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Andrew Mclaren at 03:30 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
For those who might find such a reference useful, according to Johnson's English Dictionary (5th ed, 1773) the word DENIER is defined as follows:
DENI´ER ∫. [from deny]
1. A contradictor ; an opponent. Watts.
2. One that does not own or acknowledge. South.
3. A refuſer ; one that refuſes. King Charles.==========
Always a good excuſe to uſe thoſe long letter ſ's...(ſmile)
Johnson's annotations refer to his contemporary literary sources, so that first citation is from the logician Isaac Watts, definitely not Anthony Watts!
This edition of Johnson's dictionary was the last revision by himself during his lifetime, and set the standard for the more widely disseminated editions printed in the Georgian period. The word "denier" clearly has hundreds of years of precedence as a generic term for a person adopting a contentious and contrarian position in argument, making an appeal of ignorance, or actively refusing to consider, or grant something. Such have been common understandings of the term for at least a dozen generations of common use.
Roy Spencer and others who claim that 'denier' impugns holocaust deniers specifically and exclusively, are truly oblivious to the broader basis of the language and concepts they engage with. Let alone in invoking Godwin's Law as it is called, in such a mawkish and pious claim of victimhood.
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funglestrumpet at 02:54 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
It seems to me that we have let the origin of global warming get in the way of taking action on the matter. We have let concerns as to whether the 'iceberg' of climate change has 'Caused by Humans' stamped on its bottom get in the way of avoiding the damn thing.
The fossil fuel industry has not funded a campaign to ascertain the whos, whats, whens and whys of the matter i.e. the science. It has funded a campaign to deny the need for action so that b.a.u. is maintained. And a very successful campaign it has proved to be.
We need to seriously consider whether we have lost the fight to combat climate change and face up to it. With a 97% consensus on the science, yet little in the way of action, it is difficult to consider any other conclusion?.
If we cannot hand down a safe planet for future generations to live upon, perhaps we can seek retribution on their behalf while there is still a functioning system of law and order. We know that many nay-sayers are funded to a greater or lesser extent by the fossil fuel industry and as a consequence it is possible to legitimately investigate whether they have let personal gain sway their professional advice on the matter. Opinions which upon whatever basis have in turn succeeded in detering action to combat climate change; action that has been so evidently needed for so many years.
Surely, considering the consequences of that failure to act, the least these nay-sayers should face is a jury of their peers who can judge their actions and their motives, both stated and hidden. A jury that can, on the basis of their considerations, determine the level of culpability and upon which they can thus mete out any appropriate punishment.
It needn't be a dull affair. We could have a lovely bonfire of the membership papers of scientific societies from which they have been expelled and the letters patent for those then ex-members of the peerage who have been found to have harmed their nation for personal gain. And there would also be the opportunity to take the keys to their punishment cells and see who could throw them furthest away.
I write this on behalf of my current family and any future members of it.
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Daniel Bailey at 02:18 AM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
"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."
Except that we know that the oceans are not the source for the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.
Starting with an erroneous premise, as you do here, leads you further into error.
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YubeDude at 02:15 AM on 24 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
Maybe this can get posted in next weeks round-up.
Ted Cruz: Global warming not supported by data.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/20/cruz-to-cnn-global-warming-not-supported-by-data/
It is worth listening to this video as a lesson in erudite spin-meistering and political hyperbole with that affable and dismissive smug arrogance that only a delusional ideologue and self righteous ego can produce. Note the re-direct to Iran and political base issues while smirking disdainfully about the considerably larger and more global reality.
The best way to deal with AGW is to diminish politicians who spout this kind ignorance. Hopefully he has just created the sound bite that will be the foundation for the demise of his presidential aspirations.
Pay close attention to the prop in the background, just off his left shoulder. -
rasmus at 01:10 AM on 24 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Would it be possible to set up a server to deny requests from TOR-servers, if their IP address were known? (and would it be possible to map TOR servers by using it oneself?).
Moderator Response:[BL] Yes to blocking Tor IP addresses, and many web sites do, but building the map is a huge task. Generally you have to pay to get a good Tor IP list, or you can get a less reliable and complete list for free. Just google it.
It's something we've discussed, but again, there's a lot to do and not many people available to do it, so it's a lower priority task.
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
Thanks for the information and warning, Tom!
I didn’t study Best’s graph very methodically, just noted that at a first glance it more or less resembled the results from the Nimbus satellite and the MODTRAN model. He even estimated the forcing from doubled CO2 to be a little higher than the most commonly stated 3.7 watt/m2.
It’s quite puzzling to me that someone can be an AGW skeptic (I prefer the word “denier” if they reject well-understood science) when they seem to understand the basic physics about how the greenhouse effect works by rising the altitude of heat loss, however that term is defined.
The argument “no warming over the last 12 years” in particular seems quite amateurish when Best should understand the insignificance of short periods, that only 1% of the heat accumulation happens in the atmosphere and that the alleged “hiatus” of surface warming maybe doesn’t even exist. The same applies to the argument of near-term cooling because the uncertainty of a climate model permits it. I’m not a statistician and don’t grasp the more technical aspects of Tamino’s usually excellent posts, but I do understand the simple concept that uncertainty goes both ways. It’s kind of understandable if a wrong conclusion is the result of wrong data, but it’s worse if a wrong conclusion is based on the correct data and a faulty logic.Again, thanks for the information, Tom!
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Stranger8170 at 22:59 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Two years ago I took the time to read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” by William Shirer. I found it interesting to learn that a big part of the coalition that brought the NAZI’s Nazi's to power was from conservative protestant Christians, anti-union working class labor and rich industrialists. Just saying!
Hitler was anti-intellectual, anti-union and anticommunist. I feel when I hear people like Spencer use the term NAZI Nazi they they're attempting to pound square pegs into round holes.
Moderator Response:[JH] The use of all caps is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.
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michael sweet at 22:09 PM on 23 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
From Peru,
You are correct: some scientists, like Michael Mann at the Huffington Post, have suggested a reason for the "haitus" is a general shift to a La Nina pattern. Such a sihft would effectively lower global temperatures 0.1-0.2C permanently. Mann cites paleorecords and a minority of climate models. Cai suggests the opposite, primarily based on a majority of climate models. Obviously both cannot be correct. Dueling hypothesis are how science advances. Come back in 20 years and we will know who is correct!! Perhaps improvements in models and more data will confirm one hypothesis in only 10 years.
If the shift is toward La Nina, the cooling from that shift would last about 10 years. We have used that up in the last decade. If the shift is toward El Nino, we are in for a big decade of heating in the very near future.
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ubrew12 at 20:25 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Anyone who mentions Spencer gets my rejoiner "Oh, you mean the author of 'Fundanomics: the Free Market Symplified'?" Firstly, someone so enamored of Free Market ideology as to publish a book on the subject is 'fundanomically' untrustworthy as to motivation in Climate advocacy. Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, WallStreet Journal, American Enterprise Institute: these prominant Climate denial institutions are also fundamentally anti-regulation. They see the free pursuit of capitalistic profit as a God-given Right of Man, and there are no circumstances where that Right can be curtailed. The rest of us worry about 'the Commons', these people do not recognize the Commons as a thing. There is only a God-granted exploitable resource.
Charles Krauthammer, American pundit on the Right, wrote an opinion piece about Global Warming, and also complained about the term 'denier'. One paragraph later he calls those concerned about Global Warming 'whores', quoting Deuteronomy. He repeats the slander a paragraph on: 'But whoring is whoring and the [Earth] gods must be appeased'. One wonders what sort of sympathy this 'denier' sought to generate through this tactic. Personally, I think that if we could get real 'Nazi's' and real 'whores' to sue for trademark infringement, we could yet rescue this 'conversation' we are having. Not to mention the English language.
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MA Rodger at 20:06 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
That's a classy presentation from Spencer. Although there is plenty to chose from (which you expect when an idiot starts mouthing off), my favourite passage from his little rant is:-
"I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated. "
As for what manner of idiot to describe Spencer as being - for myself, I call Roy a Denialist because he is in denial. But I suppose, because he also goes mouthing off about it, the term Denier is also appropriate.
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Tom Curtis at 19:42 PM on 23 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
tlitb1 @35, it is fairly obvious even to this non-author that:
1) The papers were "captured" by the search, not "captured" into a category. That is, the literature search can be viewed metaphorically as a net which 'caught' 12,280 papers, which were then sorted into their appropriate categories. Your misinterpretation is both typical of you, and from past experience, probably deliberate. Whether deliberate or not, it has no justification in the text of the article.
2) Even casual readers of the paper will have noted that the abstract raters rated the papers only on the abstract and title, all other information (including date and journal of publication, and authors names) being withheld. In constrast author self ratings were based not only on the full paper, but also on whatever memories they had of their intentions for the paper. As such, the two sorts of ratings do not, and cannot compounded into a conglomerate rating as you suggest. If the authors disagree with the abstract ratings, that may be simply because they are rating a different thing. It is presume that abstracts are related to the contents of papers, so that 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. Differences in the rating of individual papers, whoever, can be the consequence of to many different factors to safely attribute them to any one factor (at least without a lot of additional information).
3) In constrast, a large difference between the author rating of the same paper by various authors can only be attributed to either misunderstanding the rating categories, or (hopefully less likely) misunderstanding their own paper by one or more of the authors. A difference of just one point in self rating, however, may simply be attributable to slighly different subjective judgements, which cannot be completely excluded. In the scenario you describe, at least two of the authors have misunderstood the rating categories.
4) 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. That is fairly clear evidence that he is misdescribing how the ratings should apply.
In fact it is very interesting to compare Spencer's reaction to that of Dr Nicola Scaffeta, who when asked a question about the rating of one of his papers had this to say:
Question: "Dr. Scafetta, your paper ‘Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%“
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?"
Scafetta: “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.
The “less” claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.
By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called “skeptical works” including some of mine are included in their 97%.”
First, Scaffeta grotesquely misrepresents the IPCC position, which is that greater than 50% of warming since 1950 has been anthropogenic.
Second, the abstract of his paper reads as follows:
"We study the role of solar forcing on global surface temperature during four periods of the industrial era (1900–2000, 1900–1950, 1950–2000 and 1980–2000) by using a sun-climate coupling model based on four scale-dependent empirical climate sensitive parameters to solar variations. We use two alternative total solar irradiance satellite composites, ACRIM and PMOD, and a total solar irradiance proxy reconstruction. We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45–50% of the 1900–2000 global warming, and 25–35% of the 1980–2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."
(My emphasis)
The phrasing, "as much as" indicates that the upper limit is being specified. With solar activity specified as only contributing "as much as" 25-30% of warming since 1980, the rating of the abstract was eminently justified.
What is interesting, however, is the stark contrast between Scaffeta's misinterpretation of the rating, and that by Spencer. Interestingly, all early commentary on the paper by AGW "skeptics" followed Scaffeta's line (if not quite so extremely). Then a new, and contradictory talking point developed, ie, that used by Spencer. Some at least Anthony Watts have happily presented both views.
I suspect it is fortunate for a number of AGW "skeptics" who self rated that their self ratings are confidential (unless they choose to release them), for I suspect quite a few of them will have rated them as rejecting the concensus, and are now publicly declaring that they ratings must be interpreted such that they are part of the 97%. As I have not seen the data, that is, of course, just a guess.
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Tom Curtis at 19:02 PM on 23 February 2014It's cosmic rays
jsmith @79, if you read further into the advanced version, you will find it later refers to a record high GCR flux; after which it shows the same diagram used in the basic version, showing the same decline in inverted neutrino flux. The key point is that while GCRs have increased over time, the increase is not statistically significant. Consequently there is no contradiction between the advanced version and the basic version, nor internal inconsistency in the advanced version.
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From Peru at 15:24 PM on 23 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
I am a bit confused by the Nature El Niño Cai et al (2014) paper.
It suggests that extreme Niños will increase because " Under greenhouse-gas-induced warming conditions, warming occurs everywhere but at a faster rate in the eastern equatorial Pacific, diminishing the zonal and meridional SST gradients."
Was not observed the opposite pattern in the last decade, suggesting to some scientists that global warming may be inducing a La Niña -like state that suppress Niños and enhances Niñas, due to an increase in SST differences between East and West Pacific?
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jsmith at 15:23 PM on 23 February 2014It's cosmic rays
I am a bit confused by this page, as the basic and advanced versions seem to contradict each other. From the former:
"Cosmic ray counts have increased over the past 50 years, so if they do influence global temperatures, they are having a cooling effect."
And from the latter:
"Cosmic ray flux on Earth has been monitored since the mid-20th century, and has shown no significant trend over that period."
So my questions are whether this is, as it appears, a contradiction, and if so, which one's correct and can the one that's incorrect be changed?
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:14 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I think that John Kerry was being too polite when he said: "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact,"
The facts of the matter clearly indicate that Non-science is popular. That popularity is what needs to be scientifically investigated and reported.
Building on my post on the recent SkS article "'Its been hot before': faulty logic skews climate debate" I postulate that:
"The desire to benefit from burning fossil fuels is causing many people to readily accept non-Science that sounds like what they wish to hear and prefer to believe. And many powerful and knowledgeable but wicked people are trying to take advantage of that potential popularity any way they can get away with."
I believe there is ample evidence that almost everyone is already aware to support my claim (though some will try to deny it, ha-ha).
The actions of many contrarians, even knowledgeable ones, are unsustainable and damaging (deliberately by some of the knowledgeable ones), just like the unacceptable economic activities they want to expand, prolong and protect. They are not interested in developing a better understanding of the complex way our planet functions and how human activity affects it. They are not interested in helping to develop sustainable ways of living that everyone can enjoy improving through the hundreds of millions of years humanity has to look forward to on this amazing planet. They only want to prolong the vicious fighting over the unsustainable and damaging ways of benefiting they, and those they act in the interest of, have benefited from getting away with. And they will even partner with the socially intolerant to provide mutual support for each other’s unsustainable and damaging ideological desires that ‘miraculously’ do not conflict in any way.
The sooner that wicked pair lose their high-stakes gamble on the popularity of non-science the better it will be for everyone else. Whenever the greedy win everyone else loses, especially the future generations (and even the greedy ones in the future lose).
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dwm at 12:51 PM on 23 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
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. According to what I've read, the humidity data (NASA's UARS satellite data for instance) doesn't support the basic requirement (constant humidity levels) of the theory of self limiting feedback loops described in the link you provided. This is a large grey area, and without reliable data regarding humidity, theories about the positive feeback loop caused by water vapor are no more likely than any other theory. For now, the apparent decrease in humidity explains the more recent cooling of the past decade, and points to what one would expect to find: the existence of an as yet unexplained mechanism that prevents small changes in atmospheric composition to have large positive feedback (runaway) effects.
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villabolo at 12:48 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
One can tell that Dr. Spencer has gone bat guano crazy by seeing his other posts such as this one.
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Tom Curtis at 12:03 PM on 23 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
HK @85, first a word of caution. Clive Best is an AGW 'skeptic', and while he is more mathematically sophisticated than most AGW 'skeptics', he still breathlessly writes about the lack of warming over the last twelve years, and predicts cooling temperatures for the next decade because the lower uncertainty bound of the HadCM2 model short term climate forecast permits it. Any recommendation of one blog post by Clive Best should not be construed as a recommendation of any other blog post by Best, or the quality of his blog in general.
More importantly, Clive Best's attempt to calculate the effective altitude of radiation clearly fails on empirical grounds. Specifically, this is his calculated "effective altitude of radiation":
Clearly he shows the effective altitude of radiation on either sides of the spikes at 620 and 720 cm-1 as being between zero and 1000 meters. In contrast, as can be seen in the real spectrum he shows, at those wave numbers, the effective altitude of radiation is closer to 6000 meters {calculated as (ground temperature - brightness temperature)/lapse rate}:
As can be seen from his graph of the predicted IR spectra, he clearly gets the 660 cm-1 spike wrong as well, showing it as a dip (?!) for 300 ppmv, and as a barely discernable spike at 600 ppmv. That is so different from the obvious spike in the real world spectrum (at approx 390 ppmv) that you know (and he should have known) that he has got something significantly wrong.
Before addressing that specifically, I will note two minor things he omitted (perhaps for simplicity). The first is that he has not included a number of factors that broaden the absorption lines. Broadening increases the width of the lines, but also reduces the peak absorbance of the lines. In any event, he has not included doppler broadening, possibly does not include collissional broadening, and probably does not include some of the other minor forms of broadening.
The second factor is that he has not allowed for the difference in atmospheric profiles between the US Standard atmosphere and actual tropical conditions. Specifically, the atmosphere is thicker at the equator due to centrifugal "force", and also has a higher tropopause due to the greater strength of convective circulation. That later should reduce CO2 density, and might be accepted as the cause of the discrepancy except that mid latitude and even polar spectra show the same reduce absorbance relative to his calculated values (and hence higher effective altitude of radiation in the wings, and for the central spike).
Although these factors are sources of inaccuracy, they do not account for the major error in calculation. That is probably a product of his definition of effective altitude of radiation, which he defines as the highest altitude at which "... the absorption of photons of that wave length within a 100m thick slice of the atmosphere becomes greater than the transmission of photons". That is, it is the altitude of the highest layer at which less than half of the upward IR flux at the top of that altitude comes from that layer.
This definition is superficially similar to another common definition, ie, the lowest altitude from which at least half of the photons emitted upward from that altitude reach space. Importantly, however, this later definition is determined by the integrated absorption of all layers above the defined layer. Specifically, it is the layer such that the integrated absorption of all layers above it = 0.5. I think the layer picked out by Best's method is consistently biased low relative to that picked out by this later definition.
There are two other common definitions of the effective layer of radiation around. The most common is:
"Here the effective emission level is defined as the level at which the climatological annual mean tropospheric temperature is equal to the emission temperature: (OLR/σ)1/4, where σ is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant."
(Source, h/t to Science of Doom)
That definition can be generalized to specific wave numbers, or spectral lines, and is used by Best in an earlier blog post specifically on the subject. It also needs to be modified slightly to allow for the central spike (which comes from the stratosphere). The difficulty of such a modification, plus a certain circularity in this definition makes others preferable. The third definition is the one I give above of "the temperature weighted mean altitude from which the radiation comes". I take it that the three common definitions pick out the same altitude, at least to a first order approximation. In contrast, Best's definition in the blog post to which you refer is of by (in some portions of the spectrum) at least 6 kms.
Despite this flaw, Best's blog post does give a good idea of the methods used in radiative models. However, his detailed results are inaccurate, in a way that does not reflect the inaccuracy of the radiative models used by scientists. This also applies to the graph shown by scaddenp @55 above, which was also created by Best. It is very indicative of the type of profiles likely to be seen, but should not be considered an accurate source. I discuss the accuracy of actual models briefly here, and in more detail in the comments.
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Wol at 09:24 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Highly interesting - so long as it doesn't become thread creep!
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John Cook at 07:38 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
What's wrong with discussions about cricket? Particularly with the form Mitchell Johnson is showing lately :-)
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I just found this excellent blog post by Clive Best about the forcing from a doubling of CO2 based on how much that will change the "effective emission height", which is another term for "altitude of heat loss". It covers much of the topic we've been discussing here, and maybe it can fill some of the holes in our understanding.
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Albatross at 02:59 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
A great read Bob!
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Albatross at 02:58 AM on 23 February 2014'It's been hot before': faulty logic skews the climate debate
The hubris of ideologues like Abbott when it comes to science is just scary-- this is someone tasked with running a whole continent, yet feels he can make critical decisions based on only his opinions. If I were an Australian I'd be pretty scared for the future.
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tlitb1 at 02:54 AM on 23 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
@DB
Redundant comment so remove if you want but I'm happy with the fix of my comment and thanks for fixing it.
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Albatross at 02:53 AM on 23 February 2014'It's been hot before': faulty logic skews the climate debate
Great post John, high time someone challanged Abbott's nonsensical and unsubstantiated claims. Now will the rest of the media do the same? Sadly, probably not.
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Timothy Chase at 02:47 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
I too, am looking forward to part 2, of course. Reminds me of how Real Climate was hacked at one point. That was back at the beginning of Climategate.
Appropriately named, that. A break-in was used to illegally obtain documents intended to be used for the purpose of systematic smear campaigns. But the similarity breaks down soon after that.
In this case, the crooks got away. Then the smear campaign actually worked for a while, with the press working often as unwitting accomplices, putting the victims of the attack on trial rather than trying to uncover those who were behind the criminal act.
With the break-in at Real Climate, the perpetrators uploaded a zip of the files they thought they could best spin for their campaign to the Real Climate server. They were planning on making a post that would include a link to the file.
But at the time Gavin Schmidt was in the system. He noticed that someone had broken in, then soon realized they were still there. At that point he shut down the server. He said something about it a while back, I believe in an interview.
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Ger at 02:24 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Private forums on a vpn?
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Dikran Marsupial at 02:11 AM on 23 February 2014Solar Cycle Length proves its the sun
jsmith regarding Lassen (1995) you probably ought to also read Thejil and Lassen (2000) (yes, that Lassen), which reports that the correlation broke down when further data became available.
Solar forcing of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature: New data
P Thejll, ,K Lassen
Abstract
It has previously been demonstrated that the mean land air temperature of the Northern hemisphere could adequately be associated with a long-term variation of solar activity as given by the length of the approximately 11-year solar cycle. Adding new temperature data for the 1990s and expected values for the next sunspot extrema we test whether the solar cycle length model is still adequate. We find that the residuals are now inconsistent with the pure solar model. We conclude that since around 1990 the type of Solar forcing that is described by the solar cycle length model no longer dominates the long-term variation of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature.
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Volume 62, Issue 13, September 2000, Pages 1207–1213
doi:10.1016/S1364-6826(00)00104-8
[emphasis mine]
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philr at 01:44 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Passwords should always be stored as salted hashes:
https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm
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Bob Lacatena at 01:22 AM on 23 February 2014Solar Cycle Length proves its the sun
I would also point out that the author of Reichel 2001 is... an economist.
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chriskoz at 23:29 PM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I want to lift your spirits guys by saying that someone like me, has been reading your explanations and learned, as opposed to mgardner, a lot from your posts. Thank you! Especially to HK for very informative pictures and reference to Science of Doom, to Bob Loblaw for reference to Manabe 1964, and to Tom Curtis for overall summary. Sorry to those I did not manage to mention this time...
Like mgardner, I can boast that I have the necessary backgroound to grasp this science, but my attitude, unlike mgardner's, respect the science first (and all people who made it possible for me to learn it, starting from Manabe-san in the topic at hand), then try to assimilate it, finally comment/ask questions only at the end when new knowledge is too difficult or incompatible with my previous knowledge. mgardner's priorities are backwards to my priorities.
Tom@79, your explanation what radiation models do can be summarised as: double integration of IR energy function along altitude and frequency. If the function was as simple as Beer-Lambert law (also applicable to pressure vs altitude) and each frequency were absorbed independently, we'd have an easy analytical solution. But because the world is not that simple (natural broadening due to Heisenberg principle, Doppler broadening due to fast moving - 500m/s - air molecules, finally pressure, or collisional, broadening due to collisions between CO2 and other air molecules) the function becomes too complex, and frequencies inter-dependent to resolve it analytically. Therefore, it is resolved numerically as you described. The "effective altitude of radiation" as a is such model is an abstract term, defined by the amount of energy caried out to space within a particular band of IR and the lapse rate. That's a nice, valid definition and makes perfect intuitive sense to me [1]... Further, if you integrate total IR, energy you can define the "mean altitude of radiation" as total amount of IR energy within the lapse rate. And again, it makes perfect intuitive sense.
With such definition, the argument in the subject article (that GHE never saturates) can be understood even better. If you add CO2, the mean altitude of radiation will always rise no matter how much CO2 you had in the first place (even on Venus). That's because:
- the initial mean altitude of radiation cannot be infinite (some energy must be escaping the planet, otherwise the planet would heat up infinitely which is absurd)
- the aditional CO2 must be pushing the initial mean altitude higher, because all of the physical phenomenons involved (gas mixing, Beer-Lambert law, Doppler broadening, pressure broadening) collectively increase the IR absorption at the previous mean altitude of radiation.
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[1] Well, except the case of a band around 667cm-1, which is emitted from stratosphere: it could have been emitted from troposphere at the same temperature (linear T lapse rate does not hold in stratosphere) so there is an ambiguity in this case.
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cgs at 22:40 PM on 22 February 2014Unprecedented trade wind strength is shifting global warming to the oceans, but for how much longer?
I have a couple of questions concerning the model projections:
1. Can anyone tell me the relationship between what the authors call the AR4+AR5 model projections and the model projections shown in figure 1.4 of the latest IPCC report?2. Also, does anyone know why the authors begin their model projections in 2000 and not 1990 as in the figure I referenced in #1.
Thanks for any information!
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tlitb1 at 20:49 PM on 22 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
Hence for example, one of Roy Spencer's five papers captured by our literature search was put in [category 5], because it proposes negative feedbacks will minimise future global warming.
This concept of "capturing" a specific paper in a category and naming its authors does not seem to be an intrinsic part of the Cook et al paper's methodology or purpose, so I wondered if the authors of the Cook et al paper could answer a question for me?If the Cook et al authors think a paper can be captured in a category like this by the initial abstract rating process, would a later different author(s) self-rating "release" the paper from this category?
For example, with this category 5 captured paper of Spencer's (which had 3 other authors), had Spencer and one other author replied with a rating of 3, and the two other authors with the abstract rating of 5, this would mean the overall rating would be 4 wouldn't it?
Moderator Response:[DB] Fixed text per request.
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Solar Cycle Length proves its the sun
jsmith - Lassen & Friis-Christensen have been repeatedly debunked, and in fact the paper you refer to is a later work by the same authors that the opening post was discussing, namely the errors made by those authors. Reichel 2001 has but 12 citations in 13 years, including three using Granger causality analysis demonstrating that natural variation including the sun is not the dominant factor in the last half century of climate change.
The statement made in the opening post, that "Solar cycle length as a proxy for solar activity tells us the sun has had very little contribution to global warming since 1975.", still holds true under examination.
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jsmith at 14:04 PM on 22 February 2014Solar Cycle Length proves its the sun
Strictly speaking, the "What the Science Says" box at the top of this page is inaccurate: there are other papers which claim to have found a correlation between solar cycle length and temperature, such as Lassen 1995 and Reichel 2001.
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Sceptical Wombat at 11:06 AM on 22 February 2014Dodgy Diagrams #1 - Misrepresenting IPCC Residence Time Estimates
I have a slightly different analogy. Firstly I half full the bath with cold water (I prefer my thought experiments to be as sustainable as possible), and set the cold water tap so that the level stays constant - so far the same as your analogy. Then I turn on the hot water tap just a little bit. Now the level in the bath will start rising. The amount of hot water in the bath at any time will be very small ("CO2 from fossil fuels only accounts for 0.x% of atmospheric CO2") but only an idiot would claim that the act of turning on the hot water tap was not the cause of the rising level. When the bath is nearly full you turn off the hot water tap. The level in the bath will go down, because of the extra pressure, but much more slowly than it rose and it will only asymtotically approach its original level.
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Sceptical Wombat at 10:54 AM on 22 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
One thing I think you should stop doing is holding passwords in plain text. A better way is to use a one way encryption algorithm and to only store the encrypted password. That way you never know my password and so no one else can get it from you. If I forget my password you issue a new one and require me to change it.
Moderator Response:[BL] Passwords are not and have never been stored in the database as clear text. They are and always have been encrypted, and they are never decrypted. Rather, the password sent by the user is encrypted, and that encrypted password is compared to the encrypted password stored for the user. If they match, then the password supplied by the user is valid.
[BL] Correction, I just looked at the code, and passwords are decrypted in the "Forgot your password" function -- but that doesn't represent much of a security hole, because it can't be used to breach the system, and it can only be used to steal passwords if you already have the password and so can change a user's e-mail, or otherwise have access to that person's e-mail.
Either way, that particular flaw doesn't represent a pressing issue, at least compared to the effort it would take to correct.
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Rob Honeycutt at 10:28 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
This could be a case of "I don't (can't, won't) understand until I get the result that I'm looking for."
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Tom Curtis at 10:19 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
One addition to my post @81, mgardner has been quite critical of people above for not answering the questions he purportedly asked. He has acted, in other words, as though they had an obligation an answer him. Well, they do not. They do not, firstly because they are volunteers; secondly, because he is ungrateful; and thirdly because the question he wants to focus on is uninteresting. There are far more scientifically informative questions that could be asked - like for example, "how does modtran work". When provided with answers to those informative questions (ie, informative answers to his questions as posed), mgardner has been at his most ungrateful.
He will now, no doubt, complain that his ingratitude has lead to his questions being ignored. He is welcome to those complaints to. He is just not welcome to anymore of my time.
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Tom Curtis at 10:11 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner @80, you are welcome to your opinion, and to waste your time pursuing it. You are not welcome to waste my time on trivial technicalities. Look it up and work it out for yourself. Then when you have, if you still think it interesting, come and let us know the answer, and why it is interesting. In the meantime, your repeated questioning on a trivial point is just spam. Don't be surprised, therefore, if we put you in our personal spam folders (ie, ignore what you have to say, and ask questions about) in future.
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Rob Honeycutt at 09:29 AM on 22 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Looking forward to part two!
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mgardner at 09:28 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
Tom Curtis@78
"But the further details for which you seek serve no purpose either scientifically, or in terms of general education."
You are welcome to your opinion, Tom.
With respect to general education, I have always assumed that I was protected by the concept of academic freedom in making those kinds of decisions for myself. I do have some experience in this area, and, unless you plan to fly in for the next holiday, you are not the one who is going to be drawing little pictures for my brother-in-law, right?
With respect to scientific purpose, some of the most fruitful physicists of our time have "gone back to the classroom"-the physics 101 classroom-- because it served to clarify their conceptualizations. At the least, for an interested student, wouldn't these 'purposeless' inquiries give some insight into the thinking of those who developed MODTRAN, to which we refer so often?
And then there's the final question-- what's the harm? If HK wants to exercise his chops, is there some policy that prohibits it? I was accused of being 'critical' but several people seem to want to criticize my curiosity. I have always been delighted (and amazed) when students thought for themselves and asked questions.
If this gets me moderated out, so be it. You seem to be much more welcoming and tolerant of 'skeptics' who take up lots of space to little effect.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending attitude.
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
Tom Curtis - Agreed. I believe I stated one of those points before regarding the range of altitudes emitting, "...the sum of that emission adding up to the oft-noted temperature equivalent profiles seen in satellite observations of those band". This makes emission from a single layer at that observed temperature an incorrect way of thinking about the physics, as it is a mean altitude, not a single one.
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Tom Curtis at 08:27 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner @77, your question serves no apparent purpose.
You have asked a series of questions on this topic, and have had a perfectly acceptable response to those questions since at least Dikran Marsupial's responce @37, where his final paragraph stated:
"IIRC the lower atmosphere isn't completely opaque to IR, so it probably isn't best to think too strongly about it in that way, instead there is a band in the atmosphere from which the bulk of IR is radiated. Some may come direct from the surface, but not much as it is absorbed in the trophosphere, most will be emitted from the air higher up in the atmosphere, which is cold. The more CO2 you add, the higher in the atmosphere it needs to be radiated from in order not to be absorbed before it escapes. I suspect there is a probability distribution that shows the density of the height in the atmosphere from which IR photons escape; the mean increases with increasing CO2."
Nothing since then has done any more than flesh out details of this basic picture, and perhaps illustrate it better. One key point here is that talking in terms of layers as hard boundaries defined for x,y, such that below x, at wavelength y, no photons emitted escape to space makes no sense. That is DM's first point in the paragraph above. And yet you return to the assumption that such defined boundaries make sense, that in scientific use they are anything more than an approximate, but sometimes useful convention.
In radiation models, the atmosphere is divided into thin layers. For each layer, l, and for each wave number (or some other conveniently small division of frequency) emissions are calculated. The absorption of the total upward radiation for the layer below, l-1, is calculated. The model then passes to the next upward, l+1, layer the total upward radiation from l, ie, the sum of upward emissions plus (1-absorption) of the total upward radiation from the preceding layer. The same is done for downward radiation in the opposite direction. No attempt it made to track the exact point of origin of radiation in the total upward radiation from each level because it is superfluous information. Such models calculate the actual upward or downward radiation at any level with stunning accuracy.
If asked where the radiation that escapes to space comes from, they modellers indicated that it comes from the "effective altitude of radiation", which is defined as "that altitude that has the same temperature as the brightness temperature of the radiation to space at a given wave number" (or other conveniently small division of frequency). Thus talk of the layer from which radiation comes is just a shorthand way of mentioning the temperature weighted mean altitude from which the radiation comes. Nothing more.
In more popular parlance, we can say (and this is literally true) that increased CO2 increases the mean altitude from which the IR radiation escapes to space, and that if that mean altitude is cooler, then the IR radiation escaping to space will be reduced. But the further details for which you seek serve no purpose either scientifically, or in terms of general education.
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mgardner at 07:06 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
HK@76
Thank you. Like your other posts, this is very thorough and well written.
My interest is in the area (nominally 5 km) where we say that 'most of the energy is radiated to space'. And, because my goal is to explain or 'draw a picture' (literally or verbally) at the simplest level, I wish to discuss only one wavelength resulting in somewhere between big x and little x.
So, let's say we define at about 5 km two layers of 100 m thickness (as in that graph @55 we both like). We call the top one A and just below it B. (I use top and bottom "plane" to indicate the boundaries not to confuse with "the" surface of Earth). Also, I will simply use zero rather than negligible for quantities. And, CO2 is the only GHG for this discussion.
A has zero CO2, and B has some. (I say that A is transparent, and B is translucent.) C, which begins at the bottom plane of B and goes down x, is 'opaque' since nothing originating below its bottom plane reaches B.
How do we characterize the radiation flux and the temperature for these layers, first as described, and then after we add CO2 in the equivalent amounts to each?
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner @64 & 73:
You want some examples of how long a path of air must be to reduce the amount of IR radiation passing from one end to the other to a “negligible” level?If a “negligible” fraction of surviving radiation is defined as 1% (my arbitrary choice), it should be possible to calculate some path lengths of air needed to achieve this, assuming that my layman understanding of the Beer-Lambert law is reasonably correct. First a hypothetical example to show the principle:
Suppose that 25% of the radiation at a particular wavelength is absorbed by 1 metre of air. The next metre will absorb 25% of the remaining radiation and the same fraction will be absorbed by each successive metre after that (75% surviving through each metre).
The surviving fraction through 5 metres is 0.755 = 0.237, for 10 metres the fraction is 0.7510 = 0.056 and so on. In this case it takes 16 metres of air to reduce the surviving radiation to a negligible level, since 0.7516 = 0.01 = 1%.
And now some real data:
This graph from this article by Science of Doom shows the fraction of radiation entering one end of a 1 metre path of air at sea level that is transmitted (survives) to the other side. The CO2 concentration is 380 ppm, and the radiation originating within the air itself is ignored. The y-axis goes from 0 (no radiation transmitted) to 1 (all radiation transmitted), and the x-axis covers the wavelength interval from 15.15 micron (left) to 14.88 micron (right), i.e. around the very strongest absorption band of CO2. (10,000 / wavenumber = wavelength in microns)
As you see, 99% of the radiation is transmitted at 662 cm-1, while only 2% is transmitted at 667.5 cm-1, so the radiation at 667.5 cm-1 is already reduced to an almost negligible level by only one metre of air at sea level!
A calculation like the one above shows that it takes 458 metres of air to reduce the radiation at 662 cm-1 to a negligible level (0.99458 = 0.01) while it only takes 1.18 metres (0.021.18 = 0.01) to achieve the same for radiation at 667.5 cm-1. (See the last paragraph in Tom’s comment @67)If we ignore the complexities caused by pressure broadening and so on (I’ll leave that to the experts!), these path lengths are roughly inverse proportional to the atmospheric pressure. If the pressure drops to 0.2 bar (at about 12 km) the number of CO2 molecules per m3 is only 1/5 of that at sea level, so you need a 5 times longer path to get the same absorption as at sea level. That should translate to 2.3 km for radiation at 662 cm-1 but still only 5.9 metres for radiation at 667.5 cm-1. In the middle of the stratosphere (30 km / 0.01 bar) the same path lengths are about 46 km (!) and 118 metre, respectively.
(this approach only works for well-mixed gases like CO2, not for water vapour that is strongly concentrated in the lower troposphere)So, mgardner, the “x” you have been asking for can be anything from a metre to tens of kilometres, depending on wavelength, altitude and other factors, including how you define the term “negligible”.
Did this help?
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:40 AM on 22 February 2014'It's been hot before': faulty logic skews the climate debate
ubrew12,
I postulate that:
"Abbott has only made a statement that sounds like what people who desire to get away with benefiting from the unsustainable and damaging burning of fossil fuels will readily accept. He has claimed what that type of person wishes to hear and prefers to believe. And he does it without any substantial evidence to support his claim, because the evidence actually substantially contradicts such a claim."
It appears that Abbott is one of the many powerful and wicked people who are trying to take advantage of that potential popularity to benefit from unsustainable and damaging attitudes and actions any way they can get away with.
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michael sweet at 02:24 AM on 22 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner,
The people you are posting with are volunteers who have gone to a lot of effort to find graphs and explainations that will answer your questions. They are searching the background data for information outside of their specialties. You have thanked their efforts with criticism. Has it occured to you that the problem may be that your questions have been poorly phrased from the beginning? You appear to have specific needs for your answer that it is difficult for others to understand. Perhaps you need to do your own homework, instead of criticizing others for doing a poor job of it. You could be building your knowledge by searching for the answer yourself.
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Dikran Marsupial at 22:37 PM on 21 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner, as you continue to be ill-mannered and dismissive towards attempts to address your ill-posed questions, even after my appology in post 63, consider my participation in this discussion over.
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mgardner at 21:15 PM on 21 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
HK@70
"What if the diagram in @55 had showed radiation from a narrower wavelength interval, say 14.5-15.5 microns in stead of 13-17? I’m sure the radiation within each CO2 concentration would originate from a much narrower altitude interval and look more like a “layer” in the atmosphere (more like what mgardner has claimed). "
HK, please look at the graph @55. Look at the label of the vertical axis.
Now, read carefully what I said @64.
What have I so far claimed about radiation originating in a 'layer' other than what the graph says? Again, my original problem was the original 'layers' language of the explanation-- about 'radiating layers moving up to where it is colder'.
I've now quoted myself so often I guess there is not much point-- I think it is the hammer and nail problem. Whatever question I ask, the answer is going to be the one that everyone has learned to repeat.
Moderator Response:[JH] Ypou are now skating on the thin ice of escessive repetition which is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy. Please cease and desist.
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