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Glenn Tamblyn at 11:31 AM on 10 February 2015Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
Quick, following on from the previous thread
Your commenter is full of it. It is not Raman Scattering. It is molecular absorption spectroscopy. And CO2 absorbs over an absorption range not just a single frequency. Across that range there are 10's of thousands of individual absorption lines.
Point your 'expert' here http://www.spectralcalc.com/spectral_browser/db_intensity.php
SpectralCalc plots line strength data for any of the gases in the HiTran spectroscopic database. Have him select CO2, Microns rather than wavenumber and a range from say 5 to 20 microns then plot.
He can then look at the detailed tabulated data for the plot extracted from HiTran at this link: http://www.spectralcalc.com/spectral_browser/db_data.php
If he still has an issue then he needs to take it up with the Cambridge Research Laboratory at Harvard and the US Defense Dept who have been behind the acumlation of data in Hitran for many years - currently data on 43 different gases, 120 isotopologues and over 7 million individual absorption lines
And if he does question the lab they will politely hand him his ignorant head on a platter!
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denisaf at 09:08 AM on 10 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
Even if widespread decisions are made to reduce the use of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible by shutting down much of the existing infrastructure, the concentration level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and absorption in the oceans will continue to rise. Irreversible global (atmoshere and ocean) warming will continue. There is no limit in a applicable time scale.The 2 degree Celsius is only an indicative figure for discussion purposes. It would be more useful if discussions centred on what can reasonably be done to adapt to the inevitable climate change and ocean acidification.
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scaddenp at 07:58 AM on 10 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
I have responded in a more appropriate thread here. Please do not have any further responses to Quick on this thread. Quick's issue is not about CO2 lagging temperature.
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scaddenp at 07:55 AM on 10 February 2015Increasing CO2 has little to no effect
Replying to comment from here.
The very basics of science is comparing what your hypothesis predicts to observation.
"What they say" - is the calculated spectrum of IR with increased CO2.
The observation is what is actually measured of the CO2. See article above and graphs in comments for these comparison. I think it is simply that you person misunderstands the physics. See also "The CO2 effect is saturated" which might illuminate the basis of misunderstanding.
But in short, the observations of IR spectra, whether DLR observed at the surface or OLR observed from space, fit what is expected from theory for increased CO2.
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DSL at 07:32 AM on 10 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
Did the guy cite any sources for his claims about absorption/emission spectra?
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Quick at 07:26 AM on 10 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
What do you guys make of this? The guy who posted it is trying to promote himself as a rogue genius or something.
"First off they claim that CO2 is causing warming by absorbing infrared. They say it's preventing infrared that's in the infrared window range from being radiated away. But CO2 only absorbs 2 wavelengths of IR in that range. One peak at 9.4 microns and the other at 10.4 microns. Both peaks have absorption coefficients just less than 1%. Wien's displacement law shows temperatures radiating those wavelengths to be 95.25 deg F and 41.9 deg F. So it doesn't exactly involve much energy. Not only that, but one of those is BELOW mean global temperatures. Basically, they're trying to claim that a heater that only gets up to 95 deg F and radiates at 1% efficiency is warming the planet. LOL Hardly.
The next thing they claim is that CO2 "absorbs" and then "re-emits" photons of IR coming from the surface, and THAT action "traps" heat by sending some of those IR photons heading back towards the surface. What they're desperately trying to describe is something called Stokes-Raman scattering, which is a type of inelastic scattering. Unfortunately for the AGW cult, there are only 2 wavelengths that get scattered by CO2, one at 7.20 microns and another at 7.78 microns. NEITHER of which are in the infrared window range. So that process doesn't stop ANY infrared from being radiated away.
It gets even more interesting when you know how the process works. It works like this: A photon of 7.49 microns interacts with a photon that's ALREADY vibrating at the correct temperature (kinetic energy) as the photon. The photon gives up a bit of energy to the molecule which causes the molecule to now have a rovibrational component rather that just a vibrational component and the photon is scattered away at a lower energy level; now at 7.78 microns. This is called the Stokes shift.
The next photon that's at 7.49 microns that interacts with that molecule will now absorb just a bit of energy (from the new rotational component) and will be scattered away at a slightly higher energy level; now at 7.20 microns. This is called the anti-Stokes shift. The molecule will then lose some energy, will stop rotating, and will drop back down to its original vibrational mode.
The really emotional...err...I mean bizarre thing is, 7.49 microns isn't coming from the ground. The ground radiates between 8 and 14 microns. So 7.49 microns is INCOMING infrared. So the process is actually scattering some INCOMING infrared back out. The claim that it's scattering IR coming from the ground is a BIG LIE.
I also said that the molecule must ALREADY be at the temperature (kinetic energy) of the photon. The temperature needed to scatter a photon that's at 7.49 microns is 236.76 deg F. On a hot day, only about 1 in 10 million CO2 molecules would be at that precise temp. On a cold day, even less. Perhaps 1 in every 30 million CO2 molecules."
Moderator Response:[JH] Exactly where was this posted?
We want to check this out because recently we've had a spate of commenters who are attempting to disguise why they are posting denier memes on our comment threads.
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michael sweet at 07:20 AM on 10 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Kevin,
For your next video you might consider showing the sea temperature adjustments as a contrast to the land ones. If you say "Does it make sense to adjust the land temperature to increase the slope when you adjust the sea temeprature to lower the slope more at the same time?" I am sure you will phrase it better than me.
Sugggesting the scientists are fudging the land data does not stand up to evaluation when the sea temperature is brought into the argument.
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scaddenp at 06:37 AM on 10 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
I think it remarkably unlikely that you are going to persuade people to change their lifestyle etc to reduce climate change. Shifting people's political values is very hard. What most strategies are about is pricing the externalities associated with burning fossil fuel, so that non-carbon fuels are cheaper. This takes political will and yes it probably means you will pay more for your energy (which then encourages efficiency). The number one thing to do is stop burning coal. You will have to find a way to live without petroleum at some point anyway.
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PluviAL at 03:00 AM on 10 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
Burning European fossil fuel reserves and resources because it reduces transportation costs and because it is a large market, however, it looks suspicious and self serving. I don't think it is at all, they are the most proactive and aware, it just looks that way. Similarly, feedback loops could be greater factors at a lower temperature than expected. Look at deglaciation, IPCC forecasts went from 30 cm of SLR to 95 in a matter of a decade. The earth could be more forgiving, but it could be more angry making our efforts insignificant. We should redouble our efforts and try most avenues, not just conventional efforts. We must stay away from crazy plans, sorry I am not being pejorative, aerosols are a bit crazy for me. I realize Pluvinergy is too complex for me to communicate, but we now have a patent on the works to produce sufficient water to adjust sea level. I know that sounds crazier, but no body has a better plan, and this is amazingly simple, the one big question is if the dry land has suffecient storage, and absorption capacity. Producing the water is easy, the energy is there, is the simplest atmospheric architecture to casue mini-atmospheric rivers in tropical areas to export to subtropical zones. Initial estimates are that the land can accomodate 7.2 million km3, for 20m slr, but that has yet to be peer-considered.
Moderator Response:[PS] Please refrain from repeated pushing of pluvialenergy. This adds up to excessive repetition in violation of comments policy and is perilously close to spam.
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Kevin C at 02:58 AM on 10 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
David: The GHCN tool is unfinished, frequently broken, and not ready for release, I'm not sure how you got the link. I've removed it now.
It's mainly meant as a teaching tool. The rather more sophisticated SkS tool can do a better job, and can do land-ocean series.
Tom: The HadSST3 raw data are available as grids from Hadley. I can give you a temperature series if you want, or you will shortly be able calculate it in the SkS tool in CRU mode (note it at this moment it doesn't read the latest Hadley SST files, I've sent a fix which will hopefully be online later today).
Here is a comparison of the series with and without the SST adjustment. It is indeed in the opposite direction and much larger than the land adjustment:
Here are the land-only results from Lawrimore Figure 16:
I may be able to get the original data for this figure if you want it.
Table 4 is this data (via Nick, adjusted to make the units match):
Trend (°C/decade) Unadjusted Adjusted 1880–2010 0.061 0.079 1901–2010 0.070 0.091 1951–2010 0.16 0.18 1981–2010 0.27 0.27
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One Planet Only Forever at 01:47 AM on 10 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
sgbotsford,
The fact that many people can claim they will not be affected by the impacts of their pursuit of maximum personal comfort, convenience, wealth, and pleasure is not a justification for their preferences. That way of thinking is just a poor excuse to behave unacceptably. It is the equivalent of saying "I enjoy want I want even though I understand all others cannot equally enjoy it into the distant future and even though I understand my enjoyment creates problems others will have to deal with".
And anyone who demands that until it is cheaper and easier for them to enjoy more than they have gotten accustomed to getting away with does not need to be 'negotiated with'. Their opinion is not relevant to the determination of what needs to be done, and it is not relevant to the continuing development of the understanding of what is going on. Those type of people only deserve the choice to become more considerate, aware and better understanding of what is going on.
The development of a sustainable economy actually requires much of the perceive current wealth and prosperity to be seen as being undeserved. Excess damaging consumption and waste, particularly the damaging wasteful burning of non-renewable buried hydrocarbons has no place in the future regardless of current perceptions of popularity and profitability.
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sgbotsford at 00:03 AM on 10 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
I have a friend who is a denier. Calls this a 'religious' argument between the conservative capitalists (deniers) and the liberal/controlled economy (believers)
One point he makes that I think is valid for a lot of people out there:
* In much of the world there is a 10-15 C daily change.
* On top of that a 30-60 degree yearly change.
* Why all this fuss about 1-2 degrees?
Point 2:
Currently the oceans are rising at about 3 mm/year. Assume that the average sea coast area has a slope of 1% A 3 mm rise translates to about a foot. Given that any given storm can leave or take 20 feet of shore, who cares about a foot? Yes, if you live on a barrier island, you may want to sell to some denier. But a foot a year, isn't unreasonable to cope with.
Recently a graph of ocean temperatures made the rounds, but the units were 1022 J. Some calcuation showed that this is something like 0.003 C. The range on the whole graph was 0.08 C. After reading the sidebar article on measuring deep ocean temperatures, I don't find the article convincing.
You catch the drift: For most people it's an intellectual exercise. It doesn't affect them. They don't see 1 or 2 or even 5 degrees as making a real difference.
To counter this:
1. Find comparable regions where the only difference is 2 C in average temperature. Ideally it should be 2 different for each month. They should have similar rain fall patterns too. SHOW people what 2 degrees means with pictures. Do the same with 5 degrees.
2. Repeat this exercise, but use the change in regimes predicted by the current GCMs. (Most, I think predict more of the warming in winter, and more of the warming at high latitudes.
3. Grovel the climate databases, and for the N largest cities in each country, find a matching location for x degrees warmer by the two standards above.
This makes it real. It's not just a number anymore, it's pictures.
Consider: Most people won't change their diet to extend their life.
Most people will not do a retrofit on their house unless it pays back in under 3 years.
I considered installing 5 kW of grid tied PV on my roof. Would cost me about 15K to do this. In our climate it would generate about 6000 kWh/yr, worth about $480 at current prices. That's a 3% return on investment, not counting lost opportunity costs, and not including maintenance. Power has to get a lot more expensive that 8 c/kWh before I can go this route. (We are billed separately for wire charges and power here.)
***
The second thing that believers need to do is give viable alternatives. You can say the sky is falling, but tell people where to get umbrellas that will shed sky bits.
If you don't do this, then all you do is make people feel anxious for a few minutes, then, when nothing can be done, return to their rut.
Solutions have to be practical on large scales. E.g. Encouraging people to buy electric cars is only going to create a big shortage of lithium. There is not enough lithium to build all electric cars. (And there isn't an electric car out there that will let me make a round trip to Edmonton in winter.)
So: Make it real.
Give a call to action that is do-able.
Moderator Response:[JH] Excessive white space eliminated.
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BBHY at 22:02 PM on 9 February 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #6
"The "D" Word"
Meanwhile, those molecules of CO2 don't care the slightest bit whether people call each other names. They don't care how people feel about politics, science, scientists, taxes, liberals or Al Gore.
Those molecules of CO2 just keep on absorbing infrared heat energy. That's what they do and they are pretty good at it. The subjects that human's use to argue with each other don't mean a thing to the CO2.
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Nick Stokes at 16:02 PM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Thanks, Tom@35. Victor V made the same point about SST here. I guess you are referring to Fig 2 in KevinC's post. Unfortunately, it's harder for SST to pin down (let alone find numbers for) a "raw" dataset, and so is hard to do a corresponding analysis.
Which all illustrates the silliness of the whole adjustments accusation. Adjustment is just the process of trying to a good set of data for global analysis. Relating it to where you start from just depends on whether you started from a good place or not. With both SST and MSU, say, it's really hard (and pointless) to pin down a unique starting point.
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wili at 15:49 PM on 9 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
As a counterpoint to the '14 CEO's...' hopium, consider:
"The looming climate catastrophe."
>>The professional services group PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducts a survey in advance of the annual gathering of the ultra-rich in Davos, Switzerland--the event where the 1,500 most influential CEOs and business leaders from around the planet decide what they consider the 20 most urgent issues to address in the world. As a result of last year's survey, which registered concern for climate change at number 19, with only 10 percent of major business leaders saying it was a problem, PwC didn't bother to list it in this year's survey.
In a separate survey, only 6 percent of respondents invited to Davos said climate change should be addressed by governments.<<
socialistworker.org/2015/02/04/the-looming-climate-catastrophe
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davidsanger at 14:40 PM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Tom@35 You don't need to digitize the data. It is available at Dr. Cowtan's GHCN calculator.
Just select "station" and "add all" and the either "adjusted"or "unadjusted".
For anomalies check the box "aligns stations on common baseline". It does compute each anomaly seriers independently.
For temperature leave the box unchecked. Be sure the "area weighting" box is checked.
Then press calculate and it will add the series to the display. It can only show two series at the same time, but you can easily download the data as textfiles.
I ran a simple least squares on the adjusted anomaly for the past 50 years (1965-2014) and got a trend of +0.0230 degrees a year; the unadjusted anomaly showed a trend of +0.0214 degrees a year.
No doubt as the tool is refined and more people have access others can check these and other results. -
Tom Curtis at 13:33 PM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Nick Stokes @33, glad to have a true expert on the topic particpate. I have my doubts about the 0.05 C figure for global values, primarilly because the SST data is also adjusted, but in the opposite direction. Therefore it does not merely dilute, but cancells the effect of the land station adjustments (in agregate). As a result, depending on the figures and the SST record used, the global adjusted figure will be less than 0.05 C, and may even be negative. Do you have any comments on that?
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Tom Curtis at 13:28 PM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
First, and in response to various comments, the correct way to compare the effect of adjustments, if you are gong to use the endpoint method, is to take (Tfa-Tia)-(Tfu-Tiu), whereTfa is the final tempertaure in the adjusted series, Tia is the i-th temperature in the adjusted series, and likewise in the second parenthesis for the unadjusted series. If you include terms from the adjusted and unadjusted series in the same brackets, a difference in the baseline period could be interpreted as a difference in the actual adjustments. This, I believe, is the point raised by davidsanger, and responded to by Glenn Tamblyn. However, as daveburton used the correct method, ignoring the fallacies of that using endpoints is itself an error, I do not see the relevance.
Second, in response to daveburton @28, I have now digitized the first 21 and the final values in the adjusted and unadjusted series. Applying your method of determining the difference in adjustment, using each of the first 21 years as start points and 2014 as endpoints, I obtained adjustment percentages ranging from 18.85 - 35.9%. The mean value was 25.5% with a standard deviation of 4.98%. You will notice that using 1900 as a start year gives a value 1.97 standard deviations above the mean. In fact, for the first 21 years, 1900 gives the second largest value after 1915. I trust you will concede that an increase almost two standard deviations, or 38.4% over the mean value, is sufficient to consider the 1900 value an outlier. If you do not, I see little further point in this discussion.
Interestingly, the variance in the percentage value is much greater than the variance in the adjustment itself. For the actual adjustment, 1900 shares the maximum adjustment with 1901, at 0.3 which is 1.71, but only 12.7% greater than the mean value (0.266 C). The reason for the increased variance is that by taking a percentage, you introduce the difference between the anomaly values into the term, thereby making the year to year variance in temperature a significant factor, contrary to both of our claims above.
Please note that the temperture trend is essentially zero over the first 21 years (0.0022 C/decade adjusted; -0.005 C/decade unadjusted), so while year to year variability is, the trend is not a significant factor when analyzing the adjusted percentages.
This brings me to the third point, specifically, there is a crucial difference between "arbitrary" and "cherry picked". 1900 is an arbitrary start year because the fact that it happens to be a centenial year (and hence was chosen as the first year of the data) is a fact relating to human customs, and has no physical significance. Had we used a base eight mathematical system, or had a different religous history in Europe, some other year would have been chosen. In like manner, 1880 is an arbitrary year with regard to the temperature record, being chosen as the first year of the temperature record (for NCDC and GISS) because of historical facts about when and where people started keeping temperature records. Because these years are arbitrary, we need to take great care to avoid endpoint effects which can significantly distort an analysis (as I think I have shown it has distorted yours).
That is quite different from cherry picking, in which an arbitrary endpoint is chosen because it distorts the analysis. So, while 1900 is an arbitrary start point, it is not a cherry pick (and nor have I accused you of cherry picking).
Note further that while 1950 or 50 years ago are also arbitrary endpoints, the choice of an endpoint approximately in that range is not because it is approximately at that time anthropogenic forcings began increasing at a very rapid rate (whereas before hand they had increased slowly, or not at all according to some determinations). Further, that also corresponds to a high point in the AMO so that temperatures increases since them have been decreased by the AMO if affected significantly at all, ensuring that nearly all of the increase since then has been anthropogenic. Further, in terms of understanding the science, 1950 is the year the IPCC chose as the start point of its attribution claim so that if we want to understand how much adjustments affect that claim, we need to use that as the start point. These are the various non-arbitrary reasons for using the shorter period that you have not addressed.
Finally, I intend to fully digitize both the GHCN3 and HadSST3 adjustments on a publicly available spreadsheet, as I think the results will be interesting independently of this discussion. That may, however, take a couple of weeks so I hope you will be patient waiting for the full data that verifies my claims above.
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bjchip at 13:14 PM on 9 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
May want to push that link up as an addendum to the OP.
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bjchip at 13:13 PM on 9 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
Saw it and already started using it.
Many thanks. We are all indebted to you guys for working through the hard stuff.
respectfully
BJ
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Nick Stokes at 13:13 PM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
The effect of adjustment on GHCN V3 trends is gicven by Lawrimore et al, 2011, Table 4. For the century, land only, it typically increases trend from about 0.7 to about 0.9 °C/Cen. Of course, for global that reduces to a difference of about 0.05, which is about what I got here.
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Trevor_S at 12:28 PM on 9 February 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #6
If we want our children to have a healthy future, we need climate solutions now
I always chuckle when I see these sorts of quotes. We have solutions aplenty but as long as people want to fly, refuse to buy green energy off the grid and prefer to drive, and eat plenty of meat, we'll have no implementation of effective mitigation.
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bjchip at 12:05 PM on 9 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
Apologies... I need to remember the bold or underline rather than "all caps" rule. Alas, I learned to do this before there was bold as an option so the habit runs deep. :-)
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bjchip at 12:03 PM on 9 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
Although the current situation appears dire, I do anticipate within the next 15 years, what I think of as "2x4 events" which take the attention of the general public far more forcefully than any scientific result or rhetoric I can muster. Things that tell ordinary people that there is a real problem and, by the way, who is actually lying to them.
Those events will trigger a rise of "Green" principles in politics and "Green" parties to power... but not perhaps the same folks as we know them now, because the focus on CO2 will be sharper, and there are a lot of people even now who recognize the need to build new nuclear power as well as all the renewables we can muster ( Unless we get good, cheap energy storage systems we are going to need nuclear and almost everyone will know that we do ).
...and that will start to happen.
So BAU cannot continue as long as we might fear, even though it WILL continue far longer than we wish. A lot of coal will stay in the ground. Not as much as we wish. IMHO we're on for 3 degrees as it stands with a possible 4, but action will start to be taken.
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davidsanger at 11:59 AM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
I understand that the anomalies are based on the temperature record for a specific station, Glenn@30 , but my point, as @scaddep@31 noted, was that if you look at unadjusted anomalies then you need to recalculate the baseline using unadjusted temperatures.
Looking at Dr. Cowtan's source data it is indeed evident that is what he has done. -
Tom Curtis at 09:19 AM on 9 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
amhartley @5, what proportion those 43,000 people are paying extra to have the carbon emissions from their flight offset? It seems to me that without that information, any accusations of inconsistency are making large assumptions - that the attendees are being condemned not because of what they have done but because of what the deniers want them to have done. Certainly they have form in that regard, having made similar complaints about attendance of the AGU, while totally ignoring the stunning "green" credentials of the Moscone center where the AGU was held.
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amhartley at 07:13 AM on 9 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
Glad to see talk of optimism for the Paris talks. I do wonder, though, why, acc to Tom Miles (Reuters) today, 20,000 delegates, that many guests, & 3,000 journalists need to attend.
A question I often see from climate science deniers is, if the climate scientists & the pols who believe their message really subscribe to the idea that climate change is real & will hurt many people, then, they would curb their own carbon footprints.
When I see that 43,000 people will attend the meetings in Paris, flying in from far-flung locales, I am forced to wonder the same thing. Split over 195 countries, that's 220 attendees per country (on average). Are all these people truly needed & helpful?
Moderator Response:[JH] Would the flights to and from Paris occur if there was no meeting in Paris?
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scaddenp at 06:09 AM on 9 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Glenn, I think the question remains whether the anomaly for the station is calculated against the adjusted or unadjusted mean for that that station. Adjustment will surely change that mean value.
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John Hartz at 05:14 AM on 9 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
bjchip:
As Rob Painting has pointed out in a Moderator's Comment to #19 frenchie, Jochem Marotske & Piers Forseter have publicly responded to Nic Lewis's critque of Marotzke & Forster (2015). Their response is in the form of a guest post on the Ed Hawkins' blog, Climate Lab Book.
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wili at 04:23 AM on 9 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
Thanks for that, MA. But am I reading your chart and statement right? At a given temperature increase, does water expand more under conditions of higher pressure than under conditions of lower pressure??
That seems rather...counterintuitive! Am I missing or misinterpeting something?
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Quick at 02:24 AM on 9 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
@Rob, Glen, Philippe, and Tom.
Thank you, gentlemen! My physics is a bit rusty, so at cursory glance this paper seemed to have some meat, but alas, my instincts prove correct. I knew some of you would have the proper resources readily available. Time to go educate 2 persistent skeptics. Thanks again!
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Glenn Tamblyn at 21:53 PM on 8 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
davidsanger
"If one is going to compare adjusted temperature anomalies to unadjusted temperature anomalies, ought not the unadjsuted temperature anomalies be calculated relative to the unadjusted mean temperature? Otherwise you are calculating an anomaly by comparing an unadjusted temperature to an adjusted mean.
Or am I missing something?"
Yep.
Anomalies aren't calculated relative to a mean, at least not a global mean. For each station the anomaly for any reading from that station is calculated relative to a baseline average for that station. Then these anomalies are averaged (with an area weighting) to give the global mean.
Averaging stations to get a mean then calculating anomalies as differences in the mean is highly vulnerable to issues with station availability. local station biases etc. By basing the analysis on comparisons of a station against it's own base line, many local biases cancel out. You get a more robust result.
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MA Rodger at 20:33 PM on 8 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
daveburton @28.
I'm so sorry. I didn't realise we were playing troll rules. Forgive me while I chase any potential strawman from the scene.
You do not accuse NOAA of error, directly. You do say you are not sure if NOAA are correct or in error. So to be pedantic, you either accuse them of potentially being in error or you have no knowledge in the matter. Yet evidently you do consider the NOAA adjustment of raw temperature data to be an issue, something people are apparently "tryng to defend." This brings much emphasis to the likelihood of you knowing what you are about and also that you strongly countenance an NOAA error to exist. You may hide behind a figleaf of remaining doubt assumed by you for sake of argumentation, but your position is evident. Your position accuses NOAA of error.
You do say you see evidence to support suspicions of wrong doing, of the NOAA being "up to no good" and, as you link to such a comment from here, the location is of no consequence.
I stand by every syllable of my quote that you present @28.
As to your "point," I am not sure what you are about.
The alleged "misconception that NOAA's adjustments made a negligible difference," is surely unfounded. Kevin Cowtan is quoted by me @27 and it is plain to all but you that any "negligable difference" being ascribed to these NOAA adjustements applies to "the last 50 years." Why then do you persist with this "misconception" nonsense by arguing that the "difference" over the last 115 years is not "negligible"? Is this because you want to conflate a non-negligible adjustment with your accusations of error and wrong-doing?
Moderator Response:To better understand what David Burton is attemtping to accomplish on this comment thread, go to: http://www.sealevel.info/Cowtan_unintentionally_vindicates_Booker.html
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daveburton at 14:39 PM on 8 February 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
RH/moderator, thank you for fixing it, and please accept my apology; I'll trim/shrink to 500px in the future.
davidsanger, I'm sorry, I don't understand your question.
Tom Curtis, I don't think it is reasonable for you to characterize starting at the beginning and ending at the end as "arbitrary." I do agree that it would be better to do a regression fit, rather than just using the endpoints, but to do that properly that would require all 228 data points, and digitizing just 48 of them was tedious enough.
If you want to digitize the rest, please do so. You can start where I left off; I've posted a link to all the relevant files.
When you're done, I don't think you should use a linear fit, though. It looks curved to me. I think a quadratic fit would better capture the trend.
To me it looks like the endpoints on the "adjustments" graph are roughly on what would be the quadratic-fit curve. So I think if you do all that work you'll get about the same result. (I've written some Perl code for doing quadratic fits, though; I'd be happy to share it, if you want it.)
The unadjusted temperature curve (for the denominator when calculating the percentage by which adjustments increased reporting) is more complex. It has about three inflection points (around 1925, 1955 & 1995), so a 5th degree polynomial would be needed to fit it, or a spline.
Tom, you also say, "My other points remain unaddressed." I guess you're talking about your argument that it is reasonable to discuss only the warming added by adjustments made to temperature measurements taken during the last 50 years, rather than the full 114. But I thought I did rebut that adequately, when I showed that that was the period for which the adjustments contributed the smallest percentage of warming.
For the ten 70-year periods, the amount by which the adjustments increased the global land surface temperature warming varied from 18.9% to over 700%, and for the full 114 years it was 35%.
Remember the question being addressed in this discussion: was Dr. Cowtan right or wrong when he argued that suspicion about NOAA's adjustments could be dismissed because they resulted in an inconsequential difference in the result? So why, then, if you want to answer that question, would you examine only the period for which those adjustments made the least difference?
That's like a student arguing that, because he only got 7.5% wrong on one of his quizes, he should get an "A" in the course, even though on most of the quizes he got over 30% wrong.
MA Rodger, I agree with your first three sentences. But then you rebutted an "accusation" that you think I made: an "accusation that the adjustments are poorly founded (with heavy hints of conspiracy wafting about to boot)."
Where do you think I made that accusation? Please quote it.When you rebut something that someone hasn't actually said, it's called a "strawman." As I said to Tom Curtis @20, "My point wasn't about motives. I was simply addressing the misconception that NOAA's adjustments made a negligible difference in the reported result. They don't. They make a big difference."
I acknowledge that I have complained (mostly elsewhere) rather bitterly about the habit of the currators of the temperature data at NASA & NOAA of blocking the archiving of data and documents, by various means. I think that's suspicious-looking. But, in truth, I don't know whether the adjustments are right or wrong, and that wasn't my point. My point was simply that the adjustments are far from negligible, so trying to defend them on grounds of supposed negligibility doesn't work.
Moderator Response:[JH] You are now skating on the thin ice of excessive repetition which is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.
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Chris G at 14:12 PM on 8 February 2015The Most Terrifying Papers I Read Last Year
JJA,
I don't really separate the two. I think that, historically, whenever people have a choice between starving and raiding, they raid every time. I don't know if you would consider the unrest in the Middle East as raiding, but it certainly is violence between groups of people.
In my mind, there is a connection between the Russian heat wave of 2010, their failed harvest, their ban on wheat exports, the rising food prices in the Middle East (where the Russians sell most of their wheat), and the food price riots/unrest in Tunisia where the "Arab Spring" started. Others will think it is a thin thread.
I've also had an opportunity to speak with agricultural biologists from Syria; they are experiencing a dramatic decline in rain, making it difficult to get good yields. I suspect the unrest/violence in the region is causally related to declining ability to feed the population. Unfortunately, violence in the region multiplies the problem of trying to grow food.
Here is something from the World Food Programme along these lines.
Basically, the way I see it, heat waves and changes in precipitation patterns will make it more difficult to grow food. Food prices increase. Food is not something that you can go without; so, areas where food costs rise see declines in standards of living. Enough of a decline leads to civil unrest, civil unrest exacerbates the food security problem, and you get what biologists might call an overcorrection in population density.
Glenn,
This will not happen everywhere at once. Areas where food cost is a small fraction of income will be stable far longer than areas where food costs are a large portion of income. Personally, I think we are already seeing the start of the trouble with rising population and crop yield instability.
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Mal Adapted at 13:07 PM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
There is no 'deep sea pressure' mechanism that limits thermal expansion due to temperature rises I am aware of; I'd have to look up in a CRC handbook or something to see if there is any substantial variation in the coefficient of thermal expansion for water vs. pressure which might imply 'deep water' warming would have a lower or higher rate of expansion with heating
It appears that the thermal expansion coefficient of seawater does vary with depth.
Also, according to the IPCC:
Water at higher temperature or under greater pressure (i.e., at greater depth) expands more for a given heat input, so the global average expansion is affected by the distribution of heat within the ocean.
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frenchie at 12:16 PM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
agh, no, I'm wrong.
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Tom Curtis at 11:59 AM on 8 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
Glenn @3, first, that is a good point about the Renewable Energy Target, so if there is a spill, and if Turnbull becomes PM, that is one climate positive. I remain dubious on both of the conditionals, however. While there is no doubt Turnbull is the most electable, and probably the most competent alternative Liberal Party PM, the fact is the National Party (the Liberal Parties coallition partner, for non-Australians) are making very strong noises to the effect that they would rather split the coallition than have Turnbull as PM. That, IMO, would be enough to spook the Liberals against Turnbull, many of whom have been saying quite recently that they would not have Turnbull as PM under any circumstances. In effect, the coallition of factions within the Liberal Party that Abbott put together to roll Turnbull in the first place is still strong enough to keep Turnbull out, especially with the threat of a split coallition to sway the undecides.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 11:31 AM on 8 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
The process involves 2 stages. The party has to have a vote on whether to have a 'spill' - declaring the senior positions vacant. Then they select the candidates to refill those positions.
The spill will be voted on on Tuesday but is unclear whether it will succeed. It looks like it will be a secret ballot which might help more back-bench MP's to be a bit braver. But it isn't certain to succeed.
However if the spill does pass then the odds are stronger that Abbott will be out. The likely successor right now is Malcolm Turnbull as PM and July Bishop as Deputy. Turnbull is a firm believer in Global Warming - he even crossed the floor to vote for the Labor global warming packge. I don't know Bishop's position - I have never heard her speak on the subject but I suspect she is middle of the road.
So if Turnbull gets in, that is a positive. However he isn't a dictator and can only go so far on carbon pricing etc when a large part of his party are opposed.
But he might be able to end the attacks on the Renewable Energy Target (RET) which has been under attack. This has been effective at boosting installations of renewbles both private scale and small utility scale. They new projects have been in limbo since Abbott came to power.
I suspect if he does get in he will take some modest steps then try to build a constituency for more and stronger action both with the public and within the Liberal Party to take that to the next election.
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Tom Curtis at 09:38 AM on 8 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
chriskoz @1, IMO climate change policies had very little to do with the Queensland result, and the ALP is unlikely to move significantly to curtail Qld's coal industry. They will move to prevent dumping of dredge spill on the Great Barier Reef which should slow slightly the expansion of the port at Gladstone, and therefore slightly slow some new coal projects. They may also limit fracking on the Darling Downs. I would not expect any more from them.
The actual reasons Newman got dumped was a percieved (and actual) arrogance, particularly in this determination to privatize all of Qld's publicly owned enterprises despite his consultation process clearly indicating that Queenslanders were against it.
Further, I would not hold my breath waiting for Abbott to be dumped by the Liberal party and any knew prime minister (if he is) will pursue policies inspired by climate denial just as much as Abbott out of necessity to maintain the coalition agreement. In some respects the political news in Australia is good news (IMO), but not as regards climate.
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Tom Curtis at 09:27 AM on 8 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
Quick @456, the first thing to note is that the article is published by Scientific Research Publishing, number 405 on Jeffrey Beal's list of Predatory Publishers. That means that despite the appearance the publisher attempts to give, the article is not in fact peer reviewed. Rather, the article was published on the basis of a very careful peer review of money recieved from the authors to pay for posting it on an internet site (there is no associated print version).
Turning to the paper itself, the core of the paper is found in their equation 2. For the simplest rebutal, it is only necessary to note that the first term on the right hand side of the equation is bα, where "b is the scaling factor determined by the planet’s given surface temperature Ts in degrees Kelvin (for Earth Ts = 288.2 K)".
In simple terms, that means that their equation does not determine the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST). Rather, it requires an arbitrary value to inflate the temperature to whatever value that happens to be. Indeed, as b is arbitrary, raising it to the power of alpha is a needless complication, and simply represent camouflage for the arbitrary nature of the term. Further, as b > 1 for Earth, and >> 1 for Venus, that makes it plain that without this fudge factor, solar radiation plus pressure underpredicts the GMST. Consequently, despite this being purportedly a refutation of the greenhouse effect, they need a greenhouse effect to make their theory work.
The actual value of their fudge factor is 1.093 raised to the power of (γ-1)/γ, where γ is cp/cv, ie, the heat capacity under constant pressure divided by the heat capacity under constant volume. In air, on Earth, cp/cv = 1.4. Therefore, b is raised to the power of (approx) 0.286, so that the combined fudge factor is approximately 1.026.
Clearly that is not enough to account for the greenhouse effect, so they introduce the Earth's angle of precession,ψ, into the denominator of their middle term in a rather complex equation, reducing the denominator by a factor of 0.88, according to their claim (I have not done the maths). Introducing this factor represents, in effect, a claim that tilting an effectively spherical body will increase the amount of sunlight it will intercept by 13.6%. It might be supposed that their is some justification for this in that the Earth is an oblate spheroid - but it is simply not that oblate. More importantly, they include no equation for the oblateness of the sphere in the equation, thus treating all planetary objects as having the same, very large oblateness. As the introduction of the angle of precession cannot be justified in terms of the actual oblateness of the Earth, it is consequently just another fudge factor to account surreptitously for the greenhouse effect. This fudge factor raises the zero greenhouse effect value for GMST from 255.8 K to 264.1 K, or an inflation by a factor of 1.03. Including the first fudge factor raises the non-greenhouse GMST according to their model to 271 K. That is, they predict a GMST 17 K below the actual value. Despite this, in their figure 2 they show the surface temperature at 288 K, which strongly suggest their line in that graph was not calculated using equation 2, contrary to their claim.
You may think I am ignoring the bulk of the paper in this critique. The rest of the paper, however, simply plugs values into equation 2. That is, it assumes there is not greenhouse effect to prove that CO2 has no significant effect on planetary atmospheres.
I do agree with one decision by the authors of this paper. If I had such a dogs breakfast as this paper, I would certainly not submit it to a proper journal for peer review either. But neither would I submit it to the vanity press, for this paper can only deflate the reputations of its authors - however useful it may be as propaganda.
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chriskoz at 09:24 AM on 8 February 20152015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #6B
"One of the world's worst climate villains [Tony Abbott] could soon be booted from office"
Well, the backbenchers and Tony's own colleagues in LNP party, are fearing for their own sake, after the recent spectacular fall of that party in state of QLD:
Queensland state election, 2015
where their leader Campbell Newman, QLD premier, another big hard core climate science denier and coal mining proponent [see e.g. here], often refered in coments here as the man who destroyed PV industry in QLD, lost his seat is disgracefully retiring from politics. The swing against LNP in those election, some 15% state-wide, reached an unprecedented level of 20% in Brisbane districts. At the moment they are counting votes because clear majority in the new parliament did not emerge but I'm sure we'll see the change of government for ALP which is far more likely to secure the required minority support. That outcome would be unthinkable before the election when ALP held just 7 seats in 89-strong parliament.
I don't how much of that swing in QLD public mind can be attributed to science denial by the former ruling LNP party, or to mishandling of other policy issues by LNP. But the particular results indicate the biggest swing was against the disgraced leader Newman. No wonder federal LNP start fearing of their future election time and hanging their fears on science denying leader. I doubt the imminent (and long overdue) leadership change in LNP will result in signifficant policy shifts. But at least Malcolm Turnbull, the main candidate for PM job, does not deny the science.
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PhilippeChantreau at 09:11 AM on 8 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
I haven't read the whole thing and only perused for a preliminary inspection. The paper has all the hallmarks of pseudo-science. The journal is definitely low impact. It does, however, details its review process, accessible through a few links. The list of citations of the paper includes ridiculous stuff like the Landscheidt piece in E&E, as well as the Robinson and Soon thing and an Soon/Baliunas/Robinson piece. The authors cite themselves on multiple occasions, several of these cites are books instead of peer-reviewed papers. In light of all this, I'm sure many will decide there are better uses for their time than reading and analyzing the piece to then explain where it goes wrong.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 08:46 AM on 8 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
Quick
From the introduction to the paper, discussing what they claim the standard model of the GH effect says - "In particular, it assumes that the heat transfer in atmosphere occurs exclusively by radiation."
Megafail right there.
All the climate models include the basic physics that most heat transfer within the lower atmosphere is through conduction and evapotranspiration.
What radiative exchange controls is the external energy balance with space. Ultimately setting the balance temperature for the mid troposphere at around 5 km up. The lapse rate then propogates a temperature profile from that down to the surface.
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frenchie at 08:08 AM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
Many thanks for the link in Mod's response to post 15.
I'm in same boat as bjchip, trying to defend science against knuckleheads, but not really qualified to understand half the issues. But reading the paper... I think even a layman can spot what CA is trying to pull.
Their criticism isn't relevant to the question of model accuracy. It's about the next section, where the authors investigates "contributions of radiative forcing, climate feedback and ocean heat uptake" to the runs.
So even if they were right (which they probably aren't) - their criticism is completely irrelevant to the question of models being accurate.
Is that right? I'm hoping someone who understands this stuff better than me (I'm a carpenter), will be generous enough with their time, to take 5 minutes and verify... please?
Moderator Response:[Rob P] - Haven't been following the latest storm in a teacup, but Marotzke & Forster's reply is up at Ed Hawkins' blog - Climate Lab Book.
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bjchip at 07:39 AM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
Rob - I agree... peer review does that... in the science. I do expect that there will be official and reasoned critiques in the journals and over the next year it will be all sorted... and defended... and if at the end of that time Lewis hasn't submitted, I'll be safe to ignore him... then. It will still be out there, but I will be able to respond by asking why he didn't submit the critique. That is then...
However, in the blogs and forums where I push back at the foolishness today, there is no distinction. If it is published on some blog it is credible to the credulous fools who buy the propaganda of the likes of CEI or the lying not-quite-a-Lord. In most cases I can do the take-down myself. This one is different.
OhSweetMath - Yes exactly
" But is it true? And if so, what does it mean mean for the paper as a whole?"
I am reading now, both the paper (thanks for that link) and the source reference by Forster that Lewis appears to claim makes the logic circular. For me this is apt to take several weeks. I am not a statistician, amateur or otherwise. I have to wade through it all by brute force.
I am not yet clearly seeing the "circular logic" claimed, and until/unless I can understand that I can't argue against it, or worse, possibly decide that it is correct, or more likely and even worse, deciding it is correct in error.
Part of the reason SkS exists is to make sure that people like me don't have to do that all by ourselves. I am relying on one of the statements of the moderator above...
When a formal rebuttal is needed, we will do so either by updating an existing, or by posting a new SkS article
I am not taking Lewis' word for it, but I am not able to simply ignore the critique in the arguments I get into, nor willing to just discard it because of its source.
If I can see errors myself and I usually do (I don't come here hat in hand all that often), I will hurl it away with great force. Reading it however, it appears that the context is enough... if it is correct.
When I say this paper unusable it is in the context of the arguments I am commonly engaged in, not in the context of the science. Context matters.
I want to thank you all for helping as you have. Glad to be able to look at the paper itself. Cautiously optimistic that someone with better tools than I have can help me understand better.
Thanks BJ
Moderator Response:[JH] You are correct, the Lewis critique of the Marotzke paper has gone viral in Deniersville.
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Rob Painting at 06:05 AM on 8 February 2015Meeting two degree climate target means 80 per cent of world's coal is unburnable, study says
Indus56 - Agreed. A 2 degree limit will not save the world's coral reefs for instance. Coral will still exist, but the grand structures they have built, and which harbour an estimated one million marine species, will not.
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Rob Honeycutt at 05:00 AM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
bjchip... Fundamental rule: Peer review trumps blog post.
The CA people think they have a legitimate challenge to the research then they need to get a response through peer review, preferably in the original journal the papers was published in. (And they know this.)
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Rob Honeycutt at 04:52 AM on 8 February 2015CO2 lags temperature
It looks to me like these authors have been trying to promote this strange idea of adiabatic causes for warming for a long time, and have been repeatedly debunked.
http://wah-realitycheck.blogspot.com/2008/09/khilyuk-and-chilingar.html
They even make the completely bizarre claim that increased methane concentrations would result in greater cooling. It's rather loopy stuff they're promoting.
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OSweetMrMath at 04:50 AM on 8 February 2015Claims that climate models overestimate warming are 'unfounded', study shows
bjchip,
So on the one hand, we have a peer-reviewed, published paper. On the other hand, we have someone yelling on the Internet.
Your claim is even though you can't even understand the yelling person, their mere existence is sufficient to nullify the paper. What's the rule here? The winner is the person who yells last? The winner is the person who yells loudest? If you don't require the criticism to be at least understandable, then you are giving up scientific thinking as a criterion for evaluating the argument.
But let's go ahead and evaluate the argument. Nic Lewis says "As is now evident, Marotzke’s equation (3) involves regressing ΔT on a linear function of itself. This circularity fundamentally invalidates the regression model assumptions." Well, that certainly sounds bad. But is it true? And if so, what does it mean mean for the paper as a whole?
Your response here is to complain that Marotzke's paper isn't freely available. Perhaps if it were, you could read it and determine whether Lewis has a valid criticism. This is exactly backward. Lewis is criticizing the paper. It is his responsibility to present enough of Marotzke's argument to show where it fails. You are unlikely to find Lewis's full argument against Marotzke in Lewis's post.
Lewis has no interest in presenting a full argument. A well established denier tactic is to pluck a single statement out of a paper and then proceed to attack this statement with no context. The implication is always that if this statement is incorrect, the entire paper is invalid. By not addressing the paper as a whole, the denier doesn't have to substantiate the invalidity of the paper.
And by pulling the statement out of context, it becomes much easier to loudly attack it. Having set a low goal of challenging a single statement, taken by itself and out of context, the denier doesn't even try to succeed at that goal. All they do is make a lot of noise about that statement, leading the reader to conclude that if there's so much objectionable about the statement, it must be incorrect.
When you declare Marotzke's paper unusable, you give Nic Lewis far more power and credit than he deserves.
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