impact of a 4 degree rise in **global** temperature? Please consider initial conditions. Then also consider absolute change in addition to relative change.

Richard Alley's works is cited by GISP2 (Greenland) watchers. Here is his [2009 presentation to AGU](http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml)

It is more complicated, the Antarctic Cold Reversal began before the YD and they finished about the same time. The mechanisms involved appear to be different.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFMPP72B..11F

Instead of an ET impact we should be looking for a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the NH.

Nice try Gordo! You'll get these boffins yet!

This post-modern warming is different to the MWP, which evolved first in North America, European Russia and Greenland from about 950 to 1200. Most of Europe was between 1150 and 1300, while the SH warming only began in 1200 and lasted 200 years.

Presumably that is not happening now, so it's a good argument for your belief in AGW over natural variability. It's unique and universal.

Ha! Fatso's a Blog Scientist (BBlSc, U of Inter) in the same way that Andrew Cox, divorce laywer, is [also a Blog Scientist](http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/?p=6540&cp=64#comment-177671).

It never ceases to astound me how non-scientists not only understand how science is supposed to be conducted in an overall sense, but that they know how to analyse, how to interpret, and how to make inferences from, scientific data in which they have had no involvement deriving.

The arrogance of ignorance...

el gordo writes:

>*This post-modern warming is different to the MWP, which evolved first in [here, then later there, then down there]*

In el gordo's Post-Normal-Science the fact the the MWP didn't occur spacially and temporally globally is no obstical. It was simply an "evolved" warming.

El gordo, I wonder if that "evolved' warming is why the global temperature anomaly was [lower in the MWP than now](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/pcn/fig6-10b.png)?

Does Post-Normal-Science tell you that any regional or short cold spell is evidence of an evolving iceage (regardless of the overall global warming)?

jakerman

Had a look at Dr Ravetz's opinion and I reject his polyanna view as counterproductive. Science is not sociology.

'Does Post-Normal-Science tell you that any regional or short cold spell is evidence of an evolving iceage (regardless of the overall global warming)?'

No, in the same way that any regional or short warm spell is not evidence of global warming.

I like that graph, it has authority, if they could just reduce the hockey stick a little, we could call it a Modoki warming - similar but different to the MWP.

>*No, in the same way that any regional or short warm spell is not evidence of global warming.*

That's the difference between curret global warming and your allutions that the MWP trumps the current situation. Scince provides the data that inform our concerns, you on the contrary resort to wacky nonsense about evolved warming and latch on on to any cool pocket (or warm patch in the reconstrcutions) to make claims that are unsupported by the data as a whole.

>*I like that graph, it has authority, if they could just reduce the hockey stick a little, we could call it a Modoki warming - similar but different to the MWP.*

I don't know what you are refering to, but your past performance on this topic suggests that whatever you wanted to convey is likely misinformed guff anyway.

The arrogance of ignorance...

I think Dunning-Kruger is going to prove to be the key insight of our age - the paradoxical response to more information availability is more misunderstanding over the entire population.

Just noticed another gem from Ms Nova in response to my post pointing to Tamino's analysis of the hypothesis that "dropped stations" were dropped to create a false warming trend:

Note the Tamino site - as usual - there are grand statements about how it's so incredibly obviously wrong, but Tamino doesn't disagree that 75% of stations disappeared.

Red herring. (Does she really expect Tamino to deny the obvious - projection much?)

He doesn't show any of the specific individual examples used were wrong.

Red herring. The key claim addressed was that "dropouts" introduce a warming bias. This seems to have escaped Ms Nova.

Instead, through the power of homogenised graphs he tries to demonstrate that another conclusion is wrong...

See above. You know, that "other conclusion" that was being widely trumpeted throughout the blogosphere? "Dropouts cause fake warming"? (And associated sub-conclusions.) Or is that conclusion so sacrosanct that it may not be tested?

But as always, with homogenised samples the question remains: Who decides which stations qualify as "rural", or "urban".

Goal-post shifting. Especially if this is only asked when Tamino posts, but not when Watts posted... (Maybe she did - I didn't look for it.)

But in this case, perhaps she could start with the annotation on Tamino's graph? Or go looking at the GHCN data?

...Skeptics get down to the nuts and bolts of the evidence.

...which apparently does NOT include testing claims made by "authorities" such as Watts?

Those who disagree resort to attacking minor points, and using "black box" analysis where you have to trust someone, or it would take hours to go through all the parts of the statistical machinery to understand what they've done.

Attacking minor points such as "stations have been dropped to deliberately create false warming" by EVALUATING the evidence? Sheeesh. The doublethink hurts my head.

If the sciencey stuff is all too hard for Ms Nova personally, then she will have to trust someone - which SHOULD mean assessing their record, competency, skills and biases - or finding someone else of similar attributes to check their work. (In this case I'm pretty sure the data is public...)

I don't see much evidence of Ms Nova doing any of that. In that case, perhaps she shouldn't be making such confident pronouncements of fraud and bias about it, let alone confidently implying that Tamino's analysis is irrelevant?

...Why the heck aren't NOAA, or NASA using all the data they can get their hands on? Why leave so much out?

Apparently the possibility that station records are not generally real time and are therefore temporally limited - or may be dropped for logistic or budgetary reasons - does not compute. Therefore the ONLY explanation she can think of MUST be the right one - the scientists are winnowing out useful data for their own nefarious purposes!

Why use computers to model temperatures instead of using a thermometer.

Got to keep the red herring quota up, or the Union of Concerned Denialati will impose a draconian penance up to and including reading the entire AR4.

And that would never do.

Bummer, screwed up my blockquotes and forgot to preview. Sorry all.

I have only recently got into reading blogs in general and pretty much confine myself to issues surrounding climate change/AGW

I seem to have a disorder where I seek out reading people that I know I will disagree with and who I think are in words of Dawkins, have an IQ lower than an earthworm. Such as the Bolts/Novas etc. But still I do, and not sure what that says about me.

The reason for my post is the amazement at how these idiots parrot each other, a perfect example is type "Hide the decline National Geographic" in to the Google and all the blogs are shown talking about this decline in shown in a 1970's National Geo magazine. Now their posts are almost word for word, I guess it goes to the thinking that someone from Central HQ releases this stuff and emails it to these blogs for printing.

Only about 15% of Australian stations could be classified as rural, the rest are at post offices, airports and the like.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml

O/T Queensland schools will continue to get Realclimate and Deltoid but Watts and Climate Audit have been filtered out.

Now their posts are almost word for word, I guess it goes to the thinking that someone from Central HQ releases this stuff and emails it to these blogs for printing.

There's a politically conservative "echo chamber" in the US that essentially does this (and not just for climate change - for any message they want to saturate the mediaspace with). It has two benefits - no-one except the leaders has to decide what to say, and (for the web at least) it can clog up search engines making it hard to find alternate views because there are hundreds or even thousands of copies of the exact same core text posted to different web page addresses. It extends to TV and radio as well. It (tries to) give the impression that "everyone" thinks whatever talking points have been distributed are true and it would be silly to think otherwise ("message discipline" is a term of political art - and also a propaganda tactic).

It does make for interesting cognitive dissonance when the message of the day is "climate scientists are victims of groupthink [but you're smarter than them, right?]" - blasted out in near-identical form to hundreds and thousands of blogs where commenters pile in to agree.

Marc Morano has been a key source in the past. He no longer works directly for Inhofe, but appears to be doing much the same role on climate change. The Drudge Report is another key part of the echo chamber.

James Annan has blogged about Foster et al.'s demolition of Maclean et al.'s 2009 "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature". The real interesting bit to me was that it seems

McLean et al couldn't muster a reply that was publishable (and not for want of trying, either - it was simply rejected)

....
Those who disagree resort to attacking minor points, and using "black box" analysis where you have to trust someone, or it would take hours to go through all the parts of the statistical machinery to understand what they've done
.... .....

Lotharsson #149 that gibberish from Nova comes from her own blog does it? This calibre of "work" warrants a fisking from Tim all by itself I reckon. How much foolishness can one woman - and her merry band of wide-mouthed admirers - get away with?

California's western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

By Mari N. Jensen, UA College of Science March 17, 2010

The MWP was universal, the science is settled.

el gordo

I am not following your logic, you are claiming that an increase in scrub/forest/bush fires is evidence of a warm trend?

Cold dry areas are also able to burn, in fact it is the dryness that is the main factor not the warm.

Plenty of evidence of fires in Australia during the last glacial period.

P. Lewis, McLean et al is still being trumpeted as a disproof of AGW. On a recent The Drum thread it was even claimed that it was not coming from deniers because (IIRC) Carter had a PhD in some relevant field! On the same thread one "John McLean" asserted that he had a peer-reviewed paper on climate change, and that he could personally assure us that the science was "crap". Despite requests for references he did not provide any.

You can see the disingenuous technique at work - write a paper with a body that can pass peer review, add some unsupported speculation in end comments and hope that no-one forces you to remove it before publication, then trumpet even less supported "conclusions" or "implications" of your paper in the public sphere where most people won't be aware that your paper does not support them.

Lotharsson #149 that gibberish from Nova comes from her own blog does it?

No, it was posted on a climate change thread at The Drum (ABC). IIRC not on the one she wrote, the Lewandewsky (sp?) article on psychology of denialism. She had other ... interesting ... comments on her own article.

What is the optimal temperature of the planet?

Dengue virus like it warm, so do large repitles. Coastal cities and 6.7 billion humans like the climate they evolved in.

Read [AR4 WG2](http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.htm).

This calibre of "work" warrants a fisking from Tim all by itself I reckon.

It certainly seems like a good candidate. The biggest problem might be that Ms Nova is providing a target rich environment ;-)

Given the Foster et al. demolition soon to be published, I don't think MacClean, de Freitas and Ward or their fawning acolytes will be trumpeting their 2009 "contribution" too much longer.

...I don't think MacClean, de Freitas and Ward or their fawning acolytes will be trumpeting their 2009 "contribution" too much longer.

I don't think that will stop them :-( On other issues we see the same debunked claims over and over again.

Post hoc

I agree, in Australia the fires increased with the coming of humans, but obviously the human impact in America was negligible before 800 and after 1300.

I don't think that will stop them :-( On other issues we see the same debunked claims over and over again.

I should add that you can see this dynamic at work on any of the climate change threads at The Drum - up to and including Graeme Bird posting over and over again "there's no empirical evidence", and when people post pointers to some "no, that's not" or "that's a lie", aided and abetted by people still insisting that "McIntyre destroyed the hockey stick" and "the hockey stick does not appear in the AR4".

el gordo,

>*California's western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.*

>*The MWP was universal, the science is settled.*

Non sequitur el gordo. California's western Sierra Nevada is not the globe, among other problems with your statement.

You keep [making my point](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2356…).

>*That's the difference between curret global warming and your allutions that the MWP trumps the current situation. Scince provides the data that inform our concerns, you on the contrary resort to wacky nonsense about evolved warming and latch on on to any cool pocket (or warm patch in the reconstrcutions) to make claims that are unsupported by the data as a whole.*

[Here is the story](http://uanews.org/node/30720) on the paper which el gordo abused to his own ends.

Hubert Lamb, the first head of CRU, wrote that the warmest times in North America were between 950 and 1200. It was warm and droughty for hundreds of years.

Post hoc set me thinking about the Asians coming across the Bering Strait to people the Americas. There was lower sea level, but so much ice it would be hard to find a meal.

This recent paper suggests a fresh water Arctic lake may be the clue to their survival and ultimately the beginning of MIS stage 2.

http://cgrg.geog.uvic.ca/abstracts/ReichmuthDidMarine.html

[Disingenous Bazaro](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2360…), you need [this](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2359…) even more than el gordo.

"Al Bore", I'm willing to bet, is Brent who said something almost identical in another thread. Perhaps Tim can compare IP's for us.

Don't forget, when you are confused about the difference between regional and global, or you want to approximately quantify the amount of warming, you can go to the best available peer reviewed [data to put warming into context](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/pcn/pcn.html).

John at 171, I remembered that [same disingenuous snake](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) as you recalled.

Brent, BTW, thanks for the new lable, it [fits you like a glove](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).

California's Sierra Nevada experienced severe drought and warm conditions for more than 200 years before 1112 and for more than 140 years before 1350. This leaves a 100 year gap in the middle of the MWP, which was presumably warm and wet.

Those droughty years were worse than anything we have seen in America over the past 150 years, so postmodern warming is probably a Modoki.

el gordo,

what on Earth do you mean by this: *human impact in America was negligible before 800 and after 1300*

After 1300???? You have to be kidding. Human impact on biomes across the Nearctic have been immense since 1300 (well, esepcially since 1800). And human impact on mega-fauna in North America approximately 10,000 years ago may have been catastrophic and led to landscape-wide changes in vegetation.

>*Those droughty years were worse than anything we have seen in America over the past 150 years, so postmodern warming is probably a Modoki.*

You can't [help yourself](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2359…) el gordo. [But do try](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2360…)

I actually find el gordo's musings to be quite comical. I like Bernard and Lotharsson's take on him. I encountered quite a few of these 'blog scientific experts' on a contrarian site a few years ago. Simply put, they possess no expertise whatsoever in certain fields but try and give the impression that they are not only on top of the subject but have found errors and loopholes that have somehow bypassed the academics doing the actual research. Because they have read a few papers and scanned a few blog sites, the armchair experts suddenly think that they are professionals possessing infinite wisdom. My field is population and evolutionary ecology and I am very cautious when it comes to disagreement with the prevailing views in fields outside of my own. But people like Brent, Sunspot, and especially el gordo (I could name many others from previous threads) hold no such reservations. They appear to believe that years of study in universities, producing peer-reviewed studies in rigid journals, and attending workshops and conferences where these issues are discussed and debated are not necessary pre-requisites to gain expertise in any scientific field. Just sit on your butt and surf the internet, download a few studies, and presto! Instant expertise.

I suppose these people serve a useful function. They make me realize how far out of touch from scientific reality some people are while they are giving off an air of pompous self-belief that defies rational explanation.

Re: References to McLean's El Nino paper.

There is a reponse to this paper summarised by John Cook at Sceptical Science. The method used to filter the data makes the result spurious.

In effect, the authors (McLean et al) took two functions
- A cyclical function (Southern Oscillation)
- That function, plus another one (Global Temperature = SO + Other Forcings).

Basically, they filtered the functions to remove everything except the SO, then used the resulting correlation to claim that the 2nd function (unfiltered) was correlated to the first (filtered).

http://www.skepticalscience.com/peer-reviewed-response-to-McLean-El-Nin…

Some comments show how the filter used is perfect for demonstrating increasing Global Warming independent of the SO.

Apologies, 4th para in 178 should read:

Basically, they filtered the functions to remove everything except the SO, then used the resulting correlation to claim that the 2nd function (unfiltered) was correlated to the first (UNfiltered).

>I agree, in Australia the fires increased with the coming of humans, but obviously the human impact in America was negligible before 800 and after 1300.

Posted by: el gordo | March 18, 2010 12:33 AM

Fatso, you are so funny when you show off your ignorance.

>[Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation and Yosemite Fire Management Partner in Prescribed Fire Project](http://www.firescape.us/yosemite.pdf)

>>A very unique prescribed fire project was completed this fall in Yosemite Valley. Yosemite fire managers and
members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation completed this project in partnership for both ecological and cultural resource benefit. This fire was timed to try to control the non-native and invasive Himalayan blackberry and to encourage growth of traditionally used plants.

>>Yosemite firefighters received the opportunity to work with __the Miwuk who have thousands of years of burning experience. The indigenous people of Yosemite Valley have used fire as a tool for thousands of years. These anthropogenic fires__ clear meadows and open the canopy
for sun-loving species like the black oak -- a staple
food source for the indigenous people of Yosemite Valley.
A traditional ceremony preceded the prescribed fire project and the Miwuk employed traditional ignition methods.

We are not talking about mega fauna extinction (obviously that had nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with homo sapiens) we are discussing the fire regime in a small section of the world.

The natives used traditional ignition methods and occasionally the fires got out of control in the warm droughty conditions which lasted for hundreds of years. The MWP was real and universal in its impact.

>*The MWP was real and universal in its impact.*

Thus el gordo concludes global warming is determined via from cherry picked regions, this time California's western Sierra Nevada.

shorter el gordo: universal = California's western Sierra Nevada.

Grow up elgordo. a change in ocean current can make regional changes of this scale.

It was a long stretch, over hundreds of years, which indicates we are dealing with climate change.

>*It was a long stretch, over hundreds of years, which indicates we are dealing with climate change.*

In a region, not globally. Regional climate change is different to global climate change.

'CSIRO research has shown that higher greenhouse gas levels are likely to have caused about half of the winter rainfall reduction in south-west Western Australia.' This quote is from their recent Climate Statement.

You will slavishly accept this comment, that a small section of the west is experiencing an anomaly and so it must be caused by humans, even though it's regional and over a short time span.

El Gordo wittered:

even though it's regional and over a short time span.

Snapshot

The statement was clearly not short term but referred to a a century long decline

âWith this snapshot, Australians will be better prepared for the next step of planning for how to adapt to a changing climate and how to also take action to reduce the impacts of climate change."

Billions will be spent on adapting to global warming. Does this mean that when global cooling takes hold over the next decade we can consider criminal negligence charges against the propaganda merchants?

If people do not define real situations as real, they are nevertheless real in their consequences.

el gordo writes:

>*The MWP was real and universal in its impact.*

el gordo, your [past performace suggest](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/open_thread_42.php#comment-2293…) you won't correct such false statmenets, not even when presented with [strong couter evidence](http://i47.tinypic.com/50nzt4.jpg).

Such is the [way of the denialist](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/the_hate_mail_campaign_against…).

>*You will slavishly accept this comment, that a small section of the west is experiencing an anomaly and so it must be caused by humans, even though it's regional and over a short time span.*

It's almost like you can count of el gordo to [distort and misreprents the situation](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/gistemp/mean:240/plot/gis…).

Who would have thunk that global warming was supported by Australia data only but not in global average temperatures, thanks for educating us el gordo.

They appear to believe that years of study in universities, producing peer-reviewed studies in rigid journals, and attending workshops and conferences where these issues are discussed and debated are not necessary pre-requisites to gain expertise in any scientific field.

Nah, Jeff, that's wrong.

They appear to believe that years of tertiary study and tests followed by years of work and debate and peer review in academic environments make one less likely to come to an accurate understanding than a dilletante.

The most amusing part is that the mechanism they cite as the basis for this astonishing claim is groupthink. How do they know this? Did they employ robust evidence gathering processes coupled to rigourous analysis followed by probing peer review? Nah, they read it on a blog where pretty much everyone agrees that it must be so. But they aren't engagged in groupthink - because that only applies to academics, right?

El Gordo wittered some more:

Billions will be spent on adapting to global warming. Does this mean that when global cooling takes hold over the next decade we can consider criminal negligence charges against the propaganda merchants?

And yet just yesterday he was saying he'd have to drop his "global cooling mantra".

Is this the chap whol was saying climate scientists should communictae so his "comrades" amongst the armies of the undead could understand? He is surely confusing them right now by grunting in the wrong tone.

Gordito,

>The natives used traditional ignition methods and occasionally the fires got out of control in the warm droughty conditions which lasted for hundreds of years. The MWP was real and universal in its impact.

Argumentum et cloaca. The Medieval Climate Anomaly was real and global-wide, but that didn't mean significantly higher global temperatures.

[Observe:](http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Temperature_Pattern_MWP.gif)

The Miwuk weren't idiots. Their controlled burns were in late spring and early summer (May - early June) when there is still plenty of moisture in the soil and undergrowth, obviating the kind of out of control firestorms that can scar the remarkably fire-resistant Sequoia Gigantea. What we have in the Medieval Climate Anomaly is an enhanced La Niña, which generally brings cooler temperatures to the California Coast, but summer drought to the Sierras and the American Southwest and, consequently, hot, dry, Santa Ana winds late in the fire season (Late Aug. - Sept. {nowadays into Oct.}) that often cause lightning fed firestorms in the Southern Sierra Nevada (nowadays often caused by stupid white people).

Why does Roy Spencer's [TLT 5.3](http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.3) alogrithm [cut current outliers](http://i39.tinypic.com/2jg5l4l.jpg) but [not cut](http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2) the 1998 outliers.

Why is the cut off right at the peak of 1998? Surely any system change right at that extreme peak should raise questions about the effects of such a system change.

Satelite anomalies far exceed GISS anomalies [for 1998 and 2010](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1995/plot/uah/from:1995/p…) but only 2010 get a corretion factor?

luminous

The MCA is an enhanced La Nina. I like it and will second the motion, if I can find some peer review to support it.

luminous

Probably talking to myself here, but I found something useful to go on with.

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N27/EDIT.php

You do realize of course that the term 'Medieval Climate Anomaly' is a blatant attempt to hide the incline of the MWP? No matter, it will do.

o/t In the good old days over at the Bolter, I considered you to be one of the most articulate of the trolls in that place. Keep up the good work and no matter what the outcome of this debate, your future is assured.

Poor Gordo. He wants us to believe that the Earth looked like this during the so-called MWP.

Saying the Earth was anything less is proof of warmist doctoring.

Why does Roy Spencer's TLT 5.3 alogrithm cut current outliers but not cut the 1998 outliers.

Shouldn't there be a blogswell crescendo calling for him to release the code and prove he's not committing "fraud"? Where's McIntyre when there's a FOIA request or fifty to be filed?

;-)

>*the term 'Medieval Climate Anomaly' is a blatant attempt to hide the incline of the MWP*

Show us your data el gordo.

Luminous is correct.

https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5923/78

El Lardo,

[Peer reviewed](http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf)

Pretty much shows the Idsos are pulling crap from their butts. Tambien.

A decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1978 has just been verified by the raw balloon data. It was a very sharp downward trend, but the crew at CRU thought it best to smooth that out.

The satellite data perfectly match the balloon data from 1979 onwards, so they argue the balloon data from the battle of Britain to the great climate shift of 1976 is good.

They hide an incline (MCA, then hide a decline after the war and now they have been caught trying to hide the postmodern decline. It doesn't look good for the zealots.

el gordo will say anything, and correct nothing.

You are [a disgrace](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2361…) el gordo. So blind you can't even correctly call who the zealots are.

Flash Gordo @200,

This kind of thing is meaningless without a reliable source. By reliable I mean not CO2 "science" or ICECAP. Please take note and henceforth do not make such proclaimations without linking to appropriate substantiating evidence.

kthnxbye

Stu

Its over at Watts, I didn't want to offend. They are looking at old magazines in search of real temperatures trends, before adjustment.

El Gordo said: "Its over at Watts. They are looking at old magazines in search of real temperatures trends, before adjustment".

Of course they are, and no doubt it'll be contemporary gum wrapper comic strips and old fortune cookies after that.

The wazos over there will do anything other than accept the overwhelming scientific consensus.

They are looking at old magazines in search of real temperatures trends, before adjustment.

They are (again) looking for a figleaf, hoping they can cherrypick some errors in the data that favour their preferred narrative. After all, it's better to leave known errors uncorrected if it suits your argument, no? Simply call it "adjustment" instead of "correction" and hope the readers fall for your cute little reframing effort.

And given that all real world data has some level of error, and the chances are fairly good that any given instance of an error has either sign, they should be able to ALWAYS find some that suits their "argument" as long as they avoid drawing attention to those that go against their narrative.

Does anyone see SurfaceStations.org trumpeting the fact that "poorly sited stations" according to their criteria are responsible for - if anything - introducing a slight cooling bias? Or did they highlight instead the number of "poorly sited stations" with their "estimated errors" and leave readers to draw their own conclusions? Has Watts told his readers that there was no "systematic weeding out" of warmer stations - and that if there had been it would have introduced a slight cooling trend? Or does he continue to mislead his readers by reporting on it and let them draw their own false conclusions? What would be the scientific thing to do?

It's ironic that "skeptics" are so unskeptical of their "skeptical" sources and so willing to indulge in groupthink on such a flimsy basis.

Lotharsson

Both sides are hardening their resolve to win this particular battle and groupthink is unavoidable in a politically charged environment, but I agree with your sentiments.

Both sides are hardening their resolve to win this particular battle...

It might help to define your terms - what are the "sides" and what is the "battle"?

If you're talking about the core science there's very little battle going on. The "skeptics" haven't come up with anything non-trivial and robust for a long time now - and whatever has come up with those attributes in the past has been generally incorporated into core "science". There remain plenty of uncertainties and unsettled questions, but little evidence to suggest these will have an impact on the core.

If you're talking about the battle for public opinion about what the science says, that's a different kettle of fish. (Whether there should be such a battle is another question entirely.)

If you're talking about the battle for public opinion about whether to believe the science, that's different again. This is clearly going on...but one side's tactics are largely based on dishonesty.

If you're talking about the battle of ideas for what to do about it, that's still different again...

Oh look:

NASA: âIt is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010â³

There's also a lot of interesting stuff in there about the denialists and their timewasting FOI requests.

As you all know I'm a serial denier, so when BoM suggests this record breaking Melbourne heat spell has a climate quality about it, I automatically thought UHI.

http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20100319.shtml

Global warming hysteria is looking like a cargo cult.

el gordo (209): the problem with being an automaton is it limits your critical thinking capabilities somewhat, not to mention your ability to read. Ditto jumping to conclusions. Were you not such a short-sighted smart-arse you'd have read the last para in the press release...
"Melbourneâs record run reflects the very warm conditions that have been experienced across Victoria since the start of last winter. Victoriaâs mean temperature for the nine months from June 2009 to February 2010 is 15.3 degrees, the highest on record, and is 1.4 degrees above the 1961-90 average. The previous record of 15.1 degrees was set in 1980"

... which would have informed you that your pet UHI theory is bollocks (save that the entire state of Victoria has been concreted over since February).

If you knew any history El Ignoranto, you'd know that of all the things to claim, cargo cult would be laughable. It's nearly the polar opposite of that.

Your mainstream deniers attest to that all the time. They are the patrons of the cargo cult.

... which would have informed you that your pet UHI theory is bollocks (save that the entire state of Victoria has been concreted over since February).

gordo missed this one. his reading ability isn t better than his writing ability. and his writing is obviously limited to a single sentence...

The papers were talking about Melbourne temperatures, which includes the station 086071 at Latrobe street on a traffic island surrounded by ashphalt on one of Melbourne's busiest roads.

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/hot-city-or-global-warming/

Night min temps are increasing across the board, that must be UHI.

el gordo,
perhaps you could organise a WUWT style check of temperature stations in Melbourne. I live in the city so I will keep a look out for a fat guy wearing his underpants on his head.

Very amusing and original.

Night min temps are increasing across the board, that must be UHI.

the article you linked to, is from Michael Hammer. it is using an idiotic methodology (comparing absolute temperature values).

RSS satellite data can be found here.

http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html

the claim that the Victoria warming is UHI effect is plain out stupid.

Night min temps are increasing across the board, that must be UHI.

IIRC it's expected to do so due to GHG warming (which slow down cooling rates once the sun goes away), which would mean that the conclusion "that must be UHI" does not follow from the evidence.

Fran

So the Denialati read Richard Feynman and regard him as heroic, what is your problem?

A well known sociologists called Robert Merton said something to the effect that propaganda which promotes consensus in a democracy is one mechanism for defending against social anomie. In theory it seemed possible, but in practice....

Here's a bit more on the UHI from Warwick Hughes.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/gissbom.htm

[Fatso](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2364…).

Ockham's razor slices your thinking into wafer-thin shavings. Basically, what you are saying is that owing to an unaccounted-for urban heat island effect, there has been no record warm period for metropolitan Melbourne, but hey, outside of the city something completely different has occurred, and the observed warming is real.

You're a serial fool as well as being a serial denier.

I will make a prediction...

Fatso will continue to make vacuous, ill-considered, unsupported, pseudoscientific claims, that are instantly refuted by even a mildly-skilled lay person, until his tally of debunked idiotic pronouncements moves from well in the region of three figures to the four-figure mark.

And even then he might not stop: there is no bottom to Stupid, so he has an inexhaustible well of the stuff to tap.

I hope that your nanny has put corks on the tines of all of your forks.

NASA: âIt is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010â³

The 12-month period ending with February was the third warmest in GISS's record and the way March is going, the 12-month period ending with March will be about equal the record warmest. If April is similar to the average of the past 9 months then the 12-month record will be reached by the end of April. No need to wait another 8 months till the end of the year.

Anti-science malware is everywhere!

1. John Cook reports that his Skeptical Science web site was attacked by crackers.
2. I seem to have spotted malware running on a CRU machine.

This suggested that the regional temperature changes observed over the decade were unlikely to be observed without the influence of human greenhouse emissions, says Kearney.

He and colleagues used temperature records from the Laverton weather station, located on Melbourne's outer edge.

This weather station was used to avoid the "urban heat island" effect of the city of Melbourne on temperature records, says Kearney.

ABC Science March 17

Bollocks, Laverton is now residential.

Over which decade, Gordozola? The last decade?

Interestingly, according to wikipedia (damn, I know, get a reliable source etc. But it's bedtime.), Laverton had only 162 more people living in it in 2006 than in 1961 - a total of 4502 residents. Sounds like a real boom town...

I have just come back from my morning bike ride through Laverton and yes it is still outer edge.

It is weather station 087031 at the Laverton RAAF base. Have a look at its location 37.86° S, 144.76° E in Google maps oh "el gordo con los calzoncillos en la cabeza"

Hmmm...

[My prediction](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2364…) was fulfilled [less than 9 and 1/2 hours later](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2365…).

Fatso's guff was almost immediately slapped down by Stu and especially [by MikeH](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2365…).

The guy just doesn't learn.

Which is the root of his problem, really...

Just came back to mop up the mess and found these words along the way.

'They used a combination of computer models to create a theoretical historical temperature record covering an area (grid cell) that includes Melbourne and Laverton. The models include inputs for man-made and natural effects on temperature.

The temperature record in Laverton (adjusted for UHI, I donât know) correlates with the computer models therefore validates the model. Remove the man-made inputs and they no longer correlate thus validating AGW.'

Stephen J. of Erskineville (author)

Just came back to ignore the mockery of my everchanging, contradictory views and to try and launch the topic off on another pointless tangent.

Fixed.

[Prediction](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2364…) fulfilled [again](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2365…).