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DSL at 23:49 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Escalator link/graphic on right is "file not found" for me.Moderator Response: [Sph] ??? It works for me. When you roll over it, what URL does it show in the status bar at the bottom? Have you tried reloading the page? -
philipm at 23:07 PM on 14 January 20132012: The Year Climate Change Got Real
Sadly it seems more like the year climate denial doesn’t care if it’s unreal, continuing on to 2013. Australia has recently suffered an unprecedented heat wave, with the Bureau of Meterology having to add two new colours to the map, and Tasmania, usually relatively cool, having runaway bush fires and 40°C temperatures. Then there's this page of letters at The Australian. The rather basic fact that a linear increase in temperatures can be masked temporarily by natural variability should not be contested, and any “serious” newspaper that continues to obfuscate that fact deserves to be put behind a paywall so only the stupidly rich will read it. Oh, wait. -
CBDunkerson at 22:20 PM on 14 January 2013A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
Sorry, but no... they ARE wrong. They were wrong when they said fixing ozone depletion would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". They were wrong when they said fixing acid rain would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". And they are wrong when they now say that fixing AGW would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". It is nonsense. Pure and simple. Fixing AGW requires a change from fossil fuels to renewable energy... which will actually increase overall 'buying power' because renewable energy is vastly less expensive once all the externialities are accounted for. It isn't even close. -
jyyh at 21:14 PM on 14 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
Yes. Multiple regressions should Always be represented this way! There's probably no program which would do this automatically, so I imagine that has taken quite a while. Excellent. [DB: good job you too] -
Paul D at 20:49 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Regarding creating and editing comments... I am currently looking at different wysiwyg editors that will make it easier to format comments on Skeptical Science. Watch this space (literally!). -
snafu at 20:45 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
"Eventually the preponderance of La Niñas will end, solar activity will rise, and so forth." Will this happen naturally or by increased greenhouse emissions? -
quokka at 20:40 PM on 14 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
Here are two recent assessments of the cost of electricity generation by various technologies: Summary from the Australian Government's Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics: AUSTRALIAN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT 2012 Oct 2012 assessment from the UK Government's Department of Energy and Climate Change: Electricity Generation Costs -
John Mason at 20:35 PM on 14 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
Martin #19, primarily this is all experimental work: the aim is to see what is possible in forecasting. If we ever get to the stage where reliable 5-year forecasts can be done in detail - and we may not - then think of the very obvious benefits e.g. to agriculture. -
quokka at 20:30 PM on 14 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
#53 sailrick, Claims that fast reactors pose some sort of extra proliferation risk are very dubious. The only nations likely to build fast reactors in the next decade or more are already nuclear armed and already have an excess of weapons grade material. For would be proliferators, there are much easier, faster and cheaper ways to make Pu in a graphite moderated water cooled "research" reactor or alternatively centrifuge enrich uranium. Ultimately any nation that has access to natural uranium (which really is everybody as it can at a pinch be extracted from sea water) could with sufficient effort make nuclear weapons. Proliferation at it's core remains a political problem. Of course LFTRs present precisely zero proliferation risk because there aren't any, nor are their likely to be any commercially deployable LFTRs for 15 years or more without dramatically increased R&D spending. -
Dikran Marsupial at 20:10 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby As others have said, testing by eye is extremely unreliable. We have evolved such that our brain tries very hard to detect patterns in what we see (e.g. so that we can detect ambush predators that are hiding in cover). This is one reason that optical illusions can be so convincing. This is why we should use objective statistical methods to test out hypotheses. However, don't stop there, the next step is physics. A good physical theory is more convincing that an observed correlation, as it allows you to go into the causal mechanisms. For example, there are good physical reasons that can explain the apparent cyclical changes in climate sine 1880, based on observed changes in the forcings. This means that if for the changes to be due to a real cycle, then much of what we know about atmospheric and radiative physics must be wrong. So do you have a physical mechanism to explain the 30 year cycles and an explanation of where our knowledge of physics is wrong? Lastly, scientific method is based on the idea of self-skepticism - if you want to promulgate an hypothesis, the onus is on you to test it first. In this case, if the hypothesis of climate change being cyclical is based purely on the observations, then you need to show the evidence for those cycles is statistically significant (i.e. that the observations would be unlikely under AGW). -
cynicus at 19:48 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
although the spacing of some page elements may be different by a pixel or five, here or there. Yes, the temperature scale of the most uses septical arguments has holes in FireFox 18. Internet Explorer 9 is fine as is Chrome 23.0.1271.97 and 24.0.1312.5Moderator Response: [Sph] Have you tried reloading the page in Firefox? -
jyyh at 18:11 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
honoring this update, I've also updated my profile ;-) , pretty much counting myself out of the regulars nowadays though. Is there a way to delete the profile image, the old one was no longer very accurate, so there's a Greenland bedrock map in its place now. -
Doug Hutcheson at 17:38 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Drop downs and links all seem fine, running Firefox under Fedora 17 Linux. Also, I just worked out how to enter CO₂ with 2 as a subscript, using the Compose key and typing (Compose key)_2 How annoying to find the work-around just when WYSIWYG is nearly here ... sigh. -
Doug Hutcheson at 17:31 PM on 14 January 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #2
2012: The Year Climate Change Got Real by Greenman appears in both 'The Week in Review' and 'Coming Soon'. I must be in a quantum time warp: oh, yes, there's Schrödinger's cat, and it's still alive; I'm definitely warped ... "8-) -
Tom Curtis at 16:48 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Phillipe Chantreau @93:"Cycles are extremely easy to mistake for stochastic fluctuations."
I suspect you mean that around the other way, although no doubt both ways are true when the data is less than a few "cycle" lengths in duration. -
Bob Lacatena at 15:12 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Anyone who has the drop down problem can clear it immediately by hitting reload. It will also clear on it's own in a few days (it's just your browser caching a file that has changed, so it's using the one that's incompatible/out-of-date). -
citizenschallenge at 15:12 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
oh I hate those typos. . . good night . -
citizenschallenge at 15:11 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Just got off my girl friends Dell Windows 7 - Explorer Internet Drop downs work fine and all the menu link also work. In fact, I just check on this Mac and they are all working this time. Cheers -
Philippe Chantreau at 15:09 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Smerby says: "Some graphs do pass the eyeball test and I think the surface temp graph that I posted shows reliable and repeating trends of ~30 years." THere is a serious problem with this statement. The eyeball is not a test, can not substitute for a real statistical analysis. There is a variety of true statistical methods to determine if a cycle is a present in a data set. I'm sure Dikran can weigh in on that; Tamino has posts dedicated to the subject. One can assert that a cycle is present only after subjecting the data to these tests. Saying "I think a cycle shows" without being able to refer to any analysis is dangerously close to being full of it. It is nowhere near a skeptical attitude. Cycles are extremely easy to mistake for stochastic fluctuations. -
Rob Honeycutt at 14:34 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby... First off, I greatly appreciate you sticking around to discuss the subject. You're clearly interested, even though sometimes it can be tough to push through and get all the answers you want without getting frustrated. One suggestion I would offer is to remember, this is all about the greenhouse effect and the change in radiative forcing on the climate system. All the elements we're discussing, including surface temperature, are responses to that change in forcing. What I think I see your questions possibly alluding to (correct me if I'm wrong), is whether there is another explanation for global warming. Is it something internally cyclical about the climate system (i.e., PDO, etc.). And what I would have to remind you of is, the radiative properties of GHG's are well understood. What would be utterly amazing would be if the changes in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere did not act to change surface temperatures. -
citizenschallenge at 14:27 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
weird I just looked again and they are under their headings where they belong. Oh and I got Safari is 6.0.2 too. don't ask me, I'm just reporting ;-) -
citizenschallenge at 14:22 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
The menu bar and drop downs seem to be working fine for me {Mac OS X - ver 10.8.2 - Safari } However these links were broken: lessons from predictions trend calculator climate myths prudent path OA not OK ====================== Other than that, SWEET - it seems to work much faster and I clinked around a bunch, including translations... never appreciated how many translations you've got. Bravo! It all worked swell ! Although - about your "Donation" too bad PayPal is the only option you have. Not like I could donate much, but for you folks, I could definitely scratch some coin together. But I don't do the PayPal. ~ ~ ~ Anyways, thanks for all your collective efforts, they help. You folks are awesome !Moderator Response: [Sph] Links fixed. Thanks for the heads up. -
skywatcher at 14:22 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Smerby, you keep returning to your eyeball as a reliable identifier of some kind of "cycle", but you are as yet providing insufficient evidenciary backup for this claim. [BTW, you can refer to such work as Santer et al for why you need 20-30 years for determination fo a trend in climate.] So here is one simple question for you: Q: Is there a statistically significant change in the warming trend over the past decade? If you think there is, please show your working. Eyecrometer results are not acceptable. My thinking is in line withKevin C's video above, and the final two figures of Tamino's post - that the underlying trend has not actually changed over the past decade. Global temperatures are where you would have expected, had you plotted a graph in 2000, estimating the subsequent 12 years. Skeptics often claim that somehow there's cooling, large overprinted cycles or other changes that are manifesting themselves just now or shortly in the future. You claimed that temperatures have "flat-lined", yet is there any actual evidence for this? I contend that there is not. I also contend that you are confusing noise with signal. -
Rob Honeycutt at 14:17 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
All the drop down menus show up on the far left side of the screen. I'm using a Mac OSX 10.8.2 with Safari 6.0.2. Sounds similar to what Daniel is describing above.Moderator Response: [Sph] Hit "reload" on your browser. -
Daniel Bailey at 14:08 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Bug/Feature: Hovering the cursor over the drop-down bar doesn't generate a normal drop-down listing underneath each linked tab. Instead, the listing appears in a blocked column to the left of the Most-Used Climate Myths thermometer. It is difficult to move the cursor over fast enough to access this remote menu before it times out and disappears. Affected Tabs: Arguments, Software, Resources, Translations and About drop-down headers/listings. FF 18.0, Windows 7.Moderator Response: [Sph] Hit "reload" on your browser. -
smerby at 13:49 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
All, thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I hear you skywatcher and I agree that the eye test can be misleading. Some graphs do pass the eyeball test and I think the surface temp graph that I posted shows reliable and repeating trends of ~30 years. I have looked at the 12 month, 36 month, and 5 year mean versions of this graph to try to dampen out short term forcings and it pretty much shows the same trends. The overall time scale of these trends may not be long enough for a regular cycle as Tom pointed out and the early cooling part of the graph was influenced by Krakatoa as Kevin indicated, but it is interesting that the trends are ~30 years. These are roughly the same time frame as climate cycles. Why is 30 years decided as a climate cycle in the first place, why not 60 year cycles for normals; puzzled by this. The length of these global surface trends are roughly the same as the length of the trends of the PDO and AMO, which can influence global surface temperatures. The global surface temperature trends are more in step with the PDO rather than the AMO. I think this makes sense given the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. I look at these cooling and warming trends of the oceans as baffles and accelerators of global surface temperatures. Against the backdrop of global warming, they make for more of a step function rise in temperatures as opposed to a continuous cataclysmic rise in surface temperatures. What do you all think? -
Doug Hutcheson at 13:15 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Hooray! Wysiwyg rules! CO(subscript 2) coming to a comment editor near you Real Soon Now (I hope). Thanks, DB et al. -
Doug Hutcheson at 13:11 PM on 14 January 20132012: The Year Climate Change Got Real
Great to see the sceptical view that we are in a cooling phase. Sen. Inhofe must be so amazingly sciency that he does not need to examine the temperature records, in order to come to his conclusion. Another cup of Tea for you, sir, or has it gone cold? -
Doug Hutcheson at 13:01 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Will the change include being able to use <sub> and <sup>, or any other HTML tags, in comments?Moderator Response: [DB] Complex editing/formatting and WYSIWYG commenting functionalities will be rolled out to the comment boxes for users. This is in the works. -
bill4344 at 12:02 PM on 14 January 20132012: The Year Climate Change Got Real
Peter Sinclair is one of out greatest assets. This series gets stronger and stronger. -
funglestrumpet at 08:01 AM on 14 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday will continue to deny climate change until long after the sea-level has risen above the roof of the British House of Commons and Big Ben is seen by shipping as an hazard to navigation. (The British House of Commons under water? Oh well, ‘it is an ill wind ...!’) -
villabolo at 07:55 AM on 14 January 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #2
William @#1 "Giya" is spelled Gaia. :-) -
Tom Curtis at 07:30 AM on 14 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
fpjohn @5, as you yourself have noted on another thread, this article rebutted Lomborg's latest before it was even published. -
martin3818 at 07:15 AM on 14 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
If, as you say, El Niño has such a significant effect on the global annual temperature, what is the value of the UK's Met Office 5 year forecast? If in the year 2017 we have a super El Niño or for that matter a super El Niña what will comparing actual and forecast mean? It seems to me that decadal forecasts are really only useful when done as hindcasts, that is when the ENSO and possibly volcano effects are well known. -
Bob Loblaw at 06:51 AM on 14 January 2013Greenhouse effect has been falsified
To add: - plastic greenhouses (which don't block any IR) work pretty well, so it can't be the IR that keep things warm. - glass greenhouses, in which the glass does affect IR, tend to reduce the incoming solar more than they increase incoming IR, once the glass gets typically dirty. So, the net effect of the glass on radiative input tends to be negative for dirty glass. - all the latent heat that results from evaporating water in the greenhouse soil is kept inside (unless vented). Greenhouses are awfully humid, in addition to being warm. -
Bob Lacatena at 06:04 AM on 14 January 2013Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Wig4, ...short version of Tom's answer... A greenhouse works by interfering with both infrared radiation and convection, but the important point with reference to the topic at hand is convection. You are taking umbrage at the use of the word "block" in place of "absorption." That's just picking nits, and the use of the latter term does not better clarify the argument for the reader. To the sort of person reading the Intermediate rebuttal, the term "blocked" is perfectly clear, especially when considered in concert with the graphic presented. It's about communication. -
Mal Adapted at 05:57 AM on 14 January 2013A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
Bernard J.:It's a thermodynamic truth that many people, even on the side of the consensus, need to hear and understand.
Since CBDunkerson and I are both on the side of the consensus, I want to be sure I didn't misunderstand his(?) use of "business as usual" (BAU). CBDunkerson:The claim that environmental problems can only be solved by giving up modern technology, individual freedom, et cetera is a lie that deniers have told themselves so often that they take it as inviolate truth even in the face of observed reality to the contrary.
If BAU means "no one has to freeze to death in the dark if fossil fuels are replaced by renewables", then that's defensible. If BAU means "the transition to a sustainable economy won't reduce average buying power (what's usually meant by 'standard of living')", then that's frank denial. The professional AGW deniers don't care if a few 47%-ers freeze to death in the dark, and they don't worry about average buying power either. To them, BAU means "My own buying power will be reduced if fossil fuels are replace by renewables". Changing BAU will make winners and losers, and they'll be losers. Of course it's OK with me if the Koch brothers lose some income, but who really thinks the 1% will be the only losers? You and I might be willing to give up some of our own hard-earned buying power if it reduces the risk of climate catastrophe; we'll leave the hybrid in the garage and take the bus. We may even be willing to pay extra, to keep people now on the edge of poverty from sliding over it. As for the rest of the middle class, not all of them are as sanguine as we are about loss of buying power. Some accept the scientific consensus but refuse to change the way they live, perhaps believing that the impacts of AGW will mostly affect other people far away. Others think arguments from consequences refute arguments from evidence. Some, with no worse than average understanding of science as an institution, are willing to believe that AGW is all a hoax, and that consensus supporters are conspiring to impose world socialism. We roll our eyes, but we should ask ourselves what it will really take to keep the impacts of AGW from getting worse -- never mind establishing a truly sustainable economy. This comment is already too long, so I'll let Naomi Klein answer:The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.” Here's my inconvenient truth: they aren't wrong.
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dana1981 at 05:00 AM on 14 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
fpjohn @5 - we will have a rebuttal to a similar argument by Ridley and Murdoch this upcoming week. If I have time I'll try to incorporate some of Lomborg's nonsense. Unfortunately the deniers have been very busy writing BS media articles lately, and it's very hard to keep up. -
Lars Karlsson at 01:46 AM on 14 January 2013No warming in 16 years
Another factor that would be nice to mention is aerosols from human activities. I believe those would have contributed to warmning during the 1980's and 1990's, and to a slight cooling during the 2000's. With the effect of those aerosols subtracted, there might even have been a slight acceleration in warming the last decade. -
fpjohn at 00:56 AM on 14 January 2013Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets
This piece is a great pre-rebuttal to Lomborg's new engenous article on Climate related crop failures which he discounts. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-warming-and-agricultural-production-by-bj-rn-lomborg yours Frank Johnston -
Bernard J. at 23:27 PM on 13 January 2013A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
Mal Adapted:I'm sorry, but anyone thinks business as usual can go on is in denial.
Don't be sorry. It's a thermodynamic truth that many people, even on the side of the consensus, need to hear and understand. There is no such thing as a free lunch. -
fpjohn at 23:27 PM on 13 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
This is off-topic as I can no longer find an email link to a moderator. Delete as necessary. Lomborg has a new red herring piece on Slate which makes light of climate change related reductions in crop yields LINK Can this be rebutted and is there someone to do it? Pass the linguine? The best to you all in the New Year. yours Frank JohnstonModerator Response: [RH] Hot linked URL that was breaking page formatting. -
jake7351 at 23:00 PM on 13 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
@ sotolith this is why end points are not used. if the analysis started or ended at slightly different years you could come to the exact opposite conclusion (if you used end points). the trend is important, the wiggles are not -
shoyemore at 22:26 PM on 13 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
sotolith7 #2 The chart (Figure 1) is relative to 1901-2000. Americal Meteorological Society statement on climate change gives 0.8C warming 1901-2010, with 0.5C of that coming since 1979. The chart appears consistent with the AMS statement. -
sotolith7 at 20:49 PM on 13 January 2013Nature Confirms Global Warming and Temperature Record Accuracy
But while it may confirm the trend, doesn't it show significantly less warming? If you take the end points, roughly half-as-much (0.2 instead of 0.4). -
skywatcher at 19:54 PM on 13 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
global surface temps and sst going back to the 1880s clearly shows repeating ~30 year trends.
smerby, alarm bells ring out when I see statements like these. It sounds like you're using that unreliable statistical tool, the eyecrometer. Do you understand the methods required to correctly determine the existence of cyclicity in a dataset? And the tests required to evaluate significance of such a signal. Have you considered variations in forcings (volcanic, aerosol, increasing ghgs), which can create the illusion of cyclicity? And how to test this? And why are your so-called 'troughs' - not that there is even a statistically significant change in the recent warming rate - getting rapidly warmer over time? I would suggest you can't rely on your eyecrometer to tell you the "truth". In science, there are better methods... -
John Mason at 19:49 PM on 13 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
Ray, I'd guess that's the case; HadGEM3 seems to do a better job in general though both fail to nail the 1997-8 super El Nino - as I said in the post such things are notoriously awkward in terms of predictability, despite the level of scientific knowledge today. In turn, that creates an interesting possibility. What if there was another super El Nino in a few years' time? Looking at the temperature records, the difference between 1996 and 1998 is around 0.3C: given the mean HadGEM3 forecast figure of 0.43C relative to 1971-2000 climatology, such an event in the next 5 years could produce a spike of getting on for 0.75C. At that point, of course, the temperature would be blamed by the usual suspects on natural variation, followed in the years to come by Daily Mail articles proclaiming how global warming stopped in 2015!! -
Kevin C at 18:02 PM on 13 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Smerby: Look a bit further back to 1850, and then look at this graph. (Or don't, the site is down, but here is the link for when it is back up.) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/. Alternative version:
The dip from 1880-1900 is not part of a cycle - it is the result of a series of major volcanic eruptions.
Once you take out this effect the bulk of the cycle vanishes - it's mostly a coincidence.
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Tom Curtis at 17:05 PM on 13 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby @86, there are have been at most 2 cycles of that pattern since 1880. That is far to few repetitions to infer a regular cycle. If you look at either HadCRUT or BEST prior to 1880, the 60 year pattern breaks down and is not in evidence. Further, it is highly dubious that it is in evidence prior to that period in paleodata. Hence the inference that it is not only a regular cycle, but strong enough to counter global warming in the medium terms is completely unsupported. -
smerby at 16:50 PM on 13 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Thanks for the feedback. That graph I put up with global surface temps and sst going back to the 1880s clearly shows repeating ~30 year trends. Based on that graph, the leveling off of surface temperatures for the past 10 years falls right into step with these repeating trends. Could this trend continue for the next 20 years, I think it could. What would knock this repeating cycle of global surface temperatures off track?
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