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muoncounter at 11:28 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Nicely done, Ned: Confidence in these temperatures can now be at an all time high! It is nice to see this kind of consistency. Take just about any of these graphs and fit a line from 1970 or so to today: you see a global temperature increase at a rate of 0.4-0.6 deg in less than 30-40 years. I can't wait to hear the "No, its not" chorus come chiming in. -
kdkd at 11:03 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd #73 Your post confused me a bit. I think this is because you are getting positive feedback effects confused with runaway positive feedback effects. They're not the same thing. The water content of the atmosphere (a function of temperature and local environmental conditions) is the former. It certainly is not the latter, otherwise we would not be here. -
Doug Bostrom at 10:54 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Regarding clouds, I thought I read somewhere that models indicate the role of clouds depends on their altitude. Dredging for something useful on that, I bumped into an exploration of the concept having to do with actual clouds and concerning the disappearance of real-world low level clouds leading to the appearance of high level clouds and thus leading to a net positive feedback. See this interesting article in Physics World. More here in Science Daily. Sorry I don't have time right now to follow up with anything later or more definitive. Food for discussion in the meantime... -
KR at 10:49 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
I agree on the inverse relationship, johnd - but we already have a known cause for temperature increase in the CO2 levels. That would seem to indicate that the decreased cloud levels are an effect via the inverse relationship, not a cause, unless they are (a) independently driven, and (b) the CO2 levels are not sufficient to drive the temperature changes, which doesn't seem to be the case. -
johnd at 10:19 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
KR at 10:05 AM, the inverse relationship of global cloud coverage to temperature should hold up well irrespective of which way cause and effect applies. -
KR at 10:05 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd - excellent points on total water vapor vs. temperature. I will note, however, that increasing temperatures raise water vapor partial pressures, increasing the absolute humidity for the same values of relative humidity. And the GHE of water vapor is driven by absolute humidity. Clouds do have an immediate, local effect on temperatures. But what drives cloud formation in the first place? Relative humidity and atmospheric lapse rate, as I understand it. The bottom of a cumulus cloud is exactly where the relative humidity reaches 100% as the lapse rate drops temperature. And believe me, I follow those numbers quite closely as an aviator. As to the chicken/egg question of clouds and temperatures - the temperature increases are readily explained by the CO2 increases over the last 150 years with some positive feedback, and the global cloud cover appears to be inversely related to temperature in some fashion. Unless there's some mechanism independent of temperature that is changing global cloud coverage, I would think that the inverse relationship of global cloud coverage to temperature holds up pretty well. -
johnd at 09:45 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
KR at 09:09 AM, whilst the correlation stands up well, the real key is what drives the formation of clouds. If that turns out to be something other then clouds being driven by temperature, and it is clouds that instead are driving temperature, then that puts everything into a different perspective. Whilst the present consensus seems to be temperature driving clouds, it is a very fine line that is difficult to call decisively, but with very big implications to the whole understanding of the greenhouse effect. However, from an anecdotal point of view, most people who have spent a lifetime observing outdoors through all seasons, and longer term events such as droughts and flooding rains, would conclude most reasonably that it is definitely clouds that drive temperatures. -
Daved Green at 09:41 AM on 24 July 2010CO2 effect is saturated
Thanks Ned After another hour of searching I found Science of Dooms response in another blog with a link to his ? blog . -
apeescape at 09:33 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Japan Meteorological Agency seems to have there own set of data. They use the "Kobe collection" (Ishii et al. 2004) for SST; for land temperatures, NCDC data is used till 2000, and CLIMAT messages are used from then on. Their data uses 1971 ~ 2000 as their baseline. Kooji Ishihara 2005 ~ COBE-SST を用いた全球平均気温の算出
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johnd at 09:26 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
kdkd at 08:36 AM, water vapour has a limited residency time in the atmosphere and can only complete it's cycle by the transformation to a liquid or ice. Thus it is reasonable to expect that as atmospheric water vapour content varies, so too would that of clouds. For water vapour to transform to liquid or ice, it has to give up all the heat that it had absorbed that was providing the positive feedback mentioned. If however it didn't give up all the heat, but retained some then that would maintain that positive feedback into the next cycle. HOWEVER, H2O is subject to meeting certain well defined conditions in order to change state, so about the only thing that can vary is the rate that H2O progresses through the cycle, which is probably linked to the frequency and intensity of such events as El-Nino and other similar events which each have their own identified cycles that change over much longer time frames, 6 or 7 decades, or even longer. The Quinn El-Nino reconstruction is interesting showing periods of greater and lesser activity and intensity over such longer time frames.
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KR at 09:09 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd - As I noted here, no cloud trend over a no temperature change region - I was careless in my first look and didn't directly correlate the two. Over the 1952-1981 period clouds and temps hold pretty steady, based on ship-borne recorded cloud observations. Over the 1983-2008 period you gave data for, there appears to be an inverse relationship between temperature and global cloud coverage. If increased clouds provide a cooling effect, the data we have seems to indicate that cloud formation (negative) with temperature (positive) means that inverse cloud levels provide a positive feedback on temperature changes. Not bad - we're up to 56 years of data, with a two year gap. I don't have the raw data assembled for the Warren paper, or yours, so I can't run a statistical analysis on the trend relationship. But it's a pretty good inverse match from eye-balling it; enough to perhaps make it worthwhile to analyze the stats. Try this direct link for the Warren paper. My first link was through a citation, and might have been problematic. -
JMurphy at 09:04 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
gallopingcamel, I can see how you have misunderstood the facts. Thanks to doug_bostrom for linking to the original Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education & Skills [2007] judgement which, if you actually look at it, will show you that the NEWSBUSTERS site you linked to (Motto : 'Exposing Liberal Media Bias') couldn't even get the number of 'errors' right, let alone anything else about the judgement. Do you really believe everything you read there ? As for the IPCC's use of the word 'catastrophic', perhaps you could point out where they predict (or project) such an eventuality. I have only found such a use of the word, in very hedging terms, in Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, Ch2.2, especially 2.2.4 (Risk of catastrophic or abrupt change). Can you show where they predict "Catastrophic Global Warming", 'without presenting convincing evidence' ? -
Deech56 at 09:02 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Could the ECMWF data be here?Response: That page still doesn't make it easy - what's the path from that URL to global surface temperature? -
johnd at 08:59 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
KR at 08:47 AM, you posted whilst I was compiling mine, but it appears we are in some sort of agreement on how we interpret the information so far. I haven't been able to open the Warren study link as yet, it comes up each time with a fault, even with different browsers. -
KR at 08:56 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
1077 - In regards to 'Mavericks', I try to keep in mind a quote from Carl Sagan: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Good science is what counts. In regards to politics/money, I suggest you read Merchants of Doubt, or as an easier read Thank You For Smoking. Every day that industry delays legislative and political action means millions of dollars for them - while receiving grants to write papers means that your salary is adjusted to compensate, and you make nothing more. Hmmm... motivation... -
johnd at 08:54 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
KR at 04:52 AM, given that you were delighted that no trend was said to be found over a 29 year period, 1952-1981, with it's obvious limitations on data quality, then perhaps would you consider the 25 year period, 1983-2008, with higher quality data as depicted in the charts I posted, is a sufficiently long period to determine a trend also? However I am left wondering what trends yourself, or the authors, hoped to find, given the Warren study spanned a period that happened to begin with global temperatures in a decline, and ended with global temperatures in a recovery? What trend would yourself expect to find in such a scenario? There is one trend however that cannot be overlooked and related to clouds. That of water vapour. It correlates with temperature, yet to be fully understood is the full relationship to cloud formation. -
KR at 08:47 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd - Comparing the Warren paper to the surface temperatures, it's pretty clear that the 1950-1980 period is fairly flat in terms of temperature (aerosols and solar cycle?); the lack of trend for cloud cover over that time frame is therefore not surprising. Your posted cloud cover data (thanks!) is really short for trend analysis, as you noted. To the extent that the data is present, however, global cloud cover seems to have an inverse relationship to temperature, with a fairly clean match for the 1983-2008 temp progression. As clouds act as a cooling factor, decreasing cloud cover with increasing temperatures should be a positive feedback, increasing temperatures even more. But, as you noted, there's not much data yet - I look forward to further information. -
dhogaza at 08:42 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Anything Osama bin Laden references incidental to his raving incitements should be considered off-limits as a legitimate topic of inquiry?
So much for aerodynamics and aircraft engineering, I guess. No more air travel ... -
kdkd at 08:36 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd #50 "Clouds are not the only area of contention, but the most obvious, and likely the most important." If we're idly speculating, then let's idly speculate this. H2O gas in the atmosphere causes net positive feedback in the climate system. However one effect of increasing H2O(g) in the atmosphere may be to increase cloud cover. It seems possible that this may cause some negative feedback effect, but does it seem credible that the cloud negative feedback can exceed the water vapour positive feedback? It would be a nice get out of jail free card, but it doesn't seem very likely. -
kdkd at 08:32 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Ken Lambert #40 "I wonder what happened to the robust blockbuster arguments about the real effect of CO2, water vapour, aerosols, TSI, TOA, OHC, SLR, energy balance etc??" These are hardly blockbusters, although isolated areas of uncertainty are definately there. However, the convergence of independent lines of evidence (discussed elsewhere) are far greater than these isolated areas of uncertainty. We can use the one liners to deal with some of your three letter abbreviations above. Your overuse of three letter abbreviations makes your argument look superficially more credible than it is, as you're hiding behind technical-sounding stuff. "Maybe it is because the deeper these technical discussions go, the more the lack of knowledge and robust measurement in vital areas of climate science are exposed." There are three reasons why discussions fizzle out on this site. One is the regular posting schedule, which means newer threads are usually more popularly commented on than older ones. Two, the kind of repetitious arguments that you produce, and then when you ignore, and misrepresent important parts of the rebuttal are not well received here. Three, the recent comments link (and the RSS feed) only contain the last 20 comments, so discussions tend to end fairly quickly as a result of that. "Several of these threads have petered out with a stalemate ending in something like: "we need better measurement and more years to find out what is really happening"." This is a reasonable conclusions for many if not most scientific discussions. However, there is enough evidence available that totally discredits your "its not really happening much" style of argument. Looks to me lie you need a bit of a dose of reality Ken. By the way, this argument of yours is a good example of misrepresenting a rebuttal, mentioned earlier. -
moldyfox at 08:26 AM on 24 July 2010It's albedo
Dear Forrest, the Science Palle 2004 Earthshine manuscript is a globally discredited paper and technique. NASA have shown that even with an instrument on the Moon, due to its orbit you could not measure global albedo (as correctly stated above, also see http://science.larc.nasa.gov/ceres/STM/2005-05/loeb_earthshine.pdf ). The only global measurements are those that come from CERES when properly calibrated using peer reviewed techniques that utilize the fixed climate of the Moon as a calibration standard. These show a statistically significant drop in Earth albedo from 2000-2005 and a statistically significant increase in out going thermal radiance (see Matthews 2009). If you wish to discuss global warming, consider that. Absolutely no conclusions about climate change can or should be made based on Earthshine data. The truth is out there and its peer reviewed, hope that helps. Moldyfox -
John Cook at 08:12 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Another temperature reconstruction I've been wanting to get my hands on is by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). They're the ones who published a paper analysing the HadCRUT data and concluding their recent warming trend was slightly low due to not including the Arctic region where warming was pronounced (blogged about here). I'm told their temperature data is somewhere on their website but haven't tracked it down yet (admittedly I hadn't looked that hard). Anyone else found it, plotted it? -
KR at 08:10 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Ned - fantastic compilation. Thank you. -
Dr Bob at 08:03 AM on 24 July 2010Assessing global surface temperature reconstructions
Ned This is very impressive work. I have been reading this site for some months now and am most impressed with the quality and the quantity of dedicated and talented work that is submitted. Congratulations and keep it coming. Bob -
KR at 07:54 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
My apologies, the previous post should have referred to the Heritage Foundation, not Institute. As well as the Science & Environmental Policy Project, the European Academy for Environmental Affairs (where G. Gerlich was a member), George C. Marshall Institute, etc. -
Doug Bostrom at 07:51 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Theodwulf we're currently spending something like 4% of global GDP on what for most of us are imaginary harms, possibilities we all agree and fervently hope are only remotely probable. The fact that we spend $6 trillion dollars per year on insurance premiums which only function effectively if most of us never make claims has not threatened democracy and has not brought our industrial society to its knees. Meanwhile, something like 2% of global GDP spent on a shift from fossil fuel dependency will not only purchase insurance against a substantial risk from climate change but will also ensure that our industrial society will continue to function after our fossil fuel endowment is depleted, an inevitable outcome that will only become more difficult to address the longer we procrastinate. If you're curious to see the gains of the past few thousands years erased for most of us in a dramatic and ugly way, simply avoid spending money to foster substitutes now, instead wait for fossil fuels to be exhausted. Short of concerted effort, that inflection point is fast approaching; China, India and other countries are not going to put their development plans on hold, after all, so we'll be treated first to a bitter struggle for fossil fuel resources and then a collapse of the world order as it now stands. Seems like a no-brainer to me. -
KR at 07:45 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Theodwulf - When in the History of Science has a Theory demanded that the political and economic foundations of the world be overturned and rebuilt into unknown, untested models? - Disease control: plague in London requiring reworking entire water system. - Microbe theory of disease: All of medicine changed there, all of sanitation practices. - Fish depletion leading to major limitations on catch and seasons, major industries. - Air pollution: In the US this meant the Clean Air Act, EPA, major major industrial effects. - Ozone layer: Banning of CFC's. - DDT and other pesticides: Reworking of pest control, complete re-do on malarial prevention. Note that people and groups (in the US) opposing climate change science (Heritage Institute, lots of others) have also opposed the dangers of acid rain, smoking, second-hand smoke, dangers of DDT, any and all EPA regulations/Clean Air Act, etc. That includes Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer, among others. If they were active when the microbe theory of disease was being discovered I suspect they would have taken contributions from hospitals and opposed that. They have a lousy track record for scientific accuracy and honesty. -
Philippe Chantreau at 07:44 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
"the political and economic foundations of the world be overturned and rebuilt into unknown , untested models?" If I had a penny for every time I saw that strawman... The problem with credibility to the masses is that it is a matter of manipulation by the people who specialze in mass mind manipulation. As for this: "I personaly would rather see the world burn (or drown) than see a mass backslide to Tyrany and/or Oligarchy (even benign ones)." I don't see how you could convince me that these are the only alternatives. Considering how bleak the choices are, perhaps you could also examine a little closer why you believe that and where it comes from. -
shawnhet at 07:38 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Oops, the above was a response to post#55 not #50. -
shawnhet at 07:37 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Ned #50, I mistyped there. I meant to say that expertise in science is related to how many predictions you can get right. As you say, a guy on the street could guess right once or twice,but he could not without some understanding of the system consistently guess right. Cheers, :) -
Philippe Chantreau at 07:32 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Galoopingcamel, your counting head remark goes to the heart of the Oregon petition. Thanks to Doug for clarifying the UK's court decision on the movie. -
Theodwulf at 07:27 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Can someone without a doctorate in climate science make a valid point, make a valid observation? Can someone with a doctorate in climate science make a mistake? Someone with such a specialized edjucation is obviously very knowledgable on the subject BUT it doesn't make them correct, especially when the subject is as complex as this topic. In an acedemic setting, Yes ,one would accept that the "expert" was correct BUT when the Modern Era itself is about to be sacrificed to appease Gaia,then THEY must prove their theory beyond all doubt to us "normal folks" who will pay for it and have to live with it. THEY may be correct in defining the problem, BUT are they right with the solution for the problem? Considering the solution would require political and economical changes to the world that cannot be fully known and may require require us to get rid of the finest acheivement of Mankind...Democracy. I personaly would rather see the world burn (or drown) than see a mass backslide to Tyrany and/or Oligarchy (even benign ones). When in the History of Science has a Theory demanded that the political and economic foundations of the world be overturned and rebuilt into unknown , untested models? Don't expect us normal folk to suspend disbelief because you brushed against the walls of an institution of higher learning. If you are right , the future is going to be very bleak, even if we do heed your advice. I realy do hope the AGW crowd regroups and reestablishes their credibility to the masses. As Much as I want you proven wrong, I want it only if you are wrong. -
Doug Bostrom at 07:18 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Readers should take Galloping Camel's implication that Mr. Justice Burton of the England and Wales High Court is endowed with or claims mind-reading powers with a grain of salt. Justice Burton made no remarks about Al Gore's honesty and did not attempt any assessment of such. While generally expressing admiration of many of the film's qualities and concurring with expert witness assessment that in "An Inconvenient Truth" "Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate" Justice Burton did take issue with 9 points made in the film. He refers to them as "errors", most (or some will argue all) of which were not in fact erroneous. The complete court opinion may be read here. RealClimate elaborates on the "errors" here, where it becomes a little more clear what the case was actually deciding, a question not primarily about "An Inconvenient Truth" but rather interpretation of guidelines for material to be presented to students in the UK. New Scientist also looked more closely at the "errors" and that writeup may be found here.
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gallopingcamel at 07:06 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
JMurphy (#109) Q1. "Catastrophic Global Warming" is what the IPCC predicts in AR4, without presenting convincing evidence. Q2. Owing to the willful misconduct by most of the "Main Stream Media" in the USA, you may not have heard that Al Gore's book is considered a work of fiction in the UK. See: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/09/court-identifies-eleven-inaccuracies-al-gore-s-inconvenient-truth http://abcnews.go.com/US/TenWays/story?id=3719791&page=1 Q3. As I have said several times before on this blog, science is not about counting heads. However, it is sometimes amusing to pretend that counting heads matters. -
scaddenp at 07:02 AM on 24 July 2010Models are unreliable
Peter, your faith in Vince is touching. Perhaps you should google for some other opinions? (Or look at his review comments at IPCC and editor's response). I've known Vince all my working life and I would trust him to do a coal analysis for me. You still seem to think Hansen's model is somehow flawed because it's deals with "fictious scenarios". Would you complain about say an automobile model not predicting speed because it cant tell how hard you press the accelerator? With the Hansen model however, you can rerun it with ACTUAL forcings instead of the scenario. What else can demand of a model? You are also ignoring all the other model/observation matches in the above article. Where have the models failed? -
muoncounter at 06:52 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Wow: at #80 we learned that there could be 3 Galileos in the same room and at #110 we learned that my high school students needn't bother working any longer, as they are all potential Einsteins, whether they graduate or not. Things are looking up? Unfortunately, in the US, they are not. Despite what the majority of scientists believe, the people who repeat those two nonsensical arguments are winning: "48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997". See this article for the full dose of bad news. -
KR at 06:31 AM on 24 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
RSVP - yep, asymptotic convergence. The relationship should become linear once you are unsaturated all through the band-pass of the GHG, but that's at very low concentrations. Proper calculation of these requires numeric integration over all GHG's and the full spectra, which I am sadly incapable of doing in my head (sigh) - but a sum of asymptotic convergences of the various GHG components agrees quite well, and is pretty darn close for mental shorthand. -
RSVP at 06:13 AM on 24 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
KR I follow what you are saying. All this seems to point to asymptotic convergence. -
actually thoughtful at 05:59 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
Pete Ridley, your poinst would make sense if they were true. But they are not. How do you refute Hansen's 1988 work - still accurate after 22 years (and of course models now are much more sophisticated and while they have not stood the test of time, given that they stand on the shoulders of Hansen's early work, only a crank would claim they will do less well. -
tobyjoyce at 05:41 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
chriscanaris, @39 Like yourself, I am an admirer of Gould's writing, and his efforts to gain recognition for figures who were once admired but now derided as "losers in the game". An example was Georges Cuvier, the great pre-Darwinian biologist who explained the variety of species by periodic catastrophes destroying somes species. Gould defended Cuvier's theory as "good science" in his day, pointing out how the extinction of dinosaurs by the famous KT-boundary comet collision means that Cuvier was not entirely wrong. But where does that get us? A dollop of sympathy for Richard Lindzen or Roy Spencer because they may be partially right? Darwin spent his life after the publication of Origin of Species watering down his theory in subsequent editions to satisfy or placate various critics. But we know now that he was most correct in the first edition. My own feeling is that Hulme and people like Judy Curry are not really helping. There are some issues over which no compromise is possible. The question is "Who speaks for science?", or "Who has scientific authority?". I think we know which group is not the answer to either question. -
KR at 05:14 AM on 24 July 2010Models are unreliable
Pete Ridley - A question for you. The Hansen 1988 model appears to satisfy all the criteria I know of for a reasonable scientific model. You seem to disagree. Can you tell us where the Hansen model fails these criteria? Or perhaps tell us what your definition of a scientific model might be? -
KR at 05:07 AM on 24 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
RSVP - you forgot the other greenhouse gasses. You got 9-10 oC just by removing CO2. CO2 is 25-30% of the total GHG retention - add water for ~50%, methane, NO2, etc. (each with logarithmic effects), and look, you're right around 33 oC. -
KR at 05:01 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
TruthSeeker - Soon and Baliunas 2003 were criticized analytically, looking at their numbers and methods, misattributions of information, their selective sub-sets of data, and finding considerable fault with them. That's how you criticize a paper! If Watts feels that his data was misinterpreted, he should post a comment describing that, to the same journal that Menne published in. If he feels Menne analyzed it incorrectly, he should point out the math errors. If he feels that the full set of data would lead to a different conclusion than Menne reached, he should analyze it in the same fashion and show it. He has done none of the above. If you haven't read the Menne paper, well, that's end of discussion for me. I read Menne's paper and Watt's blog prior to even commenting on the issue. I would respectfully suggest you do the same before continuing. -
dhogaza at 04:58 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
"Come on, Einstein didn't either." TruthSeeker needs to spend more time trying to live up to his high-falutin' handle. Einstein got his undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics in 1900, and finished his doctoral thesis in 1905, and as a result was rewarded his PhD by the University of Zürich. Later that year he published the four papers that established his fame for eternity. You can read this in WIkipedia yourself. Or elsewhere, if you think wikipedia's lying about Einstein's academic background. Comparing Watts and Einstein falls flat for many reasons, claiming Einstein only had a high school diploma is only the most obvious fail. Perhaps this will teach you to more closely research claims made by denialists? The einstein one's repeated about once a month on blogs I read regularly. Isn't it about the time that this lie was put to bed once and for all? -
KR at 04:52 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
johnd - I agree that historic cloud data is limited. That's why I was delighted to find the Warren et al 1988 paper covering 1952-1981 (my typo about coverage dates in the previous post - sorry). No trend was found. Note that this was ocean data - I haven't located the previous land cloud cover data yet. But the ocean data should have much lower variability and more clearly indicate a trend if one existed. If clouds were a function of temperature, or temperature a function of clouds, I would expect some correlation. The data doesn't seem to support either hypothesis. -
Peter Hogarth at 04:37 AM on 24 July 2010Models are unreliable
Pete Ridley at 00:59 AM on 24 July, 2010 You state "contrary to reality which is a turning point or even downturn in globa tmperature trend". I assume you mean surface or lower tropospheric temperature trends as measured by land/vessel based stations, satellites or radiosondes? Could you please explain how you arrive at your conclusion? I have quite a few data sets available, and it is difficult to see any turning points or downturns in trend unless you are extremely selective or narrow on start and end times. -
TruthSeeker at 04:26 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
KR #104 "What Watt could do would be to (a) demonstrate that Menne's analysis was flawed (bad statistics, method, etc.), or (b) show that the more complete data, when analyzed a la Menne, results in different conclusions than the initial data set." I agree with that. Again, I still go back to SB03 and the fact that it was rebuked and criticized by those that argued that the authors had misrepresented or misinterpreted their data. How is this different? dhogaza #106 "I think it's become obvious that TruthSeeker hasn't actually read Menne's paper and analysis, but rather is basing his comments on Watts claims" That's true. "I hate to break this to you, but Watts highest degree is a high-school diploma," Come on, Einstein didn't either. "because I actually have some faith that you might be smart enough to figure out that he doesn't know squat on your own." You give me to much credit, remember I think Watts is being attacked because he is a hominid. . :-) Thanks for your thoughtful responses. You have given me more to think about. -
johnd at 04:21 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
KR at 03:36 AM, clouds have been determined as having an overall nett cooling effect. The problem with working them into modeling is that there is no historic data or ways to reconstruct proxy data. Early observations are obviously limited, and reliable satellite data only available for the last couple of decades, barely enough to establish trends, however enough to show a reasonably large degree of variation. But there is still that indecision as to whether temperature is a function of clouds or clouds a function of temperature.
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JMurphy at 04:06 AM on 24 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
gallopingcamel wrote : The above claim may well be correct. My point is that the outcome would be reversed if the question was changed to include the phrase "Catastrophic Global Warming" and the participation were broadened to include all scientists. What is "Catastrophic Global Warming" and why do you believe that all scientists should have a say as to whether Global Warming is happening, 'Catastrophic' or not ? Do you also believe that all scientists should have a say as to whether, say, Dark Energy exists ? gallopingcamel wrote : ...the MND piece opens up with an account of Al Gore's dishonesty in "An Inconvenient Truth" that was proven in a British court of law. What 'dishonesty' and which British court of law proved that 'dishonesty' ? gallopingcamel wrote : Getting back to John Cook's straw poll, 30,000 scientists signed a petition opposing the Kyoto protocol. So ? Does that mean that the tens of millions of other scientists out there supported the Kyoto protocol ? -
Ned at 04:04 AM on 24 July 2010The nature of authority
shawnhet writes: Basically, we have one easy way to tell whether someone is an expert in science and when someone isn't: whether they can make a risky prediction that turns out to be true. Actually, that's not a particularly reliable test either. Experts can and do make mistakes, and an incompetent amateur can make a prediction that happens to turn out correctly despite being based on entirely wrong reasoning. I doubt there's any single test for expertise, though there are a bunch of different possible indicators.
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