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John Bruno at 12:49 PM on 14 June 2010Uncertain motives: Theil misrepresents the science
And Geo Guy, think of it this way; does it seem remotely possibly that a document of that complexity, put together by coordinating thousands of volunteers, could be created without a few errors in it? -
NickD at 12:37 PM on 14 June 2010Uncertain motives: Theil misrepresents the science
Geo Guy at 11:11 AM on 14 June, 2010 "So the question for the public is: 'are these comments the tip of the iceberg, or are they indicative of more widespread misbehavior'." As a non-scientist member of the public I can assure you that niether of these questions mean anything to me. Many of your other concerns are thoroughly addressed on this site and elsewhere. -
Riduna at 12:27 PM on 14 June 2010Uncertain motives: Theil misrepresents the science
At least some part of the problem faced by scientists, particularly from the majority of their critics who are denialists, not sceptics, is self inflicted. In part, this arises from the understandable use of scientific jargon rather than language readily understood by the general public. In part it arises from the fact that when scientists are misrepresented, there is often no response from the aggrieved party, let alone legal action or the publicity which either would attract. We all know, or should do, that anyone able to disprove the broadly accepted findings of science as to the causes of climate change would win a Nobel Prize. We also know that none of the many deniers of AGW have achieved this. Why? Because the science is settled and simply can not be shown to be in error. The responsibility of all scientists goes beyond publishing in pier-reviewed journals. It goes to providing their findings and conclusions, in easily understood language, to journalists. Where necessary, scientists must be prepared to provide additional explanations and information to journalists to ensure they are well informed and have a good understanding. Journalists are all important to scientists since they are influential, will (and do) challenge the views of people like Lord Monckton and, above all, can present the public with information expressed in persuasive terms. Science needs journalists and journalists need to understand the findings of science and be able to express those findings in language we all understand. This does not happen often enough. -
philc at 12:27 PM on 14 June 2010Uncertain motives: Theil misrepresents the science
The source of the CRU emails really doesn't matter. If they were leaked illegally, that doesn't negate the comments that are there. So the question for the public is: "are these comments the tip of the iceberg, or are they indicative of more widespread misbehavior". The two reports that "cleared" the scientists of criminal behavior appeared very hasty and not thorough at all. The fact that these reports were so hastily and poorly done really doesn't clear anyone of anything. That has to be done in a court of law. It is entirely correct that million and millions of dollars flow into climate research. That includes whatever comes from "special interests" such as big oil companies and power companies. It also includes grants at least 5 times as big from governments to research selected aspects of the climate. It doesn't speak well for the government-funded selection process that as noted a scientist as Dr. Pielke Sr. can't get a grant approved for what looks like a very interesting piece of work. Funds are dispersed by relatively low level bureaucrats according to the directions desired by the higher ups- not according to an even-handed, scientifically-driven research agenda. Cherry picking appears to occur in much of the climate science published. The infamous hockey stick graph(IPCC AR3) is a good example. 30 years of tree ring data were not shown because they did not support the desired result. An honest presentation of the research would have included a discussion of how this "divergence" in the tree ring data would reduce the utility of tree rings as a temperature proxy. The question being-"this later set of data did not follow the measured temperatures. How do we verify that similar excursions haven't happened in the earlier records?" Perhaps the Theil article didn't mention it, but mcuh of the problem with the various IPCC reports is not the actual data, but the artful use of language, selective use of data, and the limited view of the overall process(which was instituted specifically to assess the effects of man-made warming due to carbon dioxide rather than examine the real mechanisms that drive climate) and the misleading emphasis on the certainty of the conclusions. For the most part these statements of probability(such as 90% certain that the major cause of global warming is man-made CO2) are the opinions of a few lead editors in the process, not any kind of statistical certainty. Consensus is not science. The consensus in the 1500's was that the earth was the center of the universe based primarily on the science developed by the Greeks much earlier. New evidence from Galileo's astronomical observations that contained new information were not well received by the consensus. The consensus in climate science appears to have fixated on the effects of CO2 increasing in the atmosphere and putatively causing dire climate change. Very little effort has gone into an open-minded evaluation of other climate drivers. One example is the consideration of solar cycles. The most prominent view is that solar output has not changed very much and couldn't be the cause of climate change, even though sunspots have correlated very well with serious climate effects. Research into how variations in solar activity, other than just the raw radiation output, might affect climate is weakly supported and rather summarily dismissed as unimportant. -
Geo Guy at 11:11 AM on 14 June 2010Uncertain motives: Theil misrepresents the science
You missed the error regarding the Amazon rain forest which it turns out was based on unsubstantiated claims made by environmentalists without any scientific background - yet it was allowed to remain in the IPCC report. Other documented errors include http://www.john-daly.com/forcing/moderr.htm In the end, reliance on the IPCC reports is simply not realistic - perhaps that is why the UN has initiated an investigation into the methodology and processes used by the Panel?Response: The Amazon rain forest IPCC 'error' turned out to be accurate - the only mistake was misattributing it to an environmentalist report but the original info actually came from peer-reviewed research. -
shawnhet at 10:03 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Oops, my typing got away form me above - this sentence -"IRC, Einstein's GR even predicted consequences that were apparently false." should read "... predicted consequences that appeared to be false when it was originally proposed. On closer analysis, it was, of course, seen to be accurate. -
shawnhet at 09:57 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
John Cook:"On the question of human caused global warming, there’s not just a consensus of scientists – there’s a consensus of evidence. In the face of an overwhelming body of evidence, the most common approach of climate skepticism is to focus on narrow pieces of data while neglecting the full picture." Rather than get into a specific issue here, I will simply point out that this is a perfectly respectable scientific approach. Check out how Einstein's general relativity supplanted Newton's gravitation. IIRC, Einstein's GR even predicted consequences that were apparently false. Potentially all it takes to *completely* overturn a theory is a very small amount of evidence. For the record, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming except on the things that are generally agreed upon. There is little disagreement that CO2 will , on its own, cause warming or that the last 100 years or so has seen a significant warming trend. There is a lot of disagreement, however, on what the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 increases is high. Cheers, :) -
Gneiss at 09:19 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
BP and Spencer ascribe physical meaning to a simple regression coefficient, from the regression of one-year average difference in temperature between station pairs (ambitiously labeled "Station warm bias") on their difference in population. Interpreting a simple regression coefficient in this manner assumes that in every relevant way except population, the station pairs are identical. I doubt many journal reviewers would buy that; the word "spurious" would probably come up. They would also not be impressed by the application of a cross-sectional coefficient from this analysis as if it characterized change over time. But without that leap from correlation to process, the analysis could claim no relevance to trends that in reality are derived from anomalies, not absolute temperatures. More than a century of data is available for hundreds if not thousands of stations where we can also roughly enumerate local population. There are quite direct ways to test the hypothesis that stations with higher growth rates have steeper temperature-anomaly trends, but this isn't a serious attempt to do so. One interesting feature of many century-long records, not just station measurements but other temperature-related indicators, is that they resemble not just the global upward trend, but its specific 20th-century pattern of early rise, mid-century leveling or decline, then steep rise again after 1970 or 80. I see that not always but quite often, including places far from the population centers. -
muoncounter at 09:07 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#52 Berenyi Peter, Actually, the GISS graph looks exactly like a large area average ought to, with smaller +/- extremes than locally derived averages.Click image for full scale.
Click for full scale. I like the 15 year trailing average on the large area indices, as it gives a look at the underlying long period signal. For example, in the 11 states and GISS graph, GISS has 2 distinctly linear segments with nearly the same slopes: 1920-1946 and 1978-2009. That seems to rule out at least three skeptical suggestions: a). Air conditioning causes spurious temperature readings -- there were very few AC units in use during the Depression. b). Random temporal events such as volcanic eruptions -- how do random events produce the same slope at two different times? c). Its the sun -- those are neither sunspot nor TSI variation periods. Rather, one has to ask: is there another mechanism for increasing temperatures that can produce such a systematic effect? If so, what other measurable effects go with that mechanism?
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ProfMandia at 08:48 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
ubrew12: I tried something like this on a blog post called: How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change -
ubrew12 at 08:24 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway wrote a great article recently in Yale Environment 360 titled "Global Warming Deniers and Their Proven Strategy of Doubt" The upshot of the article is this: For years, free-market fundamentalists opposed to government regulation have sought to create doubt in the public's mind about the dangers of smoking, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Now they have turned those same tactics on the issue of global warming and on climate scientists, with significant success. I admit I'm a liberal, and prefer 'managed capitalism' to free-market capitalism (so you are forewarned in what follows.) By way of street cred, I was in a PhD program in mesoscale meteorology 25 yrs ago, when global warming first became a 'no-brainer' among the Atmospheric Science community, but left and went back to Engineering cuz the math in ATM was just... wow... Anyway, here goes: I don't believe the fight against the deniers will be won by scientific arguments on Global Warming. Instead, it will be won by arguments on free-market unmanaged capitalism. In essence, you don't win a war by fighting it defensively, on your turf. You win it by fighting it offensively, on their turf, for their castle. Once the 'castle' of the free-market unmanaged capitalism ideology has been burnt to the ground, denial activities will dry up. Never before has there been so much ammunition with which to conduct this battle: it is practically washing up on America's Gulf shore in the form of tar balls. Sadly, I think the progressive community splits itself in this fight, with the 'hard-core' progressives suggesting that ALL capitalism is bad, even managed capitalism. With half its forces out trying to siege the wrong castle, progressives fail in taking down the castle that really matters. Hence, while the IPCC continues to pile up evidence, it may not matter as greatly as we think because the deniers have us on our turf rather than theirs. The general public doesn't know better, but they assume 'where there is smoke, there is fire', and therefore assume that global warming is controversial, because they are attacking our castle. Hence, the fight against Climate Change cannot succeed until they are attacked on their turf, rather than ours. There is abundant evidence, now, that 'free market' unregulated capitalism is disastrous for any society that adopts it. Its just a question of whether the disaster can be externalized (to Iraq or the oceans) or not. Although the first rule of any crusader is to learn to lie, especially to themselves, the anti-global-warming crusaders who fein indifference to attacks on free-market ideology are nevertheless vulnerable. That is because the same technique they are using against Climate Change also works against them: 'where there is smoke, there is fire'. If enough people put up enough of a stink about the very real shortcomings of free-market unmanaged capitalism, the anti-Global Warming group will eventually be forced to acknowledge their underpinings. Or, at the very least, channel precious resources away from their denial activities to 'defend the castle' of free-market capitalism. Sorry if I offended anyone on this blog: I know scientists are legendary 'do-it-yourself'ers, and therefore suspicious of 'common action'. But, the attack on Global Warming has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the idea of 'common action'. Sometimes, as now, we all have a vested interest in the commons. And that is like a Dentists Drill to those who have swallowed the Ayn Rand mythology. Powerful vested industries (i.e. oil and coal) are only too happy to feed their paranoia -
Riccardo at 07:58 AM on 14 June 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Berényi Péter, radiative transfer codes generally do not use model line shapes, they use the measured absorption coefficient. The proper understanding of the behaviour of CO2 absorption in the atmosphere is then not linked to an exact theoretical line shape model. So, the best thing to do is to go and see what radiative trasnfer codes have to say. Whatever the shape might be, no doubt it will shrink at lower pressures and temperatures. This simple fact makes the atmosphere more transparent to a progressively wider range of wavelength going up in altitude. Also, although the mixing ratio is aproximately constant, CO2 density (mass per unit volume) decreases. The commonly used simplification of a well defined altitude from which IR radiation escapes to space should not be taken too litterally. Back to the radiative tranfer codes, your claim that the emitting layer is already above the tropopause is not supported. Also, should the CO2 rise to such high levels the thermal structure of the troposphere would change. For example, we can anticipate that the tropopause would rise, as apparently is already happening. I'm not able to give more details because a full radiative-convective equilibrium should be considered. But for sure we can not extrapolate a simplified behaviour that far. -
Berényi Péter at 07:45 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#70 dhogaza at 05:53 AM on 14 June, 2010 When the facts aren't on one's side, one can always fall back to the good 'ole conspiracy theory... No need for conspiracy theories, plain conformism is enough. BTW, what particular facts are you talking about? Elaborate, please. "the surface station temperature record is as accurate as the satellite record" No doubt about that. -
Geo Guy at 07:06 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
{snip}Moderator Response: Geo Guy, please read -
Berényi Péter at 06:16 AM on 14 June 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
#76 Riccardo at 00:49 AM on 14 June, 2010 Listen, it's not a game. Looks like far wing shape is not described well by a lorentzian and I really don't know what is the right approximation for that region. It is also important, because CO2 has a very strong absorption line at 15 μm. It is so strong that between 14-16 μm photosphere is high up in the stratosphere, where further CO2 increase has no effect on TOA, or if any, it is the opposite of what is generally believed. Because if you go high enough, temperature starts to rise again (due to O3 UV absorption). Therefore any difference can show up only in the wings. As the wings have a general negative slope and they converge to zero as you get farther from line center, at some point the atmosphere gets absolutely transparent to CO2 absorption. It is the transition zone where stuff happens, where photosphere slowly descends through downward warming troposphere until bumps to surface or H2 continuum. It depends quite sensitively on the asymptotic behavior of wing shape, that is, on how fast they converge to zero. With a lorentzian, it is proportional to Δν-2, but apparently the convergence is much faster. There is no way line broadening can do such a thing to wing shapes, therefore it sould be something neglected in the lorentzian approximation. I am looking for that something and I do it quite honestly. -
Albatross at 06:14 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
BP, re missing the big picture. Perhaps I am mis-interpreting what you were trying to say in your post at #3. Anyhow, let us not get sidelined by semantics. Spencer should publish his work if he thinks it has merit, until then it remains some intriguing blog science. Really busy today, but hope to join the discussion tomorrow some time. -
dhogaza at 05:53 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Apparently other datasets have their own problems, unrelated to this issue except strong incentive to make data consistent with one another by whatever means available.
When the facts aren't on one's side, one can always fall back to the good 'ole conspiracy theory... It's especially ironic since his hero Spencer's UAH satellite product shows warming that is entirely inconsistent with Spencer's claims that it's all due to UHI screwing up the surface station record. BTW Spencer's partner on the UAH satellite analysis effort, John Christy, is on record, as part of an NRC review panel, as saying the the surface station temperature record is as accurate as the satellite record. -
Berényi Péter at 05:24 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#67 actually thoughtfull at 04:08 AM on 14 June, 2010 they do follow the "skeptic" pattern of focusing on some tiny detail, and blowing it all out of proportion I have bad news for you. That's what scientists do all the time. It's their daily job to focus on tiny details, blowing it all out of proportion if you will. There is no other way. If you are looking for nice holistic visions, find a politician or someone involved in Bach flower remedies. -
Berényi Péter at 05:07 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#65 Riccardo at 03:29 AM on 14 June, 2010 at the very least the sign of the correction everyone make is correct Riccardo, you can do better than that. See IPCC TAR WG1 2.2.2.1 Land-surface air temperature. "The last paper also separates rural temperature stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) (Peterson and Vose, 1997) from the full set of stations which, in common with the other three analyses, have been screened for urbanisation effects. While there is little difference in the long-term (1880 to 1998) rural (0.70°C/century) and full set of station temperature trends (actually less at 0.65°C/century), more recent data (1951 to 1989), as cited in Peterson et al. (1999), do suggest a slight divergence in the rural (0.80°C/century) and full set of station trends (0.92°C/century). However, neither pair of differences is statistically significant." Therefore the sign is indeterminate at best. However, as I've already tried to explain, this is irrelevant, since no huge differences are expected in temporal history of local logarithmic population density between densely and sparsely populated areas. What really counts is the population history of any single site along the time axis. There is no way to correct for this effect by looking at simultaneous data on nearby locations. Still, that's what people do. As world population has quadrupled in 109 years between 1900 and 2008 you should compare present day locations not too far away from each other with a fourfold local population density difference. We do know that surface temperature difference due to UHI between city centers and the surrounding countryside can be as large as several °C. On the other hand population density in cities can't possibly be a millionfold higher. As 1,000,000 ~ 220, if UHI effect is proportional to logarithmic population density indeed, one twentieth of the temperature difference above is a lower bound of UHI for population density doubling. Therefore the figure I have used (0.16°C for doubling) is reasonable. -
actually thoughtful at 04:08 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
@29 Marcus- Thank you for taking the time to refute those arguments. I don't actually think they are the best the skeptics have to offer, but they do follow the "skeptic" pattern of focusing on some tiny detail, and blowing it all out of proportion. I don't always have the knowledge to refute them (sometimes I do, but I forget!). -
Berényi Péter at 03:35 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#64 Albatross at 02:56 AM on 14 June, 2010 You accuse others of failing to see the big picture I have done nothing like that, you may re-check. In fact quite the opposite. I said the big picture is not a scientific notion and only has some heuristic value, if any. Individual issues has to be scrutinized one by one in depth. This is why I refuse to engage in an unbounded discussion about diverse lines of evidence right now and try to focus on a single theme. Not much success so far. BTW, the only thing I rely on from Dr. Spencer's analysis is the approximately logarithmic dependence of UHI on local population density. Otherwise the magnitude of the effect can be estimated from multiple independent sources. It is not complicated stuff, really easy to understand. I am a bit surprised you guys seem to abhor even the slightest effort. -
Riccardo at 03:29 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Berényi Péter, waiting for the time and the will to do the job by myself I do not pretend to disprove something with naive calculations done by hand. Honestly, I think it's safer to trust the results replicated by many others. As for the upside down UHI effect, the first thing to do is to compare rural vs urban stations to see if it's true that rural stations has warmed more than urban stations as you claim:
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Albatross at 02:56 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
BP @53, No Skywatcher is right about Spencer's bias. As someone noted at Deltoid, here are the titles from his two most recent blog posts: ""Warming in Last 50 Years Predicted by Natural Climate Cycles" Well, he only looks at N. Hemisphere temperatures for starters...... Updated: Low Climate Sensitivity Estimated from the 11-Year Cycle in Total Solar Irradiance It seems that he is making the mistake of comparing transient climate sensitivity (TCR) with equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Regardless, even his value of TCR is in fact at the low end of the range of ECS reported in the IPCC. If one calc. the ECS using his value for the TCR one gets a number (+2.55 K) close to the +3K reported by the IPCC. I could be wrong about my interpretation of his analysis identifying the TCR, but the title remains misleading. Funny enough, not any of his supporters are commenting on that thread."" So Spencer's estimate of TCR is actually not low, and he is not comparing apples with apples when he compares his value of TCR with the range for ECS reported by the IPCC. That, IMO, is misleading. BP, also, Spencer and Watts have not published their work on the US surface temperatures. Moreover, the UAH data are fraught with problems, and are not the high-quality data you seem willing to believe at face value-- read their "README" file, and is the outlier when compared to long term trends in RSS, RATPAC and various global SAT records, with perhaps the exception with HadCRUT. Here is a graph comparing the RATPAC data with the SAT data:Notice in the above figure how the warming trend in the global radiosonde data (mid-tropospheric temperatures) is greater than that in the global SAT data. As others have pointed out, you (BP) are neglecting that multiple, independent lines of evidence corroborate the warming in the global SAT records, and the reasons (both natural and anthro) for that warming have been established and discussed. Re Spencer's project. Menne et al. have published papers on the US SAT record, and Hansen et al. have something ready for submission which addresses many of the tired old red herrings which you are floating here. I also agree with Skywatcher that what you are doing here perfectly describes the tactics often used by contrarians. You accuse others of failing to see the big picture BP, but I fear that by nitpicking and confirmation bias may in fact be preventing you form seeing the big picture as shown by John Cook and others.
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Berényi Péter at 02:49 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#55 Riccardo at 01:10 AM on 14 June, 2010 you used data already corrected for UHI, even if you do not like their method Of course I don't like it. It has the opposite effect. Instead of removing bias due to increasing population density it amplifies the spurious signal. Do you want me to repeat the analysis with raw data? BTW, you could do that exercise yourself and let us know the result. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/gistemp.html ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/ Note that even Spencer didn't go (yet) that far as providing numbers for the global impact. Yet. But what I did follows from his study in a straightforward manner. To really debunk this, you should show- either average doubling time of local population density around GHCN stations flagged rural being extremely large (> 250 years) during the past century
- or UHI is negligible (< 0.027 K) for population density doubling
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skywatcher at 02:35 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#53 BP - for another thread? Look at the first sentence of John Cook's OP. The issue of multiple, corroborating lines of evidence is at the core of this thread and is one of the core issues you and Spencer refuse to deal with. "strong incentive to make data consistent"... black helicopters, anyone? As Marcus has described, quite how you expect the temperatures over the whole Arctic to be ascribed to the addition of a small number of people is remarkable, and distinctly unscientific. By your logic, if someone builds a few houses on the far side of Eureka from the weather station, it's readings might jump up by 0.3C or something!! Which is equally a trivial point as the high Arctic has experienced warming many times that magnitude... -
john mcmanus at 02:08 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
MattJ #1 There seems to be confusion about the collection of surface temperatures. Scientists don't do it: Phil Jones like Santa Clause travelling all around the world every day to read thermometers. No: temperatures are the providence of meteorologists. Watts proves that metiorologists aren't scientists every day.Temperature sets are collected, collated and stored by national meteorologic services. Scientits access this information at the end of the process. In the 60's, the local bank manager in the small ontario village where I lived collected data for Ottawa. Here in Nova Scotia the nearest station is at a Natural Resources office. The nearest station on Environment Canada's website is at a NS Agricultural research station. The thousands of people installing, maintaining and reading these stations aren't scientists. It makes one wonder how they became part of the criminal scientist's conspiancy. -
snapple at 01:56 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
On February 25, 2009, a Princeton physicist named William Happer testified in the Senate. I first read his testimony on the Virginia Mining Association. It said on page 3 at the bottom that the footnotes were "added" by the SPPI. It's not clear to the reader if these are Dr. Happer's footnotes that have been added or if the SPPI made them up later for the paper. Most of the footnotes took the reader to articles by Lord Monckton, who mischaracterizes the research of the scientists he "cites, " so I figured the SPPI must have done this because Happer is a scientist and would not base his testimony on what a non-scientist says. I later found Dr. Happer's testimony on the official Senate site. He didn't have any footnotes after his testimony to document his views. If I were testifying in the Senate, I would include footnotes. I thought Dr. Happer would be mad that someone added footnotes to his official testimony, but on his own site Dr. Happer directs the reader to the SPPI version of his testimony with the added footnotes and to a blog Marc Morano did for Senator Inhofe. I think this is very misleading "scientific" testimony and wrote about it. http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-did-drhapper-let-science-and-public.html -
Sean A at 01:39 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
"'Global warming' refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more." -- Roy Spencer Even Spencer agrees that global warming is real. -
Marcus at 01:30 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
@ Beranyi Peter. We already have pointed out the obvious errors-the fact that these records have already been corrected for urban heat island effect, yet he sees fit to correct them A SECOND TIME; the fact that his claims about UHI bias don't gel with the fact that satellite & ground-based records are almost identical for the last 30-year period; the fact that it fails to explain the warming trend over the oceans & in extremely isolated & unpopulated regions of the world; the fact that neither you nor Spencer has given a very good rationale for the "corrections" you apply. Neither you nor Spencer supply any *evidence* that population density has the effect on UHI that you both claim-& your claims run entirely counter to the most recent complaints about UHI by other so-called Skeptics-namely that there are too many Urban Weather Stations. Also, if you seriously expect us to entertain the notion that a relatively recent increase in population (not population *density*) of just a handful of people in the Arctic is sufficient to give lie to over 50 years of temperature records in that region, then we're going to need a little more proof than just your say-so! Also, for the record Beranyi, it is not ad Hominem to pull a scientist up for their past errors. His bias in terms of the satellite data he worked on (even if it wasn't deliberate) is a matter of public record-as is his refusal to correct his data after the error was pointed out to him. Yet you choose to believe this *single* person-over the scores of scientists who've been working on this data for decades-simply because he's saying what you want to hear. That's not *science*-that's more akin to Religion or Ideology! -
Sean A at 01:24 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Apparently other datasets have their own problems, unrelated to this issue except strong incentive to make data consistent with one another by whatever means available. Conspiracy theories lack scientific credibility. Seriously guys, arguing with someone who has their mind made up is pointless. The urban heat effect is a red herring, drawing you in to the tangled mess where you can't see the forest for the trees. -
caerbannog at 01:17 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
In post #16, thingadonta said, I'll give some concrete examples, off the top of my head. There is no evidence that volcanism was stronger in the Cretaceous and that is why the c02 levels were higher and T was warmer. It is a superficial consensus focred to fit into the 'model'. Possibilities ignored include continental configuration and changes to ocean currents. This is darned near smoking-gun proof that thingadonta simply doesn't know what he/she is talking about. It is clear that thingadonta doesn't understand the basics of the carbon cycle. Long-term CO2 levels are not driven simply by volcanic activity. They are also driven by *rock weathering*. Rock weathering is the process by which exposed rock material (primarily silicate) reacts with CO2 in the atmosphere, with the ultimate result that the carbon ends up sequestered as calcium carbonates in ocean sediments. Volcanic activity driven by tectonic activity can re-liberate that carbon into the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by volcanoes depends not only on the absolute amount of volcanic activity, but on the locations of the volcanoes (relative to the big carbonate sediment deposits). If ocean-sediments particularly rich in carbonates are being subducted under a continent, the volcanoes there will generate lots of CO2; otherwise, they will generate less. During times of tectonic uplift (i.e. formation of mountain ranges), silicate weathering rates increase (due the the greater amount of silicate rock material exposed to the atmosphere), and more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. So even in the case where you don't have a heck of a lot of volcanic activity, CO2 levels can still rise over the long term if there aren't a lot of big mountain ranges building up and exposing rock material that can weather and remove CO2 from the atmosphere. If you have volcanoes being fed by carbonate-rich rock being subducted, and you don't have a lot of new silicate rock being exposed by the atmosphere by uplift, you can still (over the long term) get high CO2 atmospheric levels without an "unusual" amount of volcanic activity. The reason that current CO2 levels are now much lower than they were during the Creteceous is that about 50-55 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent began to collide with the Eurasian tectonic plate. This began the formation of the Himalayan mountain range. As the Indian subcontinent continued to smash into Asia, the Himalayas continued to build up, exposing lots of rock to atmospheric weathering. This weathering began removing CO2 from the atmosphere, ultimately bringing down the CO2 concentration to recent levels. So long-term CO2 levels don't depend simply on volcanoes; they also depend on rock weathering rates which in turn depend on tectonic-plate-driven mountain-building activity. The current (long-term) historically-low atmospheric CO2 levels can be credited to the Himalayan mountains, which have exposed tremendous amounts of rock material that has been weathering and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is not controversial, "cutting-edge" science; this is Earth-science 101 material, the same sort of stuff that would be taught in an introductory class at a community college. And this is just the sort of basic stuff that "skeptics" should make an attempt to learn before they start putting their two-cents' worth in discussions about global-warming. The fact that thingadonta thinks that paleoclimatologists don't understand why CO2 levels where higher during the Cretaceous betrays his/her ignorance of the subject. thingadonta's statements about ocean acidification betray further ignorance. He/she seems to be completely unaware of the impacts of CO2 concentration *rates of change* (vs. absolute CO2 levels) with respect to carbonate buffering. Very rapid rises in CO2 levels (what we are seeing today) can "outrun" the ocean-buffering capacity, resulting in much greater pH changes than slower increases of CO2 levels (of the same magnitude). It's not just absolute CO2 level that we are concerned about; it's the *rate of change* that is also a big issue. thingadonta also seems to be completely unaware of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum event and its implications, but that will have to wait for another post. -
Riccardo at 01:10 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Berényi Péter, you used data already corrected for UHI, even if you do not like their method. You applied the correction to the global average, i.e. to all the stations as opposed to the stations affected, and did not use any gridding. Note that even Spencer didn't go (yet) that far as providing numbers for the global impact. If you don't like "AGW alarmists" methods, you may want to try Zeke's posts at The Blackboard, you'll learn how to do it properly from a "semi-skeptic" source. -
Ari Jokimäki at 01:09 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
There's an interesting lecture by Thomas Karl for those who are interested in urban heat effect. Do watch the lecture video, it contains plenty of interesting things. Links are here with an overview. -
Berényi Péter at 00:57 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#51 skywatcher at 23:57 PM on 13 June, 2010 If that one measure has errors, what causes the measured warming in all the other records Berenyi? Good question. However, it is for another thread, not this one. Apparently other datasets have their own problems, unrelated to this issue except strong incentive to make data consistent with one another by whatever means available. Spencer has a history of bias, and has not submitted this work to any form of review, and it seems plain where the mistakes most likely lie Looks like another attempt on argumentum ad hominem. If it seems indeed plain where the mistakes most likely lie, would you be so kind as to make them explicit for the rest of us instead of wasting our time? population hasn't exactly increased in the Arctic, even by a small amount! Absolute increase may be small, but logarithm of local density of population & structures around the few stations still used by GHCN almost certainly has increased a lot. It would be nice to get actual data on that. Check for example Canadian Settlement of Eureka on Ellesmere Island Nunavut. "Building continues in Eureka with the latest structure - an operation centre, completed in 2005" -
Riccardo at 00:49 AM on 14 June 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Berényi Péter, I see, it's really pointless to answer to your questions. Usually if someone asks a question is because he's intrested in an answer about something he doesn't know. If it's not the case, don't ask, don't play this nasty game. -
gallopingcamel at 00:41 AM on 14 June 2010Is the long-term trend in CO2 caused by warming of the oceans?
caerbannog, At the risk of compromising the serious tone of this fine blog, can I assume that you are a fan of Monty Python? Cymru am bith. -
gallopingcamel at 00:35 AM on 14 June 2010Is the long-term trend in CO2 caused by warming of the oceans?
caerbannog (#39), It seems that we have a "failure to communicate". My fault probably. I did not buy the Hocker hypothesis for a minute and if you read what is posted on WUWT you will see that Anthony Watts does not buy it either. I got the idea that carbon isotope ratios would provide an unequivocal debunk of Hocker. Thank you for doing such a good job on that using quite different arguments. -
Berényi Péter at 00:27 AM on 14 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#50 muoncounter at 23:51 PM on 13 June, 2010 Temperature records for most US states are searchable with a snazzy map-based interface here; many are continuous back to 1895How comes your several-states curves don't even resemble to GISS temperature history for entire US?
Please, explain.
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skywatcher at 23:57 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Berenyi Peter is clearly providing a lovely example of the skeptic tactics as seen in John Cook's opening post. One would think that was his purpose! Here it is. We have multiple direct temperature measures showing warming (surface temperatures, satellite measures, ocean temperatures etc). Additionally we have all sorts of natural changes (glaciers, sea ice, flowering dates etc etc) which are most likely driven by higher temperatures [it would be remarkable if the changes all occurred without higher temperatures]. Yet Berenyi is asking us to believe the work of one person which, if correct, invalidates merely one of our multiple direct temperature records. If that one measure has errors, what causes the measured warming in all the other records Berenyi? And why does the natural world act like it's warming, at the magnitudes we are observing? Add to that the fact that Spencer has a history of bias, and has not submitted this work to any form of review, and it seems plain where the mistakes most likely lie. Not with the multiple independent lines of evidence, but with the one study claiming to show that one of the lines of evidence has a problem. Especially when many published works have shown the UHI effect to have a minimal impact on global (or US or whatever) temperatures - e.g. here, linking to Menne et al 2010. And Berenyi you don't answer the fundamental questions that frankly invalidate your arguments before it gets started - that by ProfMandia (BTW I really like your site PM) on independent evidence, or Marcus @44 - that population hasn't exactly increased in the Arctic, even by a small amount! And you don't explain the graph you posted, nor is it explained in your links, therefore we can hardly trust it. -
muoncounter at 23:51 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Sometimes these skeptic arguments are just plain funny and fall flat of their own weight; sometimes it takes a little digging to see the flaws. #25 "false readings taken from weather stations due to air conditioners, carparks and parking lots is a strawman if there ever was one." A strawman indeed! The USEIA provides a massive amount of statistics on energy source, use, etc. One such data table yields a graph of the burgeoning use of AC by US census region:Note that the south consistently accounts for nearly 50% of the total number of US households with AC. Note, too, that the slope of the southern region graph is the steepest (although by the 1997 entry, only 7% of southern US households had no AC of any kind, so that should level off). It's obvious that the southern US is warmer than the northern US (trust me on that one, I have the electric bills to prove it!), but how do the long term trends in temperature compare? If AC is such a significant factor in distorting the record, surely the rapid rise of AC in the south results in a much steeper temperature profile (graph of temperature vs. year) than the north? Temperature records for most US states are searchable with a snazzy map-based interface here; many are continuous back to 1895. So here is a composite of temperature index (in deg C, relative to period averages) for northern states vs. southern states:
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Berényi Péter at 23:48 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#49 Riccardo at 23:21 PM on 13 June, 2010 you just scaled the GISS meteo-station dataset Of course I did. I have subtracted the spurious trend due to UHI. What's wrong with that? Explain. -
Berényi Péter at 23:35 PM on 13 June 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
#74 Riccardo at 23:45 PM on 11 June, 2010 Read the scientific litterature on line broadening I thought you understood what you were talking about. With a lorentzian-like spectral profile gaussian line broadening has negligible effect on far wing shape. That's pretty simple math. first quote the origin of the data and how they were taken I reckoned you could figure out you could have the source by clicking on the graph. Your browser should show a tiny hand or something while moving your cursor over a clickable image. lorentzian is just an aproximation I knew that. Just were not aware of the fact it was such a poor approximation at the far wing. Still looking for a better one. Help would be appreciated. -
Riccardo at 23:21 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Berényi Péter, i did read, in fact. Still you did not say what you did to make the graph. If I have to judge from your previous comments, I'd say that you just scaled the GISS meteo-station dataset. This would be so blatantly wrong that I'm sure you did not do it. This is why I ask. -
Berényi Péter at 23:10 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#47 Marcus at 22:28 PM on 13 June, 2010 Can't they at least be *consistent*? As far as I can see I am the only one here trying to keep up some reasonable level of consistency. Of course we could discuss other issues like SST or satellite data or the strong negative correlation between number of pirates and global average temperature, but its more expedient to stick to a single problem at a time and analyze that piece dispassionately. are your calculations akin to your "back-of-the-envelope" calculations regarding argon? Not likely. But you are here to check them. Much better pastime than submerging in rhetoric. -
Riccardo at 22:53 PM on 13 June 2010On the Question of Diminishing Arctic Ice Extent
From a NRL 2009 issue we can learn what people managing PIPS think about ice volume: "Evaluation of PIPS 2.0 forecasts from 2000 to 2008 reveal a slow overall decrease in Arctic ice with a minimum during the summers of 2007 and 2008. This decrease is occurring both in area of ice coverage and total ice volume. For example, in the central Arctic, ice exhibits a seasonal cycle with minimum volume in September. PIPS 2.0 indicates that this annual minimum in ice volume has undergone a 35% loss from 0.59 × 10^9 m3 in 2000 to a low of 0.38 × 10^9 m3 in 2008 (Table 1). A similar decreasing pattern also occurs in both the western and eastern Arctic regions during the same time period." I hope this will end all the naive analisys of nice color images a la Goddard. -
Marcus at 22:28 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Beranyi provides another great object lesson about the tactics of the so-called skeptics: if you're losing the argument, change the goal-posts. Until recently, the hue & cry of the skeptic movement was "the ground-based stations can't be trusted because too many of them are in urban locations-subject to the UHI effect". Now that this myth has been debunked, apparently the hue & cry has become "the ground-based stations can't be trusted because too many of them are in *rural* locations". Can't they at least be *consistent*? I do really love, though, how Beranyi is convinced that Spencer is some kind of uber-genius how can see the "obvious flaw" in the ground-based data that somehow hundreds of other researchers just happened to miss (oops, thats right-they didn't miss it, its all part of some global conspiracy-sarcasm btw). We're talking about a guy here who didn't have the wherewithal to account for something as obvious as diurnal drift in satellite temperature measurements-so how can we take him seriously? Also, Beranyi, are your calculations akin to your "back-of-the-envelope" calculations regarding argon? -
Berényi Péter at 22:18 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
#39 Marcus at 21:46 PM on 13 June, 2010 if warming was entirely down to population-density induced UHI, then It's getting tiresome. Go back please and check what I have claimed. I said UHI is responsible for about 0.29 K/cy of the 0.65 K/cy warming shown by GISTEMP (possibly a little bit more for other reasons, e.g. specific GHCN station dropout patterns and adjustment to rural surrounding). Where do you find your "entirely" here? -
Dikran Marsupial at 22:08 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
RSVP @ 25 said: "It is not the amount of data that makes a theory true. For centuries people believed that the Earth was flat based on a multitude of "evidence"." So what constituted the "multitude of evidence" that the Earth was flat? It was known by the ancient Greeks that the Earth was spherical, Erathosthenes even came up with an impressively (for the time) accurate estimate of the Earth's diameter. I don't think anyone has ever thought of the Earth as flat based on evidence. However, you are right that no amount of evidence can show a theory is true, as explained in Popper's ideas about falsifiability. Evidence can only falsify theories, not prove them. The evidence falsifies many skeptic theories, for instance the fact that the increase in atmospheric CO2 being smaller than anthropogenic emissions is inconsistent with the oceans being the cause of increasing atmospheric CO2. The point is that multiple lines of evidence provide good corroboration for AGW, while not proving it. That is the best science can do, provide the best explanation for the observed facts and weed out the theories that don't fit the facts. -
Marcus at 22:05 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
What, even parts of the world where population densities haven't increased *at all*? Like the Antarctic & Arctic BP? It seems like *you're* the one who isn't listening around here. We're not simply talking rural as in "Backwoods USA", we're talking about "rural" as in the middle of nowhere-temperature records in parts of the world which have experienced virtually *no* increase in population density at all. It also doesn't explain why temperatures briefly peaked in the 1940's, then fell away again, before rising again from the 1950's onwards. You see, as much as you try and obfuscate, BP, the reality remains that you don't have explanation for all the errors in Spencer's UHI hypothesis. Even if he was correct, though, & we were forced to discard *all* the warming measured by ground-based measuring stations, we're still left with a +0.16 degree per decade warming from 1979-2009-as measured by satellite-that no amount of hand waving can cause to vanish! -
Marcus at 21:59 PM on 13 June 2010How climate skeptics mislead
Also Iff, its not like the theory of AGW just appeared & gained acceptance overnight. No, it required an enormous amount of work-over multiple generations-to discover & bring together the various lines of evidence which explained how & why the planet was warming at the rate it currently is-& how & why humans are responsible. When the so-called skeptics are prepared to invest the same time & energy into developing an alternative theory to explain recent warming trends-instead of clinging to skepticism on strictly ideological grounds-then they might regain some measure of credibility.
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