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Roger D at 10:15 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
It seems to me there has to be something "interesting" going on psychologically with the thought processes of the Watts and Spencers of the world. Being intelligent people they must know how disingenuous their anti-mainstream-climate science arguments appear when they are completely dismantled (as in this response to their claims). Maybe after walking themselves out on the climate change denial plank to such an extent, and finding no face-saving way to stop, cheered on by people that don’t really care about the science but just don’t want to believe there is a problem, they can only hope for a miracle (mainstream science somehow "missed something" and it’s not going to be that bad, etc). At least according to this hypothesis they are not bad people. -
Riduna at 09:59 AM on 15 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
An informative article which asks: Does predicted cooling in the NW Atlantic (and NE Pacific) indicate change in ocean currents? Possible – but possibly this arises from predicted warming in the Arctic and consequent loss of land-based and sea ice producing cold water flowing into the northern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans before sinking? -
yocta at 09:51 AM on 15 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Hooray it finally works in Opera without the comments getting all muddled up! -
Tom Curtis at 09:46 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
OzDoc @8, he is a TV weather man, which means he is a (broadcast) meteorologist, and holds an American Meterological Society Seal (retired) to prove it. He studied meteorology and electrical engineering at Purdue University, but did not graduate. Make of that what you will. -
OzDoc at 09:05 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
One minor quibble: Anthony Watts (a blogger and meteorologist) He might think he is a meteorologist, but you guys? I don't think so. -
Tom Curtis at 08:11 AM on 15 January 20132012: The Year Climate Change Got Real
philipm @3, Australia's mean maximum temperature for the first eight days of 2013 exceeded the prior record (set in 1972) just once January 7th, when it exceeded the prior record by 0.13 degrees C. On January 8th, the mean national maximum temperature reached 40.1 C, 0.07 C less than the prior record. All other days in the heat wave period have been approx 0.5-1 degree C less than the prior record, although all are in the top twenty mean national maximum temperature records. Although a number of records have fallen to this heat wave, no the National maximum temperature record (50.7 C, Oodnadatta, South Australia (1960) did not fall, and neither has any state records. The forecast above 50 degree heat that required adding extra colours to the the forecast temperature scale was made for six and seven day forecasts, ie, at the limit of skill. They did not eventuate. I do not know of the temperature exceeding 50 degree C anywhere in Australia in 2013, and certainly if it did so it did not exceed the record temperature at the location where it did (as none of the many new records set exceed 50 degrees C). So, while it certainly has been exceptionally hot in Australia, and global warming has probably contributed appreciably to that heat, the heat is not outside the range that prior natural variability would lead us to expect. The take home form the Australian heatwave of January 2013 is not that it proves global warming (it does not), or even that it provides substantial evidence for global warming (it provides evidence, but very minor evidence relative to other evidence available), but that it is a foretaste of the type of heatwave that will be common by mid-century, and typical, possibly even cool conditions by the end of the century, with continued global warming. It is a wake up call that global warming has consequences. -
michael sweet at 07:33 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Watts often uses data from different sources to support his arguments. Last summer he compared IMS sea ice extent, which is defined as all extent with detected ice, and compared it to NCDC Sea Ice extent, defined as all extent containing greater than 15% ice, to argue a new extent record had not been set. In the end it did not matter, even the all ice extent was much lower than the previous 15% extent. The NCDC commented and tried to explain the problem but Watts refused to acknowledge that he had made a mistake. -
Daniel Bailey at 06:42 AM on 15 January 2013Monckton Myth #2: Temperature records, trends and El Nino
Philip, Figure 1 lists the datasets used to compile this post: HadCRUT V3 (1850-2010) Gistemp Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index (1880-2010) NOAA Global Land+Ocean (1880-2010) RSS MSU AMSU TLT Land+Ocean (1978-2010) UAH MSU AMSU T2LT Land+Ocean (1979-2010) NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis 1 (1948-2010) NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) (1979-2009) NCEP/NCAR Twentieth Century Reanalysis V2 (1871-2008) ECMWF ERA-40 (1957-2002) ECMWF ERA-Interm (1989-2010) Note: Some of the above links seem to no longer work, as perhaps the files were moved on their hosted servers. Anyone having the actual links, please post them. -
Philip Shehan at 06:19 AM on 15 January 2013Monckton Myth #2: Temperature records, trends and El Nino
Not sure if anyone is listening after 2 years but I have been arguing with characters who dispute the "provenance" of what one of them call "John Cook's hand drawn cartoon" (Figure 1). Could Robert tell me what the function fitting the temperature data is? -
dana1981 at 06:12 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
StBarnabas - we're pretty big on free speech in the USA. It's pretty hard to say anything bad enough to lose a lawsuit over. As a result, it seems like the UK and Australia hold their media to a higher standard of factual accuracy than we do, from what I've seen. There's plenty of garbage in the media in those countries, but at least the offenders tend to get slapped on the wrist when their articles are blatantly factually wrong. -
Bob Loblaw at 05:51 AM on 15 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby: What sort of cycles does your eyecrometer identify in the following sequence of (x,y) data points, and what y-value do you predict for x=11? (1,2) (2,7) (3,1) (4,8) (5,2) (6,8) (7,1) (8,8) (9,2) (10,8) Hint: it's not 1 or 2. Can you predict the next value of y to within 1, using cycles? The origin of the sequence is well-known and understood, so it is exactly predictable with a correct model. Answer is in Ray Ladbury's recent comment over at RealClimate, where I have gratuitously stolen the example. -
StBarnabas at 05:51 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Great post as usual I am full of admiration and very well done. I am aware that freedom of speech is of paramount importance in the US, but is there no law to stop these contrarians from peddling their lies and defaming scientists? Presumably they have very clever lawyers who vet their statements very carefully? Possibly the good news is that they look increasingly idiotic? Big oil will loose trillions of dollars in unusable reserves if climate change is accepted, so it's not surprising they will use any weapon to discredit AGM. Sorry rant over! StB -
JCSmith0007 at 05:16 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
I am happy to see that you have called them out for their lies. This is a very long "battle" that society will have to fight against human induced global warming. It doesn't make it any easier when we have people/organizations such as Watts, FOX, Heartland, Bastardi, and others that don't have any qualms about openly lying. They need to be called out..... "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is." Winston Churchill...Moderator Response: [RH] Please avoid all caps (changed to italics). -
CBDunkerson at 04:32 AM on 15 January 2013CO2 limits will harm the economy
Mal Adapted wrote: "If they were, we'd all be paying much more for heat, electricity and transport already" We do already pay much more for these things... we just pay the extra costs in taxes that go to the subsidies, healthcare costs, food costs, water costs, wars, increased natural disaster cleanup, et cetera. If we switched to renewable energy we might be paying more for the upfront cost of energy (though even that isn't certain), but the total cost would be much much less... so we'd have more money available... so the 'impact' to the economy would be positive. And hence no, "radically reordering our economic and political systems" (aka 'we must declare martial law and abandon all technology!'). "And at least in the early stages of transition to sustainability, without some kind of assistance the poorest may actually freeze to death in the dark -- at infinite cost to them." Who did you think it was dying from AGW, food prices, water prices, wars, pollution, et cetera now? The rich? -
Flakmeister at 04:30 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Lars: In case you have not noticed only a token few now serve time for fraudulent behaviour in the financial world... The term is "Too big to jail"... -
Lars Karlsson at 04:23 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Watts: "In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data." I believe libel is a crime. -
A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
Mal Adapted - I have replied on the more appropriate economic impacts of carbon pricing thread. -
CO2 limits will harm the economy
Mal Adapted - We are already paying the external costs of fossil fuels, in health and environmental damage. Shifting those costs to the producers, as with a carbon tax, does not subtract the value from the economy twice. To use your phrasing, there is no such thing as a free lunch - but approaches such as carbon tax don't mean you have to pay for two of them... Adaptation to climate change (with Business As Usual/BAU) will by conservative estimates cost 10x what mitigating additional CO2 now will, (by, for example, shifting those costs to the producers, hence providing incentive to move to renewables). If we want to minimize economic damage, that's the approach we should take. -
dana1981 at 03:17 AM on 15 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
snafu @96 - naturally. Solar activity has nothing to do with GHGs, and the link between GHGs and ENSO is unclear, but by definition it's cyclical and will eventually transition to more El Niños. -
Mal Adapted at 02:45 AM on 15 January 2013A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
CBDunkerson:Fixing AGW requires a change from fossil fuels to renewable energy... which will actually increase overall 'buying power' because renewable energy is vastly less expensive once all the externialities are accounted for. It isn't even close.
We all know that, but the whole point is that all the externalities are not accounted for under the current production system. If they were, we'd all be paying much more for heat, electricity and transport already, ignoring for the moment the energy cost of producing everything else. But when, as will be required for long-term global sustainability, all costs of production of goods and service are internalized, we will pay more for everything. And at least in the early stages of transition to sustainability, without some kind of assistance the poorest may actually freeze to death in the dark -- at infinite cost to them. Surely you understand that's what "internalizing the externalities" means! Nobody's mentioned it yet so it may not need to be, but simply substituting human for natural capital won't much affect the final result. To be sure, under proposed as well as existing systems there is room for human creativity ("working smarter, not harder") to improve productivity. But there will be costs to that too of course, and why would we keep those external? Too, production systems that are now energy intensive can become more labor-intensive (we can all work smarter and harder), but that cost can no more be kept external than any other. CBDunkerson, this isn't a rhetorical argument, but one founded on thermodynamics as Bernard J. says. It's not just a glibertarian catch-phrase: there really is no such thing as a free lunch. We can't call ourselves realists unless we accept that. BTW -- Moderators: should this thread move elsewhere? -
Esop at 02:08 AM on 15 January 20132012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality
Very well written indeed. Interesting how Spencer always finds the need for revisions when the UAH temp data start going into record territory. -
Philippe Chantreau at 00:55 AM on 15 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Yes Tom, that's what I meant. -
DSL at 00:02 AM on 15 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
I don't think that's the problem. I opened the page in FF (which I haven't used in months), and the link was the same -- after I dumped everything.Moderator Response: [Sph] What about the Debunking Handbook and Climate Change Denial... what do they do and what do the links say?
And check your e-mail. -
DSL at 23:56 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Nope -- maybe a cache problem? I'll dump my cache. -
DSL at 23:54 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
skepticalscience.com/escalatorModerator Response: [Sph] ??? Not sks.to/escalator? ??? -
DSL at 23:49 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Escalator link/graphic on right is "file not found" for me.Moderator Response: [Sph] ??? It works for me. When you roll over it, what URL does it show in the status bar at the bottom? Have you tried reloading the page? -
philipm at 23:07 PM on 14 January 20132012: The Year Climate Change Got Real
Sadly it seems more like the year climate denial doesn’t care if it’s unreal, continuing on to 2013. Australia has recently suffered an unprecedented heat wave, with the Bureau of Meterology having to add two new colours to the map, and Tasmania, usually relatively cool, having runaway bush fires and 40°C temperatures. Then there's this page of letters at The Australian. The rather basic fact that a linear increase in temperatures can be masked temporarily by natural variability should not be contested, and any “serious” newspaper that continues to obfuscate that fact deserves to be put behind a paywall so only the stupidly rich will read it. Oh, wait. -
CBDunkerson at 22:20 PM on 14 January 2013A Brief Note on the Latest Release of Draft IPCC Documents
Sorry, but no... they ARE wrong. They were wrong when they said fixing ozone depletion would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". They were wrong when they said fixing acid rain would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". And they are wrong when they now say that fixing AGW would require "radically reordering our economic and political systems". It is nonsense. Pure and simple. Fixing AGW requires a change from fossil fuels to renewable energy... which will actually increase overall 'buying power' because renewable energy is vastly less expensive once all the externialities are accounted for. It isn't even close. -
jyyh at 21:14 PM on 14 January 201316 ^ more years of global warming
Yes. Multiple regressions should Always be represented this way! There's probably no program which would do this automatically, so I imagine that has taken quite a while. Excellent. [DB: good job you too] -
Paul D at 20:49 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Regarding creating and editing comments... I am currently looking at different wysiwyg editors that will make it easier to format comments on Skeptical Science. Watch this space (literally!). -
snafu at 20:45 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
"Eventually the preponderance of La Niñas will end, solar activity will rise, and so forth." Will this happen naturally or by increased greenhouse emissions? -
quokka at 20:40 PM on 14 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
Here are two recent assessments of the cost of electricity generation by various technologies: Summary from the Australian Government's Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics: AUSTRALIAN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT 2012 Oct 2012 assessment from the UK Government's Department of Energy and Climate Change: Electricity Generation Costs -
John Mason at 20:35 PM on 14 January 2013Met Office decadal forecasting explained: the reality
Martin #19, primarily this is all experimental work: the aim is to see what is possible in forecasting. If we ever get to the stage where reliable 5-year forecasts can be done in detail - and we may not - then think of the very obvious benefits e.g. to agriculture. -
quokka at 20:30 PM on 14 January 2013Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive
#53 sailrick, Claims that fast reactors pose some sort of extra proliferation risk are very dubious. The only nations likely to build fast reactors in the next decade or more are already nuclear armed and already have an excess of weapons grade material. For would be proliferators, there are much easier, faster and cheaper ways to make Pu in a graphite moderated water cooled "research" reactor or alternatively centrifuge enrich uranium. Ultimately any nation that has access to natural uranium (which really is everybody as it can at a pinch be extracted from sea water) could with sufficient effort make nuclear weapons. Proliferation at it's core remains a political problem. Of course LFTRs present precisely zero proliferation risk because there aren't any, nor are their likely to be any commercially deployable LFTRs for 15 years or more without dramatically increased R&D spending. -
Dikran Marsupial at 20:10 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby As others have said, testing by eye is extremely unreliable. We have evolved such that our brain tries very hard to detect patterns in what we see (e.g. so that we can detect ambush predators that are hiding in cover). This is one reason that optical illusions can be so convincing. This is why we should use objective statistical methods to test out hypotheses. However, don't stop there, the next step is physics. A good physical theory is more convincing that an observed correlation, as it allows you to go into the causal mechanisms. For example, there are good physical reasons that can explain the apparent cyclical changes in climate sine 1880, based on observed changes in the forcings. This means that if for the changes to be due to a real cycle, then much of what we know about atmospheric and radiative physics must be wrong. So do you have a physical mechanism to explain the 30 year cycles and an explanation of where our knowledge of physics is wrong? Lastly, scientific method is based on the idea of self-skepticism - if you want to promulgate an hypothesis, the onus is on you to test it first. In this case, if the hypothesis of climate change being cyclical is based purely on the observations, then you need to show the evidence for those cycles is statistically significant (i.e. that the observations would be unlikely under AGW). -
cynicus at 19:48 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
although the spacing of some page elements may be different by a pixel or five, here or there. Yes, the temperature scale of the most uses septical arguments has holes in FireFox 18. Internet Explorer 9 is fine as is Chrome 23.0.1271.97 and 24.0.1312.5Moderator Response: [Sph] Have you tried reloading the page in Firefox? -
jyyh at 18:11 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
honoring this update, I've also updated my profile ;-) , pretty much counting myself out of the regulars nowadays though. Is there a way to delete the profile image, the old one was no longer very accurate, so there's a Greenland bedrock map in its place now. -
Doug Hutcheson at 17:38 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Drop downs and links all seem fine, running Firefox under Fedora 17 Linux. Also, I just worked out how to enter CO₂ with 2 as a subscript, using the Compose key and typing (Compose key)_2 How annoying to find the work-around just when WYSIWYG is nearly here ... sigh. -
Doug Hutcheson at 17:31 PM on 14 January 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #2
2012: The Year Climate Change Got Real by Greenman appears in both 'The Week in Review' and 'Coming Soon'. I must be in a quantum time warp: oh, yes, there's Schrödinger's cat, and it's still alive; I'm definitely warped ... "8-) -
Tom Curtis at 16:48 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Phillipe Chantreau @93:"Cycles are extremely easy to mistake for stochastic fluctuations."
I suspect you mean that around the other way, although no doubt both ways are true when the data is less than a few "cycle" lengths in duration. -
Bob Lacatena at 15:12 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Anyone who has the drop down problem can clear it immediately by hitting reload. It will also clear on it's own in a few days (it's just your browser caching a file that has changed, so it's using the one that's incompatible/out-of-date). -
citizenschallenge at 15:12 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
oh I hate those typos. . . good night . -
citizenschallenge at 15:11 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Just got off my girl friends Dell Windows 7 - Explorer Internet Drop downs work fine and all the menu link also work. In fact, I just check on this Mac and they are all working this time. Cheers -
Philippe Chantreau at 15:09 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Smerby says: "Some graphs do pass the eyeball test and I think the surface temp graph that I posted shows reliable and repeating trends of ~30 years." THere is a serious problem with this statement. The eyeball is not a test, can not substitute for a real statistical analysis. There is a variety of true statistical methods to determine if a cycle is a present in a data set. I'm sure Dikran can weigh in on that; Tamino has posts dedicated to the subject. One can assert that a cycle is present only after subjecting the data to these tests. Saying "I think a cycle shows" without being able to refer to any analysis is dangerously close to being full of it. It is nowhere near a skeptical attitude. Cycles are extremely easy to mistake for stochastic fluctuations. -
Rob Honeycutt at 14:34 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
smerby... First off, I greatly appreciate you sticking around to discuss the subject. You're clearly interested, even though sometimes it can be tough to push through and get all the answers you want without getting frustrated. One suggestion I would offer is to remember, this is all about the greenhouse effect and the change in radiative forcing on the climate system. All the elements we're discussing, including surface temperature, are responses to that change in forcing. What I think I see your questions possibly alluding to (correct me if I'm wrong), is whether there is another explanation for global warming. Is it something internally cyclical about the climate system (i.e., PDO, etc.). And what I would have to remind you of is, the radiative properties of GHG's are well understood. What would be utterly amazing would be if the changes in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere did not act to change surface temperatures. -
citizenschallenge at 14:27 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
weird I just looked again and they are under their headings where they belong. Oh and I got Safari is 6.0.2 too. don't ask me, I'm just reporting ;-) -
citizenschallenge at 14:22 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
The menu bar and drop downs seem to be working fine for me {Mac OS X - ver 10.8.2 - Safari } However these links were broken: lessons from predictions trend calculator climate myths prudent path OA not OK ====================== Other than that, SWEET - it seems to work much faster and I clinked around a bunch, including translations... never appreciated how many translations you've got. Bravo! It all worked swell ! Although - about your "Donation" too bad PayPal is the only option you have. Not like I could donate much, but for you folks, I could definitely scratch some coin together. But I don't do the PayPal. ~ ~ ~ Anyways, thanks for all your collective efforts, they help. You folks are awesome !Moderator Response: [Sph] Links fixed. Thanks for the heads up. -
skywatcher at 14:22 PM on 14 January 2013Resolving Confusion Over the Met Office Statement and Continued Global Warming
Smerby, you keep returning to your eyeball as a reliable identifier of some kind of "cycle", but you are as yet providing insufficient evidenciary backup for this claim. [BTW, you can refer to such work as Santer et al for why you need 20-30 years for determination fo a trend in climate.] So here is one simple question for you: Q: Is there a statistically significant change in the warming trend over the past decade? If you think there is, please show your working. Eyecrometer results are not acceptable. My thinking is in line withKevin C's video above, and the final two figures of Tamino's post - that the underlying trend has not actually changed over the past decade. Global temperatures are where you would have expected, had you plotted a graph in 2000, estimating the subsequent 12 years. Skeptics often claim that somehow there's cooling, large overprinted cycles or other changes that are manifesting themselves just now or shortly in the future. You claimed that temperatures have "flat-lined", yet is there any actual evidence for this? I contend that there is not. I also contend that you are confusing noise with signal. -
Rob Honeycutt at 14:17 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
All the drop down menus show up on the far left side of the screen. I'm using a Mac OSX 10.8.2 with Safari 6.0.2. Sounds similar to what Daniel is describing above.Moderator Response: [Sph] Hit "reload" on your browser. -
Daniel Bailey at 14:08 PM on 14 January 2013Skeptical Science Upgrade
Bug/Feature: Hovering the cursor over the drop-down bar doesn't generate a normal drop-down listing underneath each linked tab. Instead, the listing appears in a blocked column to the left of the Most-Used Climate Myths thermometer. It is difficult to move the cursor over fast enough to access this remote menu before it times out and disappears. Affected Tabs: Arguments, Software, Resources, Translations and About drop-down headers/listings. FF 18.0, Windows 7.Moderator Response: [Sph] Hit "reload" on your browser.
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