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Comments 124051 to 124100:

  1. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    75, RSVP "SNRatio "Of course that is not the way we work in science, and I don't really understand where you have got these notions from." Answer. Maybe engineering. People who build the equipment you guy use. " So then, when there is a 94% chance a part is faulty, you say "no fault" because the null hypothesis of "ok" can not be rejected? That may actually explain a lot, but most engineers know better, and work mostly with confidence intervals when presented with estimation problems of the type we discuss here. And when they do tests, they care about the power. You are insisting on methods that cannot detect a 0.12 degC/decade warming trend. In a climatic context, that's insisting on blindness. But it is a strategy used to conceal facts: Running tests with too low power to detect effects, and with experiment repetitions that, like short time temperature series, tend to go both ways. "There is no effect."
  2. Philippe Chantreau at 08:11 AM on 18 February 2010
    Is CO2 a pollutant?
    The complete G&T09 comment sent to the journal that published it can be found here on top of the list: http://groups.google.com/group/rabett-run-labs?hl=en How G&T made it through peer-review is unclear. Perhaps something similar to the Soon-Baliunas piece.
  3. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
    Well, this article has not necessarily increased the self-awareness of readers. We still see displays of this syndrome. Unfortunate.
    Response: Rome wasn't built in a day :-)
  4. Skeptical Science now an iPhone app
    I second the idea of an Android app. Kudos again to this site. It's been a bright spot in an otherwise dismal media onslaught of disgraceful misinformation in recent months/years. Thanks for the link, Doug. What a nonsensical tirade by Piers Corbyn. Contrarians don't like having their bunk arguments (or their "side" as he puts it) challenged.
  5. Dikran Marsupial at 07:03 AM on 18 February 2010
    Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    From Peru @ 77 woodfortrees.org is a great site for generating plots for yourself, just the way you want them. For instance, here is the HADCRUT data from 1979 onwards, including the monthly data, 12 year running mean and the 1979-present trend. http://tinyurl.com/yf8729r The trends for RSS, HadCrut and GISSTemp are all very similar, the UAH one a bit less, but basically the surface trends look like they are in reasonable agreement with the satelite trends. A woodfortrees plot is available here, I have alterered the baselines to make the difference in trends easier to see (but the trends themselves are unaffected by the baseline) http://tinyurl.com/yh2vn4n woodfortrees is a great site, I recommend anyone interested in climate science to use it to test out what they read on the blogs. HTH
  6. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    RSVP, the energy generated by a city is absolutely minuscule in comparison to the energy of the solar radiation hitting that city... and the entire rest of the planet. Further, cities are not 'warmer regions' of the planet. They often (not always) tend to be slightly warmer than their immediate local surroundings due to lower albedo of asphalt and other factors, but this is nothing compared to places like Death Valley or the Gobi Desert. Thus, viewing cities as the 'source of heat' spreading around the planet, as with CO2, is incorrect. The heat contribution from cities directly is tiny compared to solar energy, greenhouse effects, and hydrological effects (i.e. heat going into or coming out of the oceans due to weather). With CO2 isolated sites like Mauna Loa, American Samoa, Barrow Alaska, and the South Pole all show the same results... but temperature series taken at those locations would be completely different.
  7. Skeptical Science now an iPhone app
    Touched a nerve, it seems. In the Guardian: "Deniers queue up to lambast Skeptical Science application developed by solar physicist John Cook. ... I'm not sure this is going to quell the climate wars raging at present, but it's an interesting development nonetheless. An Australian solar physicist called John Cook, who runs the popular Skeptical Science website, has developed an app which "lets you use an iPhone or iPod to view the entire list of skeptic arguments as well as (more importantly) what the science says on each argument". So the next time you're caught at the fag end of a wedding reception in an interminable one-way conversation with a reactionary uncle who's boring on about how "the climate's always changed", just switch on this app, hand them your iPhone, and proceed to the bar. In reality, of course, this is hardly likely to win round any sceptic, least of all your worse-for-wear uncle who, with or without the evidence presented to him by this app, will still continue to swear blind that climate change is a fiction made up by a clandestine world government-in-waiting because he's read about it all on his favourite blog, which just so happens to be frequented by an army of other reactionary uncles. One suspects this app will only act to increase the polarisation between the two sides of this "debate". (Still think a debate's going on? When was the last time you heard someone from either side say, "Thank you for this information. Actually, I'd never thought of it like that before. I'm now prepared to change my mind on climate change.") ... " More: iPhone app pitches climate change science against scepticism
  8. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    This is a great article. I am glad Phil Jones is getting some answers into print. Actually I think he chose his words very carefully and well. The tone of his points is right - being a scientist means having doubts and being skeptical. While some of the things might be seized on by whatever camp it is good for science to show what is known and what is not.
  9. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    Mr John Cook: Could you show the RSS and UAH lower troposphere data to compare it with the hadCRU and GISSTEMP data? And also show the MONTLY and 12-month moving average of all of them? Seeing the trends and variability of all our surface temperature metrics will be a great thing. Specially the LOWER TROPOSPHERE vs. SURFACE temperature trends!
  10. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    Wow this site is getting loads of comments these days. Deservedly so. The only significance of the question was how transparently, carefully, chosen it was to provide the answer required. But Prof Jones answered correctly, even if it was a bit of a trap. Those with more than one brain cell to rub together will appreciate the "significance" of his full answer.
  11. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    SNRatio "Of course that is not the way we work in science, and I don't really understand where you have got these notions from." Answer. Maybe engineering. People who build the equipment you guy use.
  12. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    CBDunkerson Sometimes it takes questions like this to realize how differently people can be thinking. My thinking is that since energy can't be destroyed, heat from warmer regions (cities for instance) makes its way around the planet contributing to an overall global warming effect. This explains my question about why not sample temperatures as is done for CO2. There is of course the upward IR ratiative cooling path to consider. If this path dominates, and basically "shorcircuits" any convective heating, local temperature increases wouldnt represent global warming at all, but instead isolated regional warming which would be completely dependent on the amount of energy discharged locally. It would seem therefore, that the only global warming that really matters, is that which is associated with measurements in locations that are far from human populations. The problem of course is that when making historical comparisons, a lot of the data has likely been taken from areas that have since become part urban sprawl.
  13. Working out future sea level rise from the past
    The polar ice caps would be GROWING if there were global warming, not shrinking. Sea levels would FALL, not rise.
    @JM: This is completely at odds with historical sea level and ice coverage reconstructions. Also, what you said can be refuted in a simple manner. Temperature varies with latitude, evidently. This means there's essentially a temperature threshold for the ice caps. The threshold can be thought of as existing at specific north and south latitudes. These threshold latitudes change if the temperature of Earth changes. Hence, if the temperature increases, the polar ice caps shrink. If the temperature drops, the polar ice caps grow.
  14. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    RSVP: [i]PS Addressing JonMoseley's comment "To be valid science, one must state that a measurement that is not statistically significant is equivalent to ZERO." Agreed. And personally, with all these spots on communication blunders, one notices that its the reader or audience that is always portrayed as at fault for not understanding or misinterpreting explanations. [/i] By that logic, we would have "science" declaring the trend is zero one month, and, for example, 0.15 the next month, because the trend persisted, but p-value moved from 0.0505 to 0.0490. Of course that is not the way we work in science, and I don't really understand where you have got these notions from. Except for them fitting very well in a denialist "paradigm". When we look at temperature trends, for example in the UAH series, we extend it backwards till we eventually can get some stability (we do), and then, using it as a raw estimate, check for significance. With the current level of fluctuations, we typically need more than 15 years to be sure. The stability is essential, otherwise we could talk about "significant cooling" every winter. It surely is significant where I live, but that has got nothing to do with climate. I have no problems accepting the possibility of global cooling, if you present stable and sigificant cooling trends for me. But it seems to be vary hard for many self-declared "skeptics" to accept the possibility of global warming, in spite of very stable warming trends. That's the difference between skepticism and denialism. I also wonder if a number of people are somewhat logically challenged, as they tend to take over-estimations of warming as "proof" that warming doesn't happen. Or failure of models to correctly predict the processes going on as "refutations of AGW". You can die from a gunshot regardless of the people involved in the incident having a correct understanding of the trigger mechanism or not.
  15. Dikran Marsupial at 05:11 AM on 18 February 2010
    Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    RSVP (69) Jon Moseley's comment demonstrated a common fallacy in interpreting the result of a frequentist hypothesis test. Being unable to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as showing the null hypothesis to be true. Absence of (compelling) evidence is not (compelling) evidence of absence. Here are some musings on the way this misunderstanding arises: The way published research should proceed is very much the same way a good chess player plays chess. A weak chess player will simply play the most promising move he sees, without really considering his opponents reply. A good chess player on the other hand plays the strongest move he can find that his opponent can't counter. Likewise a good scientific paper doesn't advance a strong claim that is not solidly supported by the data. In this way the paper is likely to result in scientific progress as it can't be easily refuted. A good scientist therefore makes the strongest claim that he considers to be irrefutable, rather than the strongest claim that merely *could* be supportable given the evidence. So like chess it is a min-max game. Thus we are INITIALLY taught to treat statistically insignificant results as "being equivalent to ZERO" as a guard against making any claim based on statistically insignificant evidence (and indeed Jones does not). As a first approximation, that is reasonable, however once your education progresses to the point where the principles of hypothesis testing, rather than simply the practice, are better understood, it becomes clear that this is just an approximation, and the meaning of the p-value is actually rather subtle (and doesn't really answer the question you thought you were asking, at least that is the Bayesian position). However that is how we should treat the evidence for OUR claims, not how we should treat the evidence for the claims of OTHERS we would like to REFUTE, as it is a min-max game for both sides. So while "is equivalent to ZERO" is a reasonable maxim if we apply it to our own claims, it is a very poor maxim for refuting the claims of others as instead of the difference between maxim and truth being a useful safeguard, it becomes a fallacy. The reason that the reader or audience is portrayed as being at fault for not understanding or misinterpreting explanations is because of the Dunning-Kruger effect discussed on a previous thread sadly means it is often true. The impression is given by posters and/or journalists that make strong claims, quite obviously on the basis of a very shaky understanding of the facts. Were they to post questions asking for explanations of claims, rather than make easily refuted counter claims, and be open to the responses, the portrayal would not have resonance that it currently does.
  16. Skeptical Science housekeeping: iPhone app, comments and translations
    Actually, any plans to make this for the Pre? Given I'm about to buy one (I much prefer its interface to that of the iPhone), I'm a totally disinterested party. ;)
  17. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    angliss: If you want a really simple way to show somebody that not everything is a perfect grey body: just ask them to look around the room. Some things appear red, some blue, some green, even though they're being illuminated by the same light source. If the absorptivity were always constant over wavelength, this wouldn't be possible. You'd just see different shades of grey.
  18. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    RSVP, obviously CO2 and temperatures are different things and behave in different ways. For CO2 what is being measured is effectively the 'baseline' CO2 level... there are actually higher levels of CO2 downwind of industrial centers all over the world, but by the time winds would carry that CO2 to Mauna Loa (or any of the other remote measuring stations) the CO2 has diffused throughout the atmosphere and you are looking at effectively the MINIMUM value worldwide... which is why the different stations get matching values. For temperatures on the other hand there is no 'global minimum' which can be consistently detected at specific points. Instead, the global temperature values we get are 'averages' computed by taking readings at thousands of sites around the world and applying them geographically. In theory CO2 levels could similarly be computed as a global average in the same way that temperature is. This would result in values slightly higher than the baseline figures currently used. However, it would also require alot more monitoring stations and be subject to greater potential for error.
  19. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
    TOP at 22:56 PM on 17 February 2010 C02 in ciculation as part of the natural carbon cycle versus C02 contributed to the atmosphere as part of fossil fuel combustion is easily distinguished by isotope ratios. You might want to get up to speed on this entire topic by reading Dr. Spencer Weart's excellent summary, here: The Discovery of Global Warming A few hours and you'll have a basic grasp of the phenomenon, warts and all.
  20. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    RSVP, it is called global warming becasue it is, well, global. This means the any region of the planet counts proportionally to its area; if it's large it will have a relatively large effect, if it's small it will be small. As easy as the definition of average. If the Earth was like Venus the temperature would have been "well mixed" like CO2 and we could have implemented just one station at Mauna Loa or anywhere else. Unfortunately (or maybe luckly ;)) it is not, so the tempeature at one single point tells nothing about the global average.
  21. It's the sun
    Cliff Oates, can you attribute any physical meaning to your linear weighting function? It looks a bit arbitrary.
  22. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    In comparing data, article states: "the areas omitted by HadCRUT are some of the fastest warming regions in the world" If this is about detecting "global" warming, why does regional warming even enter into the equation? If taking "proxy" CO2 measurements from a volcano in Hawaii makes sense, why not apply the same idea for measuring temperature? PS Addressing JonMoseley's comment "To be valid science, one must state that a measurement that is not statistically significant is equivalent to ZERO." Agreed. And personally, with all these spots on communication blunders, one notices that its the reader or audience that is always portrayed as at fault for not understanding or misinterpreting explanations.
  23. It's the sun
    Since sunspot activity is observed for numbers, energy and radiation charistics a complete thermal balance with the earth is a very difficult if not impossible task. I believe that the oceans with their tremendous heat capacity are the key to the earths global temperature. The sunspot numbers count could be used as an indication of the sun's variation from a nominal output. I plotted an a weiighted sunspot number vs time from 1770 to the present. The average sunspot was developed using weighting factors of .4, .3, .2 and .1 for the periods of 0-10, 10-20, 20-30 and 30-40 years before the date of the data point. The resulting plot is consistant with observed long term temperature trends. It would predict the rapid temperature increase of the past century.
  24. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Suibhne, yes the G&T paper covers EM radiation (incorrectly) in subsequent sections. However, at the start they define a premise that rising CO2 can only be causing warming if it significantly changes the thermal conductivity of the atmosphere as a whole... and then go on for a few pages to show that it doesn't... but then no proponent of the greenhouse effect ever claimed it did because that's not how the greenhouse effect works and G&T are simply, in that section, ignoring radiation physics. In later sections, when they do discuss radiation, they incorrectly dismiss radiative transfer on the grounds that it doesn't conform to thermal conductivity... in essence repeating their original false premise. Again, show me something in their paper which proves that the greenhouse effect does not exist. You insist it is in there, but have repeatedly refused to cite it.
  25. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    theendisfar, please follow the comment policy: "No off topic comments. Stick to the subject at hand. If you have something to say about an unrelated topic, use the Search form in the left margin to find the appropriate page."
  26. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne, i didn't reply to your accuse to Smith on the air molecule behaviour because it's irrelevant to our discussion. Not sure what you are quoting. I assume it was this: "Molecules don't know what the local temperature is, so "hot" molecules happily travel from cold regions to hot ones, and vice versa." If you have followed the whole reasoning, he was contrasting single molecule behaviour with macroscopic "averages". In this sense, it's absolutely correct and does not violate any law of thermodynamics. Indeed, temperature itself is a thermodynamic quantity and can be properly defined only as an ensamble average. Let me quote from a good old book (Terrel L. Hill, "Statistical Thermodynamics", chapter 1, the very first paragraph): "The object of thermodynamics is to derive mathematical relations which connect different experimental properties of macroscopic systems in equilibrium - systems containing many molecules, of the order of, say, 10^20 or more. However useful, these interconnections of thermodynamics give us no information at all concerning the interpretation or explanation, on a molecular level, of the observed experimental properties." With this in mind, we can go one step further and easily see that there's no violation of any law of thermodynamics (as too often claimed in certain quarters) when a molecule radiate a photon toward a warm object simply because thermodynamics does not apply at the single molecule level. A molecule will not choose the direction of the emitted photon, it can not. Still, thermodynamics applies at the macroscopic level, or, in terms of statistical thermodynamics, to the ensamble averages of the mechanical or thermodynamic quantities. So it should come as no surprise that the net overall flux will always be in the right direction.
  27. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Riccardo Point well made ..For this discussion to go anywhere you need to deal with the actual physics involved. I have to sign off as time presses. But what did you think of Smiths howler?- surely we can agree on that.
  28. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    CBDunkerson You imply by saying ... we must look at two factors; thermal conductivity and isochoric thermal diffusivity..that G&T do not deal with EM radiation. Most of their paper deals with em radiation! To selectively misquote and then prove a point will not further anyone's understanding.
  29. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne, you're actually missing that many climatologists have a PhD in Physics. You are also missing that one needs to know, for example, atmospheric physics as well. As i'm sure you may notice, i've actually read several opinion including Staples's and commented on the physics behind it. For this discussion to go anywhere you need to deal with the actual physics involved, not just use this sort of propaganda-based claims like "climatologists need to study physics".
  30. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Tom Dayton Looked at your long list of refutations-two! The AP Smith one(above) and a German one that Eli Rabitt was going to use but since apparently has backed off) Interestingly at the end of the blog Eli asks for help from someone who knows some Physics ..Eli thinks it good that anyone writing on climate understand basic thermo. Other than that a passing acquaintance with the data and the basics helps a heap... Riccardo You seem to have looked at the AP Smith website, what a howling mistake he makes about gases in a gravitational field! At first I thought it was a hasty slip up but he seems to be persisting in it. If you have any basic knowledge of Physics you will know its embarrassing. Further you state... "This is really graduate level climatology." Perhaps they should teach more Physics in the climatology classes and elementary mistakes will be reduced. I would recommend anyone with an interest in this topic to read the A P Smith blog as the arguments are teased out and positions clarified.
  31. There's no empirical evidence
    Argus, did you ever imagined that there's not just CO2 around? Did you noticed that you (as opposed to the climatologists) are using the wrong logic that because there has been warming in the past (not anthropogenic for sure) current warming can not be due to CO2? Did ever read a general climate paper where all of what you cite ("e.g. the oceans warm up, more water vapour in the atmosphere, more clouds, less radiation reaches the surface") are give the due importance? Can you really belive it's so easy to dismiss a theory that has passed through decades of scientific scrutiny before being widely accepted?
  32. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Suibhne, International Journal of Modern Physics B? Nope, never heard of it. Not surprising given its 2008 impact factor of 0.558. Still, an actual indexed scientific journal published G&T. How very sad for them. I already listed some of the paper's blatant flaws. I note that you still refuse to cite a single passage in support of your claim that it disproves the 'greenhouse effect'. So hey, allow me; In section 1.1 G&T assert that in determining whether CO2 is warming the planet we must look at two factors; thermal conductivity and isochoric thermal diffusivity... which are basically factors for determining the transfer of heat between molecules. What G&T leave out is that molecules can also be heated by electromagnetic radiation. In short, they start from a first principle of ignoring the central cause of greenhouse warming. Their claim would also mean that heat from the Sun only reaches Earth by being conducted from one molecule to the next... NOT in the form of EM radiation. Which is, of course, pure idiocy. That's page one. It goes downhill from there.
  33. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne, Staples, in turn, has his share of misinterpretation of how the radiative balance of the surface-atmosphere system works. Trying to falsify the atmospheric greenhouse effect just because it depends on the number of, he thinks, arbitrary layers is really straw man. Is this supposed to be the backfire? This is really graduate level climatology. But anyway, "It has been widely refuted in many ways" read those many others if you don't like that one and also look at the basic mistakes in Gerlich paper an average physics student will notice. Hint #1: wrong application of the second law of thermodynamics. Hint #2: the radiative balance and net fluxes Hint #3: thermal conductivity of the atmosphere Don't need to continue, there's clearly much more. Any interested reader will easily find information over the internet or find them by himself in the paper. The real question here should be how come that such a pedantic and aggressive (they talk about "scienti c fraud") paper made it through peer review in Internation Journal of Modern Physics.
  34. There's no empirical evidence
    David Rourke (on 3 December, 2009) is right, and the responses to his posts are wrong! He points out a flaw in the argumentation. Faulty logic should not be used to prove the AGW theory. Those who opposed his criticisms did not understand basic logic. The assertion 'A implies B' says that if A occurs then B also occurs, but it does not prove that B is always caused by A. If we observe B, we cannot be sure that the reason is A. Example: We know that the burning of tyres causes black smoke, but if we see black smoke in the distance, we do not know that it comes from tyres burning. There could be other sources. An example from using climate data: there was a major period of continuous global warming from 1900 to 1940. This would seem to prove that our grandparent generation burned maybe even more oil and coal than we have done the last 50 years, since global warming obviously did occur, and since increased CO2 in the atmosphere is known to cause global warming. But they did not! They added considerably less CO2 than we do now. So there must be other explanations to global warming that have to be considered. By the same token there could be other mechanisms in action that counteract the effect of the (documented) increase in CO2, e.g. the oceans warm up, more water vapour in the atmosphere, more clouds, less radiation reaches the surface - result: global cooling or return to status quo.
  35. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne said, "Until a peer reviewed refutation of it appears then it must be considered to be the best Physics take on the topic. That's the way it works in science I'm afraid." So I take it that means that you accept that all other publications since that time are now the best physics, replacing G&T? They are, after all, newer. This is silly.
  36. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    I knew this was headed towards G&T. Sometimes a paper is just so bad in elementary ways, it isn't worth the trouble of a formal response. Among many errors (and much misplaced arrogance, and irrelevant discussions of glass greenhouses), they seem to think there's a violation of the Second Law in the greenhouse theory. There is not. Heat always flows the right way, in the theory.
  37. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne, the Gerlich and Tscheuschner article has been thoroughly discredited in multiple places by multiple people. One list of those is at RealClimate.
  38. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    CBDunkerson The peer reived article you inquired about G. Gerlich, R. D. Tscheuschner: Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics. International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (30 January 2009), 275-364 Perhaps if you have any specific criticism after reading the paper you can set these out in a formal way.
  39. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
    Having only just heard of the D-K effect, and not yet read their paper, and obviously very prone to it myself, I'm going to postulate the existence of a reverse D-K effect that might affect a whole field of study. It seems possible, and I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is true with climate science, that whole subject areas attract the less academically able, and that the individuals in this area see themselves as good academics with sound reasoning skills just because they are as good as their close colleagues.
  40. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Suibhne wrote, "Until a peer reviewed refutation of it appears then it must be considered to be the best Physics take on the topic. That's the way it works in science I'm afraid." No... it really isn't. As has been explained on this site before, 'peer review' does not mean 'proven true' or even 'best available science'. What it is SUPPOSED to mean is that the text has been reviewed to identify and eliminate any obvious errors and conforms to standard scientific practice. You still haven't said where it was published, but it can't have been in any journal with any kind of solid reputation because that study is just complete nonsense. Note that I cited specific errors and failings in the text and you respond only with an unfounded assertion of the paper's 'truth'. Again, CITE where exactly it disproves greenhouse warming. You claim it does this, so you must be able to show where.
  41. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
    What do you call the effect when you find you have more experience, wisdom, insight, brains, etc., than anyone else around you? It can be very lonely "up" here on Mt. Olympus.
  42. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
    I have to thank the editor for responding to my comment. But again I have problems with the graph. The quantity being reported is now gigatonnes of CO2, not atmospheric concentration. And the time scale is shrunken even more, now going back to 1000AD. Secondly it is comparing a hypothesis with a fact. There is no way to distinguish CO2 emitted by humans from CO2 occurring from non-human activities. Second, the amount of CO2 emitted by humans graphs follows the global population graph. But the global warming hypothesists tend to discount CO2 emitted by humans because it's source is from plants that sequester CO2 and is therefor part of a natural loop that neither increases nor decreases CO2 concentration. I think the graph meant to say, "CO2 increase due to human burning of hydrocarbons previously sequestered from the atmosphere when CO2 levels were much higher than today." I think this somewhat touches on what Ned and Marco said too. There is agreement than that previous CO2 levels did not lead to a runaway global temperature rise, but a limited rise and that driving by the sun has a huge influence on global temperature. We may be seeing that at present. We'll know as the next solar cycle revs up as it is now. If there is a limit to how much CO2 can raise global temperatures we can breath a sigh of relief. There is such a limit in science as CO2 just closes the lower temperature window to re-emission of thermal radiation from earth's surface. So as global temperature rises CO2 has less of an effect on greenhouse warming because the wavelengths of the thermal IR are higher than the notch effect CO2 has. In other words as the temperature rises CO2 becomes transparent to the emitted radiation and therefore becomes less of a greenhouse gas. The Dunning-Kruger effect brings to mind what writers thousands of years ago already recognized. "How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand..." Psalm 139:17-18 In other words the writer was admitting he was unskilled and God had skill.
  43. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Riccardo The "refutation" you cite is a non peer review paper by Arthur P Smith If you go to his own websites you will find that this attack have backfired. A contributor to this threads has been Fred Staples a Physicist whose was responsible for heat transfer in a nuclear power plant. He patiently and with good manners demolishes this attack because his understanding of thermodynamics is far superior. If you Google Arthur p Smith, not spaghetti,the arrogance of physicists, you can catch up with his thread. Currently Smith has boxed himself into a corner by saying that a gas molecule moving upwards in the Earths Gravitational Field would remain at a constant temperature. This as any high school physics student knows is rubbish. Typical High School Physics Question is" using the kinetic theory of gases calculate the rms speed of a N2 molecule at STP and if this molecule moved vertically upwards how high would it get, what would happen to the temperature as it went higher" (Answers 517m/s,13.6Km,drops constantly)
  44. Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    Tamino on OpenMind did a post on how much time was needed to establish a trend from GISS data. Tamino really knows his stuff! http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/how-long/
  45. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    suibhne, Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper was originaly an arxiv papaer in 2007. It has been widely refuted in many ways (for example here). It took two years to get published somewhere but it's essentially the same. There are two ways of refuting a paper, comment on it or ignore it. Now the latter will suffice.
  46. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    # CBDunkerson 133 I'm afraid it was published in a Physics journal which is perhaps why you haven't heard of it. Until a peer reviewed refutation of it appears then it must be considered to be the best Physics take on the topic. That's the way it works in science I'm afraid. Just repeating to yourself "it is rubbish" ten or more times will not alter the situation
  47. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    That G&T stupidity actually got published? In a real scientific journal? I'm gonna guess GRL, E&E, or something I've never heard of before... and probably never will again. I remember when they first self published it a couple of years ago. After about 50 pages it got to be too much, but I remember they couldn't figure out a simple effective temperature equation (objecting that factors of 0.7, which comes from albedo, and 0.25, from 1/r^2, were just 'made up'), insisted (repeatedly ad nauseum) that since the 'greenhouse effect' does not work the same way as an actual greenhouse it cannot exist, and claimed that Fourier and Tyndall never said anything about gases warming the planet - that was just 'made up' by Arrhenius. It is a work of pure denial... complete with lengthy screeds against 'evil warmists'. It reads like one of Bob Armstrong's 'everyone who has ever studied science other than me is an idiot' posts rather than any kind of scientific study. Please, if you think there is ANY validity to that paper, quote or summarize some argument from there which ISN'T completely ridiculous.
  48. Dikran Marsupial at 20:13 PM on 17 February 2010
    Did Phil Jones really say global warming ended in 1995?
    Tobjoyce@53 says: "Statistical significance is given usually as a p-value which is the probability that the data occurred by chance alone." no! The p-value is the probability of observing a statistic as extreme as that observed, assuming the null hypothesis is true, by chance in a large number of independent replications of the experiment. That is not the same as the probability that *this* data occurred by chance (as that would be the probability that the null hypothesis is true). Indeed frequentist approaches fundamentally can't answer such questions, they can only make statements about things like the proportion of events of a particular nature in a large number of replications of an experiment. There is nothing wrong with that per-se, but it is important to view the result of the test within the statistical framework in which was conducted, or misunderstandings will arise. JonMoseley (3) made essentially just that error, treating the lack of statistical significance as demonstrating the null hypothesis to be true (or at least highly likely to be true), and then mistakenly claiming that the models were wrong for not also supporting the null hypothesis (not that he was right about that either). Anyway, don't listen to me, I am a Bayesian so I may have strong prior beliefs about frequentist significacnce testing! ;o)
  49. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    Correction to 131 Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner
  50. Is CO2 a pollutant?
    carrot eater 129 The peer reviewed Gerhard and Tscheuschner paper removed the "Greenhouse Effect" (which labelled co2 as a threat to humanity) from the realms of serious scientific study. Since it was published in March 2009 there has been no peer reviewed refutation of their position If a successful challenge to G&T is to happen I would expect it to come from say a Professor specialising in Heat Transfer Thermodynamics

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