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Marcel Bökstedt at 04:10 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Ned> Thanks! You are absolutely right, I was confusing the two blog posts. That's a relief ...:) It's true as you say that I did get an answer from the guest poster in the sense that my name was mentioned in a post. I must have forgotten about it because I did not really understand how it was an answer to my post. That is probably, my own fault, I'll give it a new try now. Ricardo> The point I tried to make about the ENSO is different. I think that we agree that we cannot accurately predict an el Nino events. So we cannot predict climate on a scale of one year (typical timescale of el Nino events), or to put it more formally: If we tentatively define climate as "average of weather over 1 year", we cannot predict climate. Of course we can lengthen the time scale, and define climate as "average of weather over twenty years". That would more or less even out the el Nino peaks, but how do we know that there are not longer term fluctuations which we still cannot predict? It seems to me that the only sensible answer would be "because we have studied the climate for a time much longer than 20 years, and we did not see any long term variations". However, we haven't yet observed weather on a global scale for timescales significantly bigger than 20 years, so how do we know for sure? -
Ian Forrester at 04:02 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
I'd like to emphasize what Dennis said in #27. That is that the initial package (1997-1999) included a fraudulent and bogus "paper" made to look like it was published in PNAS. It should be noted that that paper was quickly exchanged for a very similar (but equally disingenuous) paper published in Climate Research in 1999. That is not the S&B paper which caused the resignation of the editors, even though it was as bad as the 2003 paper. If we now jump forward to the most recent version we find reference to another "peer reviewed research paper" published in that "highly respected" and "rigorous" "research journal" Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Not a lot of scientific credibility associated with that fraudulent petition. Here are links to the 3 papers referred to above: http://web.archive.org/web/20070321030056/www.oism.org/pproject/review.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/13/c013p149.pdf http://www.oism.org/pproject/GWReview_OISM150.pdf -
Jeff Freymueller at 04:02 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#98 RSVP, if the temperature averaged over the entire planet is warming, then global warming is an accurate description, although global climate change would also be true. If it was not warming overall, but climate is changing in most regions, then global climate change would still be accurate but obviously warming would not be in that case. -
Rob Honeycutt at 04:00 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
robrtl... But is there a scientific consensus that the theory of general relativity is good? A consensus on the theory of evolution? Gravity? Science does work on certain levels of consensus. Science must always remain skeptical but that can't mean conclusions can't be reached (even temporary ones). Even the peer review process is a process of consensus. Reviewers have to come to some level of consensus that a paper is worthy to be published. When you have 97% of the scientists working in a particular field agreeing on the science, that is a powerful message. That 0.3% of the broadly defined scientific community (as with the Oregon Petition) rejects those findings is virtually meaningless. -
Jeff Freymueller at 03:58 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#92 RSVP, if you want to know how Antarctica loses ice at -17C or whatever sub-freezing temperature, re-read #74. It isn't a matter of melting. As for albedo, the changes in snow/ice cover in Antartica are small compared to the loss of Arctic sea ice. Don't forget to average over the globe. -
Argus at 03:55 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
If we question the expert status of all the alleged scientists signing a petition, we should be even more critical towards non-experts actually writing parts of the IPCC report. Dr Mörner, who (according to himself) was an expert reviewer of the chapter on Sea Level Changes in the IPCC report in 1999, claims that none of the 22 authors to that chapter was classified as a sea level specialist. That doesn't sound so good. In a posted comment in another thread, somebody claimed that one of the authors actually was a sea level expert. Even if so, that is still not very impressive. -
robrtl at 03:50 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
my consensus shows that scientists shpuld not look at consensus... -
Riccardo at 03:43 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Marcel Bökstedt, the physics is the same for both weather and climate by definition. They both describe the movement of air and water masses and the chemical/physical interactions between them and with the land subject to some input of energy. The actual calculations might differ somewhat due to computational restrictions as, for example, when climate models use parametrizations to save computing time. Climate models have their own variability, although somewhat different between models, that reflect what is actually seen. Obviously, you should not expect to have a temporal match between, say, calculated and actual El Nino events; but theese so called oscillations are indeed more or less reproduced by models. As for the over-emphasis on chaos, it looks like invoking chaotic behaviour in physical systems may be used to inflate uncertainties much beyond any reasonable expectation. Do we have any reason to believe that our sun will suddenly collapse or expand disproportionally beyond what we already know it does? There's a lot of chaos inside our star but that's not the whole story. The same is true for climate, we have no reason to think that our climate will suddenly go weird (chaotic). For weather it is different in what models try to forecast phenomena confined both in time and space, but we can still predict warmer air temperatures next summer or the seasonal arrival of the monsoon. The only thing that might "go weird" with climate is the passing of a so called tipping point, quite hard to predict. Someone may be tempeted to call its effect chaotic behaviour, but sure it's not. -
Dikran Marsupial at 03:40 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
angliss @ 33 "As an MSEE myself, I'm not inherently qualified by way of my education to have an informed opinion on climate disruption. The same is true of anyone in a similar position, including you." Actually no, I have worked (and published) with climatologists in the past and had to learn enough of the science to be worth collaborating with. I suspect there are many who are qualified by having read the litterature, e.g. Tim Lambert, without needing a formal qualification. The point is that even if the OISM approach has no indication of a quality check, discarding the views of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians without checking their background is no kind of quality check either and worse introduces a bias into the analysis that favours the view expressed. Engineering, computing and mathematical skills are essential to climate work and arbitrarily deleting them is a bogus step that devalues the point being made. It is bias either way, not quality control, you only get quality control by checking on a case by case basis. The best science is conducted the way a chess player plays chess, you don't play the best move you can see, you play the best move that your opponent can't refute (i.e. you minimise his maximum advantage). The analysis above goes against that maxim by deleting half of his opponents evidence, without giving a sound reason, even though the results would still show that climate skepticism is a minority view. A stronger more would just be to show it is a minority view, even if you assume the sample is representative. Having said which, it isn't (or at least shouldn't be) a popularity contest. A scientific argument stands or falls on its own merits. However, that isn't to say it isn't worthwhile demonstrating that a rhetorical argument is false (and point out that it is a rhetorical/political rather than a scientific point). -
Ned at 03:36 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Marcel Bökstedt writes: Tom Dayton> I'm aware of that post. Actually I posted a comment to it along similar lines as here - asking : how do we know that climate is not chaotic? I don't think that I got a response, and it seems that the comment has now been deleted. Is it possible that the comment you're remembering was in the other thread about chaos? It's a bit confusing -- there are often pairs of posts on similar topics at the same time, one a "blog post" (where there's usually more discussion among commenters) and one a "response to skeptical argument". For example, on Friday, 22 January, 2010, there was a blog post titled The chaos of confusing the concepts. I see that you do have a comment in that thread (here), which hasn't been deleted, and there was in fact a reply by the guest author of the original post. The link Tom Dayton provided was to a "skeptical argument" by the same guest author at about the same time: Chaos theory and global warming: can climate be predicted? which only got one comment. -
Argus at 03:22 AM on 12 March 2010Visual depictions of Sea Level Rise
It is interesting that in the 1980 report (#61, Peter Hogarth) the author discards all the tide gauge stations that do not show any significant trend, and keep those 247 stations out of more than 725 stations that do. -
Ned at 03:20 AM on 12 March 2010Misinterpreting a retraction of rising sea level predictions
RealClimate has a new post about predictions of sea level rise, which refers to the retraction of the Siddell paper. Stefan is trying to contrast the bizarre and distorted way that the media has been hyping various trivial and/or misrepresented claims of errors in the IPCC AR4, but has completely ignored cases where the AR4 is "erring" on the side of underestimating the severity of impacts from AGW. As Stefan points out, there are internal pressures within IPCC to be "conservative" and to risk understating rather than overstating most claims. This is something that very few outsiders seem to understand. -
Rob Honeycutt at 03:13 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
I keep saying, there are two things going on today with regards to climate. 1) There is the science of climate change. The hard detailed work of understanding what is really going on. Messy, complicated science. 2) There is a massive political campaign targeting the science of global climate change. Ugly, vitriolic politics. The Oregon Petition is one of the many political ploys used to obfuscate the science. It doesn't really have anything to do with the opinions of the people who sign the petition. It's a tactic. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 03:05 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
I'm delighted - three comments within a day to a post made at a comparatively obscure place! This site is impressive. Riccardo > Actually, the physics is not similar. Allow me to be a bit longwinded. There is an explicit mathematical model for weather. This model is of course only a simplified model. It will not give completely correct answers, but it is quite sufficent for predicting the weather for the next few days. There is a catch though. The model depends is very sensible to small variations in the initial conditions, so that a small cause today will lead to a big effect a month from now. That's the main reason we cannot make long term predictions of weather. "Climate" is a kind of averaged weather. In physics, it is sometimes true that if you form the average over a large number of systems, the averaged system will behave in a deterministic way. This is how thermodynamics works. The thermodynamical laws used to predict weather are actually in themselves "averages" over a overwhelmingly huge number of systems consisting of individual molecules. But there is no a priori guarantee that an "averaged" system must behave in a deterministic way. Especially if the averaging is done over a small number of systems. So lets look carefully at how we do the averaging. We can try to say "We take average weather over a year, and call that climate". Now, this procedure will fail to give a deterministic system. We know that there are systematic variations of the time scale of a year. These variations do not seem to be easy to model - I don't think that we can make reliable predictions of when the next el Nino will happen. Next, we can try to average over a larger time intervall. We could hope that if we average over a decade, then we get a deterministic system, or maybe even that the "climate" is completely determined by various forcing. That is, it could be that at this time scale there is no dynamics of climate. Maybe this is so, but now we are getting unconfortably close to the time scale of the entire history of reliable measurments of global climate. So how can we know that there are not "chaotic" variations of the climate on larger time scales? (There are definitions of various level of precision of the word "chaos" - I assume that what we are talking about here is "a huge sensitivity to initial conditions"). Doug_bostrom> Yes, the history is quite interesting, thanks for giving the link! But I am not sure exactly which misunderstandings you expect the link to clear up. Maybe you could be more specific? Actually, Weart is quite careful about the uncertainty of climate models. He states for instance "However, experience shows that scientists tend to be too optimistic about their level of certainty." and "For all the millions of hours the modelers had devoted to their computations, in the end they could not say exactly how serious future global warming would be." Tom Dayton> I'm aware of that post. Actually I posted a comment to it along similar lines as here - asking : how do we know that climate is not chaotic? I don't think that I got a response, and it seems that the comment has now been deleted. -
angliss at 03:01 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
DIkran Marsupial (#25) - One of the problems with the OISM approach is that there is no indication that they performed a quality check on the people who signed their petition. They didn't verify that the electrical enginers, the computer scientists, the mathematicians, etc. who signed their petition were qualified to do so. As an MSEE myself, I'm not inherently qualified by way of my education to have an informed opinion on climate disruption. The same is true of anyone in a similar position, including you. What qualifications you or I have are derived not from our having a Bachelor of Science degree, but rather from the work we've done educating ourselves on the subject of climate science. While an engineer or computer scientist or statistician may be qualified to have an informed opinion on the science underlying climate disruption, there is nothing inherent in the earning of the degree that makes them qualified. However, the OISM's own selection criteria assumes that the engineer, computer scientist, and statistician are equally qualified as people like Schmidt or Santer or Lindzen or Spencer who conduct climate science every day. -
shdwsnlite at 02:55 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
@19 #chriscanaris "As a psychiatrist, it happens to me all the time. I've learnt to live with it. " Does that mean that the input you receive from from all individuals with various levels of knowledge and training in your field are equally valid? Or have you learned to accept comments that off the mark due to a persons over confidence on how well they understand the field. -
angliss at 02:48 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
chriscanaris (#4 and 19): Perhaps a medical analogy would be helpful here. There are lots of people in the US who believe that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases that are protected against. However, when you look at the scientific, peer-reviewed studies of the dangers of vaccines vs. the dangers of the diseases, the data clearly shows that the incidence of serious vaccine side effects is much lower than the incidence of serious injury or death from the disease. Yet people still refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated. Would you, as a medical professional, accept that a software programmer or a geologist has equivalent expertise to a medical doctor in determining the safety and efficacy of a vaccine? After all, the geologist at least has experience with peer review, the scientific method, and so on, just like an MD. I wouldn't were I in your shoes. It's one thing to accept that some people are going to second-guess your professional expert opinions. It's something else to accept that those people are going to be held up as having equivalent expertise to you by Newsbusters, Fox News, and Dennis Avery. As Mike (#12) pointed out above, this is exactly how the OISM petition has been presented. Dennis Avery, from EnterStageRight:Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus.
Mark Sheppard, via American Thinker:In last Tuesday's NRO, Lawrence Solomon reminded us that Lieberman-Warner is based primarily upon the premise that there exists "scientific consensus on [manmade] global warming." And that this over-talked talking point is based largely upon the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's headline of "2500 Scientific Expert Reviewers." Even if true, why then does Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's petition against global warming alarmism continue to add signatures to its over 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with PhDs?
Steve Milloy, via Fox News:Although dispute exists over whether there is, in fact, an actual consensus within the IPCC, head counts of scientists seem to be the name of the global warming game. Since that is the case, the 31,000 scientist signatories assembled by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine would seem to trump the 600 or so in the alleged IPCC consensus.
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Ned at 02:23 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
RSVP writes: If climatic conditions are simply shifting in season and location, or weather exhibited more erratic behaviors (where in reality there was no net energy gain), would we still want to call this global warming? Or put another way. If North Atlantic warming slows down the Gulf Stream which in turn cools Europe, providing negative feedback, which basically impedes further warming, should we still be calling this "global" warming? Good question. One could imagine three different types of change: (1) The spatial distribution of temperatures and/or precipitation changes markedly, but the global mean temperature stays the same. (2) The spatial distribution of temperatures and/or precipitation changes markedly, and the global mean temperature increases (or decreases). (3) Every place on Earth experiences warming (or every place on Earth experiences cooling). I think most people would agree that (3) could easily be called "global warming" or "global cooling", and that (1) should be called "climate change" rather than "global ___". As for case (2), which is what is actually happening, I think that both labels "global warming" and "climate change" are appropriate, if imperfect. RE: your specific comment about negative feedbacks, I don't think most people working in the field today expect that a slowdown in the meridianal overturning circulation (Wally Broecker's conveyor belt) would produce enough cooling to counteract the warming that led to that slowdown. It would perhaps lead to slower warming in Europe than elsewhere, but on balance the Earth would still be warming. -
Ned at 02:07 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
BP writes: post #90 on southern sea ice still waiting for pal review Okay, there are two parts to that post, one about the trend in sea ice and one about the mechanisms responsible for its apparent increase. In your comment that started this off (#7) you wrote: IPCC AR4 WG1 4.4.2.2 Figure 4.8 caption says "Antarctic results show a small positive trend of 5.6 ± 9.2 × 103 km2 yr–1 [...] the small positive trend in the SH is not significant" which is not true. Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing (for whatever reason) and the trend is significant. You later (comments 82 and 90) specified that you were referring to April and May. So I looked at southern hemisphere sea ice extent from the NSIDC database in April, both 1979-2005 (since that is the period used in the IPCC AR4 figure you claimed was false) and 1979-2009 (for completeness). The 1979-2005 period gives a positive trend that is not significant at 95%, with a two-tailed p-value of 0.084 and a confidence interval of -0.0032 to +0.0481 million km2/year. The 1979-2009 period is almost significant at 95% (two-tailed p-value of 0.058, confidence interval -0.000776 to +0.0452). For May, I agree that the trend is significant at 95%, both for the time period used in the IPCC figure and for the period through 2009. That said, if one were going to be very precise about this one would want to correct for temporal autocorrelation in the data. My guess is that's not a large effect at the annual timescale in this system, so it would probably either have no effect or only deecrease the significance of the trends slightly. The April trends are already not significant, and I doubt an autocorrelation correction would change the May trends enough to make them non-significant. Again, though, the details of all this are essentially irrelevant. As I said in comment #84, I'm not arguing that there hasn't been a small upward trend in southern autumnal sea ice. There has! This whole thread is about explaining the reason for that trend. One possible explanation would be that perhaps the Southern Ocean is cooling, leading to more sea ice in autumn. However, we know from multiple different lines of evidence that the Southern Ocean is actually warming, not cooling (in fact it's warming faster than the global ocean trend). Thus, we can reject that explanation. So the point of this thread is to discuss alternative explanations. The generally accepted one, as discussed in Turner 2009 and other papers, involves the effect of ozone depletion on the Southern Annular Mode and circulation patterns in the southern circumpolar atmosphere. This brings us to the second part of your post #90. In this, you construct a rather strange straw-man argument, involving a claimed decrease in the extent of the ozone hole in 2002 and a similar claimed decrease in the extent of sea ice. You then do a nice job of knocking down that straw-man argument by pointing out that the ozone image you were looking at was from Sept-Nov while the ice extent was from April-May. That might be an insightful point if someone were claiming that the correlation between the small dip in 2002 sea ice and visual examination of a map of ozone depletion in late 2002 was proof of the ozone/sea ice connection. But nobody except you has suggested such a thing. -
Riccardo at 01:49 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
RSVP, call it global climate change if you think it's more appropiate. -
Ned at 01:21 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Does the current version of the "petition" still include all the duplicate names, fake names, M*A*S*H characters, Spice Girls, etc. that were found among the signatories a decade ago? -
Berényi Péter at 01:12 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Ned, it's not nail in coffin, just snow. However, it is hard to talk about Antarctic warmth while snowflakes keep coming down on your head. In a time when almond trees should bloom. Also, I think we have worked enough here to deserve some recreation time (post #90 on southern sea ice still waiting for pal review). -
RSVP at 01:12 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Ned "Let's please not drag this blog down to the level of WUWT-style "gotcha" argument,.." I agree with the spirit of your remark, however I would ask. If climatic conditions are simply shifting in season and location, or weather exhibited more erratic behaviors (where in reality there was no net energy gain), would we still want to call this global warming? Or put another way. If North Atlantic warming slows down the Gulf Stream which in turn cools Europe, providing negative feedback, which basically impedes further warming, should we still be calling this "global" warming?Response: It helps to clarify exactly what is meant by global warming. The globe is warming. The planet is accumulating heat. More energy is coming in than escaping back out to space. If the planet is still in positive energy imbalance, then yes, global warming is still happening.
Weather and ocean cycles cause the heat within our climate system to slosh around in chaotic ways. But the total heat content of our planet continues to increase because of the energy imbalance imposed by increased greenhouse gases. -
CBDunkerson at 01:10 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
RSVP, looking at surface area vs volume does not change the results. Yes, Antarctic sea ice is a much larger percentage of the global total AREA (~38%) than it is of the total volume (~0.5%)... but that's still less than the 62% of world ice area which is melting. Amount of ice on the planet, both by area and total volume, is decreasing. Ergo... positive feedback. -
Dennis at 00:52 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
There is an important angle to the manner in which the petition was originally circulated that is worth repeating. The petition's cover letter was signed by Fred Seitz, and a past president of the National Academy of Sciences. Now, Dr. Seitz is welcome to support the petition and point out his scientific credentials. However, the petition also included an article "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" (I don't know if it was peer reviewed) that was made to look it came from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whether intentional or not, it was clearly misleading to some people. -
Ned at 00:51 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Back on topic, anyone who wonders whether the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is actually warming should check out the following: Roemmich 2009 (e.g., Figure 3.1a, showing high warming in depths from 0-400 dbar at latitudes 40-60 South). Mayewski 2009, especially sections 2.4.1 ("Warming of the Circumpolar Southern Ocean"), 2.4.4 ("Rapid Ocean Warming at the Western Antarctic Peninsula"), and 2.5 ("Changes in Southern Ocean Circulation"). Convey 2009, particularly the section on the instrumental period and the subsection on the Southern Ocean. -
Ned at 00:11 AM on 12 March 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
protestant, soot and black carbon are not significant factors in Antarctica, due to the continent's isolation. Comparison to the Arctic or to montane glaciers in northern hemisphere regions with heavy soot/BC loadings are not realistic. You're right that there aren't sufficient data to construct a mass balance for Antarctica in the 1930s, or any time before the International Geophysical Year (and estimates from before the launch of GRACE will have much wider confidence intervals). But most of that uncertainty is in the accumulation side, not the ice loss side, where there's a reasonable degree of confidence that ice loss has been accelerating. Thus, for example, a series of ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula have partially or fully disintegrated over the past two decades, all of which managed to survive the 1930s. And in recent years these effects have been moving progressively further south, an additional confirmation that warming is accelerating in the west Antarctic. Finally, I think you're mistaken about the ARGO data, though it's understandable since the claim "ARGO data show the oceans are cooling" has been very widely publicized among "skeptical" websites over the past few years. This is discussed in great detail elsewhere on this site: Does ocean cooling disprove global warming? In particular, whether or not you accept the more recent analyses of ARGO showing that the perceived 2003-2006 "cooling" was an artifact, we're talking here specifically about warming of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. This has unequivocally been warming faster than the ocean as a whole -- see, e.g., Roemmich 2009. Note Figure 3.1(a), which shows relatively high warming of surface waters (down to 400 dbar) from 40-60 South latitude. -
Every skeptic argument ever used
Even more intriguing is the lack of modern era data! -
Every skeptic argument ever used
This is clearly a one-off and/or very early study - the actual data shows a distinct cooling trend since the Roman era - intriguing that Nature published it.
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Dikran Marsupial at 23:23 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"If we remove all the engineers, medical professionals, computer scientists, and mathematicians" I have a degree and a PhD in electronic engineering, teach comupter science, and perform research in statistics, including work on climate change. I am not the only one, for example Gavin Schmidt has a degree and a PhD in (applied) mathematics, I'm sure you wouldn't want to ignore his views. ;o) Engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians are just the sort of people who should be working more in climate research, especially when so much of it involves engineering, computing, maths and stats! P.S. Some computer scientists and mathematicians I know might take exception at being described as not being "actual scientists"!!! -
protestant at 23:09 PM on 11 March 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
Ned wrote: "You're right. If we had no other evidence that fossil fuel combustion produces CO2, and no other evidence that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation, then we wouldn't be able to conclude that anthropogenic greenhouse gases were warming the earth just from measuring glacier retreat alone." So CO2 traps heat, whats the big news? Thats only a half-truth like we all know its all about feedbacks: we dont even know if they start with a + or -. But that's another topic. Ned wrote: "Actually, what GRACE does is measure distortions in the earth's gravity field over broad areas and long periods of time. This can't tell you what the exact elevation of the ice surface at point X was on date Y, but it can give you a very precise estimate of regional-scale, long-term changes in ice mass. You really should make an effort to understand how things work before throwing around accusations of "lunacy"." Ok, I was obviously wrong about that and thank you for clarification. Note that I used the term "lunacy" with the question about capability to measure 7mm differences on ice thickness, not with other possible methods. But back to the point, there are another theories for glacier melting and one is the black soot. The Lawrence Berkeley Lab concluded in their recent study http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/02/03/black-carbon-himalayan-glaciers/ that black carbon is the most significant factor on the melting Himalayas. There are other studies as well which conclude aerosols have a significant role on observed glacier changes and that increasing temperatures are not nearly enough to explain it. About context I mean we have no idea how much Ice mass Antarctica had in the 30's or how much there was ice on the 70's. Or how much variability there was between those periods. Just a 8 year trend is completely uninformative and the seen changes can be as well natural oscillation, the context would clarify this. Yet we have no context so the measurements from GRACE still tells us almost nothing. If the "warming oceans" (where actually our highest quality ARGO-data shows a slight cooling) were the reason for ice mass loss in Antarctica there would be also no increase in the sea ice. But for some reason sea ice still increasing. I bet that the most affecting factors considering glaciers are the black soot and changes in rainfall. Rising temperatures might even have an ice thickening results since in most glaciers the temps are really much below 0C most of the year and increased temps mean more snow - more ice. Where Himalayas might retreat from the lower reagions - the upper regions are expected to increase in thickness. Some of the points were a bit offtopic but I hope you dont mind. Greets, protestant -
Nick Palmer at 22:59 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Humanity rules touches on an important point about the petition that seems to have been missed by most critics. Apologies for anyone who has seen this comment before that I have posted elsewhere. "Re: the Oregon petition. I have been trying to spread my view on an aspect of the wording of the petition which seems barely to have been noticed. It is a misleading nature of the statement that even Jim Hansen could have legitimately agreed with. The wording in the petition is: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. The weasel words are a)”is causing or will”, b)”catastrophic” and c)”disruption”. The first is an absolute statement. Even if the scientific evidence said there was a 99.99 % chance, then that is still not absolutely definite is it? A pernicketty type could not deny the very small possibility that the climate may not react as we think, so they would have been able to sign with a clear conscience. The second and third effectively put forward the straw man that climate science is saying that the worst scenarios will come to pass, warming will be at the very top of the scale and we will definitely be screwed. As the science and evidence does not state that categorically, again people can sign legitimately. The wording also seems to only restrict consideration to that warming likely to be caused by human emissions – it cleverly leaves out feedback emissions. The relatively small increases of temperature that human emissions alone are causing, and will cause, directly will, in turn cause feedback emissions (water vapour, melting permafrost, clathrates etc) that probably will cause the rises in temperature that are likely to be dangerous and lead to climate disruption. The petition implies that it only is concerned with direct human emissions. Just my interpretation, because I have really not seen any dissection of the actual wording – or if it’s been done it’s not widespread as a counter argument to the validity of the views of those who signed it. Nick Palmer "Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer" -
HumanityRules at 21:06 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
From the petitions home page. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." For me the important word in that sentance is catastrophic. It is difficult to actually lump all individuals who are critical of the state of climate science, the castostrophic predictions or the anti-human agenda it promotes as having one brain that denies all the science. For example assuming the Richard Lindzen on the petition is the same Richard Lindzen of Wikipedia's list of climate deniers then here is his position according to Wikipedia. "We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But – and I cannot stress this enough – we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." I'm not even sure this form of analysis is valid. What percentage of any population would sign a contentious petition not matter what the subject. Especially one that would potentially expose them to co-workers, employers and funding bodies. In fact even those with little to hide aren't on there. I had a quick scan for some of the more infamous 'denier' names I know and couldn't find them. It's a dull and pointless exercise but feel free to give it a go. My experience of radical politics is that very few people are willing to put their head above the parapet when the nature of the politics goes against the prevailing current in society. Relatively small numbers of people in the 1950s, 1960s and even into the 1970s openly supported gay, black or womens rights, this did not make them unworthy fights. -
Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 21:00 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
D. B. Klein, C. Stern The Independent Review, Spring 2009 "Generally speaking, we can observe that the scientists in any particular institutional and political setting move as a flock [!!!], reserving their controversies and particular originalities for matters that do not call into question the fundamental system of biases they share." —Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research "Perhaps we avoid studying our institutional lives because such work is not valued by our colleagues. The academy is, after all, a club, and members are expected to be discreet. Like any exclusive club, the academic world fears public scrutiny. Research is in the public domain. Outsiders [!] might use what the research reveals against the academy." —Richard Wisniewski, "The Averted Gaze" "The thousand profound scholars may have failed, first, because they were scholars, secondly, because they were profound, and thirdly, because they were a thousand. [...]" —Edgar Allan Poe, "The Rationale of Verse" -
MarkR at 20:51 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
So what we can conclude is that the OISM doesn't contradict the polls. With years to self select, we're on <1% of what they call 'scientists' (hey look, I'm now a 'scientist', thanks OISM!) they've collected 0.3% signatures. Polls seem to find over 80% support amongst Earth & atmospheric scientists, so it's no surprise they got 0.3% of them to sign a petition saying otherwise. -
RSVP at 20:45 PM on 11 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
CBDunkerson As far as feedback, I was talking about albedo. All you need is a thin covering of frost on the ground to make it white and increase reflectivity. You could have a km of ice melting below you, but that shouldnt affect this particular variable. -
John Russell at 20:23 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Perhaps the OISM should be as open in supplying the raw data on which their survey was based as they expect the UEA's CRU scientists to be with theirs? -
CBDunkerson at 19:38 PM on 11 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
RSVP, thank you for perfectly demonstrating my point. Yes, sea ice coverage around Antarctica has increased slightly. Thus, that portion of the planet's ice is growing. Of course... it comprises less than 1% of the total. The LAND ice on Antarctica, which is 90% of the ice on the planet, is melting... as is the 9% of ice on Greenland and the remaining part of 1% found in the Arctic sea ice and total glacier mass on the other continents. So, as I said... the NET change is melting ice and a positive feedback. No matter how much 'skeptics' insist on seeing ONLY the minuscule fraction of ice which is growing. -
CBDunkerson at 19:31 PM on 11 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Tadzio, no most of us are amateurs too... we've just been at it a while now. I really can't tell you precisely what happens with deep water currents around Antarctica. Obviously they have to mix with the rest of the oceans, but how quickly that happens and/or exactly where I couldn't say. Sorry about the difficulty in getting answers. With so many debates going on a single post on a tangential issue tends to get lost. Best advice is to just keep reading. As you pick up more it gets easier to fit the pieces together. -
chris1204 at 19:21 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Mike: 'I wonder how, say, neurosurgeons would react to a survey of particle physicists on their opinions of brain tumour treatment? Or what veterinarians think of the latest on loop quantum gravity?' As a psychiatrist, it happens to me all the time. I've learnt to live with it. Actually the added burden of accountability to the public at large while at times discomfiting has been a good thing for my profession. -
Every skeptic argument ever used
This Nature article is interesting on Roman/Medieval/Little Ice age periods. The article describes research using clam shells instead of tree rings to look at the past climate. -
Doug Bostrom at 18:44 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
nerndt at 17:18 PM on 11 March, 2010 How well does near-vacuum conduct? You really ought to read Spencer Weart's history of climate research, here: The Discovery of Global Warming It's a fun read and once you've digested it you'll be much better prepared to deal with the finer points of the topic. Honestly, I don't want to sound supercilious but conduction is really not the issue here. -
RSVP at 18:37 PM on 11 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
CBDunkerson "The snow and ice cover of the planet is melting." My impression from the article was that ice cover was growing in Antartica, and please explain how it is melting at -17 C ? -
RSVP at 18:17 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"I would be curious, RSVP, as to what you would answer to this question if given yes or no option in a survey." It is a meaningless trick question (for the reasons stated), but I would have to say "yes".Response: Thanks, I appreciate the response. -
RSVP at 18:09 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
It is ironic also that it is the experts who spend the most energy testing their own theories. The experts "require" empirical evidence to back their claims. If they are so sure of themselves, why do they continue to take measurements? -
Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Unlike those that have commented that it is unnecessary to count heads I found this to be quite an interesting post and worthwhile. If statistics are being bandied about by the media over how many scientists agree/disagree with the concept of AGW then I think it is very important to know how these statistics are being obtained. The sad fact is that the vast majority of people will not do follow up research on these sort of statements, or about AGW at all and will get all their information from mainstream media sources. If these sources do not explain how the data has been obtained (and that would not make it nearly as sexy and controversial), then it must come from a post such as this. I also have a science degree, but I would definitely not consider myself a scientist, and I do know people who completed the same degree as me who would still rather believe quack theories on some subjects over proven scientific research. So while a science degree may teach scientific process, it can’t make all graduates apply it in all situations. Based on this I think it is valid knowing that the “scientists” in the OISM petition are no more qualified than myself. I have an opinion, but I would never pass myself off as an expert just because I have a degree, flattering though it would be to be considered a scientist! -
RSVP at 17:56 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Exactly what kind of people need to be convinced of AGW if it isnt precisely the educated class that appears in these lists? ...and as far as the question: "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?". ...the wording is pretty loose and would be hard for anyone to deny. To say "significant contributing factor" isnt say much of anything. 4% could be considered "significant", for instance, we are talking about a pay cut, or increase in taxes. And anyone who lives in or near a city, (and that is about nearly anyone), knows very well that urban sprawl adds heat, which would necessarily "contribute" to an increase in mean "temperature". As I have said in earlier posts, a big problem with the marketing of AGW is that it doesnt restrict its claims nor provides precision in its definition of global warming. Why wasnt the question simply construed as: "Do you think human activity causes global warming?" ...since the letters AGW, afterall, say nothing more than this.Response: The wording of the question "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" was chosen in order to compare the results to a Pew survey that asked the same question.
I would be curious, RSVP, as to what you would answer to this question if given yes or no option in a survey. -
angliss at 17:40 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Geo Guy (#3): Do you feel that a housewife who has an undergraduate geology degree but taught middle school science as her career has equivalent expertise to a climatologist who has worked in the field for decades? I ask because, by your own statements, this hypothetical housewife is "qualified to reject any statement that they believe was reached at through a faulty process," even if she has never studied climate science. That's one of the main problems with the OISM petition - it produces a false equivalence between expertise in climate and expertise in other, totally unrelated fields, purely on the existence of a Bachelor of Science degree. The other point of my post is that, by the OISM's own criteria, their 31,000 signatories do not represent a "significant number of scientists who disagree...." Using the OISM's criteria, 31,000 people represents only 0.3% of all scientists. This is the difference between an absolute measurement and a normalized measurement - yes, 31,000 sounds like a lot of people, but in reality it's a tiny number when compared to the entire defined population. -
Mike1637 at 17:35 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
@4, chriscanaris makes an interesting comment with:"...a survey of what tertiary educated individuals with some background in the sciences might think is of some relevance so long as it is represented as no more than that".
Yet unfortunately it is represented as more than that most of the time. The Petition Project is regularly trotted out as evidence that large proportions of real, qualified and practising scientists active in the field of climate studies have grave and serious doubts about what is published in the relevant literature. This is quite clearly not the case. Additionally, is a survey of people in other scientific disciplines any more or less valid than asking an intelligent layperson what their opinion is? I wonder how, say, neurosurgeons would react to a survey of particle physicists on their opinions of brain tumour treatment? Or what veterinarians think of the latest on loop quantum gravity? -
chris1204 at 17:31 PM on 11 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"I am curious as whether it is the younger scientists (who incidentally have more to lose) entering their careers as the oldies retire that will be the determinate of what improves the consensus in the statistics.' Peer review is a double edged sword. It may ensure quality or it may function as covert censorship in the setting of competing paradigms - a major problem when people have a huge emotional investment in an idea or a notion. Sometimes, peer review seems no more than a rubber stamp. Ultimately, there is no substitute for critical appraisal of the basic science (and climate science, while very complex, thankfully stays within the realms of Newtonian physics making it accessible to to the non-specialist).
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