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Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:03 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Sorry Rob, Eugene Wahl said he did. Furthermore, do you have full access to Michael Mann's computer? That's a pretty arrogant claim to make that he didn't delete any emails unless you are privy to special knowledge which wouldn't surprise me.Moderator Response: [muoncounter] Accusations of arrogance are pushing the envelope towards deletion. -
Albatross at 03:00 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
Wingding @41, Excellent find! From the links that you sent, Archibald states that: "The combination of a 0.3° response to the current La Nina and the usual 0.3° decline from January to May will result in a 0.6° decline to May 2009 to a result of -0.4° (0.4° below the long term average)." Now in complete contrast with his "prediction", the UAH global lower-troposphere temperature for May 2009 was +0.06 (with respect to the 1980-2010 mean). RSS gave a global anomaly of +0.05 C for May 2009. And 2009 ended up being the second warmest year on record in the GISS data at the time. Archibald was horribly wrong. Just how long are the "skeptics" going to keep trying to perpetuate this myth that we are headed for long-term global cooling? -
Rob Honeycutt at 02:52 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
fydijkstra... Your post strikes me as both baseless and grasping for straws. Little or nothing to do with the GHE? Really? And how do you come to that conclusion? Isn't Arctic amplification a predicted result of an enhanced greenhouse effect? Feb 2011 vs. Feb 2005? Really? Are you going to ignore the 350 some odd other data points in the data and focus on just two? That doesn't seem very skeptical to me. -
Peter Bellin at 02:49 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
The links seem to be broken (links to resources at the endo of the post). Thanks for the summary. -
fydijkstra at 02:42 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
No good perspective for the arctic sea ice in September 2011. Unfortunatly it has little or nothing to do with the greenhouse effect, and thus we cannot do anything against it. It's nature, and we can only observe and explain. By the way: the arctic ice extent in February 2011 was not a record low: in February 2005 the frozen surface was the same as in February 2011 (14.36 square km).
Response:[dana1981] Please see "Arctic icemelt is a natural cycle"
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Albatross at 02:35 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
I honestly do not think that "skeptics" or deniers of AGW on this thread have even bothered to invest some time reading the main post. Let me help, it is about Muller conflating certain issues, getting horribly confused and consequently drawing demonstrably false conclusions. Sadly, quite typical behaviour of most "skeptics" it seems. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I can only conclude that the "skeptics" on this thread support Muller's errors and his propagation of said errors/misinformation. Worse yet, they are now trying to use this thread to uncritically propagate yet more misinformation and innuendo, about papers written more than a decade ago, sourced at disreputable "skeptic" blogs such as CA. The divergence issue has been explained ad nauseum to the "skeptics" since the emails were hacked back in late 2009. Now in the spring of 2011 (!) they apparently are (quite unbelievably) still incapable of grasping the science and facts of this particular matter. Moderators : Please, I urge you to limit the discussion on this thread to Muller's faux pas, nothing more, nothing less, otherwise "skeptics" will hi-jack this thread and it will degenerate into a circus-- alas it may be too late. -
Rob Honeycutt at 02:16 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Jay @ 32... Hm, but no emails were deleted. Those damn scientists just can do anything right. -
dana1981 at 02:13 AM on 30 March 2011A Plan for 100% Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar by 2050
Ken L - please see CO2 limits will make little difference a.k.a. tragedy of the commons. -
Rob Honeycutt at 02:03 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Ken @ 27... You seem to forget that the issue of post 1960 tree ring divergence ("the decline") is discussed openly in the literature. If you are objecting that the scientists are hiding something and accusing them of "perversion of the scientific method" as you are... well I have to say they aren't doing a very good job of hiding anything by publishing papers on it. And how publishing papers on something you are supposedly hiding is a perversion of the scientific method... you're going to have to explain that one to me. -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 01:56 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Yeah I don't think there is any rationalizing the "hide the decline" comment. The fact that they told each other to delete emails is too incriminating. -
Bob Lacatena at 01:55 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
I had an epiphany. Reading thermometers causes global warming. Here me out. I took a subset of the GISTEMP readings (meaning all of them) to create what I call the Justified Oscillating Known Evaluation index, or JOKE index. Mapping this to the global temperatures measured by UAH, HadCRUT, and RSS, one can see that the correlation is almost exact! There is little difference, if any!
The conclusion is clear. Reading temperatures causes climate change. In fact, it is GISS themselves who are causing climate change.
If we simply stop studying climate, climate will stop changing! Climate change is in fact anthropogenic, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2 or fossil fuels. The climate scientists aren't perpetrating a hoax, they're actually changing the climate themselves, through the act of taking temperature measurements!
All we have to do to stop climate change is to fire all climate scientists! Maybe put them to work doing something useful, like digging more coal out of the ground...
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robert way at 01:48 AM on 30 March 2011Temp record is unreliable
Without knowing exactly where you clicked it is hard to know how to answer but certainly there are issues such as data sparsity in the north. That being said UAH uses polar interpolation also for the region 82.5-90 N. As i've pointed out before, NCEP reanalysis and ECMWF reanalysis which include satellite, weather balloon and all available station data support GISS's interpretation of the Arctic. As a polar researcher myself we have a lot of respect particularly for the quality of the ECMWF data and feel it is an accurate portrayal of Arctic trends. -
AuntSally at 01:46 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Ken@27: If your'e reconstructing a temperature record and you looked at your temp proxy data -- from tree rings or whatever else -- and found that it did not agree with instrumental data for the same period, which would you present to the world as the most likely accurate representation of temperature? Replace "hide the decline" with "hide the inaccurate data." Clearly the intent is to present the most accurate depiction. The proxy doesn't agree with the actual measurements -- so why present the proxy? It's a reconstruction of a long period. Use the most accurate data for each portion of the timeline. Further, this reconstruction as been replicated with more than two dozen other proxy reconstructions (with error bars, of course). Good grief! There's a difference between seeking honest clarification and being deliberately obtuse. In my mind, those who refuse to acknowledge that, while the phrasing in the email may not have been perfect, the intent is utterly clear in context. -
Daniel Bailey at 01:42 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
@ Bob I grok you ;) I'll fix it in a bit (hadn't had my second cup of coffee yet when I replied, screwing up your first post). Not a problem now that I see what it's doing. Cheers, The Yooper -
Kevin C at 01:41 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dennis@29: Nick Stokes has just done a useful post on this at http://moyhu.blogspot.com/. -
Gilles at 01:36 AM on 30 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
SNRratio : are you claiming that a "distribution of probability" of an unknown, but a priori definite quantity like the climate sensitivity (if you assume it's a definite quantity...) is itself an objective quantity, external to mankind, and that several different methods should converge towards the same distribution? that's a very, very surprising assertion ... -
Gilles at 01:32 AM on 30 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
adelady : actually I teach as a professor and do research at university - i didn't mean teacher in a high school. -
Bob Lacatena at 01:28 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
There are three (repeated) "skeptical" behaviors here that I find comical. The first is the ridiculous tendency to take some index of any sort and with no understanding of or attribution to an underlying mechanism (often, as is the case with PDO, not really knowing what the index itself represents, because it's just a hodgepodge of readings that signify nothing in particular) to look for some sort of mathematical correlation and to claim that this demonstrates that CO2 can't be a factor, because it wasn't directly, consciously considered in the calculations. Which doesn't mean that it wasn't, but simply that the author's alchemy was sufficiently obscure so that even the author himself couldn't see the connection. The second is the fact that almost all of the indices that skeptics use for this purpose are in fact themselves based on temperature (or some subset of global temperature, such as ENSO and PDO which include sea surface temperatures as part of their values). So what they are doing is saying that (wait for it) temperature correlates to temperature. This is particularly funny since ENSO has the opposite effect that skeptics think, in that La Nina, by "lowering" the measured global temperature, allows the Earth to radiate away less heat than normal, and so accelerates warming. El Nino, while it raises temperature observations, actually helps to cool the planet by radiating away more heat than normal. The last, really funny bit, is that climate is a system with a lot of noise. The variations in observed (not actual) temperatures due to ENSO greatly overwhelm the underlying, true global mean temperature signal, just as the swings in the seasons, or even daily temperature (due to day/night) greatly overwhelm the underlying signal. So it's easy to get graphs to visually look like good correlations because the obvious short-scale features correlate, while the underlying trend is in fact absent. Worse than this, I've seen papers (can't remember them, they aren't worth my time) that argue their case by first removing the long term trend and showing that what remains exactly matches, "proving" their correlation. Ta daaaa! [skeptical scientist blushes and bows here, to rousing applause of smug skeptic admirers] In fact, I've recently scene a magnificently humorous argument surfacing that because temperature changes with the seasons are so great, CO2 can't possibly be having a noticeable effect... it must be overpowered by the seasons. So by that same logic, the seasons can't possibly have a main effect on temperature, because the day night cycle so clearly overwhelms the seasons! Ah, isn't it fun being skeptical? -
Bob Lacatena at 01:15 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
40 Moderator (Dan), You'll note that when you reposted my post (with your moderator comment) it changed it all... converting every < to a <, and so on... That's equivalent to the "preview" effect I was talking about. You should probably delete my post now (since it's messed up), or else repost it, after fixing it all, which can be a real pain in the &butt;. I do this for a living, so it's not hard for me, but it will probably be pretty tedious and annoying for you. [If you do try to fix it, the way to write < without having it turn into a < is to write it as &lt; ... & is how you generate an ampersand that isn't interpreted as part of an HTML entity. If that confuses you... welcome to the world of web page coding.] -
Dennis at 01:10 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Under the title of "Hide the Decline" Steve McIntyre blogged a few days ago that Briffa and Osborn deleted some data from their 1999 Science article. So far only McIntyre and WUWT and have written about this, and their posts have made understanding the science behind this unsuccessful. I wonder is this is related? Do you intend to address this? -
wingding at 01:06 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
Re 39: icecap.us (PDF) David Archibald predicts the May 2009 UAH MSU Global Temperature Result -
garythompson at 00:55 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
My apologies for being OT on the last portion of my post here. I have taken that discussion as well as the answer to Robert Way's question about the 1,500 km and the number of stations to the proper page. -
adelady at 00:54 AM on 30 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
Gilles@48. Glad you mentioned that you're a scientist. For some inexplicable reason (clearly no reason at all) I was certain you were a teacher. Must have mixed you up with someone on another site who's a teacher in France. SNRatio@49. That's a handy exposition. I'll read it again in a day or so. -
garythompson at 00:50 AM on 30 March 2011Temp record is unreliable
At the suggestion of the moderator I will take an OT discussion from another post to here. referencing a comment in another thread I have a question related to the number of weather stations related to a given area. Why is it ok to have 8 data points (i.e. temperature stations) to represent a global region composed of a circle with a 1,500 km radius (which is what the GISS data does for the north pole area)? If you look at the dark red area on the picture below and then click on the center of that dark red region on the GISS site you'll only find 8 sites that have continuous measurements over the past several decades (continuous through 2011).
and here is a link to a screen capture showing the list of stations that are less than 1,500 km from the point I clicked.
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Bob Lacatena at 00:29 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
Pertaining to the moderator response to #12:...replacing 1 with the left arrow tag and 2 with the right arrow tag...
As an FYI, you can (or should be able to) include a < or > in a post by replacing them with < (meaning "less than") or > ("greater than"). For example, here is your HTML example as you would type it:<a href=""><img width="450" src=""></a>
And here is how it would come out:
(There's a small chance this won't work, that your post-processor is going to convert everything before showing it... if so just delete this post and ignore it. Also note that you can't exactly use the preview function, because that converts stuff... the preview will look fine, but it will undo your post so your subsequent submit is wrong. To use preview, copy your text before hitting preview, look at the result, but then paste your copied text back in and change that).Moderator Response: [DB] Thanks; good to know that. When I get the chance, I'll add more tips & hints to the posting tip section here. -
Ken Lambert at 00:28 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
No matter how 'hide the decline' is rationalized by the details of the 'trick', the issue here is **intent**. And the intent is clear - to 'hide'. To hide what?? 'The decline' - a piece of proxy temperature data which did not fit with instrumental temperatures which were rising - not declining. Overheard private conversations (or emails) have a strong ring of truth. The players here wanted to 'hide' a bit of data (whatever its quality) which did not fit the script. When this is accepted as the only logical explanation for using the term 'hide' - then one has to ask why leaders in their field of science would need to do that. One explanation is that they really believed that their case was already weaker than they would like and any contradictory data needed to be 'hidden'. Another is the judgement that the public must be shown a consistent story and hiding the dubious data is justified on that basis. Either way, the intent to 'hide' anything in a scientific publication is a perversion of the scientific method. -
SNRatio at 00:22 AM on 30 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
#48 Gilles: Think of my example of estimating domestic energy consumption from individual house recordings/estimates - without having any net result readings - think of it like everyone being off-grid wrt utilities. You can pick a huge variety of estimators, using parameters like area, temperature, construction type and building standards, types of heating, appliances etc. If you construct estimators from disjoint sets of such parameters, you may be on the way to producing independent estimates, and the choices may represent different methodologies. If, then, different methodologies end up generating very similar estimates for the distribution of consumption, this will normally be considered significant, because with real independence of parameters (their "readout", that is), you would not expect that to happen by chance. In the climate setting, temperatures and their distribution throughout the atmosphere, integrated radiation balance and sea level could be examples of independent indicators. The parameters themselves are of course not independent, but our measurements of them are. The same could also apply for modeling: When different sets of assumptions and approaches produce similar results. And when we are basically searching for a probability distribution, large variance does not have to mean low precision - we may have a precise estimate of this huge variance, and we may even get localization measures like expectation right. But with large variance, it may be important to try to identify covariates in order to estimate better - think of latitude and land/sea neigborhood area ratio in the case of domestic energy consumption. In climate sensitivity, there is much uncertainty about possible covariates - and what is a good way of modeling. Covariates are typically intensively used in regression approaches, but with complex feedback mechanisms, less simplistic approaches may be necessary. Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen both argue that sensitivity is very low, and as long as their hypotheses are not physically impossible, their estimates have some positive probability. Because water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas, and its lifetime may be just a few days, instant feedbacks may depend on a lot of hard to sort out factors. Some of them give higher, some lower CO2 sensitivity, and it may be possible to cherry-pick conditions to support quite different sensitivity estimates. What counts in the long run, is the long-time average of the sensitivity, but this may in fact be impossible to predict in advance with high precision. #46 actually thoughtful: Defining standards, either by regulation or by customer expectations, may help. As consumers, we are inclined to behave opportunistically rather than long-time rationally. And this is perfectly natural - estimating long-term results may be very difficult. When I built my house about 30 years ago, I knew that some decisions were completely irrational according to the standards and assumptions made then. But I have never regretted them, and now, most are integrated into Norwegian building code (without me talking publicly about it at all). -
Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 00:22 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
One note. According to the latest research does not exist - however - something like: "divergence problem". A critical evaluation of multi-proxy dendroclimatology in northern Finland, McCarroll et al., 2011.: “Of the individual proxies, δ13C performs best, followed by maximum density. Combining δ13C and maximum density strengthens the climate signal but adding ring widths leads to little improvement. Blue intensity, an inexpensive alternative to X-ray densitometry, is shown to perform similarly. Multi-proxy reconstruction of summer temperatures from a single site produces strong correlations with gridded climate data over most of northern Fennoscandia.” Spatial and temporal stability of the climatic signal in northern Fennoscandian pine tree-ring width and maximum density, Tuovinen et al., 2009.: “At all four sites, the correlation between maximum density and June to August mean temperature is lowest in the latter half of the 20th century, but split sample tests with strong verification statistics (RE and CE) show that this represents a quantitative change in the strength of the correlation with climate, rather than a qualitative change in the nature of that relationship, and thus does not invalidate climate reconstructions.” In many regions, the high-latitude NH the “modern warming” - it is just very small ... However, tree-rings in some high-latitude locations diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. - so: this sentence, that is - quite simply - wrong. P.S. By the way tree rings (the stable carbon isotope ratios of pine treerings) talks a lot about the reasons for the old warming: Cloud response to summer temperatures in Fennoscandia over the last thousand years, Gagen et al., 2011.: “A negative shortwave cloud feedback is indicated at high latitude. A millennial climate simulation suggests that regionally low temperatures during the LIA were mostly maintained by a weaker greenhouse effect due to lower humidity.” Not a word about CO2 ... So the question arises: who "sows" disinformation more ... -
John Brookes at 00:03 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
wingding, do you have a link to where David Archibald predicted that?Moderator Response: [DB] I believe a version can be found here. -
Ken Lambert at 00:03 AM on 30 March 2011A Plan for 100% Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar by 2050
Bern #50 "When you include carbon pricing at $150/tCO2, then solar PV is cheaper than coal right now. Given that it's projected to be cheaper than coal *without* carbon pricing by 2020, you'd have to be a mug to think a coal-fired plant is a good investment. Either that, or have a lot of friends in government who can keep up a supply of tax breaks, subsidies, and barriers to entry to keep other players out of 'your' market." A few comments needed here Bern. With PM Gillard and Prof Garnaut offering a carbon price of $25/tonne, and you suggesting $150/tonne to get Solar PV competitive, then one can see how tokenism works. With Australia contributing 1.5% or less of all CO2 emissions and the USA and China doing over 40% - the idea of saddling ourselves with a tax which has negligible impact on world temperatures (if one believes all of the CO2 effect is real), is patently adsurd. Your points about wholesale prices for coal fired generation remaining static and the 8 cent/kWhr increase paying for the distribution network are instructive. The distribution network can be hooked up to any generation source including feed-ins from anyone with a Windmill, Solar PV or Fumarole with an inverter. How incompetently the formerly Taxpayer owned utilities were privatized and split the generators from the distributors, is a whole other story. It is a tale of politicians setting up retailers to 'compete' against each other to supply you with power form the same pooled source. A nonsense of semi-regulation and lucrative $400K jobs for the mates retiring from State Parliaments and a trail of finance spivs and 'consultants' who conned the gullible into this brave new world of deregulation. -
Mighty Drunken at 23:57 PM on 29 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
Giles, I think SNRatio's point is that there are many different estimates for the climate sensitivity due to a doubling of CO2. For instance it may be based on a simple radiation model where the sea is modelled as a slab or a complex model which accounts for ocean currents, aerosols and other GHGs. You could look at the history of the Earth to determine its response to CO2 or look at modern data and estimate the climate sensitivity. If these methods come up with a similar figure than you would be more certain that those figures are reasonable? Even though the range is quite large 3C is considered far more likely than 1.5C.Here is a list of calculated climate sensitivities. -
Alexandre at 22:43 PM on 29 March 2011Weather vs Climate
johnd #116 Yes, Rahmstorf compares those 16 years of observations with the early IPCC projections, and finds they were pretty good. And yes, he also acknoledges the short period - although that's not cherry picking, since he used all the available period. Your paper has not been tested against such a long period, so I'm not sure why you're so prompt to dismiss the mainstream (successful) science. Besides, the japanese paper does not deny the GHE long term importance. Again: the obstruction of IR radiation by GHG is well established, well known and observed. The better modelling of ocean circulations is an important work that will improve interannual and decadal predictions - it does not contradict the GHE. I stress you avoided to answer any question regarding the evidence supporting the consensus (lack of time). -
Gilles at 22:25 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
22 : the problem is not in the use of the word "trick", it is in the fact that data have been deleted when they could have shed some doubt about the validity of the method. I assume that everybody who supports faithfully the use of dendro data knows perfectly the answer to question #20 - but i don't, may I have this answer ?Moderator Response: [Dikran Marsupial] If there is good reason to believe data is unreliable, it is standard statistical operating procedure to exclude it from the analysis (c.f. outliers). The problem with the data is openly discussed in the litterature, and whether you mention it or not depends on the level of detail appropriate for the particular discussion - those who want to look into it in more detail can find out about the divergence problem by following the references given in the report. That is what the references are for. The divergence problem doesn't cast doubt on the method, only on the reliability of the method for the recent period covered by the "divergence problem". -
wingding at 21:18 PM on 29 March 2011The Day After McLean
Anyone remember David Archibald's prediction for May 2009? Similarly absurd.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 19:14 PM on 29 March 2011The Day After McLean
Susanne @33 The terminolgy used for the temperature products is rather abritrary and historical. I have a discussion of Satellite Temperatures here http://www.skepticalscience.com/Primer-Tropospheric-temperature-measurement-Satellite.html -
Glenn Tamblyn at 19:11 PM on 29 March 2011The Day After McLean
Alexandre @10 "To boldly predict what no man has predicted before... " Ahhh...I Love the Smell of Split-Infinitives ine the morning! -
shoyemore at 18:38 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
J. Bowers #22, I read your post just as I was putting Christopher M. Bishop's tome Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Springer, 2006) into my briefcase. In the index under "k" is kernel trick, 292. The page elaborates "The concept of a kernel formulated as an inner product in a feature space allows us to build extensions of many well known algorithms by making use of the kernel trick, also known as kernel substitution." Bishop is an employee of Microsoft, and I am sure no one is going to accuse him (or anyone who uses the kernel trick) of scientific skulduggery. -
shoyemore at 18:28 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
adelady, #6, Different strokes, I guess. I just refer people to Skeptical Science whenever this comes up!! -
J Bowers at 18:28 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
There are other examples of the term "trick" being used in the emails, which denialists oh so conveniently ignore even when, as they themselves say, they have read the emails in their entirety. This one explains quite clearly what a trick is... #1200162026 “I would note that the distribution of rejection rates is like the distribution of precipitation in that it is bounded by zero. A quick-and-dirty way to explore this possibility using a “trick” used with precipitation data is to apply a square root transformation to the rejection rates, average these, then reverse transform the average. The square root transformation should yield data that is more nearly Gaussian than the untransformed data.” Perhaps Dr Muller would like to accuse the sender of that email of something ansty. -
damorbel at 17:50 PM on 29 March 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
Re #874Tom Curtis you wrote:- "1) Surely you mean that Heat is what is measured by temperature multiplied by heat capacity" That would be energy - Joules. Heat capacity is 'C' (Cp; Cv) which is in Joules/Kelvin (J/K) The 2nd law requires for equilibrium, that T is uniform, i.e. no temperature diffences, no teperature gradients. Further you wrote:- "I think the revisionist physicists who want to outlaw the use of "heat" to describe internal energy are merely sowing confusion for themselves and their students." I have noticed this too but it isn't consistent. Since heat is only a function of temperature, it is only a function of molecular motion, the harder they vibrate the hotter things are! The devil in the matter seems to be latent heat which really is a misnomer. Let us take ice; when ice is formed the operative change is the loss of vibrational energy as the molecules line up to form crystals. Crystals have energy stored in the the lattice bonds. This is of course is 'energy in Joules' but it does not affect the temperature as ice forms/melts so it is not really heat but it is part of the internal energy of a water/ice thermal system. I suspect you knew all of this before reading it here. But there seem to be a number of contributors who need reminding! You wrote:- " Any back radiation that is reflected from the surface is simply part of the Surface Radiation." In kinetic theory molecules exchange energy by collision, thus on any (imaginary) surface introduced in a volume of gas the molecules on either side of this imaginary surface exchange energy (momentum, really), (T>0) all the time; so, if you were being pedantic, you could describe this energy exchange as 'forward' energy and 'back' energy and it is going on all the time, at every imaginable 'surface' in the volume. Energy exchange by radiation is not much different, but in this case the collisions are replaced by the emission and absorption of photons. Just like kinetic theory where the 'collisions' are between adjacent molecules. This is where the concept of 'back radiation' fails because it relies on radiation acting over large distances whereas it is actually very local, just the same as kinetic energy exchange. I have referred to this in previous posts, at the time I mentioned Einstein's paper 'Strahlungs-Emission und Absorption nach der Quantentheorie (german 1916) It is available on line in english and it is fairly easy to read and it firmly disposes of the idea that radiating gases can make any difference to the distribution of energy in a gas. -
shoyemore at 17:30 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dana1981, #3 I have watched Muller in action twice on video, and both times found myself fuming at his misinformation and calumnies against other scientists. I also noted his obvious ego-driven presentation and love of the spotlight. Here is someone who not only wants to undermine Jim Hansen, he wants to BE Jim Hansen or be the new Hansen figure. On the credit side, Muller correctly identifies anthropogenic climate change as a major threat. But the way he uses his scientific disagreements as cloaks for personal attacks is unacceptable. He certainly deserves refutation on his many "errors" (deliberate or otherwise), more so than Monckton. I would just not have started with this point! I think the Mann-Jones issue has been thrashed to death and few people will be swayed either way by coverage of old ground. -
Gilles at 17:13 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
sorry but (again), something is still unclear for me : what is the calibration period and what is the validation period of Briffa's dendro series ? -
Gilles at 16:59 PM on 29 March 2011A Plan for 100% Renewable Energy by 2050
scaddendp : what's your guess for the average slope of the temperature increase in the 4 next decades? I you predict an acceleration, It would be interesting to see how soon it will be measurable. Mucounter 118 : what is classic is your continuous misreading of what I'm saying. First I didn't care about the website hosting this graph, I know it perfectly well and I already commented it a number of times since it appeared in fall 2010 in WEO 2010. I just was too lazy to find if it were published on line on the IEA site on a html page instead of the pdf I gave you in link - so I just googled "iea oil production WEO 2010" and I took the first occurence I found (the fact that guys like you are not aware of this kind of predictions is for me totally indicative of the total unawareness of the real problems of the coming decades, BTW). You say it is only a "very limited attempt to reduce CO2 emissions". Thank you, I can read numbers. I know that. It wasn't my question. My question was : why does the IEA think oil is "needed", even the poor 20 Mb/d "yet to be found" if it is so easy to suppress it ? I hope you don't think this graph has been obtained simply by adding commitments of all countries US+SFU+China+france+ Etc... No country can know exactly what its growth and energy consumption will be in 2030, and if you consider all the oil excluding NGL and unconventional, you can notice it is strictly flat. I hope you will agree that the likelihood that the sum of all commitments of all countries in the world is strictly flat for 30 years is extremely tiny. So is the likelihood that we would find exactly this amount. Obviously IEA has no way to know exactly how much oil will be found in yet unknown fields. So think a little bit more about all this : on which basis can IEA produce such a graph ? any idea? may be les, who understands perfectly "how the world works" , could help you ? -
Glenn Tamblyn at 16:40 PM on 29 March 2011Of Satellites and Air – A Primer on Tropospheric temperature measurement by Satellite
BP Although the lower Stratosphere hasn't colled much lately, the fact remains that it has cooled since start of the satellite record. ince each reading from a satellite is based on the current temperature profile through the air column. Since the temps are all anomalies relative to a baseline period, the stratosphere doesn't have to keep cooling to impact what the tropospheric reading from T2 appears to be. Earlier in the history it will have had a growing bias. If its cooling has stabilised, the bias it contributes isn't growing, but there is still a fixed bias from the amount of cooling that has occurred. The important point about how the various compensation schemes for Stratospheric cool bias compensation work is that they are applied at the individual sample level, not at the high order trend level. Each reading has the compensation applied then trends are calculated from it. If the bias isn't changing at present then new samples will still have the same bias removed. Interesting from the records - Eruptions don't show up much at all in the lower trop' series but hugely in the strat'. El Nino is the opposite, largely lower trop' based. -
robert way at 16:23 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
For you Charlie A, More support for my interpretation from Briffa 2001 “Bias might be introduced in cases where the spatial coverage is not uniform (e.g., of the 24 original chronologies with data back to 1500, half are concentrated in eastern Siberia) but this can be reduced by prior averaging of the chronologies into regional series (as was done in the previous section)… Eight different methods have been used… They produce very similar results for the post-1700 period… They exhibit fairly dramatic differences, however, in the magnitude of multidecadal variability prior to 1700… highlighting the sensitivity of the reconstruction to the methodology used, once the number of regions with data, and the reliability of each regional reconstruction, begin to decrease. The selection of a single reconstruction of the ALL temperature series is clearly somewhat arbitrary… The method that produces the best fit in the calibration period is principal component regression… “…we note that the 1450s were much cooler in all of the other (i.e., not PCA regression) methods of producing this curve…” -
dana1981 at 16:04 PM on 29 March 2011A Plan for 100% Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar by 2050
Sean A #48 - we try to refrain from calling people "deniers" on this site, especially when they aren't denying anything. I've merely discussed a study (two now, actually) which puts forth a plan to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy without using nuclear. Now, you may have your doubts about these plans, and that's fine. But there's no need to be rude about it. I specifically outlined 7 ways in which the intermittency of some renewables can be addressed. Solar thermal can easily store energy, geothermal and hydroelectric can be used to fill in the gaps when wind or solar production are low. It seems like a perfectly plausible plan to me. I often find that people who are pro-nuclear are often unwilling to consider other alternatives, and that really puzzles me. There are a lot of good reasons not to want to rely on nuclear power, so if we don't have to, I don't see why we wouldn't explore other options. -
dana1981 at 15:57 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Charlie A #16 - please take a look at the site Comments Policy, particularly the very first policy - no accusations of deception. This is actually my biggest beef with McIntyre and co. If you want to know why Briffa made a certain decision, why not try, hmm, I dunno, asking Briffa? Instead of immediately leaping to the conclusion that he's "hiding" something, or only showing data when it comes out "as desired". Personally I find that when people assume others are dishonest, they're projecting their own behavior. -
robert way at 15:53 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
garythompson at 14:52 PM on 29 March, 2011 This is the spatial distribution of proxies from the CA stuff pre-1500 http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Sites.png If you call that an adequate spatial distribution then you are fooling yourself. 87% of pre-1500s data comes from 2/5 regions from the study. It is obvious to those who pay attention that this is a good reason to consider that the reconstruction pre-1500 does not accurately represent the entire region. Furthermore, show me the 8 station to which you refer? I can count more than 8 on greenland alone so tell me where you get these numbers? Actually you're also wrong on the 1500 km part, it is 1200 km not 1500 so get your facts straight. Also consider that stations at high latitudes are highly correlated (0.5) at 1200 km as presented by Hansen and Lebedeff (1987). Finally, the assessment presented by GISS is supported by NCEP Reanalysis, and ECMWF reanalysis datasets which include satellite, weather balloon and station data. NCEP in fact shows greater warming than GISS (supplemented by Environment Canada stations) as shown in my previous post. http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/ArcticTC1880-2010NCEP.png Your argument is just wrong. Sorry. -
Bern at 15:47 PM on 29 March 2011A Plan for 100% Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar by 2050
johnd: regarding your comments on variability of supply & demand - note that there has been decades of effort put in to "levelling" the demand curve. This is due to the increased efficiency of running coal-fired plants at constant load, not because of any insurmountable difficulty in matching supply & demand. One of the biggest impacts of that we see locally (at least in Queensland), is that it is illegal to connect electric water heaters to normal supply - they *must* be connected to a different, controlled supply, where the electricity network managers can turn them on & off remotely to shape the demand curve. This mostly results in them running at night, to boost minimum demand. It has the side effect that they also draw power when prices are lowest, so a lower tariff is charged. Even with efforts like this, however, there is still a 40% drop in demand for electricity at night. Take the demand-levelling out of the equation, and you'd find that the demand curve would peak higher during the day, and plummet much lower at night. Hmm, that sounds like a ripe candidate for solar generation with storage... Ken Lambert: If you read the Part II paper linked in the article, you'll find a lot of information on costs. Basically, most renewables are expected to be competitive with coal (and cheaper than gas) within ~10 years or so. Some are competitive now. If you factor in the costs of destabilising the world's climate, then fossil fuels are more expensive now than nearly every alternative out there. The number quoted in the paper (about 14c/kWh, although it might be double that or more) equates to a carbon price of at least $150/tCO2, I think (not 100% certain how the numbers convert). To put that in perspective, electricity prices here have increased ~8c/kWh over the past 8 years, when there has been no carbon pricing whatsoever. That's all to pay for transmission network upgrades, and the cost is borne entirely by the consumers, while the wholesale price of generation has remained fairly static. When you include carbon pricing at $150/tCO2, then solar PV is cheaper than coal right now. Given that it's projected to be cheaper than coal *without* carbon pricing by 2020, you'd have to be a mug to think a coal-fired plant is a good investment. Either that, or have a lot of friends in government who can keep up a supply of tax breaks, subsidies, and barriers to entry to keep other players out of 'your' market. Oddly enough, we have just those kinds of barriers here in Australia. Transmission network improvements required to bring online a new generator (e.g. a windfarm or solar plant) must be 100% paid for by the wholesale price of electricity from that generator, despite all the existing generators (nearly all coal-fired) having been permitted to spread their network costs across the entire network (when it was all government owned - the privatised generators now don't have to pay for the network costs at all). -
Charlie A at 15:43 PM on 29 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
#14 Robert Way says @13:48 29 March "What they don't tell you is that going back to 1400 there are only 8 proxies so they do not include the data past 1550 because of the substantial reduction in the number of proxies" So why two years later in 2001 does Briffa choose to show a similar reconstruction extending back to 1400, with only 2 (TWO!) sites in 1402, 8 sites in 1500 and 19 sites in 1550? Perhaps because this reconstruction came out as desired?
Figure 2. From Briffa et al 2001 (JGR) Plate 3, also showing the pre-deletion data used in Briffa-Osborn 1999 (magenta). The Briffa 2001 version ends in 1960 and has been extended using data from Climategate emails (showing the decline).
ref: HIde the Decline, the Other Deletion
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