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Comments 38201 to 38250:
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jsmith at 06:50 AM on 26 February 2014Models are unreliable
I would be shocked if I was the first to bring this up, but a recent article in Nature Climate Change contends that the models predicted more global warming (as defined by global surface temperatures only) than actually happened. To wit: "Global mean surface temperature over the past 20 years (1993–2012) rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06 °C per decade (95% confidence interval)1. This rate of warming is significantly slower than that simulated by the climate models participating in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)." Does this in any way validate those who state that the models can't be trusted?
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MA Rodger at 06:40 AM on 26 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
An interesting collection of denialist writing being linked @430 (Shaviv, Scarfetta & Solheim-Stordahl-Humlum). I'm not sure what we are supposed to make of them.
The different ilk of "It's the sun wot done it" messages are together rather contradictory. Shaviv's the one who tries to demonstrate ocean heating has an 11-year cycle, good ole Scarfetta fits global temperature to pretty-much every pulse-beat in the solar system with the one exception of the 11-year solar cycle, and the not-to-be-outdone Humlum in that linked paper fits Svalbard temperatures to the duration of the previous solar cycle.
And the other puzzle is - What has this collection of tosh got to do with the subject of CO2 lagging temperature? Anybody any ideas? -
scaddenp at 06:32 AM on 26 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm - let's see if I can get a clearer understanding of your issue. I believe that you agree with the mainline science in that:
1/ Increase of CO2 in atmosphere at the moment is due to our emissions though in the glacial cycle it was outgassing from the ocean as temperature warmed.
2/ That increased CO2 does cause warming (and presumably the corallary that reducing CO2 cools the planet).
3/ That a no-feedback warming would be about 1 degree but the effect is amplified by feedback (including water vapour but also albedo).
Then we have the statement: "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?"
Since you agreed that increased CO2 increases temperature, this is a strange statement to make. You claim "deglaciation" (by which I assume you mean the glacial cycle) is offtopic. However, the relationship of CO2 during the glacial cycle is the topic of this article so, as one of the moderators of this site, it is ontopic. Trust me on this. (However, argument that current climate change is caused by the sun are off topic and go to the topic that I pointed out above).
So to answer your question, "why assume anything other than the sun...", implies you think the graph excludes CO2 having anything to do with glaciation cycle. Beyond the difficulties in making the numbers work, there are two other reasons for assuming something beyond the sun that I can think of.
1/ If the glacial cycle is only about change in solar (plus its water vapour and albedo feedbacks), then why are NH and SH glaciations not anti-phased? The CO2 and to lesser extent CH4 are well mixed GHGs which contribute.
2/ The Milankovich cycles have been around a long time and yet we dont get the big glacial cycle till the Pleistocene. Easier to explain when look at earlier CO2 levels.
Finally note the in the PETM, CO2 increase preceded warming so closest analogue to the current situation.
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tstreet at 06:32 AM on 26 February 2014Global warming continues, but volcanoes are slowing down the warming of the atmosphere
Another thing. I infer from this article that the amount of heat transferred to the earth has slowed down during the so called slowdown or pause. They imply that an increase in the amount of energy going into the oceans is not the issue. I wonder if these authors know what they are talking about.
Climate scientists have stated that there is no slowdown in the energy reaching the earth. This, I presume is measurable and is measured on a continuing basis. This article seems to contradict what I thought was a fairly straight forward measurement of energy transfer and blockage by greenhouse gases.
I may be misunderstanding this article because I find it hard to believe that climate scientists are not measuring the heat gain properly.
Can someone please explain this to me?
Moderator Response:[JH] Unnecessary white space inserted at end of post deleted.
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tstreet at 06:12 AM on 26 February 2014Global warming continues, but volcanoes are slowing down the warming of the atmosphere
I wonder if the models also take into account the massive pollution form primarily coal fired plants that exists in places like China. if it has increased significantly, was this increase accounted for?
Yes, it is the total energy reaching the earth that is important, but doesn't an increase in aerosols reduce the total energy reaching the earth?
Are the emissions from volcanoes greater during the last 15 years than we were in previous period when we have a greater degree of surface temperatures?
If we are having measurement problems now, were we having measurement problems before?
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scaddenp at 06:08 AM on 26 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I did get it from Clive Best (just examine the link). I am aware of Best's opinions but at a quick look, it was the diagram I was looking for more or less in online form.
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Chris8616 at 05:04 AM on 26 February 2014Global warming continues, but volcanoes are slowing down the warming of the atmosphere
Global Temperature Update Through 2013 21January 2014
James Hansen, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy: The recent slowdown of global warming is a consequence of both a slowdown in the growth rate of climate forcings and recent ENSO history. Given that the tropical Pacific seems to be moving toward the next El Niño, record global temperature is likely in the near term. However, the rate of future warming will depend upon changes of the tropospheric aerosol forcing, which is highly uncertain and unmeasured. LINK
Moderator Response:[RH] Shortened link to preserve page formatting.
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martin3818 at 04:33 AM on 26 February 2014Global warming continues, but volcanoes are slowing down the warming of the atmosphere
I could only access the new paper's abstract but if I have understood it correctly, the volcanic influences over the past decade or so is not very large.
In two simulations with more realistic volcanic influences following the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, differences between simulated and observed tropospheric temperature trends over the period 1998 to 2012 are up to 15% smaller ...
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funglestrumpet at 04:07 AM on 26 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
I came upon this site by accident. I was exploring the issue of climate change and happened to have it come up in one of my searches. I thought, "Well, I might as well have a look at what the skeptics have to say on the matter" and was very pleased to find within a minute or so that it was what I was actually looking for in the first place. I still have doubts about the name, even though I can see the logic behind it.
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Paul D at 04:06 AM on 26 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
I was wondering when 'they' would resort to something like DOS.
It points to the fact that such people are more interested in politics than science and truth.
It was always going to be the case that the weaker 'deniers' got the more aggresive they would get. -
NewYorkJ at 03:42 AM on 26 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
Congrats, SkS! I was an early reader of this site and have recommended it to others. The site came around the time the blogosphere was becoming a common source of science denial and communication of climate science to the public was relatively sparse. It still is in my view but SkS goes a long way in closing the gap.
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funglestrumpet at 03:37 AM on 26 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Tom, seriously, are you happy that this site can publish a post entitled 'Corrections to Curry's Erroneous Comments on Ocean Heating' concerning her flawed evidence to the Senate? Surely, in the light of that post, the sanctions that you say are already in effect, cannot be described as “appropriate.” They are supposed to be a deterrent. If they really are as effective as you claim them to be, Dana should have raised the fact that she had contravened them and unless she can provide an extremely good reason for such behaviour, faces … (add a fitting sanction).
I too am a champion of free speech and see it as a right. Indeed, it is impossible to have a functioning democracy without it. However, it needs protection from abuse and here is possibly where we differ most. Considering what it means to the lives of our progeny, I really don’t think that we should simply wring our hands and say “What can we do? It is just the way they are” when contrarians, such as those named in this post, pump out the 'same old same old' despite there being ample evidence that that 'same old same old' is false. It is important that they be brought into line with the existing science if they cannot provide a rebuttal to the received position on the matter in hand. Furthermore, unless you can suggest some alternative, I think that they need to face some sort of sanction. If science is about anything, it is about seeking the truth. The deliberate publication of what can legitimately be said to be flawed at best and downright wrong at worst, does, after all, provide the politicians with an excuse to not act, and, one suspects, get their envelope of thanks from the fossil fuel industry, which has a lot to gain from the b.a.u. that results from that inaction.
By all means support free speech, but not without sanction for abuse of the right to speak freely. Even with free speech we cannot stand up and be ‘phobic about many of society’s issues, even if we want to. I have no objection to homosexuals, but if I had, I certainly could not publish work that would reflect such a view. Not where I live at any rate. I have no objection to such constraints.
To conclude, I think that it is well past time to take the gloves off and do whatever we can to bring the debate round to a discussion of the facts. Surely, one has only to watch any of Potholer 54’s videos on Monckton to support the creation of a mechanism that would shut him up until his presentations follow the science and not be fodder to a media that is more interested in its advertising revenue than it is about its kids or its country, be it the one they were born in, or the one where they currently rest their head. If I have his lordship measured correctly, the threat of losing his title would be very effective at closing the said lord's cake hole.
Alternatively, perhaps we should all take James Lovelock’s latest advice and eat, drink and be merry for climate change is going to “hit the fan” in twenty years or so no matter what we do. If he is right, it is all too late to do anything meaningful about it anyway. I just happen to think that it would be a good thing for those who have done so much to ensure the b.a.u. that might have led to such a situation should pay a price for their actions. I suspect you don’t agree, though I am darned if I can understand why. Sod “Vengance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” I want to actually see it when the punishment is dispensed to fit the crime.
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Tom Dayton at 02:38 AM on 26 February 2014Humidity is falling
dwm: I regret to inform you that your tesseract is malfunctioning. In this timeline that the rest of us inhabit, and that you have dropped into, the year 2004 is earlier, not later, than the year 2010. Research on humidity levels has indeed continued, but in the time direction of 2004 forward to 2014, not the reverse. Therefore the newer results of Dr. Dessler and others were reported in their papers published in 2010 as summarized in the orginal post at the top of this thread.
By the way, which manifestation of The Doctor are you? My favorite is the one with the curly red hair.
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Chuck123 at 01:52 AM on 26 February 2014It cooled mid-century
I have heard it said that the Pacific decadal oscillation superimposes a sine wave of variation onto the underlying warming trend line, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PDO.svg and that this correlates to the multidecadal variation of the rate of rise. Is there research that supports this?
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Tom Curtis at 01:38 AM on 26 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Funglestrumpet @40:
1)
"You seem to have put yourself into the position of judge and jury as far as the point is concerned. We get [no] "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!."
That is an odd sort of rant. Particularly so given the almost complete lack of such qualifiers in your post @6. There "it seems" to you that we have let the exposition (or understanding) of the science get in the way of taking action on global warming, but when you call for a witch hunt against deniers, it no longer seems, but is (apparently to your mind) uncontestable fact. We cannot take you as a spokesperson for the SkS community, for you explicitly state that you are the spokesperson for, not just your familly but all future generations of it. A self appointed spokes person, off course.
That may be the problem. I have always, emphatically insisted that I speak only for myself, and nobody else unless I specifically specify that I am speaking in a formal capacity. I certainly do not speak for SkS, nor purport to, as I am no longer part of the SkS community in any formal way - having publicly resigned from whatever capacities I served in. I do not even speak for my familly, who are all perfectly capable of speaking for themselves; and nor do I pretend to speak for future generations even of my descendants (whose opinions I do not know - so how can I speak in their name). My overwhelming impression of people who purport to speak for others without officially being appointed to do so is that they are charlatans (for they invariably misrepresent the opinions of those they claim to speak for) who are claiming a false authority for their views because those views will not stand on their own.
Further, and as I have said before:
"You should also not be confused by my confident tone. I eschew the false humility of prefacing comments as IMO (or worse IMHO). Of course all that I write is my opinion, unless specifically identified as a quote. Even when I cite facts, the facts are only my best understanding of them. This is again something that should not need saying, but I have seen too many writers on the internet who strew their comments with IMO and the like, and genuinely seem to believe that any sentence they do not so adorn is some how unimpeachable truth."
2)
"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."
In fact, such sanctions already exist, and are quite appropriate. I think a case can be made that in some instances various deniers have been in breach of those provisions, and should accordingly be penalized. They should be penalized, however, on the basis of existing law - and no change of that law should be made to make the test for attracting penalties less strenuous for AGW deniers.
Your post @6, however, did not restrict itself to discussion of people in contempt of parliament, or who perjured themselves. It as a general claim that prominent (and not so prominent) deniers in general should be penalized. That is not acceptable.
This is an issue on which I am very passionate. Democracy, and with it a commitment to free speach are the highest achievements of the human species. So high an achievement that if we would sacrifice them for survival, we are not worthy of survival. And your impassioned plea @6 was de facto a plea for an abandonment of those principles. A plea to replace the rule of law with the rule of vendetta.
If you want to back down from that position, and defend the use of existing provisions against false testimony alone, by all means say so. We might then find a measure of agreement. But if you are not backing down, then do not pretend that your original position concerned only cases of breaches of existing law with respect to perjury and contempt of parliament (or other national equivalents).
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mgardner at 00:41 AM on 26 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
funglestrumpet @40
" 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."
I tend to agree that the first part is a problem, but I think your 'call to arms' is an illustration a larger tactical failure. You want to drum these contrarians out of the community, and the denial industry would like nothing better. Isn't it obvious how it would be played?
The 'skeptics' are very good at tweaking scientists and bloggers into chasing their own tails and creating a false equivalence, giving the most bizarre 'skeptic' arguments legitimacy. People tend to want to do what they are comfortable with; for many capable in science, it is obvious that thinking and communicating outside their peer milieu is not their strongest suit. So, rather than respond at the level appropriate to the debate as presented by skeptics, and the audience it is aimed at, they foster the impression that rebuttal requires an ever-more complex analysis. Conclusion: The contrarian claims are on the same level, no matter that in reality they can be refuted with the most fundamental argument.
I would say that you are succumbing to the same jiu-jitsu; light the torches and bring the pitchforks, and the cries of Socialist Conspiracy will fill the airwaves.
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martin3818 at 00:17 AM on 26 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
... and how do you explain the pause before September 2013 ;-)
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Dikran Marsupial at 22:52 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm - the double posting is caused by your use of the refresh and/or back buttons on your browser.
None of the papers you mention show that solar forcing is strong enough to explain the variations in temperature over the last 400,000 years, specifically the transitions from glacial to interglacial conditions. If you disagree, give page numbers and direct quotations from the paper.
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Tom Curtis at 22:42 PM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
nealjking @92, I don't know where scaddenp got it, but it was constructed by Clive Best. Best used his own radiation model for which he provides code. There was also a spreadsheet based implimentation of an earlier version, but the link is dead. The model only calculates values in the 13-17 micron range, and treats it as a single band. That means the results are approximate rather than accurate but still indicative.
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CBDunkerson at 22:21 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I agree with Spencer on one thing... we shouldn't call him a 'denier' any more. Given his forays into... less than accurate representations of the facts (e.g. the graph in #36) he is not merely denying the evidence of AGW. He is actively distorting it. SkS policy forbids any speculation on certain motives for such, but he can certainly be called a 'distorter', 'disinformer', 'fabricator', et cetera without getting into why he would do such things.
As to Esop's point in #35 about Spencer's data inevitably disproving his own position... it already does. He frequently makes the 'no global warming for XX years' claim despite the fact that his satellite data does show statistically significant warming for the time period in question... he instead relies on the Hadley Center data to make the case. To all appearances, Spencer is a 'true believer'. I think he believes the things he says, even when they are obviously false. Thus, there is no 'plan' in place for when his data shows a new record high temperature. He simply doesn't believe that is possible... and when it happens he will undoubtedly come up with a way to believe that it hasn't, or that it doesn't matter. The man believes, and wrote a book arguing, that scientific facts and economic results must conform to his personal religious views. At that level of self delusion there isn't much which you can't rationalize away.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 22:13 PM on 25 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
chriskoz
Belatedly, welcome to Oz.
Where in Oz do you live? I am near Daylesford, NW of Melbourne.
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dwm at 22:10 PM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
I don't know why this board sometimes double posts my posts, some kind of feedback loop?
Happy reading:
Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, A11101, doi:10.1029/2007JA012989, 2008Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (2010)
Solar activity and Svalbard temperaturesAdvances in Meteorology Volume 2011 (2011)
Moderator Response:[PS] Fixed link (I hope)
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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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