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kdkd at 13:23 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
HR #14 "There are many instances where things don't point to a consistent result, off the top of my head Trenberths "missing heat"." For a substantial case it's pretty usual to be able to get three "off the top of your head" items. For example, off the top of my head, some of the convergent evidence is: 1. Independent sources of global temperature change. 2. Ecosystem changes showing a warming world (e.g. beetles devestating boreal forest) 3. Earlier onset of spring in the NH. There, easy. You refer us to one single item based on an inappropriately short time period, with a complex measurement model lacking the required precision to be sufficiently sensitive over a such short time period. If there really is the inconsistency at largethat you claim is possible, then you really should be able to do better than that "off the top of your head". Or will your attempts already be covered in the excellent list of one line rebuttals? -
gallopingcamel at 13:21 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
While I am just a scientist rather than a "Climate Scientist" you can count me as a supporter of the alleged 97% who claim that humans are affecting global warming. For me the interesting question is whether the "Anthropogenic" component of "Global Warming" is measurable. -
ProfMandia at 13:11 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
John, the only change I would make to the graphic is to place the three red people right up front. The 3% get much more press than they deserve because they have great ability to place themselves "front and center". Scott A. Mandia, Professor of Physical Sciences Selden, NY Global Warming: Man or Myth? My Global Warming Blog Twitter: AGW_Prof "Global Warming Fact of the Day" Facebook Group -
HumanityRules at 12:57 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
11 robhon Somebody like Roger Pielke Snr might say he has no say in how policies are being formed because his field of climate science is being effective ignored by the IPCC. From recollection he was part of the IPCC in the early days but left when he felt his viewpoint was being ignored. He now writes and often read blog, publishes and seems to still work to shape policy but all this as an outsider who can easily be ignored. The power in this example lies with the IPCC not Pielke. You're maybe over-stating the power of the blogosphere. The Copanhagen Summit wasn't scuppered by deniers, each nation went in with it's own agenda based on it's narrow nation interests not on whether they read WUWT or SkepticalScience. I actually think stalemate and continued talks was what most ultimately wanted. Still seen to be still working on the problem while not committing to something that will harm their economy or hand advantage to their competitors. It's an oft used tactic. -
scaddenp at 12:53 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Actually HR, since there is a suggestion that you think these points have some validity, perhaps you can show some evidence. 1) All variability has physical causes. Where is the evidence of natural variability that isnt adequate captured by known physics and accounted for? 2) We measure 3.7W/m2 of forcing from our GHG(cf <1 for solar min/max) and that is over-estimating? Again, where is the evidence for a more important factor. 3) We have?? Estimated at 0-0.4W/m2. Obviously we have NOT ignored the issue. Where is the evidence that this is underestimated. 4)Doubtful, but uncertainty cuts both ways. Suppose ECS is 6 not 3? How much risk to you like? -
mark2746 at 12:42 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
What do you get when you put 1oo climate scientists in a room? FEAR - because a world-wide press conference is about to start and not one of them remembered to bring the Skeptical Science list of one-line answers.Response: They've got an app for that now :-) -
scaddenp at 12:34 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
HR - the only climate scientist dissenting views that I have heard are either: 1/ There is an undiscovered natural variability or 2/ negative feedbacks gives us a lower sensitivity I'd have said IPCC treated your other points very thoroughly but I know that non-climate scientists have tried to push them. Want to list the climate scientists you think follow your ideas? Can any of them do physics? -
HumanityRules at 12:29 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
John, "It's not based just on theory or models or even just a single dataset but many different observations all pointing to a consistent result." This is a bit nebulous and too convenient for me. There are many instances where things don't point to a consistent result, off the top of my head Trenberths "missing heat". If that is any idea in climate science that fully satisfies your inquiring mind then... well I don't know. But your comment did get me thinking. "what are the ten most important climate science experiments" (or 20, or data sets or theories or whatever). Something that amounts to the complete picture (Somebody's going to tell me to go read the IPCC report). As well as a list of denier arguments how about the best of climate science, if you dare include all the limitations and caveats associated with the work. I realise you sort of do this on a daily basis, for which I'm grateful, but I'd be interested in that sort article. Maybe it's too much to sum up in one article.Response: I attempt to do that in the empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming. In truth, though, that page is in sore need of updating. I've yet to incorporate some of the human fingerprints plus I've learnt a few new "human fingerprints" in recent weeks that I'm desperate to blog about but just can't seem to get to. So on the to-do list is to blog about these other human fingerprints, then revamp the empirical evidence page, synthesising it all into a single, user-friendly, well-cited, easy-to-understand page. Just let me get through the other million things I have to do and I'll get onto that asap! :-) -
chris1204 at 12:27 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
John: When it comes to complex science, whether it be climate science or heart surgery or how a plane manages to stay up in the air, we defer to the experts who do this stuff for a living. Why? Because they know every nook and cranny of their area of expertise. Having seen the appalling standards of care tolerated in some areas of medical practice in Australia and having heard a few things about the safety culture of a well known Australian airline from an engineer ostracised by its management, I'm rather choosy about who I'd go to see about a medical problem and who I'd fly with. I'm not saying the 97% have got it all wrong or even that they haven't got all or most of it right. Like the rest of us, I can't go through the many thousands of peer reviewed papers (many of which contain scientific arguments that are way beyond my ken). But I do feel that focusing on majoritarian views actually distracts us from the excellent and stimulating science that so often appears on this site. I guess my problem stems in part from my work as a psychiatrist which includes a substantial slab of forensic or medicolegal reporting. Consequently, I've had an unusually high degree of exposure to systemic dysfunction in many of the institutions in which we normally trust (and which I have to trust when dealing with them in every day life because I have no choice - I would otherwise find myself reduced to a paranoid mess). -
Rob Honeycutt at 12:14 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Whoops. Sorry, I flipped that. If 3 Senators were all there were in one party they would have far less sway than the 3% of climate science contrarians currently have on climate policy in the US. -
Rob Honeycutt at 12:11 PM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Honestly, the issue isn't so much that there are the three that disagree with the consensus of the other 97. One expects that in science. It's that the main stream media puts the three on the same level (if not higher) as the 97. Think of it this way. What if 97 senators in the US Senate were from one party? How much sway would they have on policy. Certainly far less that the 3% of climate science contrarians currently have on climate policy. -
HumanityRules at 11:58 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
MattJ "cursed" wow! How about just excluded, blacklisted, demonised as in the pay of Big Oil........oh wait. -
Wayne Johnston at 11:52 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
You get local warming. -
MattJ at 11:51 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Answering #3: they will be cursed long before they are forgotten. For their intransigence is a major contributing factor to the incredibly stubborn delay of our political and social leaders in taking effective action to prevent a catastrophic rise in average surface temperature. There might not be as strikinga consensus concerning when we will start feeling the effects of this failure, but that won't stop me from placing my bet: my bet is that by the end of the 21st century, even the skeptics will have a hard time denying the onset of catastrophe. Even by 2150 only the stubborn will still be denying it. The rest of us will begin to feel it as crop failures and decreasing water supplies drive up food and water prices. -
michael sweet at 11:41 AM on 22 July 2010The Missing Link, Creationism and Climate Change
Chris: Not all scientists as as sanguine about coral reefs as you http://www.sprep.org/att/irc/ecopies/pacific_region/607.pdf. To quote the summary: Reports of a recent study showing that 43% of 27 central-Pacific Atoll islands have grown in net area over recent decades, with only 14% of these studied islands decreasing in net land area, have led to claims that risks to these islands from projected sea level rise due to global warming have been overstated. The comments of the authors of the paper cited by the press, often out of context, have contributed to this false impression. Indeed the authors warn “while the islands are coping for now, any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise could overtake the sediment build up”. This has not yet been peer reviewed, but clearly Tuvalu has reasons to worry. I am glad you feel Florida will have no problem with 1-2 meters more water. There is no reason to be concerned just because experts say the sea level will rise. -
HumanityRules at 11:39 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
It's not funny but...... three red guys in the back corner being ignored ;) I would have thought 100 of them would be green if you asked that question. Most of the so-called deniers I've read seem to accept CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that increasing CO2 is anthropogenic. From what I've read the so-called denier scientists seem to hold a range of ideas including. 1) We have focussed solely on the effect of CO2 while denying or ignoring natural variability. 2) We have over-estimated CO2's impact on the climate. 3) We have ignored other ways of how we changed the environment, such as land use. 4) We are still in the early stages of climate science either in our data collection or theories. We still have too much to learn before we can pass conclusions. The simple reduction of things to yes/no becomes a real problem when you're trying to assess were the science is at. (I can't help feeling sorry for those discriminated red guys. Some bring it on themselves and no doubt enjoy it but it strikes me some of them are just going were their science takes them) -
Jeff Freymueller at 11:39 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
Sorry, no good joke. But if you put 100 scientists from any one field into a room, you will get plenty of arguments. A reasonable chance of some heated arguments. But most likely the arguments won't be about any of the things the denier side thinks are important -- because most or all of the people in the room will know that those things really are not important or not in dispute. John's guess on the 3% is probably a good one. I suspect that the 3% also include some who would have agreed if you said "probably changing" as opposed to "changing". They just have some doubts about one aspect or another (like the feedback question). -
Marcus at 11:38 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
I'd say the other 3 are not convinced, & are still looking for that elusive, exotic factor that might *really* be the cause. I'm completely fine with that because that's the way science works. Personally, I hope they *do* find that *other* factor, because it would be a great relief to me to know that humans aren't causing Global Warming. Personally, though, I feel that all the available evidence suggests otherwise. Also, even if AGW was disproved tomorrow, I'd still argue for a reduced reliance on fossil fuels on the basis of *general* pollution & resource sustainability!Response: The whole "maybe there's some other yet to be discovered cause" line of thinking fails to take into account that we're directly observing all this heat being trapped by CO2. We don't think CO2 is causing warming just because we've eliminated all the other options - we're actively observing an increased greenhouse effect at CO2 wavelengths. To deny man's influence, you need to not only find another cause but also explain what's happening to all the heat being trapped by CO2. -
Jeff Freymueller at 11:34 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
100 climate scientists walk into a bar, and ... -
Rob Honeycutt at 11:32 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
The other 3, I would say, have a level of cognitive dissonance that they're dealing with from a personal or political standpoint. It's not that they're bad scientists, they're human like all scientists. They're just finding the capacity to ignore the overwhelming evidence in favor of what they prefer to believe to be the truth. Beyond that, IF (a very monumental IF) they did manage to locate that "missing link" in climate science that showed that current warming was clearly NOT anthropogenic, then they would be vindicated and written into history for all time. Whereas if they are wrong they are more likely to be merely forgotten. -
Jeff Freymueller at 11:31 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#26 Marcel, it is my impression that the warming in the Arctic is always amplified relative to the more equatorial latitudes (presently it shows 3-4x the average global warming). There is some evidence that this may be true even for episodes of warming millions of years ago. (And presumably a similar factor applies for cooling episodes). I'm not sure its fully understood why this is so (my impression is that it is not fully understood). I see what you are getting at in asking for an explanation for the pattern of the last decade, but I am not certain whether or not anything other than the usual Arctic amplification is involved. Maybe somebody else here can answer that. The one thing that is pretty clear is that many of the real "hotspots" are in remote places where few people live, and thus there are few weather stations. Even here in Alaska, there are very few weather stations in the mountains where the glaciers are, mostly they are in or near towns or roads because that is easier and cheaper. -
John Brookes at 11:25 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
I suspect the other 3 have their hands over their ears, and are saying, "I can't hear you, I can't hear you,..." ;-) -
wanyden at 11:23 AM on 22 July 2010What do you get when you put 100 climate scientists in a room?
If the 97% agree that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, what do the other 3% say? Is it that they simply not convinced, or that the evidence does NOT point to AGW?Response: It is possible to track down what the 2 to 3% say - the Anderegg paper is based on public statements signed by climate scientists. So you can always track down which climate scientists have publicly signed statements of climate skepticism. My guess is the majority of them would agree that humans are raising CO2 levels and that higher CO2 causes warming, but that negative feedbacks will reduce the warming. A "Get out of jail free" card generously handed to us from the climate. This is the view of scientists like Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer. -
muoncounter at 10:59 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#26: "areas sampled by hadcrut have not warmed much during this decade. I would like to have some mechanism for this on the table. " There are a variety of consistent observations to be made here: Look at the LOTI records, which are broken into bands of latitude roughly 20 degrees wide. As you move north from the equator, there is consistently more warming. Look at CO2 for a variety of locations, as you move closer to the north pole, the difference between seasonal high and low is much larger than it is in the lower latitudes. Look at the ocean heating paper I referenced in #15; there are considerable differences in heat content between the various oceans. Whatever the mechanism, it seems to be consistently stronger as you move closer to the north pole. -
scaddenp at 08:46 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
johnd - GHG isnt the only positive feedback - albedo also comes into play. You might find Matthews & Weaver take on the issue interesting. Water vapour is more or less directly function of temperature so to get water vapour down you first have to reduce temperature. Zero emissions will also not immediately reduce GHG as warming will be still be affecting slow feedbacks in carbon cycle. I think that only the latest generation of climate models are capable of looking at this question in detail though. More expert opinion would be welcome. -
johnd at 08:23 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
scaddenp at 08:16 AM, I was thinking in terms of that positive feedback mechanism being a GHG itself, namely water vapour, and should any warming continue if atmospheric water vapour content stabilises or even falls over such a time frame? -
johnd at 08:02 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
scaddenp at 07:07 AM, re "15-20 years of flat or negative temperatures while GHGs rise would clearly invalidate AGW." Would the converse also apply, IE. 15-20 years of flat or negative GHG whilst temperatures rise? -
Peter Hogarth at 07:51 AM on 22 July 2010Models are unreliable
Pete Ridley at 22:54 PM on 21 July, 2010 I was intrigued by your note 2) which contains this: "A meta-analysis of all the articles written on the subject showed that the vast majority of experts believe that not only was the MWP widespread but that average temperatures were warmer than they are now" Perhaps this needs a bit of VV&T...? -
actually thoughtful at 07:27 AM on 22 July 2010Models are unreliable
And why do you want climate modelers to debate, other than as yet another delay tactic? Why don't you create a model that account for everything the AGW models do, and prove to the world that man-made CO2 is simply not an issue? The debate of ideas, not names, not titles, not one-liners is the debate that matters to me. So Pete Ridley, where is your competing, complete non-AGW theory of climate change, complete with models that have excellent hind-cast ability, and whose ability we can compare to Hansen 1988, or any of the newer, better models that have come out in the last 22 years? -
scaddenp at 07:07 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
Pete Ridley - "Some sceptics are arguing that the “slump”... ". And this opinion is based on what physics? 15-20 years of flat or negative temperatures while GHGs rise would clearly invalidate AGW. However, the point that Gavin is making is that models do not produce linear warming and demanding that do is a straw man. The actual pattern of temperature rise that you get in the model depends on how the model is initialised. The nature of the models is that are predicting climate not weather - trends over a 15-20 year. They do not have the skill to predict shorter periods and make no claim as such. Everyone might wish they do but so far this has not been possible. The predictions that do make are rather accurate and in this I mean the patterns of warming, not just the temperature trend. (eg warmer nights, arctic amplification, upper stratospheric cooling, warming ocean etc) "I would suggest that one shouldn’t assume that any of the models are able to make reliable predictions/projections of global climates even for just a decade from now, never mind to 2100." You can suggest butterflies in India are responsible for climate but until to you provide a basis for your suggestion, how would we take it seriously? This is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of the models. Hansen 1988 did very well for a model so primitive. My favourite analogy - put a large pot of water on a flame. You will have a hard time predicting the surface temperature distribution beyond a certain accuracy - however you can make the completely solid prediction that the pot will get warmer. -
Tom Dayton at 06:50 AM on 22 July 2010Models are unreliable
Pete Ridley, evidence of predictive ability was described in the original post at the top of this page. I suggest you read it. -
Ned at 06:15 AM on 22 July 2010Models are unreliable
actually thoughtfull and Pete Ridley, I suggest avoiding carrying over Pete's comments about user names from the previous thread. As far as I know there is no policy here of privileging "realistic-sounding full names" over others. Comments that disparage the choice to use a pseudonym are offtopic and will probably be deleted. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 06:08 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
Tony Noerpel> Yes, the pacific oscillation could be part of the explanation. In the 1998 el Nino event there was certainly energy transfered from the sea to the atmosphere, which hasn't happend to the same extent later. But a complete explanation might involve a precise description of the global energy budget, and it seems that people can't do that yet. Jeff> I agree with what you write, but that does not explain why the areas sampled by hadcrut have not warmed much during this decade. I would like to have some mechanism for this on the table. -
actually thoughtful at 04:11 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
42 CBDunkerson - THANK YOU - now it makes sense. -
Tony Noerpel at 02:29 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
Hi Marcel 1998 was a huge step wise increase in temperature from prior years. Note that 1987-1995 looks like a plateau as well. The el nino in 1998 was a 2-sigma event (it was the strongest el nino on record) so very rare and not likely to be matched if the temperature was not rising, yet it was closely matched nearly every year even in figure 1. You might want to think about it this way: that the temperature never recovered from the extremely high level reached in 1998 (its highest level in the record) and now it is going even higher. Yes, ocean and atmospheric circulation move heat around from lower latitudes to higher latitudes but it is not temporary. It is ongoing since solar insolation is strongest at lower elevations. Lower elevations tend to be where the people are. :+) Tony -
muoncounter at 02:22 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#19: 0.47C per decade is the straight line trend over the entire 30+ years of the UAH North Polar LT dataset. Data shown below
.
But the smoothed curve(purple) shows a higher rate of increase from '92 on, as high as 0.9 degC per decade or a more modest 0.7 deg/dec if you prefer a straight line from Jan92 to Jan2010. Either way, the Arctic region has the highest rate of temperature increase on the planet.
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actually thoughtful at 02:15 AM on 22 July 2010Models are unreliable
Pete Ridley (whoever you are) - it seems your points were addressed on the other thread - yet you repeat them here. Can you state your beef in a a sentence or two, instead of a fully annotated paper? I think the strongest rebuttal to the skepticism of the model-making process is that they can both hindcast (the easy part) and predict - 22 years isn't as good as 5 decades, but how many years of successful modeling will you need before you are satisified?Response: Quick comment - they're repeated here because I emailed Peter and asked him to move the discussion to this more relevant thread. -
Rob Honeycutt at 01:58 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
David Horton @ 3... I'll toss myself into the fray with the common punters on this one. But what I think is interesting is that, because of people becoming more interested in this complex issue, they are learning a thing or two along the way. Two years ago most outside of science didn't know the definition of the term "statistical significance." The flap over the Phil Jones interview threw that term into the main stream. People had to learn what "p-value" is, how it is calculated and how it works. Okay, maybe it went right over the heads of a lot of punters but it stuck with others. Climate involves a lot of charts. The charts, I think, are slowly making people just a little smarter. Slowly. That's a good thing. -
DarkSkywise at 01:40 AM on 22 July 2010Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line
Would it be possible to get something like this for the translators too? (Yes, I'm one of those.) :D As it is now in the translated sections, the titles (like "Did global warming stop in 1998?") wind up as the sceptic arguments in the Arguments list (while they aren't) and the rebuttal is the entire content of the green box in the actual article, which sometimes is kinda, well, long. :P Proposed adjustments: - make the bold first line in the "red box" show as the sceptic argument. (I could use the sceptic arguments as titles so they'd show in the Arguments list, but that'd mean misleading titles like "We're heading into an ice age!" or "It's cosmic rays!", which I assume we don't really want.) - make an extra window for a short rebuttal, which doesn't show up in the actual rebuttal article but only on the Arguments list. If no short rebuttal is submitted, the content of the green box is used automatically instead. *hurries back to working on "Wordt opwarming veroorzaakt door kosmische straling?"*Response: Re translations and the one-liners, I'm going to shortly restructure the whole rebuttal database so that will throw everything into disarray and we'll need to rethink the whole translation system too. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. -
Jeff Freymueller at 01:34 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#18 Marcel, I don't see how Figures 2 and 3 disprove each other, and I didn't see anything in the post that claims they did. Figure 2 just emphasizes how HadCRUT undersamples some areas of the most rapid warming. That's relevant to the point that 1998 was the hottest calendar year in HadCRUT but not in some other temp series, but I don't think John was trying to claim anything more about Figure 2. -
CBW at 01:24 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
David Horton @ 3, I agree that many people have trouble with graphs (and statistics). That's why I think it is important to relate to people's experience and to present the information in a way that is accessible to them (not just to other scientists). Below is one of my favorite plots from GISS because I think people can grasp it intuitively (blue=cool, red=warm):
It's hard to look at that and not see a warming trend.
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skywatcher at 01:00 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
Some great examples of cherry picking in the posts above, as if to prove John's point. Yes, HadCRU shows limited warming (though still warming) over the past 12 years, but this is not exactly unusual for this dataset:[ergh, not sure the woodfortrees graph is going to show, shortened link with a tinyurl. It showd HadCRU 1977 to present, with relatively flat streches between 1977-1987, 1987-1997 and 1998-present - ie decades of relatively flat temperature, but of course the climatologically significant upward trend is strongly and significantly positive.] You can pick out several relatively flat regions in the Hadley dataset, but the long-term trend is still upwards, just as in all the other datasets. The analyses such as ECMWF and GISS explain the reasons for some of the discrepancies, with the missing of remote regions, while also showing that the warming is not "hidden" - it is present and observed, just not in the Hadley dataset of the past decade. Quite why the regions in the Hadley dataset show a more pronounced 'stepping' pattern over the past few decades is perhaps an interesting question in itself, but it is clear from observations the global temperatures and global heat content show a much steadier upwards trend. There is absolutely no reason to suggest we're anywhere other than on one of Hadley's 'steps' on it's upward progression.
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barry1487 at 01:00 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
@HumanityRules"Also deniers criticize GISS for the way it extrapolates(?)"
As skeptics seem to prefer the UAH satellite record above all others (it is compiled by John Christie and Roy Spencer, whose work is published regularly at WUWT), it's worthwhile pointing out that they derive a North Pole temperature trend of +0.47C per decade over the last 30 years. http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt (Decadal trends are given at the bottom of the page at the UAH link above) That's right - nearly half a degree Celsius every ten years. At 3 times greater than the global trend, UAH NP data corroborates GISS and ECMWF finding accelerated heating in the Arctic. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 00:54 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
Jeff> I don't doubt that the Arctic is warming. And I'm not trying to argue that global warming has stopped. But you have two sets of data (like figure 2 and figure 3), you usually don't claim that one set disproves the other. Preferably you want to have some understanding of both sets simultaneously. So I'm wondering about what has been going on in the last decade, and if there is some understanding of why the different measurements seem to give different trends (in the last decade). -
Jeff Freymueller at 00:38 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#12 Marcel, I should have added in my response that that what the post is really about is the multiple levels of cherry-picking required to even make this particular argument. That's the central point. -
Jeff Freymueller at 00:37 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#12 Marcel, the post is not claiming that the warming is continuing but is in hidden places. Living (almost) in the Arctic myself, I can assure you that very large areas of the Arctic are indeed warming, whether or not there are weather stations there. There is plenty of non-instrumental evidence that the weather station observations are representative. But I don't see how you can make your argument looking at Figure 3. Clearly, even with something as simple as averaging over the solar cycle, there is no substantial (visual) change in trend going back as far as the 1970s. I think the same would be true if you updated the figure to 2010. If you want to do a real statistical test, that's a better way to test whether the trend has changed since year X, but to do that you need to base the trend on more than a decade -- more like 20-30 years. -
Lars Träger at 00:33 AM on 22 July 2010The Missing Link, Creationism and Climate Change
Odd that nobody commented on the quoted anecdote about Ohm. Quote Wikipedia: "When Ohm first published his work [...]; critics reacted to his treatment of the subject with hostility. [...] The prevailing scientific philosophy in Germany at the time, led by Hegel, asserted that experiments need not be performed to develop an understanding of nature because nature is so well ordered, and that scientific truths may be deduced through reasoning alone. " IOW: Not "It's too simple" but "We don't need no stinking empirical evidence, reasoning dictates it's getting warmer because the sun did it." Anybody surprised? -
muoncounter at 00:31 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
Here is a 2008 version of ocean heat content. If you fast forward down to fig 9 on p. 13 of the pdf and fig 12 (p. 16), you get a very clear picture (graph) of the results. Very consistent with the ocean heat content that John shows above. Arguing why one interpretation is 0.1C higher or lower than another, or why temperature profile X is flat for 5 years while temperature profile Y is increasing? That's fine when it comes to working out the details, but it obscures the overall story (which is exactly what the denialists want). As CBD says (#8) "it's down to disputing the margin of error", a far cry from HR (#4) "many records exist, all with pros and cons. It seems that this fact allows for multiple interpretations." We can't allow a reasonable discussion over margin of error to be turned into 'there's no consensus' or 'the science isn't settled'. -
Jeff Freymueller at 00:28 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
#10 HumanityRules, I suggest you get a calculator and a table of numbers and check it yourself. It is not complicated (add 11 numbers and divide the sum by 11). Every year is equally represented in the moving average. The moving average is doing exactly what it should, and stops exactly where it should given the data in the figure. You are not doing yourself any favors by suggesting otherwise.... As for your comment #1, certainly it is true that WUWT and actual scientists have different interpretations of the recent record, but we will know in a few years how that turns out. My money is not on WUWT in that bet. But I am sure WUWT will simply move on to other claims by that time. Given that the last 12 months have been the hottest 12 month period on record, I predict that WUWT and others will be dropping the "no warming since 1998" claim within a couple of years at most, because even the cherry-picked version will be untenable. But you are correct that an 11-year moving average is not the right tool to evaluate a claim that the temperature trend has changed. For that, you would need to use a 20-30 year average so that you could average out more of the natural variability. The other point about this denier argument not addressed here is that the post-1998 record is too short for a statistically significant trend given known variability in climate. I'm sure John left it out because he chose to focus on the cherry picking x3 aspect of the argument here. But you can see simply by averaging over the solar cycle that there is no radical change in trend at 1998. -
Alexandre at 00:23 AM on 22 July 20103 levels of cherry picking in a single argument
They'll soon have this 'skeptic' argument recycled: "It hasn't warmed since 2010" or "GW stopped in 2018" This global warming never stops stopping!
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