I should have set this up much earlier, and have done so now because I want to alert readers to an excellent essay by Willis Eschenbach about whether there has been any acceleration in sea-level rise in the satellite period. Sea-levels were the subject of a recent essay.
He says No, after some straightforward analysis which is accessible to most readers. It might be more accurate to say that he cannot find any significant acceleration in the satellite data. The Comments are worth reading, because there are some interesting critical comments. And yes, Tamino says the opposite, but then Tamino doesn’t like criticism, and bans you if you offer any.
LATER:
Commenters sometimes chide one another for ‘cherry-picking’ — choosing particular starting and finishing dates to suggest a trend. Whoever did this graph (I’ve lost where it came from) has provided all sorts of trends , each of which depends on where you start and where you finish. You can see that the possibilities are almost endless.
Yes, 1sky1’s comments seem sound to me. I don’t know how anyone could look at Fig 1 and conclude “is sea level rise accelerating? Visually you’d have to say no”. That red line looks significantly steeper to me post 2010 than pre 2010, even with those negative dips after 2010.
I think 1sky1 is also correct in his critique of this claim: “in the quadratic fit, the second term (acceleration) is NOT statistically significant (p-value=0.37)”. As 1sky1 says, I think that just means the acceleration (if there is any) is not constant, and that’s pretty obvious just looking at the graph.
Here is Lomborg’s quick summary of Gore’s AIS nonsense. This article appeared in the WSJ.
http://www.lomborg.com/sites/lomborg.com/files/art_bl_2017-07-29_wsj.pdf
And here is some more detail on the way alarmists avoid the facts to peddle their junk:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/12/peter-stott-being-economical-with-the-truth/
How is: fitting data with increasing numbers of terms, and concluding the only one among them that is statistically significant is the first term (a linear equation) and then trying to support this by presenting residuals of fits using from one to five terms: anything like;
“straightforward analysis which is accessible to most readers. ”
This looks like second or third year undergraduate statistics to me. How does this relate to “most readers”?
A straightforward analysis would be the Pearson coefficient of correlation to a linear (ie non-accelerating) tend. This can be accomplished with any modern spreadsheet program.
Informal, unrefereed, essays from biased websites such as WUWT are not really suitable for any rigorous attempt to explore the impacts of global warming.
Blithering again, blith?
Instead of sticking your head out the window?
Chris, if Don said check out the sea-level rise graph, you would then complain about how subjective ones eyes are and the lack of scientific rigour.
dlb
If you download the dataset (over 800 data) and check out the sea level-rise, you will see, with sufficient rigor that there was a early period of gentle rise – followed by a short period 2010-2012 of deceleration – and then a steeper rise thereafter.
If you look at the NASA sea level chart you can see short-run decelerations near 2010, 2013, 2016 but a general rise overall.
This supports JimboR’s point.
I doubt any mathematical process can produce an accurate result as there are different numbers of data in each year and this would introduce a bias unless some correction was applied.
“If you look at the NASA sea level chart you can see short-run decelerations near 2010, 2013, 2016 but a general rise overall”
Of course you will see a general rise, the issue is whether it is accelerating. Take all those 800 points, average per year and look at your graph …. diddly-squat acceleration. Fit it to a second order polynomial curve and check for acceleration and you get an extra increase 0.0064 mm per year on the 3.4 mm a year trend. Again diddly-squat with maths.
“I doubt any mathematical process can produce an accurate result as there are different numbers of data in each year and this would introduce a bias unless some correction was applied.”
And, blith, when you apply your enuresis nervosa, that floats your boat even higher.
And climate “scientists” demonstrate once again how little they really know about the science of climate:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/12/some-of-the-worlds-largest-non-polar-glaciers-are-expanding-despite-global-warming/
You can almost see Pauline thinking…. “I need to ring my sister and tell her to pack her bags for Canberra”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-09/malcolm-roberts-responds-to-questions-from-chris-uhlmann/8790216
The 2014 Woppelmann et al study checked the tide gauges vertical land movement around the globe before they calculated SLR. And they then found SLR of about 2.1mm year in the NH and 1mm a year in the SH. That’s a mean of about 1.5 mm a year for global SLR or about 150 mm ( 6 inches) a century.
Here’s the Co2 Science summary and the link.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V17/dec/a9.php
A New Method of Assessing the Rate of Global Sea Level Rise
Paper Reviewed
Woppelmann, G., Marcos, M., Santamaria-Gomez, A., Martin-Miguez, B., Bouin, M.-N. and Gravelle, M. 2014. Evidence for a differential sea level rise between hemispheres over the twentieth century. Geophysical Research Letters 41: 1639-1643.
As a preface to describing their new approach to the subject, Woppelmann et al. (2014) write that “whichever data analysis strategy is employed, the evidence for sea level rise primarily comes from the information provided by long tide gauge records,” which “are mainly located along the coasts of northeast America or western Europe.” And given this uneven distribution, they say that “information on long-term spatial variability is limited,” citing Woodworth (2006), while additionally noting that “in the majority of studies the tide gauge records have only been corrected for the vertical land motion associated with the glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA),” citing Peltier (2004). And irrespective of the accuracy of the GIA models involved, they state that “other geophysical processes can cause vertical displacements of the land upon which the tide gauges are grounded,” citing as examples the facts that (1) “delta regions are prone to subsidence processes, which are often caused by sediment compaction and removal of underground water,” as noted by Kolker et al. (2011) and Woppelmann et al. (2013), and that (2) “tectonically active areas are likely to display abrupt vertical land movements,” citing Ballu et al. (2011).
The way in which the six European researchers overcame this latter problem was to accurately determine the vertical motion of the land upon which each of the tide gauges employed in their study was located. This they did, based on data they obtained from the Global Positioning System (GPS) that the University of La Rochelle consortium (Santamaria-Gomez et al., 2012) used to produce the final gauge-site vertical velocities. And what did their results reveal?
Woppelmann et al. (2014) report that their work revealed the existence of “a clearly distinct behavior between the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres,” with mean sea level rates of rise of 2.0 mm/year and 1.1 mm/year, respectively. And given the coherent spatial patterns they observed, they go on to say that a mean global sea level rate-of-rise value of 1.5 ± 0.5 mm/year is inferred from “a weighted average of the hemispheric trends according to the area they represent.” And they note that these findings “challenge the widely accepted value of global sea level rise for the twentieth century.”
References
Ballu, V., Bouin, M.-N., Simeoni, P., Crawford, W.C., Calmant, S., Bore, J., Kanas, T. and Pelletier, B. 2011. Comparing the role of absolute sea-level rise and vertical tectonic motions in coastal flooding, Tores Islands (Vanuatu). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108: 13,019-13,022.
Kolker, A.S., Allison, M.A. and Hameed, S. 2011. An evaluation of subsidence rates and sea-level variability in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Geophysical Research Letters 38: 10.1029/2011GL049458.
Peltier, W.R. 2004. Global glacial isostasy and the surface of the Ice-Age Earth: The ICE-5G (VM2) model and GRACE. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 32: 111-149.
Santamaria-Gomez, A., Gravelle, M., Collilieux, X., Guichard, M., Martin-Miguez, B., Tiphaneau, P. and Woppelmann, G. 2012. Mitigating the effects of vertical land motion in tide gauge records using state-of-the-art GPS velocity field. Global and Planetary Change 98-99: 6-17.
Woodworth, P.L. 2006. Some important issues to do with long-term sea level change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 364: 787-803.
Woppelmann, G., Le Cozannet, G., de Michele, M., Raucoules, D., Cazenave, A., Garcin, M., Hanson, S., Marcos, M. and Santamaria-Gomez, A. 2013. Is land subsidence increasing the exposure to sea level rise in Alexandria, Egypt? Geophysical Research Letters 40: 1-5.
Posted 8 December 2014
The Hunter et al 2003 study found that SLR at Port Arthur’s “Isle of the dead” from 1841 to 2002 was about 1mm a year. That’s about 100 mm a century or about 4 inches.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N9/C1.php
Sea Level at Port Arthur, Tasmania Reference
Hunter, J., Coleman, R. and Pugh, D. 2003. The sea level at Port Arthur, Tasmania, from 1841 to the present. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2002GL016813.
Background
The authors write that “on 1 July 1841, a sea level benchmark was struck on a small cliff on the Isle of the Dead, near the penal settlement of Port Arthur, Tasmania … by T.J. Lempriere, an amateur scientist and storekeeper at Port Arthur, and Captain James Clark Ross, who was visiting Tasmania during his explorations of 1839-43.”
What was done
Hunter et al. compared Lempriere’s measurements of 1841-1842 with observations made at Port Arthur in 1875-1905, 1972 and 1999-2002.
What was learned
The full set of data indicated an average rate of sea level rise, relative to the land, of 0.8 ± 0.2 mm/year over the period 1841 to 2002, which yields, in their words, “an estimate of average sea level rise due to an increase in the volume of the oceans of 1.0 ± 0.3 mm/year, over the same period.”
What it means
The three researchers say their results may be compared with recent estimates for the two longest (continuous) Australian records of Fremantle and Fort Denison of 1.6 and 1.2 mm/year, respectively, after glacial isostatic adjustment, citing Lambeck (2002). Noting that “historic and modern records from Port Arthur, Tasmania, cover the longest time span of any sea level observations in the Southern Hemisphere and are related to a single benchmark,” they say “they provide a significant contribution to our knowledge of past sea level rise in this data-sparse region.” And part of that significance must reside in their noting that their sea level rate-of-change results “are at the lower end of the recent estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on global average rise for the 20th century.”
Reference
Lambeck, K. 2002. Sea level change from Mid Holocene to recent time: An Australian example with global implications. In: Ice Sheets, Sea Level and the Dynamic Earth. American Geophysical Union, Washington DC, Geodynamics Series 29: 33-50.
I’ll use this thread to alert readers to an essay by Nick Stokes (not a sceptic) at WUWT on temperature adjustments. It is excellent that Nick has been asked to write this essay, and it is about ‘adjustments’ to raw temperature data. I read it carefully, and read all the comments as well (300+ of them). I came away with my usual irritated query: why are we doing this? Why is it important to have an ‘average global temperature’. It is plain from his essay and the critiques that, as I wrote ten years ago, the data we now have are rubbery, indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates. Oh dear. Such a terrible waste of time and energy, and money too.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/08/bom-raw-temperature-data-ghcn-and-global-averages/
There are readers who think that WUWT is biassed. It is sceptical, certainly. But it does encourage real debate and discussion, as here, as does Judith Curry at Climate etc.
“it is about ‘adjustments’ to raw temperature data…..I came away with my usual irritated query: why are we doing this?”
To improve the quality of the data. As Nick Stokes says in his submission to the GWPF temperature data review:
Global averages are averages of millions of individual readings. Unbiased noise is very heavily damped in the result. The
big source of error is bias, which is not damped in the same way. The essential purpose of homogenisation is to identify
and minimise this bias. The tradeoff vs added unbiased noise is advantageous, because of that damping.
(http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/GHCN/gwpf/submgwpf.pdf)
“Why is it important to have an ‘average global temperature’”
The same reason it’s important to have a temperature gauge on your car dashboard. So you can monitor it, look for anomalies and take preventative action before major damage is done.
“indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates.”
All physical measurements are estimates. The processes you find so irritating are an attempt to improve their accuracy. Nick runs his own global temperature index (TempLS) based on unadjusted data, and the differences between his and the major indices are small. Which is more accurate? Who knows… and does it matter so long as they both show the same trends?
> ” … an attempt to improve their accuracy …”
Based on what assumptions, exactly ?
It’s the deliberate lack of transparency, not the dicking-around, that causes the irritation. See the recent BoM episode, where faulty thermometers were suddenly blamed – but only after opaque dicking-around was exposed. Even then, never detailed was what the exact fault with the thermometers actually was.
Jimbo R, I think the correct question is, ” why are we wasting trillions of dollars on this silly nonsense.” Unless you can tell us how this will make any difference to climate change?
So please inform us how this hoped for change would be beneficial for the climate by 2030 or 2050 or 2100? So come on tell us how any mitigation can work?
“It is plain from his essay and the critiques that….”
I can’t claim to have read the comments, but I did read his essay and I can’t imagine what you found alarming in that. It seemed a pretty good description of how the temperature reading travels from sensor to global unadjusted GHCN. I can only assume that your alarm must have come from the 300+ comments. For those of us a little less time rich than you, perhaps you could point to which comments in particular you found convincingly alarming.
Alas, I’m not time-rich at all, but had a relatively free Sunday. I didn’t find the essay or the comments alarming. Where did you get that from? We do not need all this time and energy trying to find an average global temperature, which means nothing to anyone anywhere — UNLESS you think that the world is warming up at a terrible rate and that we are all doomed. Even with ‘adjusted’ readings there is no sign of that occurring. It was, and is and, I think, will be a delusion.
Yes, fair point, “alarming” is the wrong word, let me rephrase. With regards these sentences:
“It is plain from his essay and the critiques that, as I wrote ten years ago, the data we now have are rubbery, indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates. ”
Which part of his essay led you to that conclusion (or more correctly, reconfirmed that early conclusion)? Or is it all in the comments, and if so, which ones?
“We do not need all this time and energy trying to find an average global temperature, which means nothing to anyone anywhere ”
Presumably most scientists would groan at this sort of ‘shooting the messenger’.
Average global temperatures are trying to tell you something although the average for the northern hemisphere is different to the southern.
But the trends are consistent.
There is no license to ignore global warming.
Jimbo R ( again) and Chris, I think the correct question is, ” why are we wasting trillions of dollars on this silly nonsense.” Unless you can tell us how this will make any difference to climate change?
So please inform us how this hoped for change would be beneficial for the climate by 2030 or 2050 or 2100? So come on tell us how any mitigation can actually work?
What difference would I notice in Melbourne or Darwin or NYork or London or Greenland or the Sahara or Tokyo or Istanbul or Moscow or Shanghai or ????. I mean even Dr Hansen knows that Paris COP 21 is just BS and fra-d, so where do you get your evidence that proves him wrong? IOW why waste endless trillions $ for no measurable return?
Neville, I believe it is called herd instinct and never mind the consequences:
‘MacDonald’s opinion about an inhibiting impact of funding, policy and politics on scientific innovation is reflected in this 2003 quote, ”In all science there is a strong ‘herd instinct’, and interactions occur largely within these herds. They may argue vigorously about details, but they maintain solidarity, or close ranks, when challenged by other herds or individuals. The herd instinct is strengthened greatly if those making funding decisions are members of that herd. Strays do not get funded, and their work, no matter how innovative, is neglected as the herd rumbles on. Herd members will change their views rapidly, however, if the herd leaders change direction. By contrast, if the innovators are not part of the herd it becomes very difficult, or impossible, for them to change the herd’s direction.”’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_J._F._MacDonald
Neville
I do not think I have ever claimed that the present proposals, from Paris or wherever, or proposed budgets are anywhere near sufficient, and I feel they will leave the fate of the Earth pretty much unaffected.
We need a different approach, but one that humanity is incapable of undertaking, so GHG’s will continue to accumulate beyond this generation.
Poor ol’ blith.
He plainly doesn’t know the difference between the message and the messenger.
He’s so beyond reason that I shouldn’t be blaming him for his mental condition.
“They are estimates. Oh dear. Such a terrible waste of time and energy, and money too…… We do not need all this time and energy trying to find an average global temperature”
I can’t help but wonder if you’re blurring the cost of making an average global temperature calculation with the cost of reducing CO2 emissions. In the big picture, the former is minuscule while the latter is significant (although some would argue that too is insignificant compared to the cost of just ignoring it and hoping it will go away). Institutions like the BOM have weather station networks for all sorts of reasons unrelated to AGW. The incremental cost of posting some data off to someone for further climate research is not going to keep me awake at night. To put some perspective on just how costly that is, a retired CSIRO scientists does a pretty good job of running his own average global temperature calculation at home on his PC with a bit of R code.
“We do not need all this time and energy trying to find an average global temperature, which means nothing to anyone anywhere — UNLESS you think that the world is warming up at a terrible rate and that we are all doomed.”
With just a few changes, I could agree with that. Certainly I agree with your basic premise that is why we make these calculations. I’m nowhere near as concerned about the cost of making the calculation as you appear to be, and I’d tweak slightly why we make them to read:
“We do not need all this time and energy trying to find an average global temperature, which means nothing to anyone anywhere — unless you think that the world COULD be warming up at an UNPRECEDENTED rate and that we COULD TAKE ACTION TO DAMPEN THE RISE”.
Upper case not meant to be shouting, merely a way to highlight what I changed. I’d probably add some footnote to what I mean about unprecedented as well, in order to filter out the mob that want to compare the climate to what it was like millions of years ago. The concern is what climate change might do to our modern economies and lifestyles, and more likely those of our great grandchildren.
To me, the best case scenario is that we spend the trivial amount of money to make the calculation and it reveals all is well. When I’m powering up a mountain range on a 45C day and I look down and see my temperature gauge is sitting where it always sit, I don’t bemoan the incremental costs of adding a temperature gauge to my car. The piece of mind it brings significantly outweighs the costs. Without even getting into a debate about what the measurement is telling us, the measurement seems worthwhile to me.
JimboR, AGAIN here’s Dr Rosling’s 200 countries in 200 years video, just for you. Just terrible climate and life expectancy today compared to 1800, SARC. We’ve transformed the human world in just 200 years and yet you still think there are insurmountable problems? And don’t forget that China has shortened that journey considerably by well over 100 years and dragged 1+ billion people along on this much faster trip. Even Bill McKibben and Gore admit the key role that FFs have played in our prosperity in just 200 years.
“…..unless you think that the world COULD be warming up at an UNPRECEDENTED rate and that we COULD TAKE ACTION TO DAMPEN THE RISE”.
Jimb, I’ve known a few CSIRO scientists in my time and I have yet to find one, retired or otherwise, who, in the last 50 years anyway, is free of the herd mentality.
Please enlighten us as to what your “UNPRECEDENTED rate” is.
I must have missed it somewhere.
Are you talking about that [CSIRO agreed] rate of 1.0c of warming that we have enjoyed since 1750?
That is about one third average nat var per century for the last 80 centuries?
Or that nat var warming at the beginning of this interglacial which was at least 10 times this current warming?
And then you could explain why we “COULD TAKE ACTION TO DAMPEN THE RISE”.
Or then again, even why we SHOULD.
Please elucidate, Jimb. We would love to know what you are talking about.
Jimbo, all around the world there are people working on adjustments. They are there in the BoM and in every major national meteorological enterprise. They are doing this because the orthodoxy says that the world is warming at an unprecedented level. In order to make such a claim stick you have to be able to show that the temperatures have been increasing, and in an unprecedented way. The task requires an average global temperature, and a clear and convincing rise.
You may think this is a virtuous exercise. I don’t, and I don’t think the outcomes are impressive at all. Nor do they, or can they, show that the rise is unprecedented. The data are too rubbery, and they don’t go back in time far enough. We drop quickly to proxies, and are linking apples and melons.
I have gone over this stuff many, many times. You like the methodology and the outcomes, and I don’t. You don’t persuade me at all, and plainly I don’t persuade you. Nature will tell us in time, and I expect to be round for a decade. I note that since the early 2000s the shift from our present conditions to the supposed disaster has moved from now to some distant point in the 21st century, or even later. That doesn’t fill me with conviction either.
You’ve suggested a change in my statement, which I don’t accept at all. You can say that, but I wouldn’t. You’ve put in two qualifiers, and at once they take all the force out of the statement. There are all sorts of things that COULD happen and there are things we COULD do to avoid them. But no one will do anything unless they are convinced that if they don’t disaster will occur.
Think about it.
So anyhow, back to my question:
“It is plain from his essay and the critiques that, as I wrote ten years ago, the data we now have are rubbery, indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates. ”
Which part of his essay led you to that conclusion (or more correctly, reconfirmed that early conclusion)? Or is it all in the comments, and if so, which ones?
Your latest response doesn’t seem to reference the essay at all.
Sorry. His essay makes no reference at all to the issue of whether all this work is sensible. He simply takes it for granted, as do you, and did many of those who added their comments. So many of them are about better (or worse) way of making adjustments, and only a small few actually ask why is this necessary in the first place. One or two make the point (I quoted, above) that once you adjust the data you don’t have data any more. You have something else.
As others have written, the data you have are the data you have. Don’t fiddle with them.
“As others have written, the data you have are the data you have. Don’t fiddle with them.”
How long do you think an Airbus would stay in the air if the designers took your advice?
So, jimb, you’re not yet aware of the difference between the two sciences?
Where one has modelling that is100% spot on and the other has modelling that is 95% wrong?
Where one is a wing and a fact and the other is a wing and a prayer?
Sciences are like brains.
Some are hard and some are soft.
It’s precisely because they do signal processing on their raw sensor data that aircraft are as reliable as they are. If they were to follow Don’s advice “the data you have are the data you have. Don’t fiddle with them” we’d all be dead. Even with their signal processing, people sometimes end up in hospital. Solution: add more signal processing.
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2008/aair/ao-2008-070.aspx
Jimbo, the Airbus illustration is irrelevant. Next you’ll be telling me about smoking, or what would I do if three doctors all said that I had cancer.
The reason we have this fuss about an average global temperature, is because the orthodoxy says the earth is warming and that is dangerous. You have conceded that. The effort to show that the earth is warming up is unnecessary, because all the data, unadjusted, would suggest that this is what happened over the 20th century. But that’s not enough. The orthodoxy wants to be able to tell the world that the earth has warmed by exactly so much, and that 2016 was the warmest year ever, and go on t=with model-building that require precise numbers.
All of it is based on adjusted data, and to me is pretentious rubbish. Furthermore, it says nothing at all about attribution. And it says nothing about whether or not warming is actually beneficial. That is why essays like that of Nick Stokes finally exasperate me. I think he is a most sensible guy, for the most part, and is always courteous. But he is inside the problem, and I am looking at it from outside.
Don
If one doctor ran tests and gave you data that you had cancer, and another doctor gave you different data, and a third gave yet a different data, all pointing clearly to cancer – but all the data was different and variable, what would you do?
The Earth is a patient – global warming is a cancer.
“The reason we have this fuss about an average global temperature, is because the orthodoxy says the earth is warming and that is dangerous. You have conceded that.”
No, we differed slightly remember?
Your position (correct me if I’m wrong): we have a fuss about an average global temperature so that we can show the earth is warming and that it is dangerous.
My position: we have a fuss about an average global temperature so that we test if the earth is warming and it is dangerous.
I’m not making any claims (at least in this thread) about the results of the test. Let’s assume you’re right and the test shows there is no problem at all. I’m still arguing that it was good that we spent the small amount necessary to calculate it, otherwise how would we know? You seem to be arguing that because the test shows there is no problem (at least for the duration of the above assumption) the test has been a complete waste of time, energy and money. That’s like saying because your car’s temperature gauge always sits at the same spot, having it is a complete waste of money.
“because all the data, unadjusted, would suggest that this is what happened over the 20th century.”
I think that’s what Nick’s position is too. He doesn’t include the homogenisation step in his average global temperature index, and his tests come to pretty much the same conclusion as those who do. For something that everybody agrees makes little difference to the answer, we seem to spend way more time discussing homogenisation than we spend doing homogenisation…. it’s a bit like gay marriage really.
“the Airbus illustration is irrelevant”
I think you need to consider the different types of adjustments made. Homogenisation is completely unrelated to filtering out spurious sensor spikes. One happens right at the end of the process by the climate analysis team, the other happens right at the beginning of the process by the sensor firmware team. While Nick is happy to defend homogenisation, he doesn’t bother with it in his index and doesn’t believe it makes much difference.
Anyone that’s had any experience of taking raw sensor readings will be familiar with the issues there. Whether it’s AOC sensor on an Airbus or a temperature sensor in an AWS you will get spurious readings. Are the algorithms for dealing with these spikes perfect? Clearly not: people ended up in hospital as a result of mishandled AOC spikes and some AWS’s refused to record temperatures lower than -10C. As you find the bugs you fix them and move on. One thing you don’t do is implement a “the data you have are the data you have. Don’t fiddle with them” policy.
Jimbo, (1) I relied for my statement that you conceded the point about the reason for spending so much time and energy on adjustments from your sentence further above: ‘Certainly I agree with your basic premise that is why we make these calculations.’
(2) Re your further statement: ‘My position: we have a fuss about an average global temperature so that we test if the earth is warming and it is dangerous.’ As I have already said, the unadjusted data tell us already that it is highly likely that the planet warmed, in an irregular way, over the 20th century. An average global temperature (AGT) does not make that assertion any more certain. Indeed, it adds a spurious precision to it. Further, the AGT tells us nothing at all about whether warming is dangerous.
(3) You persist with your metaphors. They are irrelevant to the point we are arguing about. You think we really need an AGT. I can see no reason at all. Yes, the earth has been warming, in an irregular way, over the 20th century, and probably since the mid 19th. So what? Warming is generally good for life forms. There is no strong indication that CO2 is the cause of the warming, and in any case, its contribution seems to be logarithmic, so most of the warming effect has happened already. We are only half way to a doubling of AGT since the late 18th century, if the estimators have got the past right (I’m not sure they have, but let’s agree). It will take a very long time indeed to get from 580 ppm to 1160 ppm. Do disagree with all this? If so, on what basis? Why are you so determined to stick to the catastrophic AGW thesis?
“(1) I relied for my statement that you conceded …”
Yes, fair cop. I should have been clearer. You really need to read that concession in conjunction with the caveat that comes straight after it, but you weren’t to know that. What I was attempting to concede is that I agree AGTs sole purpose are closely and solely related to AGW, I can’t imagine any other use for them. I think the distinction between our positions is that I believe an AGT is needed to _test_ the AGW theory (regardless of whether the test says yes, we have a problem, or no, nothing unusual here). I may have it wrong, but as best I can tell you seem to believe that an AGT is needed to fabricate a Yes answer, but that they’re not very good at the fabrication: “Even with ‘adjusted’ readings there is no sign of that occurring.”
“You persist with your metaphors. They are irrelevant to the point we are arguing about.”
OK so lets forget about Airbus sensor glitches and focus on AWS sensor glitches. The BOM guys running the AWS network are primarily involved in weather reports and weather forecasts. What would you have them do with a spurious sensor reading? Do you think your “the data you have are the data you have. Don’t fiddle with them” is appropriate at the front-end, or is it only the climate guys and their homogenisation you have a problem with?
“You think we really need an AGT. I can see no reason at all. Yes, the earth has been warming, in an irregular way, over the 20th century”
How would you know that, without an AGT? Either an AGT without homogenisation (like Nick uses) or an AGT with homogenisation, is surely required to make your warming assertion and to confirm that there’s nothing unusual happening.
Jimbo, there are times when I wonder whether you actually read what others write. before you respond with a comment. I have already explained that any look at unadjusted data suggests that there has been some warming in the 20th century. You don’t need an AGT to tell you that. Indeed an AGT, as presently arranged, gives you a false precision about it.
Those working on forecasts in the BoM are not using adjustments to Rutherglen in the past to help them predict the weather next week. At least I hope they are not.
” I have already explained that any look at unadjusted data suggests that there has been some warming in the 20th century. You don’t need an AGT to tell you that.”
Where has the warming occurred? Everywhere? How do you know? How do you know there hasn’t been cooling somewhere else to equal it all out? How can you possible claim “Yes, the earth has been warming, in an irregular way, over the 20th century” without coming up with some sort of AGT? Serious question. How do you know that “earth has been warming, in an irregular way, over the 20th century”? It’s your statement, back it up…. no use of any OTAs allowed since you’ve deemed them unnecessary.
“Those working on forecasts in the BoM are not using adjustments to Rutherglen in the past to help them predict the weather next week. At least I hope they are not.”
Correct, but they are filtering out regular spurious readings back from the Rutherglen sensors (just like Airbus do). How do you feel about that?
OTA should read AGT.
Could climate science possibly be improving?
Be interesting to compare the nat var on Mars and Venus with Earth:
“The increasingly corroborated atmospheric mass pressure (gravity) explanation for variances in planetary temperatures – which precludes a significant role for CO2 concentration changes – has now advanced from peer-reviewed scientific journals to university-level textbooks.
The “adiabatic theory” of the greenhouse effect (adiabatic: “the constant decline in temperature of an air parcel as it rises in the atmosphere due to pressure drop and gas expansion”) is capable of explaining the variances in temperatures on planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus using each planet’s atmospheric pressure gradient – and without reliance on the traditional greenhouse effect theory that assigns a governing role to CO2.
As a simplified example, Mars has an atmosphere made up of about 950,000 ppm (95%) CO2 compared to the Earth’s 400 ppm (0.04%), and yet Mars’ average surface temperature is about -75°C colder than Earth’s. Venus also has an atmosphere with about 950,000 ppm (95%) CO2, but its surface is +447°C warmer than Earth’s. In addition to each planet’s variable distance from the Sun, the difference in temperature for Mars, Venus, and Earth can be calculated by considering its atmospheric mass (pressure) gradient. Mars’ atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Venus’ atmosphere is 92 times heavier (pressurized) than Earth’s. The CO2 concentration of each planet may therefore be insignificant in determining surface temperature relative to factors (a) distance from the Sun and (b) atmospheric density.”
http://sciencing.com/difference-between-thick-thin-atmospheres-12302390.html
Even your ABC was telling you that years ago Drongo.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/we-live-in-a-greenhouse-with-no-vents/6277528
A hypothesis that has achieved some prominence, but fails to meet this feature of the definition, concerns the very high surface temperature of Venus, about 460 degrees Centigrade. The massive carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus invited the inference that this is a result of an extreme or ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect. There is an alarming but implausible implication that it is possible for the effect to be that strong. The cloud in the Venus atmosphere is very dense and prevents anything more than weak diffuse sunlight reaching the surface. There can be no greenhouse effect because the surface is not heated by sunlight. The high temperature has a different explanation. The atmosphere is stirred by vigorous winds, with the gas repeatedly compressed and decompressed by the vertical component of its motion. The temperature rises as it is compressed by moving downwards and is cooled by upward movement, establishing a temperature gradient similar to, but much stronger than, the gradient in the Earth’s atmosphere. The effect is very strong because the atmosphere is dense, with a surface pressure 90 times our atmospheric pressure. There is a radiation balance with sunlight at a level roughly coinciding with the cloud tops and the relationship between the temperature there and at the surface is simply a consequence of compression heating. There is no greenhouse effect.
That ‘no greenhouse effect’ on Venus was a very minority opinion, Jimb. Mostly it was about runaway greenhouse effect.
And still is:
http://theconversation.com/venus-has-very-few-volcanoes-weirdly-this-might-be-why-its-as-hot-as-hell-78363
And our ABC’s Catalyst is usually very alarmist:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/catalyst-climate-astrology-in-your-very-own-backyard/
I’ve been looking at the York Uni tool and it seems the temp trends have changed again. The IPCC considers HAD 4 to be the gold standard so I have compared the data change to the BBC 2010 interview with Phil Jones.
In 2010 Jones listed these warming periods and the trends.
1860 to 1880- 0.163 c dec.
1910 to 1940- 0150 c dec.
1975 to 1998 -0.166 c dec
1975 to 2009 -0.161 c dec.
But today those trends are–
1860 to 1880-0.167 c dec
1910 to 1940-0.139 c dec
1975 to 1998- 0. 167 c dec
1975 to 2009- 0.193 c dec.
Why has the second 1910 to 1940 trend dropped today and why is the last trend so much higher than seven years ago? Remember the temps of the last 7 years have nothing to do with Jones’s calculations in 2010. Why do these trends keep getting higher as time goes by. If this is the gold standard it leaves a lot to be desired. Something very fishy in the breeze.
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
And link to the 2010 BBC interview.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm
Also Jones seems to not understand that there are many PR studies that show a Med WP in the SH.
Neville
A lot of temperatures need revision. Christy adjusted satellite data in 1998 to prove that the lower troposphere was cooling.
So the most rigorous approach is to use probabilities and the recent bout of extreme heat corroborates AGW according to the latest analysis by Michael Mann.
His team says:
We use a previously developed semi-empirical approach to assess the likelihood of the sequence of consecutive record-breaking temperatures in 2014, 2015, and 2016. This approach combines information from historical temperature data and state-of-the-art historical climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). We find that this sequence of record-breaking temperatures had a negligible (<0.03%) likelihood of occurrence in the absence of anthropogenic warming. It was still a rare but not implausible event (roughly 1-3% likelihood) taking anthropogenic warming into effect. The probability that three consecutive records would have been observed at some point since 2000 is estimated as ~30-50% given anthropogenic warming, and <0.7% in its absence. The likelihood of observing the specific level of record warmth recorded during 2016 is no more than ~one-in-a-million neglecting anthropogenic warming, but as high as 27% i.e. a nearly 1-in-3 chance of occurrence taking anthropogenic warming into account.
[Geophysical Research Letters · August 2017. DOI: 10.1002/2017GL074056]
So denialists still have roughly a 1-3% chance of being correct, but for the heat in 2016, one in a million chance.
maybe the data will be adjusted in the future, who knows, but it is unlikely that even Christy will be able to use it to prove the LT is cooling.
Chris the trends you are talking about are related to very strong and natural el nino warming. I can also show that there was very weak warming for UAH V 6 from 1995 to Jan 2016 of about 0.039 c per decade. RSS V 3 shows about 0.054 c/dec over this same period of 21 years. That’s using the York Uni tool.
But that extreme change in warming trend ( 1975 to 2009) since Jones’s 2010 interview makes me doubt their data and motives.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/sa-premier-hailed-leader-spends-20-times-more-to-make-one-third-of-the-electricity-with-solar/
I would like to give this essay by Richard Lindzen, a most notable scientist, a place of its own. But I can’t do it, given my agenda and time. So here it is. It is not earth-shattering, but it is historically important. It was published in WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/07/lindzen-on-the-death-of-skepticism-concerning-climate-hysteria/
Guest essay by Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bill Nye looks forward to the death of skeptics in this Huffington Post essay.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/bill-nye-climate-deniers-die_us_5971556ce4b09e5f6cce59c7
There is a sound basis for his wish.
While the politicized climate issue dates back to the 60’s, things really took off after the Clinton-Gore administration assumed power and funding for climate increased by about a factor of 15. This was far more than a small backwater and very difficult field could absorb, and led to a vast increase in the number of scientists who claimed their work was related to climate in order to cash in on the windfall. Moreover, the institutional structure for support of alarm was already in place with the United Nations creation of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) – both exclusively concerned with only human impacts on climate. Added to this were the wild enthusiasm of the well-funded green advocacy movement, and the motherhood nature of environmentalism.
It is, therefore, informative to look at who the skeptics (not of climate change, but of climate catastrophism and the need for specific action) were when this explosion of support began. Here is a very brief set of examples (for those who have died, the year of death is listed):
William Nierenberg: Director of America’s foremost oceanographic research institute, Scripps Oceanographic Institute of the University of California, San Diego. The Institute is located at La Jolla. Nierenberg was also a member of the National Academy and he chaired the massive 1983 NRC (National Research Council of the National Academy) report on climate. He died in 2000.
Frederick Seitz: Often regarded as one of the fathers of condensed phase physics, he was a professor at the University of Illinois, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and President of Rockefeller University. He died in 2008.
Jerome Namias: Professor of Meteorology at Scripps and former head of NOAA’s long range forecasting. Namias was also a member of the National Academy. He died in 1997.
Robert Jastrow: First chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, Founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Upon retirement, the bulk of the institute was moved back to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. However, a rump group headed by James Hansen successfully fought to remain in New York. Jastrow continued as Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College. Jastrow died in 2008.
Aksel Wiin-Nielsen: Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Michigan. Director of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather-Forecasting (Europe’s preeminent atmospheric research center), Director General of the World Meteorological Organization, and Professor of Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen. He died in 2010.
Lennart Bengtsson: Head of Research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.
Henk Tennekes: Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute. Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. A leading expert on atmospheric turbulence and aviation.
Reid Bryson: Founder and first chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Meteorology and Center for Climatic Research. He was the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (now the Nelson Institute) at the University of Wisconsin. Global Laureate of the United Nations Global Environment Program. He died in 2008.
Joanne Simpson: President of the American Meteorological Society, Director of Project Stormfury while chief of the Experimental Meteorology Branch of the Environment Satellite Services Administration’s Institute for Atmospheric Sciences. NASA’s lead weather researcher. Member National Academy of Engineering. Interestingly, she kept her skepticism private until she retired from NASA. She died in 2010.
Robert White: Director of the United States Weather Bureau, administrator of the Environmental Science Services Administration, the first administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and president of the National Academy of Engineering. He also was the first chairman of the World Climate Conference in 1978. He died in 2015.
Hubert Lamb: Pioneer in historical climatology, Founding Director of the Climatic Research Unit established in 1972 in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He died in 1997.
Paul Waggoner: Chief Scientist, Soils, Climatology, Ecology, Director, and Distinguished Scientist at The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Member National Academy.
S. Fred Singer: Professor of Physics and the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia and George Mason University. Founding Dean of of the University of Miami School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Established the National Weather Bureau’s Satellite Service Center. Deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, and chief scientist for the Department of Transportation. He is credited by many for the first prediction of the Earth’s radiation belts.
These were hardly fringe scientists (as opposed to Nye who is no scientist at all). On the contrary, they were leading figures whose deep interest in climate long pre-dated the Global Warming Hysteria and the subsequent explosion of support for those endorsing alarm. So, Bill Nye is right. The newcomers are younger, and with death of many of the previous generation, they have come to dominate the field – to the great detriment of the science, itself. Those, among the older generation, who are still alive, are the subject of constant public abuse and libel, leading several of them like Bengtsson and Tennekes to withdraw from the field. Singer went so far as to sue for libel, winning his case and obtaining a public retraction from Justin Lancaster (http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/0817939326_283.pdf ).
In addition, there are many outstanding scientists who have bothered to actually examine this issue, and have come to the obvious conclusion that there is much less to the story of gloom and doom than is popularly asserted. Many started as supporters of alarm but came to change their minds. Here are a few of them:
Ivar Giaevar: Nobel Laureate in Physics, Member National Academy, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Professor Emeritus, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Professor at Large, University of Oslo.
Freeman Dyson: Distinguished theoretical physicist and mathematician who played a key role in the development of quantum electrodynamics and mathematical methods of quantum field theory. But he also maintained a strong interest in applied science and was one of the designers of the hugely successful TRIGA nuclear research reactor. Freeman spent most of his career at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Member National Academy.
William Happer: An experimental physicist who spent most of his career at Princeton and Columbia Universities. He is the inventor of the sodium guide star that is used in most big modern telescopes to compensate for atmospheric turbulence with adaptive optics. He was a pioneer of medical magnetic resonance imaging with laser polarized noble gases. He served as the Director of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993. Member National Academy.
James Lovelock: Fellow of the Royal Society, President of the Marine Biological Association, Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Lovelock actually endorsed alarmism, but eventually changed his view.
Daniel Kleitman: Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT and former chair of the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
Edward Teller: He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many years. Known as father of the H-bomb. Member National Academy. He died in 2003.
Robert Adair: Former Chair Department of Physics and director of the Division of Physical Sciences, Yale University. Member National Academy.
…….
When, today, one hears of overwhelming support for alarmism and for the control of Carbon Dioxide as the unique and precise solution to a largely unknown and uncertain set of phenomena, we should all realize the individuals promoting such narratives have not studied the underlying science, have decided to cash in on the windfall, are politically and economically motivated, fear expulsion from the ranks of the politically correct, and/or are intent on befuddling the public. In brief, we are in the midst of a very unhealthy situation for both this issue and science in general.
I have a lot of time for Lindzen, and if you want to see him in action, there is a YouTube hour-long address of his in the Comments.
Waiting for deniers to die will take too long.
Better to lead them to science and hope they can drink.
Poor ol’ blith wouldn’t know science if he tripped over it.
And he trips over it a lot.
Even the dullards at the Guardian don’t like Gore’s silly AIS Sci-fi flick.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jan/20/an-inconvenient-sequel-review-al-gore-climate-change-documentary
They can pick the wheat from the chaff, Nev. Give it a try.
Who knew…. George Brandis is suddenly a fan of activist judges.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/section-44-doesnt-apply-to-barnaby-joyce:-brandis/8806768
Strangled Bongo once informed me that Godwin Law says that if you use Nazi or Nazism to make a point, you’ve already lost the argument.
So what happens if there are actual nazis involved in say…murder…or terrorism, and you refuse to mention them at all?Has a new law been created?
Of course, rossie, if you haven’t got the brains to realise that it applies only to arguments that have nothing to do with Nazis then you have not only lost the argument, you have lost the plot.
But to go out of your way to NOT mention nazis, when nazis are involved. You know…like your hero.
I guess it’s not a law. More an admission.
Go Bongo!
….Aaaand another thing Bongo. Your original lecture to me on Godwins Law (yes dear, I was always aware of the concept) was in response to my observation that Trumps speeches had an uncanny similarity in style to Hitler’s. (Bad me) Turns out he keeps a copy of Good ol Adolfs speeches on his bed side table. The source? Ivanka Trump.
What do you know? I was right. Godwin was right. And you’re a fool for ever being taken in by this thug.
Neo nazis? KKKK? White Supremacists? 1 dead. 19 injured. Seems a no brainer.
But as the Grand Imperial President informs us angrily, “They had a permit!”
The DA/Jimbo thread is getting too long, and I’m now to do other things before going to bed. So I’m re-starting, or perhaps finishing, it here.
I don’t have the date easily available, but at best guess the search for a mean global temperature started in the late 1980s. Before that there were ‘indexes’ of temperature variations over time notably in the USA which has the longest and best set of stations, for European cities, the CET, I think even in Australia. There was nothing global, and they were not assembled into a single figure. Indeed it was well known that the NH and SH had notably different temperature readings. All those indices, from memory, showed an irregular movement in a warmer direction over the first eight decades of the century, with a pronounced rise in the first half of the century, then a cooling for a couple of decades, then a similar continuing rise, at say 1988, since about 1975, in the second. The satellite readings came available from 1979, and they were virtually global. Since then there has been a concerted effort to do a lot of really difficult things (estimating SST, for example, over eighty years) so as to show that there really was a mean global temperature with a certain reading throughout the 20th century.
The orthodoxy doesn’t much like the satellite readings, and certainly they are about the lower troposphere, but since they show essentially the same movements over time to the land/sea-based readings, though at a lower level, I can’t ignore them. Indeed, if we want to talk about truly global readings, then the satellites plus the radiosonde balloons seem the way to go, not the adjusted land/sea ones.
I don’t think the search for a mean global temperature based on land and SST data has been sensible, necessary, or successful, and the resulting apparent precision is spurious.
But each to his own, I guess.
OK, so if you’re happy to accept those old per-country ‘indexes’ for your assertion on temperatures, you’re presumably equally happy to accept the GHCN Unadjusted data file? It’s all those institutions sending their ‘indexes’ to one location.
Returning for a moment to Nick’s essay that started this whole thread: you said that it confirmed your 10-year old belief that the data is very rubbery. Nick’s essay is all about the complete transparency of how monthly min/max/mean temperature readings travel from an instrument at Melbourne Airport to the GHCN Unadjusted data file without any molestation. What happens after that is up to each of you researchers. The unadjusted global collection of all those temperatures that you trust to make your “gentle irregular warming” assertion is here for everyone to play with:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/ghcnm.tavg.latest.qcu.tar.gz
All up over 7000 stations from around the world…. pick and choose the ones you trust if you like.
Nick uses that data to develop his global trend lines, most others go on a homogenisation binge first (GHCN Adjusted). You and your fellow citizen scientists are free to do whatever you like with it to demonstrate your position. Nick has demonstrated that with his index, it makes little difference whether he uses the adjusted, or the unadjusted, so he sticks with the unadjusted. He’s also shown that his trend line tracks very closely to all the major indexes.
The incremental “time, energy and cost” of gathering all this stuff in one place seems incidental to me. Our BOM was already monitoring the temperatures at Melbourne Airport for other purposes. And remember, when you collect this stuff it’s not just how you can use it today, perhaps climate researchers 100 years down the track will find it useful. The raw data is always carried forward so future scientists can decide for themselves whether they like our ancient homogenisation techniques.
My original question still remains though. Given how Nick’s essay is all about the total transparency of how data gets from Melbourne Airport into the GHCN Unadjusted data file without any molestation, how does his essay confirm your belief the data is rubbery? I’m not asking you why you think the data is rubbery, I’m asking you why Nick’s essay confirms that for you? Two possibilities come to mind:
1. you’re talking about what happens next, i.e. homogenisation and production of GHCN Adjusted
2. you think the data is rubbery before it leaves Melbourne Airport due to BOM filtering of spurious sensor readings
Anything else?
“Anything else?”
How about, jimb, the whole attitude of the gatekeepers in general, including the IPCC?
When we are dealing with trillions of dollars being slaughtered over 1c of global warming since 1750, anyone with an ounce of observational capacity and rationality that has read the climategate emails awa made their own obs of sea levels going nowhere, your “anything else?” needs only to be very small to negate the whole beatup.
“Anything else?” if only political and financial attitude, is all it takes.
Dancing angels can be discarded completely.
And it is more than political and financial, it is totalitarian in many cases:
“And that brings me to my final point. Since the fall of communism, global warming has been, without question, the most potent weapon in the hands of those who wish to control the behaviour of their fellow human beings. Lukewarmists like me do not caution against visions of an environmental apocalypse out of some perverse hatred of nature. On the contrary, concern for the environment is laudable and, I happen to believe, nearly universal. But, environmentalism, like all –isms, can become totalitarian. It is for that reason that, when it comes to our environmental policies, we ought to tread very carefully.”
https://capx.co/the-totalitarianism-of-the-environmentalists/
Jimbo, you remind me of a remark by an early teacher at university who warned us of the danger of reading something in a journal article and then riding off in some direction we fancied with guns blazing.
I did not say that reading Nick Stokes’s essay ‘confirmed my 10-year old belief’ that the temperature data were rubbery. This is what I actually said:
‘I came away with my usual irritated query: why are we doing this? Why is it important to have an ‘average global temperature’. It is plain from his essay and the critiques that, as I wrote ten years ago, the data we now have are rubbery, indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates.’
And I explained why I cam away with that query. Nick, for all his courtesy and clarity, never asked himself, or at least never told readers, why he thought this long, continuing and (in my view) empty quest for a ‘precise’ (it can’t be truly ‘accurate’) AGT was necessary.
So your further questions, based on a mis-reading, seem irrelevant to me, and therefore need not to be answered.
Enough.
Don, do you read what you write? You wrote:
“It is plain from his essay and the critiques that, as I wrote ten years ago, the data we now have are rubbery, indeed, they’re not data at all. They are estimates.’”
I asked
“how does his essay confirm your belief the data is rubbery?”
And it’s a relevant question because I believe his essay was intended to do the exact opposite. It’s show’s there are no estimates and there is no rubber (at least in the unadjusted dataset he uses). I’m beginning to think you didn’t read his essay and you didn’t read your own comments on it! This is taking your usual crabwalk to delusional levels.
Jimbo, if you read both of my statements you’ll see that they are of the same kind. And I explained what I meant earlier. Give over.
I should have added that the great majority of all the SST ‘data’ prior to the satellite period are all estimates, mostly for a 300,000 square km grid cell. I’ve said all that before.
Seems to be the coolest start to the summer holidays in the UK since 1982.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4236373/uk-weather-coldest-summer-rain-forecast/
Neville
This is natural variation. Cool periods still exist. This is covered in the first moments of Gore’s latest movie.
The distribution of cold and hot has shifted.
Gee Chris you’re slowly catching up. The point about NATURAL variability is why I and others doubt so much of your so called CAGW scare. Of course this isn’t helped when the HAD 4 data is changed to cool the past ( 1910 to 1940) and increase the recent temp trends.
Remember that HAD 4 trend 1975 to 2009 has jumped from 0.161 c to 0.193 c a decade according to the York Uni tool.
Neville
The shift in natural variation is not natural variation.
You cannot point to natural variation and pretend that this is all that exists.
Global warming is added onto natural variation.
This has been explained before several times.
“The shift in natural variation is not natural variation.”
We are still waiting for you to convince us, blith, that you have any idea of what nat var really is:
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/antarctica-91-volcanoes-coincidentally-found-under-glaciers-warming-due-to-climate-change/
Chris, I think you and most of your fellow CAGW group thinkers are having a lend of yourselves. But let’s have a look at your so called CAGW so far using UAH V 6 TLT.
Global trend for TLT is 0.13 c decade and regions highest to lowest. Note no warming since DEC 1978 for SP and we now know that the Ant Peninsula has been cooling since 1998 according to BAS study and others.
NP- 0.24 c
Nth Ex- 0.17 c
NH- 0.15 c
Trop- 0.12 c
SH- 0.1 c
S ex- 0.1 c
SP- 0.00 c.
Don’t forget the Santer et al 2017 study also found a pause in warming and that showed models were not able to accurately predict the lower warming trend. Something that Curry, Lewis, Knappenberger, Michaels, Spencer, Christy, Lindzen, McIntyre, McKitrick, etc had been pointing out for years. Mears and Mann were also a part of the Santer et al study.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/20/the-new-consensus-on-global-warming-a-shocking-admission-by-team-climate/
Neville
You have been told at least a dozen times, that using 1998 is fraudulent.
But you persist – cherry picking nonsense.
Global warming is now a scientific fact although, admittedly, only perceived by those who use science.
Others are wallowing in denial.
Gosh Chris I think this time I’ll accept Santer et al over your silly nonsense. I think you’ve got cherry picking on your brain.
Oh and I suppose Jones’s 2010 interview on the BBC involved cherry picking as well? You do understand that he chose four historical warming trends since 1850 I hope?
Neville
The author of cherry-picking has it on the brain.
I just call it out for what it is.
Stop it or you’ll go blind.
“Global warming is now a scientific fact although, admittedly, only perceived by those who use science.”
Stop telling lies, blith.
You are not talking about global warming. Stop making out that this is your claim. Nobody denies that the world is warming.
Why don’t you stick to the truth for once?
Stop with the B/S and state what you are really claiming.
Here’s a proper example of cooling since the LATE 1990s in the Antarctica peninsula. This was once one of the fastest warming areas of the globe and was used by Gore and other extremists to misinform people about their so called CAGW.
BUT SINCE THE LATE 1990s this area has been cooling at a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT RATE. Here’s the last paragraph of the Turner et al abstract.
“Our findings cover only 1% of the Antarctic continent and emphasize that decadal temperature changes in this region are not primarily associated with the drivers of global temperature change but, rather, reflect the extreme natural internal variability of the regional atmospheric circulation.”
Here’s the full abstract of the study and the link.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7612/full/nature18645.html#extended-data
“Since the 1950s, research stations on the Antarctic Peninsula have recorded some of the largest increases in near-surface air temperature in the Southern Hemisphere1. This warming has contributed to the regional retreat of glaciers2, disintegration of floating ice shelves3 and a ‘greening’ through the expansion in range of various flora4. Several interlinked processes have been suggested as contributing to the warming, including stratospheric ozone depletion5, local sea-ice loss6, an increase in westerly winds5, 7, and changes in the strength and location of low–high-latitude atmospheric teleconnections8, 9. Here we use a stacked temperature record to show an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s. The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the most rapid cooling during the Austral summer. Temperatures have decreased as a consequence of a greater frequency of cold, east-to-southeasterly winds, resulting from more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet. These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects. Our findings cover only 1% of the Antarctic continent and emphasize that decadal temperature changes in this region are not primarily associated with the drivers of global temperature change but, rather, reflect the extreme natural internal variability of the regional atmospheric circulation.”
Neville
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. Obviously as the globe warms there will be patches where cooling coexists.
Pointing to 1% of Antarctica which is impacted by “more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet” does not change anything. It would not surprise me if increased energy in the Earth’s climate system did in fact increase mid-latitude jets, maybe rediverted some, and maybe destroyed others.
You claimed “This was once one of the fastest warming areas of the globe and was used by Gore and other extremists to misinform people about their so called CAGW.” but I can find no reference to any such usage of this particular 1% area affected by the Weddell Sea.
All references by Gore I am aware of are to broader areas of Antarctica.
Can you justify your claim.
Gosh Chris I think their ABC has caught your Cherry pick delusion as well. Read the article to see your dreaded 1998 date mentioned and since then this fast cooling trend is about minus 0.5 c a decade.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-21/part-of-antarctica-gets-a-chill-after-warming-fast:-study/7647276
Thanks, Neville. Amazing how these scientists [and of course our ABC] choke on nat var yet quickly return to the catastrophe consensus mantra to maintain their cult standing.
Notice the “anything else?” here, jimb?
There’s something very strange going on with the HAD 4 data. According to the York Uni tool there was minimal warming of just 0.023 c/dec from 1929.9 to 1990. That’s only 0.23 c/ century.
That period of 61 years also shows GISS warming of 0.055c/d and Berkeley of 0.037c/d. IOW GISS warming over that 61 years has been about 2.4 times the HAD trend and Berkeley has been about 1.6 times. And you can now find a negative trend for well over 30 years if you check it out. Sorry Chris for this much longer cherry pick, but I’m not the one playing with the data.
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
Why would you pick 1929 to 1990?
There are plenty of other 60 year periods.
In fact, using the York tool, you can average over 60 years (720 months) and the strong recent global warming is clear to see.
Some 60 year intervals are different to other 60 year intervals.
So you need look at all 60 year intervals – not just at one.
Global ocean cooling continues:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/tropics-lead-ocean-cooling/
And the short summer melt is over:
http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget
Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations At 400 PPM Are Still Dangerously Low For Life On Earth
http://notrickszone.com/2013/05/17/atmospheric-co2-concentrations-at-400-ppm-are-still-dangerously-low-for-life-on-earth/#sthash.UD68cEjH.dpbs
‘Carbon,’ says Primo Levi in The Periodic Table, ‘the key element of living substances.’
Reposting his beautiful and significant essay.
https://www3.nd.edu/~skandel/CHEM10101/Main_Page_files/primo_levi_carbon_excerpt.pdf
Yes, wonderful, beth. Knows ‘is onions, does Primo:
“Besides the vegetable and animal worlds, these reserves are constituted by
deposits of coal and petroleum: but these too are the inheritance of photo-
synthetic activity carried out in distant epochs, so that one can well affirm
that photosynthesis is not only the sole path by which carbon becomes living
matter, but also the sole path by which the sun’s energy becomes chemically
usable.”
Agree, SD. – an ode to carbon. So many sheeple
in the church of CAGW think carbon’s soot.
And the proof is in the pudding, too, beth:
“Yet another dud global warming prediction by the scientists who told us the science was settled.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001:
Acute water shortage conditions combined with thermal stress should adversely affect wheat and, more severely, rice productivity in India even under the positive effects of elevated CO2 in the future.
Times of India, 17 August 2017:
India’s foodgrain production for the 2016-17 crop year is estimated at record 275.68 million tonnes … which is over 4% higher than the previous record production achieved in the country during 2013-14.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/fake-warming-scare-exposed-more-food-for-india/news-story/39266a67e5b7b60b503474997696b024
https://cdn.theconversation.com/files/182394/width926/file-20170817-13494-w9q1t.jpg
Here is Australia’s most senior climate skeptic reminding us all why his views continue to be dismissed so readily.
Tragic people … untrammelled egos
But when the tragic alarmist-deniers are led by the nose to the elephant in the room isn’t it marvellous how they still can’t see the elephant.
When it needs only a mild stunt to point out their so-obvious, tragic short comings, they still refuse to see those same short comings and what they really amount to.
He looks like a glass half full man to me.
The thing in black has not touched its water, I wonder why?
🙂
Australia, the ungovernables:
“Check out the wording of our constitution – spot the problem?
Section 44(i) of the nation’s founding document disqualifies someone from office if that person:
“
…is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power…”
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/handy-guide-for-foreign-nation-to-remove-any-australian-politican-give-them-entitlements-of-dual-citizenship/
This is probably the best and most accurate response to Gore’s AIT (2006) book and movie. The author provides numerous list and references to support his findings.
Gore’s claims about dangerous Greenland and West Ant Ice Sheet SLR is easily refuted. Even all the models used by the IPCC show that Antarctic SLR is negative for the next 300 years. Even the higher Uni of Colorado SL data shows satellite increase of about 3.2 mm/ year or about 12 inches over the next 100 years. Dr Pearman ( senior scientist CSIRO) and Dr Hansen ( head of NASA GISS) were Gore’s principal advisers for the 2006 AIT book and movie. How could they be so sloppy and inaccurate in so many of their claims? It was at best an absurd Sci-fi flick as is the even sillier 2017 AIS.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/gore.html
Neville
Your link is outdated. Essentially it was based when denialists were still playing the Medieval Warming Card (MWC) without ever describing the mechanism as to the cause of the medieval Warming,
We now know that recent warming well and truly exceeds Medieval Warming. See here:
https://archive.is/2ZK0p
Recent temperatures are shooting up to the higher estimates of Holocene temperatures.
https://archive.is/SsETi
Greenland is loosing ice as iceberg caving exceeds snowfall. Huge slabs are breaking away from Antarctica due largely to warm seawater under cutting ice ledges.
As GHG concentrations increase these trends will worsen.
Sorry Chris you’re still having a lend of yourself. There has been no Antarctic warming since DEC 1978 and there is no data that shows recent SLR is unusual at all.
And Vinther et al and other studies show faster Greenland warming trends in the early 20th century. And the PAGES 2 K study also found higher Antarctic warming from 141 AD to 1250 AD compared to the early 20 th century warming. Note up to 1250 AD neatly shows that there was a Med WP in Antarctic studies as well and temps were higher than today for about 1,100 years. 141 to 1250.
Neville
If warming is caused by CO2 then it is not necessary for areas with no deforestation, industrial industry, or population and no CO2 emissions should show warming since 1978.
I guess you are unaware of sea level data. It is not hard to find NASA data here:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
This shows sea level rise of 200mm from 1870-1995, and rate of rise today of 3.4 mm per year.
So based on this – the rate of sea level rise has doubled since the nineteenth century. The is no reason to suspect that this acceleration will decrease or disappear.
Your statement “Vinther et al and other studies show faster Greenland warming trends in the early 20th century” is not supported by Vinther.
The rate of Greenland warming is dramatic and according to his chart, is unmatched by any previous trend going back thousands of years. See here:
https://archive.is/LttIk
Since Amundsen sailed his wooden boat “Gjoa” through the Northwest Passage 111 years ago with primitive navigational aids:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gj%C3%B8a#/media/File:Gjoea.jpg
The only way you can sail through today is in one of these:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0cF8KTgM0Qs/maxresdefault.jpg
More info on comparing recent skyrocketing temperatures compared with earlier warming phases such as the Holocene.
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2017/05/31/a-holocene-temperature-reconstruction-part-1-the-antarctic/
Another excellent, factual article from Matt Ridley in The Spectator. He quotes the latest research from Dr Tol, Lomborg and an expert team of economists who list all the positive gains from our warming climate.
By 2080 the world’s citizens will be 9 times wealthier than we are today and will be able to adapt much more easily because of that increased wealth and technology. This just backs up Dr Rosling’s forecast for the future of humanity using the same UN data.
Here’s the full article and the link. Just add up all the good things over the last century and everything to come for the next 70 years.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/carry-on-warming/
Why climate change is good for the world.
Don’t panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm
Matt Ridley
Email
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Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.
At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.
There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.
To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2?C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3?C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8?C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it’s a long way off.
Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.
You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.
Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.
It will still be 1.2 per cent around 2050 and will not turn negative until around 2080. In short, my children will be very old before global warming stops benefiting the world. Note that if the world continues to grow at 3 per cent a year, then the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defences that the Dutch have today.
The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths — not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece. Both Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by 18 per cent each winter. Especially cold winters cause a rise in heart failures far greater than the rise in deaths during heatwaves.
Cold, not the heat, is the biggest killer. For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter. Compare this to the heatwave ten years ago, which claimed 15,000 lives in France and just 2,000 in Britain. In the ten years since, there has been no summer death spike at all. Excess winter deaths hit the poor harder than the rich for the obvious reason: they cannot afford heating. And it is not just those at risk who benefit from moderate warming. Global warming has so far cut heating bills more than it has raised cooling bills. If it resumes after its current 17-year hiatus, and if the energy efficiency of our homes improves, then at some point the cost of cooling probably will exceed the cost of heating — probably from about 2035, Prof Tol estimates.
The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air — less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average — plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air. Commercial greenhouse operators therefore pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to raise plant growth rates.
The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates. It is responsible for a startling change in the amount of greenery on the planet. As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green. This translates into a 14 per cent increase in productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.
Dr Randall Donohue and colleagues of the CSIRO Land and Water department in Australia also analysed satellite data and found greening to be clearly attributable in part to the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect. Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa, where satellites show a big increase in green vegetation since the 1970s.
It is often argued that global warming will hurt the world’s poorest hardest. What is seldom heard is that the decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosystems have benefited.
Even polar bears are thriving so far, though this is mainly because of the cessation of hunting. None the less, it’s worth noting that the three years with the lowest polar bear cub survival in the western Hudson Bay (1974, 1984 and 1992) were the years when the sea ice was too thick for ringed seals to appear in good numbers in spring. Bears need broken ice.
Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical — so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting ‘no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale … low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms’.
In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer: witness the remarkable success of cyclone warnings in India last week. That’s the thing about climate change — we will probably pocket the benefits and mitigate at least some of the harm by adapting. For example, experts now agree that malaria will continue its rapid worldwide decline whatever the climate does.
Yet cherry-picking the bad news remains rife. A remarkable example of this was the IPCC’s last report in 2007, which said that global warming would cause ‘hundreds of millions of people [to be] exposed to increased water stress’ under four different scenarios of future warming. It cited a study, which had also counted numbers of people at reduced risk of water stress — and in each case that number was higher. The IPCC simply omitted the positive numbers.
Why does this matter? Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter? There is one obvious reason: climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.
As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain’s climate policies — subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest — is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to lower the air temperature by about 0.005?C — which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.
So we are doing real harm now to impede a change that will produce net benefits for 70 years. That’s like having radiotherapy because you are feeling too well. I just don’t share the certainty of so many in the green establishment that it’s worth it. It may be, but it may not.
Disclosure: by virtue of owning shares and land, I have some degree of interests in all almost all forms of energy generation: coal, wood, oil and gas, wind (reluctantly), nuclear, even biofuels, demand for which drives up wheat prices. I could probably make more money out of enthusiastically endorsing green energy than opposing it. So the argument presented here is not special pleading, just honest curiosity.
Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less – just £12 for 12 issues.
Here’s another recent Greenland study summary from Co2 Science. This Axford et al study certainly finds that temps today on Greenland are not unusual or unprecedented at all. And the LIA was the coldest period for the entire Holocene, so we are lucky that we now have some NATURAL warming to benefit humanity into the future.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N29/C1.php
Holocene Temperatures at the Western Greenland Ice Sheet Margin Reference
Axford, Y., Losee, S., Briner, J.P., Francis, D.R., Langdon, P.G. and Walker, I.R. 2013. Holocene temperature history at the western Greenland Ice Sheet margin reconstructed from lake sediments. Quaternary Science Reviews 59: 87-100.
Background
The authors write that “predicting the response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to future climate change presents a major challenge to climate science,” but they say that “paleoclimate data from Greenland can provide empirical constraints on past cryospheric responses to climate change, complementing insights from contemporary observations and from modeling.”
What was done
As they describe it, Axford et al. “present Holocene climate reconstructions from five lakes along the western Greenland Ice Sheet margin, near Jakobshavn Isbrae and Disko Bugt,” where “insect (chironomid) remains from North Lake are used to generate quantitative estimates of summer temperatures,” and where “changes in sediment composition at the five study lakes are interpreted as evidence for ice sheet fluctuations, changes in lake productivity, and regional climate changes throughout the Holocene.”
What was learned
The six scientists report that “temperature reconstructions from subfossil insect (chironomid) assemblages suggest that summer temperatures were warmer than present by at least 7.1 ka (thousands of years before present), and that the warmest millennia of the Holocene occurred in the study area between 6 and 4 ka.” They also note, in this regard, that “previous studies in the Jakobshavn region have found that the local Greenland Ice Sheet margin was most retracted behind its present position between 6 and 5 ka,” and they say that they used chironomids to estimate that “local summer temperatures were 2-3°C warmer than present during that time of minimum ice sheet extent [italics added],” while indicating that the Little Ice Age “culminated at North Lake with 19th century summer temperatures that were colder than any other period in the record since deglaciation [italics added].”
What it means
Against this backdrop of data-based information, it should be clear to everyone that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about current temperatures along the western Greenland Ice Sheet margin – or anywhere else on the planet, for that matter – for temperatures there currently fall well within the extreme bounds experienced over the course of the Holocene. And it should also be realized that starting from the coldest point of the entire Holocene (the depths of the Little Ice Age), one could well expect that once started, warming (for whatever reason) could well be anticipated to be substantial.
Reviewed 17 July 2013
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Copyright © 2017. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Neville
The CO2Science website does not appear to have any information on the CO2 science on how CO2 interacts with longwave radiation.
Does this mean they are not aware of this CO2 science or are they only post materials that have been cherry-picked?
Greenland has just set a record cold minus -33 c July summer temp and the island has been cooling since 2005. This article quotes the 2017 Kobashi et al study.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/07/12/swiss-daily-record-cold-july-in-greenland-alarmists-struggling-to-explain-as-arctic-island-cools/#sthash.O2aDgNyN.dpbs
Neville
Professor Richard Tol is an economist, academic and an advisor to the climate denial organisation the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
This does not show that current temperature trend are caused by whatever caused the Holocene warmth.
It also does not show that rate of sea level increases have not increased since the nineteenth century,
Putting the word “natural” in capital letters indicates you are not sure of your own statements.
If the present trends were natural or NATURAL some scientist would have proven a natural cause.
“If the present trends were natural or NATURAL some scientist would have proven a natural cause.”
You’re determined to be as thick as you can be, hey, blith?
When present trends are well below nat var it is up to you sufferers of enuresis nervosa to prove that things are NOT NATURAL.
And also to see someone about your problem:
http://bedwettinginstitute.com.au/fact-sheet/
If things were warmer before the industrial revolution and the LIA, what are we worrying about?
Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years
Yair Rosenthal, Braddock K. Linsley, Delia W. Oppo
Abstract:
Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large
The 2017 Liu et al study checked the condition of men and women living within an environment of 3,025 ppm co2 levels. No problems were found with any of the participants during the study.
Of course we know that submariners and some greenhouse workers spend long periods exposed to very high co2 levels over their working life.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V20/aug/a1.php
The 1998 Dahl-Jensen et al study used ice cores to check the last 50,000 years of Greenland temps. They found warmer temps during the Holocene optimum and a warmer Med WP and cooler LIA. Here’s the summary and link from Co2 Science. No delusions about so called denial of science but an endorsement from the best proxy evidence of historical Holocene temps.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V1/N4/C1.php
Past Climate in Greenland Reference
Dahl-Jensen, D., Mosegaard, K., Gundestrup, N., Clow, G.D., Johnsen, S.J., Hansen, A.W. and Balling, N. 1998. Past temperatures directly from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Science 282: 268-271.
What was done
Temperature measurements from two Greenland Ice Sheet boreholes were used to reconstruct the temperature history of the Greenland Ice Sheet over the past 50,000 years.
What was learned
The data revealed that temperatures on the Greenland Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (approximately 25,000 years ago) were 23 ± 2 °C colder than at present. After the termination of the glacial period, temperatures increased steadily to a maximum of 2.5°C warmer than at present during the Climatic Optimum (4,000 to 7,000 years ago). The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were also documented in the record, with temperatures 1°C warmer and 0.5-0.7°C cooler than at present, respectively. After the Little Ice Age, the authors report that “temperatures reached a maximum around 1930 A.D.” and that “temperatures have decreased during the last decades.”
What it means
The results of this study stand in direct contrast to the predictions of general circulation models (GCMs) that consistently suggest there should have been a significant warming in high northern latitudes over the past several decades. They also show large temperature excursions over the last 10,000 years, when the air’s CO2 content was relatively stable. Both of these observations raise doubts about the ability of current GCMs to accurately forecast earth’s climatic response to the ongoing rise in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration.
Reviewed 1 November 1998
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Copyright © 2017. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and
Neville
So what is the point? Are you trying to claim that there has not been:
“… a significant warming in high northern latitudes over the past several decades.”
Only bodgey science from bodgey websites would try to make this crazy link.
There were no large temperature excursions of the type we have recently experienced.
This is the pattern: https://archive.is/FWsqA
As we know, the holocene warmth was caused by orbital changes. As NOAA says:
“These orbital changes can be easily calculated and predict that the Northern Hemisphere should have been warmer than today during the mid-Holocene in the summer and colder in the winter. ” [ https://archive.is/GOSay ]
Today we are getting orbital-level warmth without the orbital cause. Once you digest this fact, maybe you will come to realise that only GHGs can have caused such a radical departure from natural events.
When you don’t know what you are talking about blith, it’s better to keep quiet and let people suspect you are ignorant than to open up and prove it.
We’re at the peak of orbital eccentricity RIGHT NOW, blith luv:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity
A sceptical journalist asks an extremist+ hypocrite a few awkward questions about his latest Sci-fi flick and gets the usual pig ignorant response. You must be a denier says this monster HIPPO.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/one-day-when-al-gore-gets-some-evidence-he-wont-need-to-call-everyone-names/#comments
The Pollard et al study looks at Gore’s claim about WAIS collapse and many metres of SLR.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N17/C1.php
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: How Fast Could It Collapse? Reference
Pollard, D. and DeConto, R.M. 2009. Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years. Nature 458: 329-332.
What was done
The authors state that projections of future West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) behavior “have been hampered by limited understanding of past variations and their underlying mechanisms.” With the findings of Naish et al. (2009), however, they gained important new knowledge that helped them frame a greatly-improved “ice sheet/ice shelf model capable of high-resolution nesting with a new treatment of grounding-line dynamics and ice-shelf buttressing to simulate Antarctic ice sheet variations over the past five million years.”
What was learned
Pollard and DeConto report that they modeled WAIS variations ranging “from full glacial extents with grounding lines near the continental shelf break, intermediate states similar to modern, and brief but dramatic retreats, leaving only small, isolated ice caps on West Antarctic islands.” In addition, they say their work suggests that “the WAIS will begin [our italics] to collapse when nearby ocean temperatures warm by roughly 5°C.” So how long would it take to complete the process?
In a News & Views story on Pollard and DeConto’s findings, Huybrechts (2009) states that “the amount of nearby ocean warming required to generate enough sub-ice-shelf melting to initiate a significant retreat of the West Antarctic ice sheet … may well take several centuries to develop.” And once started, he says that the transition time for a total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would range from “one thousand to several thousand years,” which time period, in his words, “is nowhere near the century timescales for West Antarctic ice-sheet decay based on simple marine ice-sheet models,” such as have been employed in the past.
What it means
Once again, the specter of 21st-century sea level rise being measured in meters — as hyped by Al Gore and James Hansen — can be seen to be receding ever further into the distance of unreality.
References
Huybrechts, P. 2009. West-side story of Antarctic ice. Nature 458: 295-296.
Naish, T., Powell, R., Levy, R., Wilson, G., Scherer, R., Talarico, F., Krissek, L., Niessen, F., Pompilio, M., Wilson, T., Carter, L., DeConto, R., Huybers, P., McKay, R., Pollard, D., Ross, J., Winter, D., Barrett, P., Browne, G., Cody, R., Cowan, E., Crampton, J., Dunbar, G., Dunbar, N., Florindo, F., Gebbherdt, C., Graham, I., Hannah, M., Hansaraj, D., Harwood, D., Helling, D., Henrys, S., Hinnov, L., Kuhn, G., Kyle, P., Laufer, A., Maffioli, P., Magens, D., Mandernack, K., McIntosh, W., Millan, C., Morin, R., Ohneiser, C., Paulsen, T., Persico, D., Raine, I., Reed, J., Riesselman, C., Sagnotti, L., Schmitt, D., Sjunneskog, C., Strong, P., Taviani, M., Vogel, S., Wilch, T. and Williams, T. 2009. Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations. Nature 458: 322-328.
Reviewed 29 April 2009
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So this means that the water is warming.
No doubt the authors were somewhat surprised when a huge part of the ice sheet collapsed in July.
When were they expecting this? 2017 or a hundred years into the future?
It looks like Gore and fellow lemmings couldn’t be more ill advised about the imminent collapse of the WAIS. One problem is the fact that the Holocene is cooler than the previous four interglacials. The WAIS seems to have been fairly stable over that long and warmer period of time.
How Imminent Is the Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? Reference
Hillenbrand, C-D., Futterer, D.K., Grobe, H. and Frederichs, T. 2002. No evidence for a Pleistocene collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from continental margin sediments recovered in the Amundsen Sea. Geo-Marine Letters. 22: 51-59.
Background
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet [WAIS] is often described as the world’s most unstable large ice sheet. As the authors of this paper report, “it was speculated, from observed fast grounding-line retreat and thinning of a glacier in Pine Island Bay (Rignot, 1998; Shepherd et al., 2001), from the timing of late Pleistocene-Holocene deglaciation in the Ross Sea (Bindschadler, 1998; Conway et al., 1999), and from predicted activity of ice-stream drainage in response to presumed future global warming (Oppenheimer, 1998), that the WAIS may disappear in the future, causing the sea-level to rise at a rate of 1 to 10 mm/year (Bindschadler, 1998; Oppenheimer, 1998).”
What was done
The authors studied the nature and history of glaciomarine deposits contained in sediment cores recovered from the West Antarctic continental margin in the Amundsen Sea to “test hypotheses of past disintegration of the WAIS.”
What was learned
All proxies regarded as sensitive to a WAIS collapse, according to the authors, changed markedly during the global climatic cycles of the past 1.8 million years, “but do not confirm a complete disintegration of the WAIS during the Pleistocene” at a place where “dramatic environmental changes linked to such an event should be documented.” In fact, they say their results “suggest relative stability rather than instability of the WAIS during the Pleistocene climatic cycles.”
What it means
In light of the findings of this study, it seems reasonable to conclude we are nowhere near having to worry about a disintegration of the WAIS. This seems also to be the feeling of the authors, who – although careful to state their results “do not exclude the possibility of a WAIS melting in response to future global warming” – emphasize that their primary conclusion is “consistent with only a minor reduction of the WAIS during the last interglacial period (Huybrechts, 1990; Cuffey and Marshall, 2000; Huybrechts, 2002), which was slightly warmer than the Holocene.”
Along these same lines, we note that all four of the interglacials that preceded the current interglacial were warmer than the Holocene, by an average of more than 2°C (see our Editorial of 9 August 2000), yet the WAIS still didn’t disintegrate.
So, don’t hold your breath waiting for the Big Meltdown to occur; it’s just not in the cards.
References
Bindschadler, R. 1998. Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science 282: 428-429.
Conway, H., Hall, B.L., Denton, G.H., Gades, A.M. and Waddington, E.D. 1999. Past and future grounding-line retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science 286: 280-283.
Cuffey, K.M. and Marshall, S.J. 2000. Substantial contribution to sea-level rise during the last interglacial from the Greenland ice sheet. Nature 404: 591-594.
Huybrechts, P. 1990. The Antarctic Ice Sheet during the last glacial-interglacial cycle: a three-dimensional experiment. Annals of Glaciology 14: 115-119.
Huybrechts, P. 2002. Sea-level changes at the LGM from ice-dynamic reconstructions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets during the glacial cycles. Quaternary Science Reviews 21: 203-231.
Oppenheimer, M. 1998. Global warming and the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Nature 393: 325-332.
Rignot, E.J. 1998. Fast recession of a West Antarctic glacier. Science 281: 549-551.
Shepherd, A., Wingham, D.J., Mansley, J.A.D. and Corr, H.F.J. 2001. Inland thinning of Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica. Science 291: 862-864.
Reviewed 27 November 2002
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Copyright © 2017. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
Denialist says:
“So, don’t hold your breath waiting for the Big Meltdown to occur; it’s just not in the cards.”
Reality says Larsen Ice sheet has melted and over 5,000 sq km have separated.
https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2017/07/archive-4-zip/giv-3902DYNNmUtS6Pg8/
So our denialists are playing with fake cards.
Gee, blith, UNPRECEDENTED, hey?!?!?!
I wonder where all those huge icebergs that were around down there that the whalers encountered, and for centuries before, came from?
I seem to recall in 1956 an iceberg of 32,000 km2.
But where would you blitherers be without the aid of modern satellites.
Read it and weep, blith.
It’s called history:
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Image1581_shadow.png
More stuff that indicates how little science really knows about climate and feedbacks:
“Melting sea ice could help cool the planet by flooding the atmosphere with particles that deflect sunlight.
Australian research suggests climate modellers have underestimated a natural “thermostat” that helps alleviate the rise in temperatures: immense quantities of reflective compounds, emitted by marine microbes, that act like a handbrake on global warming.
The study, published by the American Meteorological Society, suggests an overlooked source of these so-called aerosols — algae living in ice — could jam the handbrake on even harder.
Dr Gabric, [the author] a marine biogeochemist with Griffith University in Brisbane said the process had “absolutely not” been factored into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models of global warming.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/sea-ice-a-handbrake-on-global-warming/news-story/4f35434660076cff01ba91f429e56361
This recent article from William Kininmonth in the Australian is a very good read. What a pity school kids are not exposed to this type of information.
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=57726
ELECTRICITY
Blueprint author did not ask about the weather
by William Kininmonth
News Weekly, July 1, 2017
Blueprint for the Future, Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s report into the future security of the National Electricity Market, claims four key outcomes: increased security; future reliability; rewarding consumers; and lower emissions.
The central theme is Australia’s continuing commitment to the Paris Accord. This commitment requires a cut in greenhouse gas emissions (that is, carbon dioxide) of 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
Surprisingly, and without policy direction, Dr Finkel extends the target to zero emissions by the second half of the century.
The blueprint does not deal with the appropriateness of the Paris Accord as a policy objective (too hard? politically incorrect?). There is no acknowledgment that global temperatures have failed to match the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario of anthropogenic global warming and that scientists don’t know why.
The need for the blueprint is that the electricity market is becoming increasingly distorted as governments pursue policies aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. The distortion is manifested as a reduction in security and reliability of the infrastructure, and higher prices.
Previously, Australia’s electricity generation and distribution systems were world class. They were based on readily available and cheap fossil fuels. The systems employed best available technology to minimise atmospheric pollution, were reliable, and provided relatively cheap energy for industry and the community. Australia was internationally competitive.
It should be noted that France also has a reliable, efficient electricity system but based on nuclear fuels. French generated electricity is exported throughout Europe and is available to back up other systems.
There is general agreement with the proposition that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will raise Earth’s temperature. The contentious questions are: by how much and will it be dangerous?
The Paris Accord relies on the UN’s IPCC as its authority. The IPCC claims that anthropogenic emissions will raise Earth’s temperature to dangerous levels unless constrained. Other alarmist claims are that Earth might reach a “tipping point leading to runaway global warming”. These latter assertions have no basis in science.
The IPCC warming scenarios rely on projections of computer models that have consistently indicated a temperature increase (or sensitivity) of between 2 degrees Celsius and 4.5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration, with a best estimate of about 3 degrees.
However, real-world observations over the period of satellite monitoring (since 1980) do not support these projections. The IPCC scenario is for warming of between 0.7 degrees Celsius and 1.6 degrees. The actual warming over the 3½ decades of satellite monitoring has been barely 0.3 degrees, or half the lower model estimate.
Recent climate history suggests that models exaggerate sensitivity to carbon dioxide and that concerns over anthropogenic emissions are misplaced.
Alternative methodologies for estimating climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide also exist. These latter are underpinned either by physics of surface energy exchanges or correlation of historical data. Mostly these alternative methods suggest that the real sensitivity is less than 1 degree Celsius for a doubling of concentration. The IPCC and proponents of the dangerous anthropogenic climate change hypothesis ignore these alternative methodologies.
A sensitivity of less than 1 degree makes attempts to regulate climate through atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations fraught, even futile. The real challenge for society is to manage within a naturally varying climate. A total of 70 per cent of natural disasters involve weather and climate extremes. Regulating carbon-dioxide concentration (indeed, if this is even possible) will not ameliorate these.
Also, the climate system is ever changing. Global temperature varies by almost 1 degree in the shift between El Niño and La Niña conditions (linked to variations in sea surface temperature over the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean).
There is evidence of major global climate oscillation on the 1000-year time scale, with the present equable climate a reflection of recovery from the Little Ice Age that reached its extreme during the 17th century. Less than 20,000 years ago Earth was in the grip of the last glacial maximum. Deep ice sheets then covered much of North America and northwestern Europe; sea level was 130 metres lower than today. Our present relative warmth is a blessing.
It is unfortunate that the Chief Scientist did not conduct an independent review of the science underpinning the contentious hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic climate change before embarking on a blueprint for the national electricity market.
A misplaced objective of emissions reduction at the expense of affordable and reliable electricity services will unnecessarily impoverish Australians. A shift to renewable sources will be burdensome on Australian industry because it will result in even higher prices for all Australian electricity consumers. Energy intensive industries and the associated jobs will shift to those countries with no obligations under the Paris Accord.
William Kininmonth is a former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, Australian delegate to the WMO Commission for Climatology, and consultant to the WMO World Climate Program. He is author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard, and contributor
“Energy intensive industries and the associated jobs will shift to those countries with no obligations under the Paris Accord.”
It’s thanks to the climate “scientists” that are on the $500 trillion plus gravy train that this is well under way.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/08/20/harvard-physicist-climate-science-in-serious-trouble-really-dirty-people-doing-bad-stuff/#sthash.KYDX5wW3.BXlfsRrw.dpbs
The science religion:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Soon_1.png
How easy is it to ignore the facts when you must be seen to be PC:
“The AMA’s endorsement of child-rearing in same-sex marriages has drawn protests from doctors and professors who accuse President Michael Gannon of ignoring adverse research in favour of dangerous, politically correct myths. An overwhelming body of research supports their case…
Another problem with the AMA narrative is the higher levels of violence in same-sex households. The belief that violence comes from patriarchal domination was called into question in the early 1990s, when a significant survey of 1,099 American lesbians revealed that they were more physically abused by their (female) partners than women involved with men in traditional relationships.”
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2017/08/childrens-welfare-sex-families/
Another battery maker bites the dust and now has a hazardous factory to clean up as well.
http://www.thegwpf.com/another-one-bites-the-dust-battery-maker-alevo-files-for-bankruptcy/
And there is no need to panic about the East Ant ice sheet.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4803132/East-Antarctic-stay-stable-western-ice-sheets-melt.html
“And there is no need to panic about the East Ant ice sheet.”
Well, Neville, not if you were a rational, enuresis nervosa-free person or one who had no financial, political, religious or ideological skin in the game.
But those who are will never tell the truth:
https://www.iceagenow.info/phony-scare-tactics-nasa/
Given that where I live this winter has been notably cold, I was intrigued by a commenter’s remark (supported by what I heard on the news) that July was notably warm for Australia. Ole Humlum’s data are now available for July and you can see that in fact Tasmania was marginally colder than the ten-year average, where people live was unchanged, and that the extra warmth was in a stretch of Northern Australia where few people live. You can see the map in
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_July_2017.pdf
Don
Humlum’s paper is well written and worth reading. Tasmanian July was marginally cooler and it was notably warmer for northern Australia but even warmer for most of Antarctica on the same measure.
And here’s another to scratch one’s head about. Gavin Schmidt wrote the following in one of his essays in RealClimate the other day, in part explaining why using anomalies was so important:
‘But think about what happens when we try and estimate the absolute global mean temperature for, say, 2016. The climatology for 1981-2010 is 287.4±0.5K, and the anomaly for 2016 is (from GISTEMP w.r.t. that baseline) 0.56±0.05ºC. So our estimate for the absolute value is (using the first rule shown above) is 287.96±0.502K, and then using the second, that reduces to 288.0±0.5K [2016]. The same approach for 2015 gives 287.8±0.5K, and for 2014 it is 287.7±0.5K. All of which appear to be the same within the uncertainty. Thus we lose the ability to judge which year was the warmest if we only look at the absolute numbers.’
The reference to rules can be understood from his essay — they are rules in ascertaining uncertainties, and not relevant here. What I take from this paragraph is that Gavin dismisses the actual measurements because they don’t allow him to say that one year was warmer than the other, but if he uses anomalies he can do it! Good old anomalies! I ask my usual question: why are we trying so hard to show that one year is warmer than another, given the uncertainties and the methodology (including averaging SST and land measurements, ugh)?
You can read it all here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/08/observations-reanalyses-and-the-elusive-absolute-global-mean-temperature/#comment-681908
A third is at the head of the thread, on cherry-picking.
Don I can’t understand how the HAD 4 data can be recently changed from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 2009. Phil Jones’s temp data changed for 1975 to 2009 from 0.161 c/ dec to 0.193 c/ dec. This changed after his 2010 interview, yet nobody seems to notice or care.
BTW here is a recent interview by Alan Jones of Dr Jennifer Marohasy on Sky News.
http://www.skynews.com.au/video/program/program_featured/2017/08/01/bom-accused-of-manipulating-temperatures-.html
Dr Roy Spencer brings out a new book to counter Gore’s deceptive AIS Sci- fi flick. Here’s his summary and a great title for his book.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/08/an-inconvenient-deception-how-al-gore-distorts-climate-science-and-energy-policy/#comments
Neville
Regurgitating News Weekly, July 1, 2017 only leads to embarrassment. News Weekly is a magazine funded by right-wing Catholic political activists.
They consistently corrupt information and publish dogma.
You posted a standard example:
” There is no acknowledgment that global temperatures have failed to match the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario of anthropogenic global warming and that scientists don’t know why.”
This is a deliberate drongo lie.
The match of scenario to global temperatures has been investigated and acknowledged.
See here: http://www.archive.is/sTdYX
Chris, stop talking nonsense. Here’s Dr Christy’s sworn evidence before the US govt house committee in 2017. See figure 2 . Don’t forget he and Dr Spencer pioneered satellite temp data and both won awards from NASA for their work .
https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/HHRG-115-SY-WState-JChristy-20170329.pdf
Neville
Unfortunately your crude tag of nonsense comes back to bite your good self.
The drongo lie:
” There is no acknowledgment that global temperatures have failed to match the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario of anthropogenic global warming and that scientists don’t know why.”
is also exposed by the IPCC discussion of observations and models, such as:
As was done to a more limited extent in AR4 (e.g., Figure 1.1 in IPCC, 2007), observations are compared with available model analyses from the previous assessments as a test of planetary-scale hypotheses of climate change – in other words, how well have the models used in the past assessments projected what has been observed. In the case of AR5, there are now five additional years of observations. The analyses presented in this section provide a demonstration of the advancement of science. Comparisons with the climate and associated environmental parameters are presented in Figure 1.3 (which is updated from the similar figure in IPCC, 2001). This section discusses recent changes in several indicators, but it is not the aim here to be comprehensive. Many of the indicators are more completely updated and discussed in other chapters. Note that a projection is not a prediction; the analyses presented only examine the short-term plausibility of the projections and models considered from the earlier assessment.
The IPCC found:
Even though the projections from the models were never intended to be predictions over such a short time scale, the observations through 2010 generally fall well within the projections made in all of the past assessments.
Poor ol’ drivelling blith descends into despair.
Even NASA scientists who have worked for Hanson and Schmidt admit that computer predictions are ‘Mathematically Impossible’:
http://columbia-phd.org/RealClimatologists/Principles/More_Reasons_To_Doubt_Climate_Models_Can_Predict_Climate/index.html
I think you’ll find that more blither just isn’t the cure for enuresis nervosa, blith.
Weasel words like “projection” trip off the blitherers’ tongues like honey. They know they can’t predict anything with their 95% wrong models so they have to use sneak-speak to give them a back door to sneak out:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/can_someone_show_us_a_climate_prediction_that_has_ever_come_true.html
Chris according to Werner Brozek there has been no stat sig warming using the UAH V 6 data since April 1994 ( over 23 years) and no stat sig trend using RSS V 4 for about 16 years. That’s using Nick Stokes’ software and there was a negative trend for UAH V 6 from 1996.5 to 2015 or about 18.5 years.( York Uni ) And RSS 3.3 trend was just 0.01 c/ dec over that 18.5 year period or just 0.1 c/century.
But-but-but-but Neville, cli-sci predicted the eclipse so that makes catastrophic warming a CERT!!!!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/22/nyt-we-should-trust-climate-scientists-because-the-eclipse/
Neville
You need to stop all this cherry-picking – it has made you go blind.
UAH V6 data shows a warming trend of over 1C century using the full data set – ie no cherry picking.
The so called negative trend, over your cherry-picked sample, is minuscule – 1C per 10,000 years. Can’t you do better than that?
If there was no global warming, negative trends would equal the positive trends. As this is not the case, global warming is a proven fact that cannot be denied.
The rate of warming is as measured by professional scientific instruments.
Anyone can check this out using:
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
Chris it is no cherry pick, even Santer et al and Phil Jones check out different trends over different periods. And your so called global warming shows no trend in the SP region and much less warming in the SH.
Also the BAS study now finds a strong cooling trend in the Ant peninsula since 1998. Using a natural event like a recent strong el nino to find a warming trend is the real cherry pick.
It will also be interesting to observe Arctic and Greenland changes when the AMO changes to the cool phase over the next decade or so.
What is missing in all this debate about global warming is some skepticism from real climate scientists. And yes there are real climate scientists who are skeptics, but they are universally shunned, even by non-scientist skeptics (who tend to be scientist wannabees). Here is a global warming skeptic website done by expert real climate scientists, one of whom used to work for James Hansen at NASA GISS, including coauthoring papers with him:
http://RealClimatologists.org
Dr. Duane Thresher
Researcher, tree ring climate proxy modeling, University of Alaska (ARSC and SNRAS).
Guest Scientist, ocean climate proxy modeling, Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany.
PhD, Earth & Environmental Sciences (climate modeling/proxies), Columbia University and NASA GISS (working for Dr. James Hansen, the father of global warming, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt).
NSF research cruise, RV Nathaniel B. Palmer in Mertz Glacier region of Antarctica, out of Hobart, Tasmania; CTD operator.
MS, Atmospheric Science (climate modeling/tree rings/chaos), University of Arizona and NCAR.
BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT and NASA.
Neville
Where has anyone used a recent event like El Nino to “find” a warming trend?
Global warming is added onto any such event.
Your reference to BAS study is too cryptic to be useful but any denialist can invent a cooling trend if they cherry pick an interval from 1998.
Interesting comment by Prof Peter Ridd at Jennifer Marohasy’s website on the corruption and dishonesty of science:
“Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never check[ed]. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.”[3]
You can be sure he will get the Bob Carter treatment on this.
Dr Roy Spencer compares the latest RSS V 4 TLT dataset with UAH V 6 TLT. Note that both are well below average model trends.
Average model trends are about 0.27 c/ decade and UAH V6 trend is just 0.12 c/decade and RSS V4 trend is about 0.17 c/decade. Therefore average model trends are 2.25 times higher than UAH V 6 and 1.6 times higher than RSS V 4.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/07/comments-on-the-new-rss-lower-tropospheric-temperature-dataset/
Comments on the New RSS Lower Tropospheric Temperature Dataset
July 6th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
It was inevitable that the new RSS mid-tropospheric (MT) temperature dataset, which showed more warming than the previous version, would be followed with a new lower-tropospheric (LT) dataset. (Carl Mears has posted a useful FAQ on the new dataset, how it differs from the old, and why they made adjustments).
Before I go into the details, let’s keep all of this in perspective. Our globally-averaged trend is now about +0.12 C/decade, while the new RSS trend has increased to about +0.17 C/decade.
Note these trends are still well below the average climate model trend for LT, which is +0.27 C/decade.
These are the important numbers; the original Carbon Brief article headline (“Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998”) is seriously misleading, because the warming in the RSS LT data post-1998 was near-zero anyway (140% more than a very small number is still a very small number).
Since RSS’s new MT dataset showed more warming that the old, it made sense that the new LT dataset would show more warming, too. Both depend on the same instrument channel (MSU channel 2 and AMSU channel 5), and to the extent that the new diurnal drift corrections RSS came up with caused more warming in MT, the adjustments should be even larger in LT, since the diurnal cycle becomes stronger as you approach the surface (at least over land).
Background on Diurnal Drift Adjustments
All of the satellites carrying the MSU and AMSU instruments (except Aqua, Metop-A and Metop-B) do not have onboard propulsion, and so their orbits decay over the years due to very weak atmospheric drag. The satellites slowly fall, and their orbits are then no longer sun-synchronous (same local observation time every day) as intended. Some of the NOAA satellites were purposely injected into orbits that would drift one way in local observation time before orbit decay took over and made them drift in the other direction; this provided several years with essentially no net drift in the local observation time.
Since there is a day-night temperature cycle (even in the deep-troposphere the satellite measures) the drift of the satellite local observation time causes a spurious drift in observed temperature over the years (the diurnal cycle becomes “aliased” into the long-term temperature trends). The spurious temperature drift varies seasonally, latitudinally, and regionally (depending upon terrain altitude, available surface moisture, and vegetation).
Because climate models are known to not represent the diurnal cycle to the accuracy needed for satellite adjustments, we decided long ago to measure the drift empirically, by comparing drifting satellites with concurrently operating non-drifting (or nearly non-drifting) satellites. Our Version 6 paper discusses the details.
RSS instead decided to use climate model estimates of the diurnal cycle, and in RSS Version 4 are now making empirical corrections to those model-based diurnal cycles. (Generally speaking, we think it is useful for different groups to use different methods.)
Diurnal Drift Effects in the RSS Dataset
We have long known that there were differences in the resulting diurnal drift adjustments in the RSS versus our UAH dataset. We believed that the corrections in the older RSS Version 3.3 datasets were “overdone”, generating more warming than UAH prior to 2002 but less than UAH after 2002 (some satellites drift one way in the diurnal cycle, other satellites drift in the opposite direction). This is why the skeptical community liked to follow the RSS dataset more than ours, since UAH showed at least some warming post-1997, while RSS showed essentially no warming (the “pause”).
The new RSS V4 adjustment alters the V3.3 adjustment, and now warms the post-2002 period, but does not diminish the extra warming in the pre-2002 period. Hence the entire V4 time series shows more warming than before.
Examination of a geographic distribution of their trends shows some elevation effects, e.g. around the Andes in S. America (You have to click on the image to see V4 compared to V3.3…the static view below might be V3.3 if you don’t click it).
Gridpoint lower tropospheric temperature trends, 1979-2016, in the V3.3 versus V4 RSS datasets.
We also discovered this and, as discussed in our V6 paper, attributed it to errors in the oxygen absorption theory used to match the MSU channel 2 weighting function with the AMSU channel 5 weighting function, which are at somewhat different altitudes when viewing at the same Earth incidence angle (AMSU5 has more surface influence than MSU2). Using existing radiative transfer theory alone to adjust AMSU5 to match MSU2 (as RSS does) leads to AMSU5 still being too close to the surface. This affects the diurnal drift adjustment, and especially the transition between MSU and AMSU in the 1999-2004 period. The mis-match also can cause dry areas to have too much warming in the AMSU era, and in general will cause land areas to warm spuriously faster than ocean areas.
Here are our UAH LT gridpoint trends (sorry for the different map projection):
In general, it is difficult for us to follow the chain of diurnal corrections in the new RSS paper. Using a climate model to make the diurnal drift adjustments, but then adjusting those adjustments with empirical satellite data feels somewhat convoluted to us.
Final Comments
Besides the differences in diurnal drift adjustments, the other major difference affecting trends is the treatment off the NOAA-14 MSU, last in the MSU series. There is clear drift in the difference between the new NOAA-15 AMSU and the old NOAA-14 MSU, with NOAA-14 warming relative to NOAA-15. We assume that NOAA-14 is to blame, and remove its trend difference with NOAA-15 (we only use it through 2001) and also adjust NOAA-14 to match NOAA-12 (early in the NOAA-14 record). RSS does not assume one satellite is better than the other, and uses NOAA-14 all the way through 2004, by which point it shows a large trend difference with NOAA-15 AMSU. We believe this is a large component of the overall trend difference between UAH and RSS, but we aren’t sure just how much compared to the diurnal drift adjustment differences.
It should be kept in mind that the new UAH V6 dataset for LT uses three channels, while RSS still uses multiple view angles from one channel (a technique we originally developed, and RSS followed). As a result, our new LT weighting function is a little higher in the atmosphere, with considerably more weight in the upper troposphere and slightly more weight in the lower stratosphere. Based upon radiosonde temperature trend profiles, we found the net effect on the difference between the two LT weighting functions on temperature trends to be very small, probably 0.01 C/decade or less.
We have a paper in peer review with extensive satellite dataset comparisons to many balloon datasets and reanalyses. These show that RSS diverges from these and from UAH, showing more warming than the other datasets between 1990 and 2002 – a key period with two older MSU sensors both of which showed signs of spurious warming not yet addressed by RSS. I suspect the next chapter in this saga is that the remaining radiosonde datasets that still do not show substantial warming will be the next to be “adjusted” upward.
The bottom line is that we still trust our methodology. But no satellite dataset is perfect, there are uncertainties in all of the adjustments, as well as legitimate differences of opinion regarding how they should be handled.
Also, as mentioned at the outset, both RSS and UAH lower tropospheric trends are considerably below the average trends from the climate models.
And that is the most important point to be made.
Roy Spencer’s “An Inconvenient Deception” is winning easily against Gore’s new Sci-fi flick. Here’s Roy’s comment.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/08/skeptic-beating-al-gore-on-amazon/
Skeptic Beating Al Gore on Amazon
August 24th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
“Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, has been in theaters for about a month now, and has received rather tepid reviews.
The Kindle e-book version of Gore’s movie, despite being very colorful, has been doing even worse and is currently running at #20,768 overall on Amazon, and is not ranked #1 in any sub-category.
But the skeptic take-down of Gore’s new movie and book, An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy, is at #956, and is #1 in three sub-categories.
What makes the discrepancy even worse is that An Inconvenient Deception was self published, with no paid advertising.
Maybe people are finally wising up to Mr Gore?”
“Cannibal discourse discloses the enduring sensation of corporeal vulnerability that accompanied colonial encounters. The body of the British invader was permanently threatened by the native capacity for atavistic terror; the body of the native was punished and dismembered to satisfy imperial curiosity and pseudo- scientific objectives. In each instance, the accusation of anthropophagy by the colonists functioned as a thinly-veiled disguise for British anthropophagous practices that flourished as maritime culture developed in the age of imperial expansion. Cannibal discourse also operated as a metaphor for consumption, where everything that is outside law’s empire is colonised, incorporated into the body of law, regulated, controlled and classified. Rejecting all accusations of its own cruelty, the common law consumes the atavism of its Others.”
https://sydney.edu.au/law/slr/slr27_4/Biber.pdf
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/april/1427806800/jeff-sparrow/bring-bodies
“The traditional narrative of white Australia posits the coming of the First Fleet as an almost natural development, the inexorable result of the British Empire’s growth. By contrast, the Batavia story, and contemplation of the Dutch presence in Australia prior to 1788, sets both England and the Australian continent itself on a different axis. It remaps the regional geography around Jakarta, and Amsterdam becomes more significant than London. We’re pushed into a multivalent history in which there are more actors and the outcomes feel somehow less preordained. The specific way that white settlement unfolded loses some of its inevitability.
And that seems to me to be a good thing. When the past opens up, so does the future. The world of the Batavia is undoubtedly strange to us and will surely remain so, no matter how many skeletons we find. Nonetheless, the story we tell about the lives saved and lost in that desperate episode almost four hundred years ago illuminates, in some ways at least, the stories we tell about ourselves today.”
A fascinating book for young adults that I enjoyed.
https://readingaustralia.com.au/books/strange-objects/
“In the end, Crew seems to say, this is what history is: a patched together account of failed perceptions, misunderstandings and impossibilities, made anew by each person who considers it from their own, particular viewpoint.”
Strange times indeed, and not all Georgian architecture and silk ball gowns as some would like to imagine was brought to ‘terra nullius’ by superior civilisation and colonial refinement.
https://batavialegacy.wordpress.com/category/white-tribes/
In fact, there is no such thing as western civilisation according to this long read.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture
Western Judeo-Christian culture is generous to a fault.
One of the silliest things the west did after WW1 was to leave Constantinople in the hands of the Turks. It was probably due to the fact that Greece was never much of an ally to the west during the war but it would have been interesting being a fly on the wall during the Treaty of Sevres.
Western culture owes a lot to the Byzantine Empire [the first Christian empire] yet today [due to much western support and restoration] almost every mosque in the Balkans is built on a Christian church site.
Even Israel oldest shrine is captive to generosity to Muslims.
And the Australian Light Horse were the first westerners into the Holy land since the Crusades after the victory over the Turks at the wells of Beersheba.
But we stepped aside.
Could you imagine other cultures doing likewise in similar circumstances?
More porkies from the delusional Fairfax media. Just incredible that we still have these religious fanatics and extremists who will tell any lie to try and convince people about their so called CAGW.
An inconvenient deception for sure.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/fairfax-blames-houstons-residents-for-the-weather/news-story/620c1304edb66774ad2e1305ee4d41cc
Dr Judith Curry also looks at the long history of Cat 4 and 5 landfalls in the US. The record shows that there is nothing unusual about Cat 4 Harvey at all.
What is unusual is the 12 year gap when no Cat 3 to 5 hurricanes hit the USA.
https://judithcurry.com/2017/08/27/hurricane-harvey-long-range-forecasts/
Joe Bastardi takes Michael Mann to task over his claim that CAGW caused more damage from Hurricane Harvey. Mann also claims that later lower ( post hurricane strike) wind strength was a also caused by humans. Unbelievable from the so called scientists who’ve been telling us for decades that CAGW will also cause greater wind speeds. And they still can’t explain the 12 year gap in the US when no Cat 3+ hurricane made landfall.
http://junkscience.com/2017/08/bastardi-no-michael-mann-climate-change-did-not-cause-hurricane-harvey/
Yes Neville, Roy Spencer says it well:
“Downtown Houston flood of 1935.
By way of comparison, as of 6:30 a.m. this (Monday) morning, the water level in the same location is at 38 feet, which is still 16 feet lower than in 1935. I’m sure that will continue to rise.
Are the rainfall totals unprecedented?
Even that question is difficult to answer. The exact same tropical system moving at, say, 15 mph might have produced the same total amount of rain, but it would have been spread over a wide area, maybe many states, with no flooding disaster. This is usually what happens with landfalling hurricanes.
Instead, Harvey stalled after it came ashore and so all of the rain has been concentrated in a relatively small portion of Texas around the Houston area. In both cases, the atmosphere produced the same amount of rain, but where the rain lands is very different. People like those in the Houston area don’t want all of the rain to land on them.
There is no aspect of global warming theory that says rain systems are going to be moving slower, as we are seeing in Texas. This is just the luck of the draw. Sometimes weather systems stall, and that sucks if you are caught under one. The same is true of high pressure areas; when they stall, a drought results.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/08/why-houston-flooding-isnt-a-sign-of-climate-change/
It seems the extremists lies about polar bears are starting to catch up with them. Perhaps polar bears may soon have an obesity problem and could even Mickey Mann be starting to wake up? What a joke.
Below is a quick update from Dr Susan Crockford.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/01/death-of-a-climate-icon-the-polar-bears-demise-as-a-useful-poster-child/
susanjcrockford says:
September 1, 2017 at 1:22 pm
What I find especially hilarious is when they lead a climate change catastrophe story with a photo of a fat, healthy polar bear.
Talk about a subliminal message that refutes the objectives of fearmongering!
Like this one from last year: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/science/polar-bears-global-warming.html?mcubz=1
Note the only subpopulation that is still considered to have registered a recent decline in numbers is the Southern Beaufort Sea group. But that last survey was completed in 2010 – seven long years ago now – and the decline it registered was due to thick spring ice conditions in 2004-2006.
Oddly enough, the bears showed signs of recovery in 2007 even though that was the first summer of markedly low summer ice.
As far as I know, there hasn’t been another thick spring ice event in the SB since 2006 – even though the phenomenon has been documented every 10 years or so since the 1960s.
None of the field researchers working in the SB seem to have considered the possibility that less severe ice conditions, especially in spring, might be beneficial to SB seals and bears.
Certainly, virtually all of the photos of bears onshore and offshore in the SB in recent years have shown fat, healthy bears.
If anyone tries to present the “SB decline” as an indicator of polar bear response to reduced sea ice let them know that data is not only out of date and but was misleading at the time it was published.
Dr. Susan Crockford, zoologist