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Comments 90701 to 90750:
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Albatross at 05:46 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Shawnhet @49, "Many supporters of the mainstream position want to have it both ways - essentially saying that one should accept the consensus position even though said consensus does not have a vigorous self-policing function." I find this statement incredibly ironic, hypocritical even, especially on a thread demonstrating very clearly yet another example (out of dozens) of a "skeptic" not being "policed" and spouting nonsense. And yet again his diatribe gets free pass by the "skeptics". "Skeptics" are very clearly cannot police themselves, never mind lecturing others on what they perceive to be right or wrong. It is this systematic poor behaviour, this systematic lack of quality control, this perpetual campaign of misinformation that results in those in denial of AGW (and those who claim to be "skeptics") having very serious credibility issues. It is also why they are largely ignored, except perhaps on some partisan internet blogs and by some naive and misguided journalists who do not have time nor the inclination to get their facts right. -
CBDunkerson at 05:38 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
shawnhet: "it speaks to the credibility of the climate science community." Precisely the sort of thing I was talking about. The supposed actions of two or three people speak to the credibility of thousands of researchers all over the planet? Calls into question science stretching back about two hundred years? That isn't logical. The only basis for such a claim is emotional... 'if we can paint one of them as wrong then the whole thing must be a fraud'. "The issue for the non-climate science community is why do we need to rely on outsiders to find this sort of stuff?" Because people who would lie and misrepresent Jone's e-mail in the way that Muller has are inherently going to be 'outsiders'? "An effective scientific community would go to great pains to make sure that EVERY time this work is discussed that the flaws with it are also pointed out. Clearly, this has been a major failure on the part of the mainstream climate community." Given that they do go to great pains to point out flaws and limitations I'm sorry but that is just untrue. Climate science has extensive self-checking and policing. You'll note that even 'skeptics' like Lindzen and Spencer are taken seriously and studied even after they have been found to have shown clear biases and false statements... because they are at least doing actual research and presenting actual theories which can be checked and evaluated as part of the ongoing process. After those there are large numbers of actual skeptics (no 'square quotes') who continually challenge various parameters and findings of the science. Thus we get different views on, for instance, how much mass loss Greenland is experiencing and further study is performed to figure out who is right. This claim that 'climate scientists are all in lockstep and do not check each other' is just another flat out deception that the 'skeptics' spread. There are constant disputes and re-evaluations going on in climate science... on the matters which haven't been settled by overwhelming evidence. The problem for the 'skeptics' is those areas of remaining doubt are vastly smaller than they would like to pretend. -
shawnhet at 05:17 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
CBDunkerson, even granting arguendo that you are correct the reason this is still a big deal is that it speaks to the credibility of the climate science community. I don't think that a reasonable person can look at the use of trees as temperature proxies and conclude that they are very poor proxies that should not be used in reconstructions. The issue for the non-climate science community is why do we need to rely on outsiders to find this sort of stuff? An effective scientific community would go to great pains to make sure that EVERY time this work is discussed that the flaws with it are also pointed out. Clearly, this has been a major failure on the part of the mainstream climate community. Many supporters of the mainstream position want to have it both ways - essentially saying that one should accept the consensus position even though said consensus does not have a vigorous self-policing function. Cheers, :) -
Daniel Bailey at 05:16 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
CW also ignores that the Arctic Polar ice cap of the 21st century is much thinner, friable and decrepit that of the 20th Century. Why? Arctic amplification of global warming. A cap that in winter was essentially a monolithic bloc 8-10 meters thick is down to about 2 meters thick. What was once 40% or more multiyear (MY) ice is down to perhaps 5% MY ice. The cap of yore was very resistant to advection during winter. Not that of today. Winter was once the time the cap recharged its volume to endure and withstand the summer onslaught of sun/insolation. As evidenced by the lack of winter recovery of the cap in the OP graph above, this summer melt season will be...interesting. In the Chinese curse sense of interesting. The Yooper -
Albatross at 05:01 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
We have to be careful about making dichotomous statements about what drives Arctic sea ice area and volume. The climate system is a continuum and a myriad of intertwined factors/processes modulate its behaviour. So for someone to state with authority that increased GHGs have nothing to do with Arctic sea ice coverage when we the science and data show that CO2 is a major control knob of the climate system, is simply not true. So let us please ignore the myth floated @1 on this thread. ChrisG @6 is right, the Arctic is the canary in the coal mine and we ignore its warnings at the peril of future generations. -
Chris G at 04:52 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
ClimateWatcher, What is your point? Or, what are you talking about? "There is much less tendency to blame temperature on Arctic Sea ice change." Circulation patterns are driven by patterns of energy imbalances. Without a change in the thermodynamics of the system, there would be no cause for the circulation patterns to change. "Also, sea ice is much more emissive than sea water in the infrared." Emission spectra of black bodies is given by Planck's Law. Granted, neither is a perfect black body, but this is the first I have heard that they are categorically different in that respect. Are you confusing emission with reflectance? -
CBDunkerson at 04:51 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
CW#7: On what grounds do you proclaim that global warming is not a factor in ice export/advection? I'd think there is a direct correlation; 1: Warming melts ice (as you have conceded) 2: Melting ice increases the likelihood that ice bridges/jams break up... allowing advection through more channels. 3: Melting ice means less ice for currents to propel... resulting in less energy being used to move the ice and thus faster currents / advection. Basically, you are arguing that the Arctic sea ice loss is caused by advection rather than global warming... as if global warming weren't directly responsible for the increased advection. -
muoncounter at 04:34 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
CW#7: "sea ice is much more emissive than sea water in the infrared." That's part of the problem. Decreasing summer ice extent means increasing areas of open water. This was addressed in detail on the Flanner threads. -
dana1981 at 04:30 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dennis #29 - we're looking into McIntyre's claims and may do a blog post on the subject. It's a complicated issue, and unlike certain other blogs, we prefer to get the facts straight before posting about them. -
muoncounter at 04:23 AM on 30 March 2011A Plan for 100% Renewable Energy by 2050
Gilles#119: "what is classic is your continuous misreading ..." Beg to differ; I have not misread you at all; you've set a pattern of saying X and claiming you said Y when you are called on it. "My question was : why does the IEA think oil is "needed"" That was exactly what I addressed in #118, in particular where I demonstrated that your interpretation of the purpose of this graphic is utterly incorrect. Where do you obtain the idea that IEA thinks this scenario means that 'oil is needed'? It is merely a projection of what is likely to occur given the meager commitments made to reduce CO2 emissions. Interestingly, you've managed to steer the discussion away from what should be the main point: Given this likely scenario, we are headed for 650ppm! Maybe that is your real intention in being so persistent here. "on which basis can IEA produce such a graph ?" Easily. There are known production rates which are not going to accelerate radically in the near term. There is a finding rate based on historic industry performance, which can be used to forecast future production. Unless you believe the last barrel of oil has already been located, that is likely to continue in the near term. How do you think any industry makes projections for long term investment? It takes years to get a new product to market; it takes years to get newly discovered oil to market. Industry must make projections of future demand to justify investment. You seem to believe that a scenario must either be absolutely true or else its worthless. This opinion is unfounded, yet all too common; indeed, the same ideas were stated by another commenter on a thread regarding computer modeling. Such statements indicate a profound lack of understanding. If you disagree with the results of a scenario or a projection, state your objection and back it up with specifics. Taking the attitude that 'all projections are subject to error and therefore worthless' is the lazy way out; you won't get away with it here. -
ClimateWatcher at 04:21 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
#3. Isn't Arctic amplification a predicted result of an enhanced greenhouse effect? Perhaps, but advection is not. Clearly this:
has everything to do with advection.
There is a tendency to blame Arctic Sea ice change on temperature.
There is much less tendency to blame temperature on Arctic Sea ice change.
But there are a couple of reasons to do so.
Sea ice insulates the air from the warmer water below, allowing temperatures to decrease further and thinner ice insulates less well.
Also, sea ice is much more emissive than sea water in the infrared.
Surely it takes heat to melt ice. But cause and effect are intertwined and dynamics are at work as well as thermodynamics.
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Chris G at 04:20 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
In some respects, the Arctic is like a canary in a coal mine. The fact that the canary dies itself has relatively little effect on people. By itself, it is merely an indication that something is happening. But maybe that is not a good analogy because the canary has no impact on the gas content of the mine, but replacing ice with water changes the albedo from 90% reflected to 90% absorbed. So maybe a better analogy to the current situation is watching a canary become ill at the same time that the noise from the air circulation system is faltering. -
Albatross at 04:11 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
CBDunkerson @46, A great synthesis of a sad situation. Appeal to emotion is what Muller is trying to do here. -
NewYorkJ at 04:10 AM on 30 March 2011The Day After McLean
"David Archibald is a Perth, Australia-based scientist operating in the fields of cancer research, oil exploration and climate science. After graduating in science at Queensland University in 1979, Mr Archibald worked in oil exploration in Sydney and then joined the financial industry as a stock analyst. Mr Archibald has been CEO of multiple oil and mineral exploration companies operating in Australia. He has published a number of papers on the solar influence on climate, and is a director of the Lavoisier Society (Lavoisier Group), a group of Australians promoting rational science in public policy." Australian Climate Science Coalition Google Scholar reveals those "papers" are mainly E&E and non-peer-reviewed stuff. Here's one: Solar cycles 24 and 25 and predicted climate response "Based on solar maxima of approximately 50 for solar cycles 24 and 25, a global temperature decline of 1.5°C is predicted to 2020, equating to the experience of the Dalton Minimum." Have fun with that one. Would be fun to see this plot on Dana's graph (the vertical axis would need to be nearly doubled for it to fit), perhaps in a different post that examines Archibald's past predictive powers. I'm trying to figure out where Archibald gets his Dalton Minimum info from. On Wikipedia, the DM page has a similar statement that references "Archibald says" with no link. Pretty sloppy page overall. Dalton Minimum -
dana1981 at 04:09 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
Peter #2 - sorry about that, I think I've fixed the links now. Thanks for pointing that out. -
CBDunkerson at 03:57 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it doesn't really matter to most 'skeptics'. Think about it. Let's pretend for the moment that Muller's claim of Mann having used a 'trick to hide the decline' were completely true in all its nefarious implications. Applying logic we would then conclude that this was evidence that Mann was not to be trusted and we should question his work... but in doing so we would then examine other results and discover that every paleo-temperature reconstruction done since, even those by 'skeptics' who denounce him venomously, validates the original 'hockey stick' results. Ergo, a >logical< approach would lead us to the conclusion that even if Mann was a complete fraud it would have no impact on global warming science, because all available studies confirm Mann's results. Yet skeptics will insist both that Mann is a fraud (despite this accusation being groundless) and that therefor the 'hockey stick' and indeed global warming as a whole must also be frauds... even though all his contributions have been independently confirmed many times over. This is not logical reasoning, but rather emotional reasoning. Thus, no amount of proof of misdeeds on Muller's part or innocence on Mann's is going to make a bit of difference. If logic worked then the fact that Mann's work has been confirmed would already have made this a non-issue. That said, there is still value in documenting false statements by the 'skeptics' because it allows people who do use logic to see that once you eliminate 'skeptics' spreading misinformation there aren't any skeptics left. However, in the long run we're going to have to come up with a way to address the people who 'think' emotionally. Otherwise they'll still be debating global warming at their Antarctic beachfront property. -
Albatross at 03:29 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dr. Cadbury, I agree with John Cook, who invested a lot of time researching this story to unravel Muller's confusion and to get the facts straight. I might suggest that you do the same using the helpful search function on the top LHS of the page. Muller's confusion and misdeeds run deeper than the (equivocal) concession that you have just made @42. -
Albatross at 03:25 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Please, Dr. Albatross, we Drs. are very important and all knowing are we not ?:) And please spare us the attempt at sincerity-- you have been "attacking" Mann on this thread and going off topic. Are you familiar with the term "concern troll" Dr. Cadbury? You and Muller are entitled to you own opinions, but not your own facts. As it happens the reality and the facts show that Muller is wrong. Sad that you and other "skeptics" cannot, will not recognize that. -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:24 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
@dhogaza What are you referring to? What is item 3?Moderator Response: [DB] He was referring to Charlie A's comment earlier in this thread. -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:24 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Okay Albatross. So I see that Muller paraphrased a quote and tried to connect 2 of the emails together as part of the same. So he is mistaken in this instance. What do you think though? I noticed all your doing is complaining that I am off topic. -
CBDunkerson at 03:22 AM on 30 March 2011Arctic Ice March 2011
fydijkstra, while the article above doesn't actually say so... February 2011 was a record low, not a 'new' one but still a record... tied with 2005. Granted, given that the prior two months (December 2010 and January 2011) were new record lows you might draw a distinction of February having 'merely' tied the record, but it seems a bit desperate. -
Albatross at 03:18 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dr. Cadbury @37, You continue to remain off topic. The MWP has been discussed here, and here, and here -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:18 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Albatross I am not going to attack or defend anybody. I think everyone has had a different perspective on this topic. I think if Mann and his colleagues had a second chance, they would have approached the issue in a different way.Moderator Response: [DB] No more on the MWP or Mann on this thread. See Albatross' links in the next comment for direction if you wish to pursue your interest. -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:15 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
@Albatross, @moderator I think this is the best moderated climate site by a long shot. I appreciate and respect that even though many of my comments are in opposition to the moderator's viewpoints, they allow me to post and provide feedback on what they want me to avoid posting. Albatross, I hope your comment was not aimed at me. I'm not trying to hijack anything. I think it is good that 2 opposites like ourselves can come here and analyze the information for ourselves. -
Albatross at 03:14 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
Dr. Cadbury, With respect, you are wildly off topic and now engaging in innuendo. Are you here to defend Muller (who is the subject of this thread)? Either defend Muller or concede that he is wrong, or please take your OT discussion elsewhere. Sincerely, Dr. Albatross, PhD Meteorology :) -
SNRatio at 03:09 AM on 30 March 2011Dana's 50th: Why I Blog
#53 Gilles: You still haven't got it? How could you say sensitivity is "a priori definite quantity"? For all practical purposes, it is not-deterministic, and maybe it is even in principle. It is one of the best examples of a "real" random variable that I can think of, because it follows the chaotic aspects of weather. And even "deterministic" things like a digital camera exposure is by no means "apriori definite" when you go down to pixel level. Because of the quantum nature of light, it is not "a priori definite". Whether it is "objective" or not, is a philosophical question that I don't think we have to answer in order to work with it, and reproducibility is a basic feature of natural science. When e.g. random effects make complete reproducibility im,possible, we turn to things like statistical distributions. If different methods do not converge to the same distribution, we usually consider the entity as ill-defined, or our methods as inadequate. This is rather basic natural science, as I normally work with it. -
Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd. at 03:08 AM on 30 March 2011Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline
"A common and broadly held misconception is that Mann's hockey stick hides the decline. There is no "decline" in Mann's reconstructions." Yeah okay, there's no decline if you believe the MWP was not as warm as today's temperatures. I believe the MWP was warmer than the current temperatures so I see a pretty big discrepancy.Moderator Response: [DB] "I believe the MWP was warmer than the current temperatures" Please take discussion of the MWP to a more appropriate thread. -
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.
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