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Ned at 00:15 AM on 20 March 2010Was Greenland really green in the past?
Marcel's comments are very wise. Argus, I do not believe your description of "AGW supporters" are reasonable, particularly if you include in that group the IPCC, which has staked out a very middle-of-the-road territory, avoiding extreme claims on either side. For example, from time to time people make claims that climate sensitivity is > 6C per doubling of CO2, but those are generally rejected by mainstream climate scientists. Although the IPCC offers support for a range of 2.0 - 4.5 C, most people seem willing to settle on a probable 3C, in the middle of that range. As for claims that supporters of AGW "never disagree" ... they generally agree on the big picture, but there is lots of disagreement (sometimes vehement!) over the details. -
James Wight at 23:59 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
I've been perusing the full list of arguments looking for contradictions (I hope I haven't gotten too carried away – you can delete my additions if they clog up the list) and noticed that "It's SSCs" refers to a measure of solar activity. Shouldn't this belong under "It's the Sun"? And “A drop in volcanic activity caused warming” has to do with volcanic aerosols, not volcanic CO2, so does it really belong under “Human CO2 is a tiny & of CO2 emissions”? Also, “CO2 is plant food” and “Ocean acidification isn’t going to happen” don’t relate to consequences of global warming per se, but increased CO2, so perhaps they belong under “CO2 is not a pollutant”.Response: These are all good suggestions that I've adopted in the Global Warming Links. There are so many arguments and the list was assembled in such a chaotic fashion, it's inevitable that some have ended up sorted not quite right. So I appreciate the feedback and have shuffled the arguments around so the sorting is a little more accurate.
I very much appreciate all the suggested contradictions added to the Contradictions Page, both by yourself and everyone else. It was quite a pleasant surprise waking up in the morning to find so many suggestions submitted - much better than last week waking up to find the Skeptical Science website hacked! Of course so many submissions means now I have no excuse and have to get working on Phase 2 of the contradiction page (actually Phase 2 is going to be the really interesting part but it's also a bit more work than Phase 1). -
Ned at 23:57 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
gallopingcamel writes: UEA/CRU needs to explain why they discarded the majority of the data they got from the IEA "IEA" is an obscure right-wing Russian economics "think tank" associated with the US Cato Institute. They don't operate met stations and they don't provide data to GHCN. Can you please stop churning out one incorrect claim after another? -
Ned at 23:51 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
gallopingcamel writes: Take a look at post (#102). Canada is the largest country in the world. Can you justify eliminating all but 44 of that country's weather stations? Canada is not the largest country in the world. Temperature anomalies are spatially correlated over large areas, and 44 stations are enough to cover the country. And neither NASA nor NOAA are "eliminating" weather stations -- they use the data that are provided to GHCN by participating national meteorological programs in other countries, and in some cases those stations are dropped by their home countries or there are delays in reporting. For example, with Canada, there are many more stations with data currently through 2008 which presumably will be providing updated data at some point. If you have a problem with this, complain to Canada, not to NASA or NOAA. Continuing, gallopingcamel writes: You can put all the statisticians in the world end to end but they will still not reach agreement. Your claim may be correct but the only way to prove it would require comparing the full data sets with the truncated sets. This is exactly what Tamino and others have done. More to the point, there are good a priori reasons to believe that dropouts of high-latitude, rural, and high-altitude stations would if anything artificially decrease the warming trend, not increase it. Since these areas are warming faster than the globe as a whole, when they drop out it would tend to decrease the overall trend (if the gridding methods weren't sufficiently robust to handle the dropouts). So, it was highly irresponsible of Watts, D'Aleo, etc. to accuse NOAA and NASA of "dropping stations" to fraudulently increase the warming trend. They made those accusations without ever testing them. Now their claims have been tested by different people using different methods, and have been found to be false. At this point, if you want to claim that there IS an artificial warming trend introduced by dropping the stations that are warming fastest, you need to prove that. All the evidence is against you. Moving on, to the next point: The satellites do not show warming at least in the last 12 years, as noted by D'Aleo & Watts. That's a very interesting claim. Let's look at all 10-year, 11-year, 12-year, etc. trends in both the UAH and RSS temperature series. In the UAH record, trends running through last month and starting in March of the following years are positive: 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1989, 1988, 1987, 1986, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979 UAH trends starting in the following years are negative: (none) Well, let's look at the RSS record. Again, trends starting in March of the following years are positive: 2000, 1999, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1989, 1988, 1987, 1986, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979 And RSS trends starting in the following years are negative: 1998 It's interesting that your choice of "twelve years" just happens to be the only period where either one of the satellite records shows a negative trend, that it just happens to start with the largest El Nino on record, and that even so only one of the two records shows a negative trend from that year. Continuing: The ground station data is diverging from the satellite data. Check John Cristy at UAH. Actually there's very little divergence between the two, and in the past disagreements between the satellite and surface records have turned out to be due to errors in the methods used to process the satellite data. Thus, over time, the satellite records have progressively become closer to the surface record. Still continuing: Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are very high but are currently falling. http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt Those data aren't SSTs! They're the same MSU lower-troposphere data, just disaggregated into different spatial regions (northern vs southern hemisphere, land vs ocean, tropics vs extratropics vs poles, etc.) Actual SST data are available here, or see Kelly O'Day's excellent graphs and scripts here. And there's no very meaningful sense in which "sea surface temperatures are falling" is true. You can only get a negative trend if you cherry-pick a length of 5-9 years. Trends of 1, 2, 3, or 4 years, or of any number of years greater than 9, are all positive. ================== So ... this all leads to the question of why people employ such weak, wrong, or misleading arguments. If there were really good, convincing arguments to support the "skeptic" position, presumably there wouldn't be a need for the kinds of cherry-picking and factually questionable claims we see in this thread, nor for papers like McLean 2009, Lindzen & Choi, or that embarrassingly wrong Chylek one (link, link). Or E.G. Beck's physically impossible claims about chemical CO2 measurements being representative of actual global CO2 concentrations. Unfortunately, it takes a lot more time and effort to track down and refute these kinds of incorrect claims than it takes to make them in the first place. -
gallopingcamel at 23:49 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
Marcel (#108), thanks for setting me straight. Canada is only #2. It appears that Russia still accounts for 12.5% of land area so the UEA/CRU needs to explain why they discarded the majority of the data they got from the IEA. quokka (#107), I think you are referring to Peterson & Vose (1997). That paper does record the station drop off that was occurring at that time. We should thank D'Aleo & watts for bringing us up to date on the continuing drop off saga. While you are right to say that the station drop off is no secret we are still waiting for a valid explanation. Do you know of one? -
Nick Palmer at 23:37 PM on 19 March 2010Less than half of published scientists endorse global warming
You wrote: Schulte's paper (going on DailyTech's account) places great emphasis on the fact that only one paper endorses 'catastrophic climate change'. This is a classic straw man argument. Oreskes' 2004 paper never refers to an imminent catastrophe. Neither do the IPCC nor do the Academies of Science from 11 countries that endorse the consensus position that most of the warming over the last 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. As I've been trying to point out, the above is the major deception in the Oregon petition's crafted wording which explicitly asks people to sign to confirm that they do not have 100% confidence in catastrophic climate change/disruption. Even James Hansen could sign the Oregon petition as it has been worded. People should stop totting up the numbers of real scientists vs Mickey Mouse as a method of countering the credibility of the petition -
Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 23:37 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
John, very sorry to read about the hacking. Not at all nice. Obviously you've ruffled the feathers of a nasty and cowardly person. This has reminded me that my donation is overdue, will rectify this immediately - (small consolation I know). BTW I don't seem to be able to log out. I wanted to check my new password, but when I click the logout button I remain logged in. Is it my system or something at your end? -
joabbess at 23:32 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
sorry to hear about the hack job. i noticed the other day that the website looked like it had been taken back a week, and i thought, "nothing to worry about". i just assumed you were doing some maintenance or recovery. i didn't realise you'd been ransacked ! if i see anything untoward in future, you can be sure i'll be on the blower to alert you. this website is a completely priceless set of information. it's very hard to piece together a summary of the climate change science in every area. it's a constantly moving thoughtship, floating like a UFO in the night above the suburban streets, with lights of certainty flickering on every now and again. we have such a strong signal for evidence of climate change, and clear indications from the past about how it's going to develop; but many people cannot see this because they can't see inside the science machine and they do not trust the cogs and gears and data collection or analysis. keep up the excellent work. that fact that you were hacked is proof that you're getting through to people ! -
ProfMandia at 23:31 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
WAG has a list of 54 hypocrisies here: http://akwag.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-of-hypocrisy.html -
Marcel Bökstedt at 23:19 PM on 19 March 2010Was Greenland really green in the past?
Oracle2world> There are several places on this site where the medieval warm period is discussed, like here : http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm It seems to me that they make a strong case (but perhaps not completely airtight one?) for the assumption that a warmer Greenland was a local phenomenon. Its not just an empty claim, there are various data to back it up. I have no idea about what you are hinting at with those Siberian trees, so I can't answer that. Argus> You have a certain not too favourable impression of AGW supporters. I don't share your point of view, and for instance it is not my "impression" that AGW supposters on this site always agree on everything. However, it is very hard to answer such general claim except by similar but opposite generalizations. Maybe you could be more precise about who it is that in your opinion ignores data etc., and give some precise references. Then we could examine the situation together. -
Alexandre at 22:40 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
This contradiction page is a good idea. The general public often does not grasp when they're presented to conflicting arguments, as the Plimer/Monckton debate illustrate. I've even seen one skeptic use the arguments below on the same speech "It's not warming - it's all urban heat island contamination" "The warming is actually a natural phenomenon from the end of the last Ice Age" "The warming is caused by the PDO" -
quokka at 21:21 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
Watts site has a fine example of denialism in action at the moment. It seems that they have dredged up a copy of National Geographic from 1976 which shows a chart of NH temperature from 1880 to 1976 showing a marked drop from 1945. Of course it differs from the CRU record which gets the author quite excited about "hiding the decline". As far as I can tell the National Geographic piece is not peer reviewed, or based on something that is peer reviewed. There is no mention of methodology or data sources. It seems to have very little authority whatsoever. Nevertheless it is totted out to sow "doubt and confusion". Desperate times indeed for Watts and fellow travelers. -
Argus at 21:00 PM on 19 March 2010Was Greenland really green in the past?
oracle2world, I think you got it straight! What you describe with an example, certainly seems to be the way in which the advocates of AGW work, whether they are scientists loyal to IPCC, or just well-read opinion makers. They pick out the data that support the trend that they want to prove, and ignore the data that do not support it. Then they make impressive-looking graphs, where the proper 'corrections' are always added, so that the desired slope of the curve is achieved. The uniformity, the flaw-less consensus, and the lack of debate within the group of AGW supporters, all just works together to make me more skeptical. It would be a healthy sign if they sometimes disagreed, if they ever showed doubt, or if they once in a while agreed that a skeptic arguments had some merit. -
gpwayne at 20:52 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
Sorry to hear this John. Still, if they're shooting at you (as it were), you must be doing something right. Small consolation, but I'm sure you'll be keeping up the good work. The fantastic work, actually... -
Marcel Bökstedt at 20:31 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
I'm a little confused here - on the map which Ned links to in #100 there are many stations in northern Canada, but in #102 BerenyiPeter claims that there is only one. Is the map maybe not up to date? And just for the record, gallopingcamel, Russia is the largest country in the world (you knew that, didn't you?) -
David Horton at 18:59 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
After you have chopped the veges John, how does one get to the contradictions from the Home page (as distinct from the link in your post)? I might be befuddled, having just eaten dinner, but I can't see the link to it anywhere.Response: No other link yet - will add some navigation drop downs for my next housekeeping session in order to get more easy-to-find links to all those nooks and crannies. -
James Wight at 18:56 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
Every day, this site becomes a more useful resource. Keep up the great work! As regards the hacking, I was wondering what exactly was the content that got changed? Was it obviously vandalism or could a reasonable reader have assumed that it was coming from you?Response: It was obvious vandalism - I found out because several readers emailed me overnight saying they thought my site had been hacked. A nice surprise to wake up to. -
David Horton at 18:44 PM on 19 March 2010Skeptical Science housekeeping: Contradictions, URLs and getting hacked
Well done John, as always, but as your wife would say - time you got off the computer!!!!!Response: She is, actually, I have to go cut up some vegetables... -
GFW at 17:55 PM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Typo in my previous comment. ... a greater difference the less "black" the object is. -
quokka at 17:37 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
gallopingcamel (#105), You obviously have not looked into this at all. Older station data in the record comes from multiple historical sources. 1. It has been gathered and digitized over the years from something like 30+ sources. Most of these sources no longer produce temperature data and the current record is updated 'real time' from just three sources - the most important being the World Meteorological Organization. 2. There is no secret about this - it is documented in a paper by Petersen (1997 I think). 3. Hansen also discusses this in a paper (2001 I think) about how the GISS record is constructed, so no, he does not 'need to explain' because if you cared to look you would find it has already been explained - long ago. Could we please leave all this nonsense over on Watt's site? -
GFW at 17:35 PM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Barry, the UAH numbers are negative because they are brightness temps - the temperature of a pure black-body spectrum that would yield the same total observed energy. So brightness temp is always lower than actual temp, with a greater difference less "black" the object is. Ned & Tony, Tamino *is* one of the authors of Foster et. al. so he's getting his due credit. -
gallopingcamel at 15:30 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
Ned, (#104), Your claim (1) Take a look at post (#102). Canada is the largest country in the world. Can you justify eliminating all but 44 of that country's weather stations? Your claim (2) You can put all the statisticians in the world end to end but they will still not reach agreement. Your claim may be correct but the only way to prove it would require comparing the full data sets with the truncated sets. Your claim (3) The satellites do not show warming at least in the last 12 years, as noted by D'Aleo & Watts. The ground station data is diverging from the satellite data. Check John Cristy at UAH. Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are very high but are currently falling. http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt -
gallopingcamel at 15:01 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
scaddenp (#103), thanks for accepting that the station drop off is real. Do you have any explanation for the drop off? If scientists discard ~80% of the data before starting their analysis some kind of explanation should be given. In the case of NASA/GISS we are still waiting for Tom Peterson, Gavin Schmidt or James Hansen to explain what is going on. The HADCRUT3 situation and the associated IEA (Russian) station drop off is still under investigation. I am not sure who should be speaking up for NOAA/GHCN. The "before and after" Tamino statement you mention is meaningless. What is needed is a comparison of the full data sets with the truncated data sets. Wild claims by Tamino (or anyone else at this moment) are paper tigers unless they have the missing information. You can prove or disprove anything using statistics. For a pungent explanation on this point, there is a well known saying that Mark Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that I am not allowed to quote on this blog. Several of the D'Aleo & Watts allegations have to do with station quality control which NASA and NOAA have already admitted is poor. Are you defending a position that has already been abandoned? Like you, I don't trust D'Aleo & Watts but I am still keeping an open mind while weighing all 15 of their allegations. -
barry1487 at 15:00 PM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
"could someone explain to a science illiterate why the global average shows a temperature below zero?" The values are not actual temperatures. Each temperature record has a baseline, which is the average of temperatures over a given period. The baseline is zero, and the the temps are represented as departures from the baseline - known as 'anomalies'. This has no impact at all on trends, of course, as each value is equally offset. Here's the GISS anomaly data for monthly temps. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt At the top of the page they give you the baseline period, at the bottom they tell you how to convert the anomalies back to the *real* temps. On the chance you're referring to the UAH daily temp website, which appears to show only negative, values, I have no idea why that is. Perhaps someone else knows the answer to that. -
jyyh at 14:10 PM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
that's the lowest they can measure accurately, the name of the channel is 'near-surface layer' but actually it's something like a mile and a half up, was it 850mb-level? Does someone know the actual average height of the plane? -
Ned at 13:33 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
(1) There are more than enough existing stations to compile the monthly global mean temperature data, so the decline in the number of stations is irrelevant. (2) The stations that were dropped have no different trends than those that kept reporting. Furthermore, selectively deleting high latitude, high altitude, or rural stations has no impact on the trend. This has been shown repeatedly in separate analyses by Tamino, Ron Broberg, and Zeke Hausfather. Neither Watts, D'Aleo, nor EM Smith bothered to actually test their claims statistically before loudly claiming that the dropped stations affected the trend. They owe NOAA and NASA an apology for their false accusations of fraud (and they owe people like gallopingcamel and Geo Guy an apology for misleading them). (3) Even without the statistical analyses, everyone who thought about this knew that Watts, D'Aleo, and Smith were wrong. The satellites show warming, and there's no UHI in space. The oceans show warming, and there's no UHI in the middle of the ocean. In fact, we know from longstanding physical climatology that the warming trend over land is going to be larger than that over the ocean. In conclusion, all of the complaints about station dropouts are irrelevant. The observed warming is real and not an artifact of composition of the station lists. -
scaddenp at 12:47 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
101/ Huh? Tamino states "Two of the most prominent claims of global warming denialists have proven to be utterly false." No one is denying that fewer stations are reporting. Tamino's analysis is refuting the false claim that the cutoff introduces a warming trend. Doing this analysis, he compares subset before and after the cutoff. Where is the "economy with truth" here? Where is the "provably false testimony". -
Mangeclous at 12:24 PM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
#19: could someone explain to a science illiterate why the global average shows a temperature below zero? I know "global temperature" is in some way kind of an abstract concept, but not as much as to show such unexpected figures, am I right? Thanks for your patience and help. -
Berényi Péter at 12:14 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
#100 Ned at 09:33 AM on 19 March, 2010 "Can you explain what you think that sentence means? Because there are certainly lots of stations north of latitude 65 in the GHCN dataset used by NOAA for their surface temperature record" I think I know what he has meant. He was referring to recent Canadian data. In that country only one station north of 65 has data in GHCN for 2009-2010. 40371917000 EUREKA,N.W.T. 79.98 -85.93 And in fact only three more north of 60 40371964000 WITHEHORSE, Y 60.72 -135.07 (1942-2010) 40371966000 DAWSON,Y.T. 64.05 -139.13 (1897-2010) 40371915000 CORAL HARBOUR 64.20 -83.37 (1933-2010) It's weird, since otherwise GHCN has 119 stations in Canada north of 65, 118 of them are discontinued. And 298 stations north of 60. Between 1989-1991 the number of active GHCN stations in Canada dropped from 496 to 44. -
gallopingcamel at 12:12 PM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
tobyjoyce (#99), your dismissal of Geo Guy based on the provably false testimony of Tamino shows that you have not looked at the evidence. D'Aleo and Watts make 15 allegations concerning temperature records based on surface stations. Like you I was sceptical about their claims so I decided to check them myself, starting from raw data. As I don't have the time or skills to check all 15 claims I went for D'A&W claim #4: "....more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting." I downloaded the NOAA/GHCN v.2 raw and adjusted data sets and counted the number of stations versus reporting year. There were over 6,000 in 1972, falling to under 1,000 in 2009. You can easily do the analysis yourself by downloading from the NOAA web site: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/ When I point out Tamino's economy with truth on this blog, my comments usually get deleted; he seems to be some kind of minor deity around here. This time I have been very careful with my "rhetoric" so maybe it will get through. If you don't have time to do the analysis yourself take a look at: http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2010/01/station-drop-out-problem.html -
NewYorkJ at 11:05 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
James Annan (one of the co-authors of the refutation) has some comments. He references this site. http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2010/03/mclean-debunked-at-last.html -
shargash at 10:25 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
If El Nino events were the source of a long-term warming trend, there is a thermodynamics problem. Where is the heat coming from? We know it's not from increased insolation, and the heat leaking from the earth's core is too weak. On the other hand, my understanding of current theory is that El Nino & La Nina events cancel each other out over time. One releases heath into the part of the earth whose temperature we can measure; the other removes heat and sinks it in the ocean. Because it is a transfer, there is no need to postulate a new (as yet unknown) source of heat. -
Ned at 09:48 AM on 19 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Berényi Péter writes: Just noticed the trend in differences (significant on 95% level, strange for such a short series). It might or might not be strange if it were significant at 95%, but it actually isn't. Slope -0.026 Two-tailed p-value 0.087 You're really grasping at straws here. The NSIDC data set is fine, the JAXA data set is also fine albeit a lot shorter, they both show declining trends in Arctic sea ice, and neither gives any validity to Jeff Id's claims about "recovery" unless you set an astoundingly low bar for the word "recovery". -
Albatross at 09:44 AM on 19 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Thanks Peter @86 -
Ned at 09:33 AM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
Geo Guy, from my perspective almost everything you write in that comment is either false or misleading, presumably because it's coming from highly unreliable sources. However, I have no doubt that you believe it to be true. So, let's just take the first factual claim in your comment: NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees." Can you explain what you think that sentence means? Because there are certainly lots of stations north of latitude 65 in the GHCN dataset used by NOAA for their surface temperature record. See, e.g., this map. Or go to GISTEMP, where you can see that they use many, many stations north of latitude 65. Just a handful of examples include: Ostrov Vize (79.5 N) 1951-2010 Eureka, NWT (80 N) 1974-2010 Danmarkshavn (76.8 N) 1951-2010 Gmo Im.E.K. F (77.7 N) 1932-2010 Bjornoya (74.5 N) 1949-2010 Ostrov Kotel' (76.0 N) 1933-2010 Ostrov Dikson (73.5 N) 1916-2010 Jan Mayen (70.9 N) 1921-2010 and those are just a few - there are many more. So, could you explain what you think that sentence means? -
Peter Hogarth at 09:27 AM on 19 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Albatross at 04:58 AM on 19 March, 2010 I had downloaded and read all the docs on OI.v2 and ERSST.v3b when they revised them, but I haven't charted any data yet. I remember the sparse sampling and change from mainly vessel to mainly buoy for Southern Ocean. I also note that global SST charts on the webpage usually stop at 60 degrees latitude (N and S), which may be pertinent. The sea ice will also grow past -60 latitude in Sept/Oct in many places so probably SST needs interpreting with care? I'll look, time permitting. sidd at 06:41 AM on 19 March, 2010 Basal melt of Ice shelves is also mentioned in a few references, and is suspected as a factor in some of the shelf "break ups". -
Riccardo at 08:47 AM on 19 March 2010It's Urban Heat Island effect
Arjan, i didn't go yet throgh the details of Spencer's analysis. What's surprising is that other peer-reviewed studies (e.g. Peterson et al. 2005) already checked for population and other effect. I do not fully understand why Spencer decided to use a different dataset which didn't pass through the same quality control as GHCN. This may at least in part explain the different results. -
D Kelly O at 08:01 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Geo Guy Here's a link to a non peer reviewed analysis of temperature anomaly, ENSO and SATO (volcanic activity indicator) along with links to source data and my R script. Why not run the data yourself, I find it much more helpful than trying to patch together some charts. link Kelly -
Albatross at 07:28 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Marcel @36, Just to clarify, I am by no means an expert in climate science. I'm just relaying the information. My take on your interpretation of Swanson et al. (2009) is that you did identify the salient features. Yes, it was a modelling study, but models, for all their limitations, are great tools for gaining insight into complex systems because one can conduct controlled experiments. Yes, OHC is going to be a huge player in how our climate responds to the energy imbalance from higher GHG concentrations. How the oceans redistribute that heat and how the energy imbalance affects the THC will be key. As Murphy et al. (2009, JGR-A09 have shown, most of the energy arising from the energy imbalance have been absorbed by the oceans. AOGCMs need to improve, and the next round of models in AR5 will be much better than those used in AR4, both in terms of gris spacing, as well as other aspects (atmospheric chemistry). That said, I would not go so far as to say that " the known variation are completely explainable in terms of SST". Swanson note that: Finally, a fraction of the post-1970s warming also appears to be attributable to natural variability. The monotonic increase of the cleaned global temperature throughout the 20th century suggests increasing greenhouse gas forcing more-or-less consistently dominating sulfate aerosol forcing, although our technique cannot exclude other mechanisms not contained in the current generation of model forcing (22). They acknowledge the role of internal climate variability: This result is another link in a growing chain of evidence that internal climate variability played leading order role in the trajectory of 20th century global mean surface temperature. This seems contrary to their earlier statement that "a fraction of the post-1970s warming also appears to be attributable to natural variability. Their main conclusions: First, it suggests that climate models in general still have difficulty reproducing the magnitude and spatiotemporal patterns of internal variability necessary to capture the observed character of the 20th century climate trajectory. Second, theoretical arguments suggest that a more variable climate is a more sensitive climate to imposed forcings (13). Viewed in this light, the lack of modeled compared to observed interdecadal variability (Fig. 2B) may indicate that current models underestimate climate sensitivity. The second point is interesting, b/c it suggests that the climate sensitivity could be higher than currently thought. Anyhow, ENSO etc. are transient cycles, whereas the radiative forcing from higher GHGs is increasingly monotonically, and will become an increasingly important player with time. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 06:46 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Albatross> Kyle L. Swanson, George Sugihara, and Anastasios A. Tsonis, Long-term natural variability and 20th century climate change, (16120–16130 PNAS September 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 38) looks very interesting, but also not so easy to read. I'l try to summarize it, and hope that those who know more (thats you, Albatross) can correct my misunderstandings. The way I see it, they use known climate models, run them under conditions assuming NO CO2 increase to deduce how global temperature varies from year to year in dependence on sea surface temperature. This step is not about how the global temperature varies over the whole period, by definition of the model the average is supposed not to vary at all, but about the year to year variations around this average. The weak point is that you are working with models, not with actual, measured data, the strong point is that you can get precise information inside each model. You do this for a number of popular models, and somehow average them, to get a prediction (regression coefficients) about how a particular distribution of temperature of the sea surface temperature in a certain year will influence the global mean temperature in this year. It's important that these coefficients do not see global warming, since we are interested in the natural variations from the general trend. The outcome of the theory is this set of regression cofefficients. Then, there are a number of internal consistency checks (including testing the models against each other). I'm a bit unsure about the next step, but I believe that what happens is that the computed regression coefficients are used with actually measured sea surface temperatures. This should give the internal variability (unrelated to global warming) which depends on the distribution of the sea surface temperature. The result is not perfect, but it does suggest that the known variation are completely explainable in terms of SST, which is new to me! -
sidd at 06:41 AM on 19 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Mr Hogarth writes, re: freshening in the Southern Ocean: "The freshening is believed to be due to extra ice melt run-off" I thought so too, but I could not find a calculation of the effect in the literature based on ice wasting in Antarctica. Could someone point me to a reference ? I have attempted the calculation and I find the GRACE estimated mass loss of land ice in Antarctica is too small to account for the freshening. von Schuckmann refers to Morrow (Prog. Oceanography v 77, pp 351-356, 2008) linking these changes to atmospheric circulation. The salinity anomaly is also seen in Figure 9 in Morrow(2008). I note that Morrow attributes the fresh water anomalies to changes in precipitation, while not ruling out increased sea ice melt. sidd -
tobyjoyce at 06:28 AM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
Re: Geo Guy (#15) It seems the best you can do on the Russian stations is offer a paper from the Cato Institute, a political think-tank. Something from a peer-reviewed journal, maybe? I thought not. I'll stick with Tamino's description of D'Aleo and Smith as "plain wrong" and "incoherent". http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/message-to-anthony-watts/ I don't mind if we draw a line under this at this point, unless you can do a bit better. -
Dennis at 06:04 AM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
TrueNorth @96 "... there are fools on the other side who believe that everything bad that happens must be caused by global warming." Who? I strongly suspect that either: 1. their words and writings do not mean what you claim here, or: 2. they have been called out for their errors by members of the scientific community. -
Geo Guy at 05:39 AM on 19 March 2010The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
In response to tobyjoyce at 06:26 AM on 18 March, 2010 "Please investigate your claim further and get back to us." The researchers who identified the issue with respect to NASA are American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, who point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees." A search of the internet using the two authors names will give you a large list of references where this issue has been reported - one being http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=30000 As for further details on the Russian temp data: The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations. The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations. On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations. IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations. The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world's land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration. Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research. For an in depth look at the paper go to: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/12/17/new-study-hadley-center-and-cru-apparently-cherry-picked-russias-climate-data/ -
Albatross at 05:35 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
GeoGuy, @ 31. First, climate scientists do not attribute all the observed warming to increases in GHGs, the numerous drivers are documented and quantified in AR4. Second, scientists have filtered out natural variability form internal climate modes (incl. ENSO) and detected a monotonic and accelerating warming trend in the 20th century. Please read my post @14, or read the paper by Swanson et al. (2009, PNAS). Also, McLean et al. (2009) seem to be guilty of confirmation bias, as were Lindzen and Choi (2009). Does that not concern you? -
CBDunkerson at 05:30 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Here you go Geo Guy;
As to your comments, El Nino and other oceanic variations are short term events with flat trend lines. They thus aren't any more examples of 'climate change' than the seasons or day and night are.
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Riccardo at 05:28 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Geo Guy, the point here is not to accept or refuse a methodology. The problems is that McLean et al. filtering procedure does not allow any claim on the trend. Indeed, after the case exploded, they said they were just looking at assessing the lag thus admitting that no conclusions on the trend can be draw from their analysis. That ENSO influences the global mean temperature variability is widely recognized. What is not is that ENSO has an influence on the trend. There are many analisys around showing this point, it's relatively easy, you can try yourself or read this related post and references therein -
Geo Guy at 05:06 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
Ok..my image link did not show up..please go to http://www.stratified.com/comap_1.jpg to view it....sorry I did follow the instructions for posting images here but it didn't work for me..:( -
Geo Guy at 05:04 AM on 19 March 2010A peer-reviewed response to McLean's El Nino paper
I think this is an example of "you can use statistics to generate relationships that you want people to see". This doesn't add any substance to the debate at all. One thing abut science is that you can get a group of peers that will refute a specific premise AND you can find a group of peers that will support the same premise. While peer reviews do have their place in the evolution of science, the process is open to manipulation in that a group can focus on peers scientists that have a contrary view. As far as el Nino is concerned, from my perspective (and experience as where I live is affected by el Nino) I am convinced there exists a relationship between spikes in global temperatures and el Nino activity. The following image is a rough plotting of el Nino activity (1950 to present) along with average global temperatures for the same period. I don't think you need a Phd in statistics to see that there certainly appears to be a correlation between peak temperatures and el Nino activity. More importantly, the period from 1978 to the present is characterized by extreme el Nino activity versus a prevalence of el Nina, where periods of related cooling occurred between 1950 and 1975.I am left wondering what the response will be from those saying that the climate change is attributable only to increases in atmospheric CO2 while the comparison of data indicates warming temperatures related to high el Nino activity. At the very least, climatologist should factor out global temperature increases attributable to el Nino activity in order to substantiate their claim.
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Albatross at 04:58 AM on 19 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Peter (Hogarth) any thoughts on #78? Not sure where their reference to "accelerating" came from? Those data appear to be OI.v2. Not sure how they compare with ERSST.v3b, which now does not use satellite data. Anyhow, these GODAS data also show warming of the southern polar oceans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osu4o-Fi38A The NODC 0-700 m OHC also show warming of oceans south of 60 S
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