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Comments 38151 to 38200:
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Dikran Marsupial at 21:56 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, I suspect you are using the refresh or back buttons on your browser, which are resulting in reposts of your previous messages.
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MA Rodger at 21:21 PM on 25 February 2014Humidity is falling
dwm @15.
The information you quoted on the NASA website (linked @14) is titled:-
Humidity Relative to Earth's Temperature 07.20.04
It would perhaps have been better if it said 20th July 2004 but that probably would not make its message less of a honeypot for skeptical argument as its presence on the NASA website could be argued to show continued relevance.
The UN IPCC Assessment Reports stand as a pretty definitive account of the present science. If you are having difficulty with the content of this SkS post, I woud thus recommend you read AR5 Chapter 2 Section 2.5.5 pp206-8.
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nealjking at 21:04 PM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
scaddenp:
Where did you get the graph shown at #55 ?
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dwm at 20:47 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
(-snip-). "History", (-snip-), is anything for which there exists a record. Ice cores make history.
This chart was used for years to prove the driving effect co2 has on temperature, and only after the accuracy of the dating was improved, showing that the co2 increases actually lagged warming, did explainations such as this article begin to evolve.
(-snip-).
Moderator Response:[DB] Inflammatory tone snipped (twice); sloganeering snipped.
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funglestrumpet at 20:03 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
funglestrumpet @ 40
I would never become a proof reader! @ line 8 should read: 'We get no' instead of simply 'We get'. It makes a difference. The other proof reading errors are about par for the course, sorry.
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Anne-Marie Blackburn at 19:58 PM on 25 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
rocketeer - thanks. I'd initally made a reference to the hockey stick but removed it at the last minute. Never mind :)
chriszov, unfortunately the data from Facebook only go back to August 2011 so there was nothing I could do. The acceleration really started around September 2013, which you can glean from figure 1.
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funglestrumpet at 19:27 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Tom Curtis @ 14
I would have thought that this site would not only attract scientists, it would attract scientists with families to protect. Judging by the total lack of support for either your views or for mine, I have to assume that I was wrong on the families bit.
The evidence is hardly hidden. Apart from promises to act, what the global community has achieved compared to what needs to happen is miniscule. You seem to have put yourself into the position of judge and jury as far as the point is concerned. We get "I think", "I believe" or any such phrasing that might indicate that you are just another commenter. No, you, Tom Curtis, have decided to act as spokesman for this site in total. Very democratic!.
I have deliberately delayed my response to see if either of our comments would attract discussion, but sadly, none has so far surfaced, I suppose it is more fun to concentrate on the science instead of taking that science into the political arena which is where it matters. Let's face it, with 97% support for the case that we are in trouble and it is our fault, the science battle is won. The problem is, we are in a war and the science of the issue is only one of its battles, albeit a major one. The danger is, to quote Bob Dylan, that those resisting action to fight climate change will 'win the war after losing every battle.'
I would have thought that if a climate scientist can be shown to have testified to Congress, Parliament, etc. with evidence that they know, or can reasonably be assumed to know, has previously been proven false, then that should attract sanction of some kind. I need hardly add that that should also apply anyone behaving in like manner, particularly including British peers of the realm. If the scientific community are not sufficiently annoyed to rise up and demand action to stop such behaviour when they see it repeated again and again, then it is hardly surprising that the politicians see no reason to take the action we all know to be essential and overdue. On this issue, as with many others, silence can be deafening.
We can all follow your lead, Tom, and snuff out any demand for positive action to shut up those who commit the 'crime' of misinforming those in parliament and even government on the issue of climate change. Or we can rise up and create a situation where the politicians are forced to either support those who have misled them, or act to ensure that they are removed from any position of influence in order to stop them doing so ever again. We would be in a much better place in the fight to combat climate change if we had only managed to treat the scientific 'guns for hire' that so managed to delay action on the tobacco and lung cancer issue.
If the mechanisms to silence those people are not in place, such as stripping them of their scientific credentials, or letters patent for their peerages, then there should be a campaign, and a prominent one to boot, that creates those mechanisms
Or we can continue polishing the science, who knows, we might even achieve 97.5% consensus, while climate change marches inexorably on and the fossil fuel industry and those in its pay laugh all the way to the bank.
I don't think this side of the fence will take any solace in being able to utter the words, "Told you so!" I think our children and grandchildren would prefer a cry of "Phew, that was close. Thank goodness we managed to get the politicians to act, albeit belatedly"
Make no mistake, how we as a species deal with climate change has ramifications way outside that of changes to the climate. There are many issues where public opinion has been swayed away from hard science by a media that is obviously working to a hidden agenda. An agenda which seems to follow what most affects their advertising revenue. How we react to that media and its influence will affect how we deal with those other major issues. We will get nowhere if we just let one person decide for the rest of us with little or no discussion. Judging by this particular comments thread, the portents are not good.
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Dikran Marsupial at 19:01 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm wrote "This chart was used for years to prove the driving effect co2 has on temperature,"
This is simply incorrect, the data shown in the chart provides evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that can act as a feedback mechansim (amplifying the effects of orbital forcing). This is very clearly stated in the article above.
Nobody is claiming that CO2 forcing DRIVES climate change on that particular timescale, so you are just making a straw man argument.
"Regarding the variability of solar energy reaching the earth and whether it is sufficient to cause the warming patterns shown in this chart, I disagree."
Fine, care to provide any evidence to support your disagreement with the scientific mainstream on this one, some calculations perhaps?
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Dikran Marsupial at 18:31 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm wrote "3. In no way did I ever imply that co2 contributed by man does not contribute to warming. We should all know, however, that it would not contribute to much more than 1 degree celcius of warming this century by itself without any feedback loop from water vapor, so to suggest otherwise would be disingenious."
Has anybody suggested otherwise?
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dwm at 18:24 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
To Scaddenp: (-snip-).
(-snip-)?
1. de-glaciation is no more relevant to this thread than the water vapor feedback loop, for which I was scolded for answering someone else about after they brought it up.
2. (-snip-).
3. In no way did I ever imply that co2 contributed by man does not contribute to warming. We should all know, however, that it would not contribute to much more than 1 degree celcius of warming this century by itself without any feedback loop from water vapor, so to suggest otherwise would be disingenious.
Moderator Response:[DB] Inflammatory tone snipped (twice), link to fossil fuel shill site snipped.
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dwm at 18:21 PM on 25 February 2014Humidity is falling
The information I quoted is on the NASA website. Are you suggesting that the research has been "done" now on humidity levels and the issue is completely understood and settled?
As you know, humidity is technically hard to measure accurately at all alititudes for the whole world, and there is not general certainty about what those levels are, or what they have been historically. It is a very weak spot of most current climate models.
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Dikran Marsupial at 18:18 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, I'll ignore your attempts to irritate by use of phrases such as "Despite the scientific equivilant of wrangling and wringing of hands,", which strongly suggest you are not really interested in the answers to your questions and answer them anyway:
"this chart is nothing other than a clear representation that co2 is not driving anything historically."
For the last 400,000 years, excluding the post-industrial rise in CO2, this is essentially true, because CO2 has acted as a feedback mechanism, rather than a forcing, which is what the article actually says, if you bothered to read it. Note the first line is "CO2 didn't initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming.".
However, "history" (I use inverted commas because history doesn't go back 40,000 years, never mind 400,000) goes back rather further than 400,000. This paper for instance discusses the possibility of climate change in part induced by a reduction in atmospheric CO2 as a result of increased chemical weathering following the uplift of the Tibettan platueau in the Cenozoic era. There is also the example of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, where rapid climate change ocurred most plausibly as a result of increases in greenhouse gasses. So your conclusion is incorrect, CO2 has "historically" acted as both a feedback and a forcing, although over the interval covered by the chart it is only acting as a feedback.
"Since you admit to the fact that the amount of solar radiation the earth receives is variable/cyclical, why assume anything other than that (solar) for the changes in temperature, which then cause co2 to go up or down accordingly?"
Because the changes in solar forcing due to Milankovic cycles are far too small to explain the observed changes in temperature. You would know this, had you actually read the article above. "This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation. "
"Often in science, complex theories are built up to support a set of assumptions that are later shown to be wrong. It seems to me that a lot of effort is going on to retrofit data sets to fit theories about co2 as a primary driver of climate, and that this article is a prime example."
This is deeply ironic, given that you obviously didn't read the article, but drew a stong conclusion which is at odds with that of the scientists who have actually studied this topic in detail.
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Tom Curtis at 13:52 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
paulh @37, the first data point on the graph for satellites and radiosondes is 1980. Assume that to be the data point for the average of 1979 (the first year of available data) to 1983. It then follows that the last data point is the five year average 2013 to 2017, which a remarkable average to have in early 2014. Alternatively, assume the last data point is the average from 2010-2014. The the first data point is the average from 1976-1980, which is extraordinary given that the first year of data is 1979 (for satellites).
Any way you cut it, Spencer has averaged across over three years of non-existent data; or he has treated a two year average as being a five year average without notice.
As shonky as that is, however, I do agree that the baselining is even more shonky.
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Chris G at 13:50 PM on 25 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
It is an interesting read so far, but protecting against SQL injection should be as simple as making everything that can come from outside a parameter in the statements to be executed. That way there is no way the server can receive data that look like commands; data always look like data.
Once you've got the name dictionary out of the database, you can substitute pen names for real names everywhere with a short script using tools as simple as awk and sed. Concatenating files with a predictable path name is pretty simple fair as well. This isn't common knowledge, but it isn't exactly a high degree of skill or labor either. I guess I'm chaffing a little at building the hacker up into something more impressive than I've seen evidence for so far.
Nonetheless, this is interesting. It sounds like something motivated by emotion rather than profit. I suspect that they may have actually thought they'd find something nefarious and be able to attach a name to it. I mean, look at the way some people cling to the word "trick"; Mann supposedly "tricked" people by describing in the text how he "hid the decline". Telling people exactly what you've done is a curious way to hide it from them; nonetheless, there are still people who think that. I think that has more to do with their emotional response than rational thought.
P.S. I sympathise with having to work on code that has probably grown beyond anything the original architect envisioned.
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Bob Loblaw at 13:18 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
paulh:
...but the graph Tom shows in #36 starts one year after the data starts (1980 vs. 1979) and it stops the same year the data ends (2014, which is barely under way). If the last value is the five years up to 2014, where does the data come from to get the value for the five years up to 1980?
You can do smoothing with methods that go to the ends of the data, but running means ain't one of them. Tamino has a series of three posts on smoothing. This is the third. You can get to the other by the links at the start of each part.
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paulhtremblay at 12:33 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
@36 Tom Curtis @32 Keith Pickering.
I use rolling (4 week in my case) averages all the time at my work. I don't take an average every 4 weeks. Instead, I calculate a number every week by going back 4 weeks and dividing by 4. So if I averaged weeks 1 through 11, I can still have a 4 week average at week 11 by using weeks 8, 9, 10 and 11. Of course, I would not be able to get a 4 week average for week 1 (unless I have data from the previous year, which in fact I do).
What confuses me is the manipulation Spencer engaged in by using different baselines. Can anyone explain this?(My former boss wanted me to change the scales on graphs to make data look greather or smaller--I refused.)
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chriskoz at 11:09 AM on 25 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
Even though I liked SkS some 2y ago, I don't like the presentation on figure 1. The baseline is at some random number ~4000. As such it suggests the growth rate of "likes" stronger than in the reality. It would be far cleaner and better balanced if its baseline was simply at 0. If you want to show the exponential acceleration of the trend in last two years, show the full history, from 0 likes at time of SkS facebook creation. I'd be interested in such a fuull graph.
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scaddenp at 10:59 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm. This site exists to point readers to what the science actually says about "denier myths" - ie stories being told by people who are in denial about the science is actually saying. I do not think it encourages good debate by labelling people as "deniers" or "warmists" but the myths are what they are.
As such, it is especially appropriate when talking about myths to reference this site because considerable efforts goes into the articles to collect the appropriate science papers about a subject. The whole point is that you dont have to rely on the site - from an article you can go and read the referenced material. Having found the papers, you can put them into Google Scholar to see cites and other discussion.
1/ I did not talk about deglaciation - I talked about the entire aspect of relations between glacial cycle and CO2 which is necessary if you want understand the CO2/temperature relationship in past climate. If you do not understand that then you are not equipped to understand modern relationships.
2/ Read the references there instead. I dont know a better collection of reference material so naturally I point to that.
3/ Absolutely - and as the lag shows, it takes a long time to warm an ocean to the point where that happens and its not some mystery - you pump the numbers into Henry's law plus ocean-mixing rates. Fortunately, we dont have to worry about outgassing this century. The isotopic ratios cannot be ignored however. We are responsible for the extra CO2 in the atmosphere.
And no, fire doesnt mean arson - you instead weigh all the evidence and see which fits the observed data. The sun isnt causing it. The CO2 is not from the ocean. The energy imbalance matches the GHG calculations. There is more backradiation heating the earths surface. The data fits what is more obvious - the tons of fossil fuel we burn is trapping more of the sun's heat at the surface.
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dwm at 10:18 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
Tom - the repeated use of the phrase "denier myth" shows complete bias not conducive to scientific discussion, so I would suggest that you refrain from such inflammatory rhetoric.
By the way, this is not the "appropriate place" to debate de-glaciation.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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dwm at 10:11 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
To scaddenp:
1.this is not the "appropriate place" to debate de-glaciation.
2. the continuous re-referencing of this one website for all of the answers is suspect. I would suggest finding a few other sources in order to seem credible.
3. According to the article above (to quote this website) - "as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere"
Just because there is a fire doesn't mean it's arson.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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Tom Dayton at 09:03 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, please focus on the purpose of this original post. It is to rebut the denier myth that human-caused CO2 rise cannot cause warming, because CO2 rise always only follows temperature rise, as seen in these de-glaciation episodes. This original post successfully rebuts that myth, by showing that CO2 rise was followed by temperature rise. The fact that that CO2 rise was a consequence of a previous temperature rise is irrelevant to rebutting that myth.
By the way, for more details of the mechanism of deglaciations, read the post about Shakun et al.'s 2012 paper.
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Tom Dayton at 08:53 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, for details supporting scaddenp's comment, watch Richard Alley's lecture "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History."
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scaddenp at 08:42 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm - your chart is about what happened in the past in response to solar forcing changes. You won't find anything in any IPCC report that contradicts that. While extremely valuable to understanding climate, it is however not so relevant to the present situation.
1/ You cannot explain the glacial cycle by change in solar alone and albedo. For a start, SH and NH cycles would be antiphased. CO2 is operating as both a feedback and a forcing agent in that cycle. First the changes in solar, but this is then amplified and globalized by GHGs.
2/ If current warming was due to milankovich cycle, then we should be slowly cooling and CO2 dropping. If due to change in sun, then why warming when TSI (measured directly) is stable (see the Its the sun argument).
3/ The change in CO2 in the atmosphere is not from the ocean. The isotopic signature among other things tells you that. Actually the oceans are still absorbing nearly half of our emissions. They will continue to absorb for possibly hundreds of years more before temperature rise causes outgassing.
Science theories have to work with all of the data available not just that which works for a simple explanation. The idea that climate change this time is a natural cycle does not fit the data. It also violates the physics of GHG. And to quote a well known analogy, just because forest fires occur naturally doesnt mean arson cannot happen.
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dwm at 08:20 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
I didn't bring up water vapor, I was replying to DSL, who first referred to the water vapor feedback loop by referring me to a link.
To Dan & Dikran: As I pionted out, the chart we are discussing here goes back 400,000 years and recent history is basically not visible on this scale, so human activity has no bearing on this chart of the lag of co2 levels relative to the earth's temperature. I don't know why you keep bringing that up. Dan either doesn''t understand that or deliberatly tries to misinterperate what I wrote.
Meanwhile, his patronizing attitude ("Starting with an erroneous premise, as you do here, leads you further into error") is wildly off base.
I'll say it again: The chart above shows clearly that more Co2 is given off by the ocean after temperatures become warmer, and less co2 after temperatures become cooler. As Dikran pointed out, there is absolutely nothing erroneous about that. Since man's injection of co2 into the atmosphere has nothing to do with this chart, the only relationship on display is that as the earth's temperature rises, the oceans give up co2, and as temperatures cool, the ocean responds by absorbing co2. Despite the scientific equivilant of wrangling and wringing of hands, this chart is nothing other than a clear representation that co2 is not driving anything historically. Since you admit to the fact that the amount of solar radiation the earth receives is variable/cyclical, why assume anything other than that (solar) for the changes in temperature, which then cause co2 to go up or down accordingly? Often in science, complex theories are built up to support a set of assumptions that are later shown to be wrong. It seems to me that a lot of effort is going on to retrofit data sets to fit theories about co2 as a primary driver of climate, and that this article is a prime example.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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Tom Curtis at 08:04 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
KeithPickering @32, the graph:
You might will as also, how did they get a five year average for the interval 2011-2015 for their final value?
However, what is very clear to me from the grap is that they used different baselines when comparing satellites to radiosondes (balloons), to that which they used when comparing satellites to baloons. Had they used the same short baseline that they used for the satellite/model comparison for the radiosonde/sattelite comparison, it would have lifted the balloon data relative to the satellite and model data by 0.05 C. That would have only slightly decreased the discrepancy between them, but would have clearly shown a disagreement between satellites and radiosondes.
Alternatively, had they used the same long baseline for satellites and models that they used for radiosondes and satellites, that would have decreased the apparent discrepancy of the models to the satellites and radiosondes substantially.
This is a cooked graph. It is designed to distort the presentation so as to suggest a misleading conclusion.
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Esop at 07:44 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I would actually have expected Spencer to try to align more with the reality based side of the ''debate'' rather than doing this. The next El Nino will very likely push the UAH dataset to a new global record, so that would mean that somewhere between 2014 and 2016 there is a very good chance that Spencer/Christy will be thrown under the bus by the ''skeptics''. Unless there is a plan.
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Composer99 at 07:35 AM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner:
I would recommend re-posting this comment on one of the Weekly Digest or Weekly Round-Up threads, which being more-or-less "open threads" are topical for just the sort of thing you have posted, while it is off-topic for this thread.
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mgardner at 06:32 AM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I thought this might be of interest; I hope it can be posted:
NY Times Article on Communication
Alan Alda on his work for Scientific American
Over the years, I must have done around 700 of these interviews, and I felt that in doing them I had stumbled onto something that could help solve a big problem the science community faces.
Which is?
That scientists often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity. They sometimes spray information at us without making that contact that I think is crucial. If a scientist doesn’t have someone next to them, drawing them out, they can easily go into lecture mode. There can be a lot of insider’s jargon.
If they can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances. They won’t fund science. How are scientists going to get money from policy makers, if our leaders and legislators can’t understand what they do?
I heard from one member of Congress that at a meeting with scientists, the members were passing notes to one another: “Do you know what this guy is saying?” “No, do you?”
Moderator Response:[PS] This is offtopic. I would appreciate if you would repost here. Thank you.
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Ian Forrester at 06:11 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Keithpickering, according to Roy Spencer UAH and RSS do not use the same data anymore. UAH switched to the newer NASA Aqua AMSU satellite while RSS use data from the older NOAA-15 satellite. Spencer claims that the older satellite "has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality".
This is what is causing the divergence between the two data sets.
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tlitb1 at 05:08 AM on 25 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
@ 37. Tom Curtis
As such, the two sorts of ratings do not, and cannot compounded into a conglomerate rating as you suggest.
I'd like to assure you that I do not think that the abstract ratings should be merged in any way with the self-ratings. On the contrary, it seems more logical to assume that scientist self-ratings of their papers override, or displaces, the former rating.
I think you agree with on this point since you say:
...on average the pattern of ratings by authors represents a check on the accuracy of both the method of rating papers by abstract alone and on the accuracy of abstract raters.
I.e. by using the author ratings as a 'check' like this, it implies they are trusted to be a reliable bench mark. I don't see anything in Cook et al's methodology for considering errors, or throwing out false answers from the surveyed authors. So by implication they are taken to be the correct categorisation.
So when you say:
In this case, Spencer makes an explicit claim about how he would be rated, a claim which is shown to be false by the actual facts.
I am not sure what actual facts have 'shown' any of his statements as false. Currently the only 'fact' I see is the category 5 rating of his papers' abstract as assessed by the Cook et al authors and bloggers here.
I don't think Spencers contradicted that this has happened has he?
I don't think Spencers statements have been explored thouroughly, but for the sake of argument, if Spencer is now publicly rating his own paper as category 3 I don't see how it can be said to be a false rating, or have any less validity than if he did this within the self-rating process.
Surely the argument here isn't just that Cook et al rated one of Spencers works as category 5 and that is enough to define his stance?
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rocketeer at 04:57 AM on 25 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
It even looks like a Hockey Stick, congratualtions!
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Paul D at 04:50 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Cornwall Alliance - "Earth and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory."
Well the bit - '...are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting...' - is correct but since God has defined the rules of Physics and let us know those rules, we know that the rules can result in harm to humans.In other words it is self regulating and correcting, but that doesn't mean that process will always sustain humans. You would have to deny there was ever an Ice Age to believe that the only outcome good be good for humans.
I think the Cornwall Alliance statement is a creation of the human mind not God.
The problem Spencer has is that he may have to create 'fictions' eventually in order for his religion to match his science. It's already looking like that, which might explain why he and others are getting cornered and becoming more extreme.
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keithpickering at 04:48 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Another huge discrepancy!
Here's Christy & Mcnider's WSJ graph:
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/EG-AD687A_McNid_G_20140220095703.jpg
Note that these are supposed to be 5-year averages. Note that the satellite 5-year average begins in 1980, and ends in 2013.
So how did they get that 5-year average in 1980, when they only had 2 years worth of satellite data in 1980?
I smell a rat.
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keithpickering at 04:40 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Regarding mid-troposphere datasets, it’s important to note that UAH and RSS differ by a factor of three in temperature trend, despite the fact that these two groups use the exact same raw data from the exact same satellites. Thus at least one of these two groups is doing something pretty badly wrong in their analysis. So when you average one good dataset with one bad one, as Christy and Mcnider have done (and as Spencer did before them on his blog), you know for sure you’ve got bad data in the mix.
The same criticism applies to balloon-borne datasets: the underlying data is the same, but it’s being analyized differently by different groups. Thus by averaging you’re putting bad data in with the good.
A far better procedure is to actually look at the way these groups analyze data and figure out who’s doing it best. For example, when you take RSS as the best of the two satellite datasets and RATPAC as the best of the balloon datasets, most of the discrepancy between that and models disappears.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:26 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
sapient fridge - the start date isn't cherry picked in this case as 1979 is the start of the satelite record, ut the use of a single year baseline is still incorrect for the reasons I demonstrated to jsmith on the previous thread.
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Sapient Fridge at 04:20 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith, I think it's the same tricks as described on HotWhopper i.e. they picked a nice big spike in the observation data to "align" the models starting point with. My understanding is that models should be started at a multi-year average temperature - not a particular cherry picked start year e.g. 1979 in this case.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:13 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith, they are essentially using the very same trick I already explained to you here.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:08 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith - Christy and McNider are using the same "on-year baseline" trick that they have been using for quite a while. This is a method used to make the difference between the models and the observations look bigger than it actually is, for details see dana's recent blog post at the Guardian (don't be put off by the title - the stuff about Christy and McNider is the second half of the post after the stuff anout Roy Spencer's unfortunate meltdown). Of course this won't fool anybody that understands how the models work and what the ensemble method does, but it does make great fodder for the media and "skeptic" blogs.
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jsmith at 03:36 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
A recent article in the WSJ by John Christy and Richard McNider (I'm sure many of you know about it) claims that the models predicted more warming than was actually observed. I'll leave it here so that other contributors can explain why it is either misleading or flat-out wrong. The image I am referring to is entitled "Warming Predictions vs. the Real World". I would just add the image, but I can't figure out how, so here's the article.
Moderator Response:[RH] Hotlinked url.
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Jim Eager at 02:56 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Elmwood, it could just be the evolution of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, since the Carbonist Barons seem to see themselves as the new Monarchy.
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Tom Dayton at 02:10 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, I replied to you on an appropriate water vapor thread.
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Tom Dayton at 02:08 AM on 25 February 2014Humidity is falling
dwm: The NASA press release you quoted was written in 2004--ten years ago, and one of the authors was Dessler, whose more recent work is cited in the orginal post at the top of this thread you are reading now.
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Joel_Huberman at 01:06 AM on 25 February 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #8
What is meant by "TCP"?
Moderator Response:[JH] TCP = The Consensus Project undertaken by the all-volunteer, SkS author team lead by John Cook.
The TCP culminated in the publication of the peer-reviewed paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 2013; 8 (2): 024024 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:48 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Reflecting on the Parking Fees point in my list of things fought against @27, it is very pertinent to the possible actions regarding CO2.
Parking is a limited opportuity that everyone tries to enjoy. But it is actually something that needs to be discouraged until the use of private vehicles is sustainable, something that everyone can choose to do forever.
However, a parking fee is only addressing part of the issue, the fighting over the limited opportunity. And it addresses it in a socially unacceptable way, by saying those with more money get the right to benefit from doing the thing that only a few can be allowed to do. A better solution would be much more effective ad affprdable public transportation systems (subsidized by taxation of the wealthier people who want to park). But even that better solution creates the socially unacceptable desires to be like the wealthy and be able to do unacceptable things.
A focus on parking, like a focus on CO2, can become a distraction from the bigger issue of the wealthy needing to be the leaders toward totally sustainable living.
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:34 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Correction of my @27 comment: My list is a muddled mix of unacceptable things that are fought for, and actions to try to limit unacceptable things that are fought against
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:30 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Spencer's participation in the Cornwall Alliance appears to indicate that his Doctorate of Philosophy is in Spiritual Reflections that cannot be proven or disproved, just be discussed for as long as some are willing to potentially believe them.
That explains his persistence at a hobby he has little evidence of skill in, climate science.
However, his person view that "God has ensured that Humanity can do no wrong" contradicts the clearly established and open admission of the fallibility of humans and the need many have to confess their sins. And it is not likely to be the motivation for his persistence in arguing against climate science (he is not participating in developing the fullest and best understanding. He is clearly struggling to argue against that effort.
There has always been a strong motivation in some people to disbelieve that benefiting from burning fossil fuels was unacceptable. It fits the pattern of reluctance to accept any new information and better understanding that indicates the unacceptability of what a person is accustomed to enjoy getting away with. As examples of this obvious and powerful motivation to dismiss new information and discredit those attempting to lead to a more sustainable society and economic arrangement I offer the following unacceptable things that are persistently fought against:
- driving after drinking
- speeding
- newly established parking fees
- smoking in public places
- high-fructose corn syrup
- pesticides and herbicides used for pleasure or convenience
- antibiotic use to deal with the problems developed by cows fed grains to make them grow quicker. Feeding grain to make cows grow quicker also leads to greater risk of contaminated meat because the bowels of those cows contain compounds poisonous to humans.
- non-Caucasians are equal and acceptable (and the versions that have struggled to be applied in many other cultures).
- non-Christians are equal and acceptable (and the versions that have struggled to be applied in many other cultures)
- private ownership of killing devices and carrying them in public is unacceptable.
The motivation of Spencer and others is clear. Their interest is not in the Science, it is abusing their understanding of the popularity of Non-Science to prolong the ability of some people to benefit more and longer from unacceptable attitudes and behaviours. Al Gore may be best known for "The Inconvenient Truth", but his book "The Assault on Reason" is more pertinent to the climate science 'debate' (and calling it a debate is clearly debatable)
The actions of the contrarians are unsustainable and damaging, just like the popular and profitable activities they persistently struggle to defend. The sooner they are unable to get away with the unacceptable things they want to get away with the better it will be for everyone else.
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I’m aware of that, nealjking. My calculations only considered transmittance of the original radiation entering the path of air, not re-emission within the air itself. That, combined with the cooling and thinning air with altitude, is a crucial part of the non-saturation argument, as Glenn Tamblyn pointed out in the blog post.
If the only radiation escaping to space came directly from the surface while the atmosphere only absorbed without re-emitting, much of the radiation shown in the MODTRAN graph in @67 would be virtually zero. -
Dikran Marsupial at 20:49 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm wrote "All the data shows is that as temperature increases, the oceans breath out co2, then as temperatures decrease, they inhale and store it until it heats up again."
This is basically true, but only if temperature is the only thing that is changing. An important feature of the science that is missing here is that the uptake of CO2 into the oceans is also governed by the difference in partial pressure between the atmosphere and the surface ocean. If the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the solubility of CO2 in the oceans also increases. Fossil fuel emissions have caused atmospheric CO2 concentrations to rise, which in turn has resulted in a strengthening of the oceanic sink. The fact that atmospheric CO2 levels have only risen at about half the rate of anthropogenic emissions shows that the effect of the change in the difference in partial pressure dominates the effect due to the increase in temperature.Thus, as Daniel correctly pointed out, we know for sure that the oceans are not the source of the post-industrial rise in CO2 (in fact the oceans have been opposing the rise by taking in more CO2 than it emits).
The water-vapour feedback mechanism seems to be off-topic for this article, so if you want to discuss that, please take the discussion elsewhere on SkS.
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dwm at 20:39 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
To make my point completely clear, also from the NASA article:
"Using the UARS data to actually quantify both specific humidity and relative humidity, the researchers found, while water vapor does increase with temperature in the upper troposphere, the feedback effect is not as strong as models have predicted. "The increases in water vapor with warmer temperatures are not large enough to maintain a constant relative humidity"
Moderator Response:[TD] An appropriate place to discuss water vapor is What Does the Full Body of Evidence Tell Us About Water Vapor?
Anybody who replies to dwm about this topic in future, please do so there, not here.
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dwm at 20:21 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
The data on this page shows co2 rising after (lagging, as in the title) temperature rises, and vice versa. That's "all we know." I didn't say "the" source, the data shows that the oceans are a source. The data on this page is a historical record going back thousands of years and has nothing to do with anthropogenic co2 production. Your erroneous reply avoids the point of what I wrote: that "without reliable data regarding humidity, theories about the positive feeback loop caused by water vapor are no more likely than any other theory." The current climate models predicting catestrophic rises in temperature rely on humidity levels to remain constant in order to trigger a positive feedback loop from the water vapor in the atmosphere, however the most recent data suggests humidity levels are falling, or in other words, from NASA's website:
" Since water vapor is the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, some climate forecasts may be overestimating future temperature increases. "
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/warmer_humidity.html
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