A rare sighting of endangered scientific graph in newsprint

We skeptics get excited about unusual things. The Australian published Michael Asten today in the Op-Ed pages, and took the extremely rare step of publishing a scientific graph (!) with a few error bars and everything. Newspapers publish economic graphs all the time, so it’s nice to see the scientific debate getting a bit more sophisticated than just the usual “deniers are evil, government climate scientists speak the word of God” type of stuff. (In the Enlightenment, data was a greater source of authority than any human; how we pine for those days.) The only thing the story should have added was a note that reminds us that the not only was the “hottest” record not beyond the error bars but that it did not occur in satellite measurements. I’m sure a lot of people mistakenly think that NASA might use satellites, but they prefer highly adjusted ground thermometers next to airport tarmac instead.

The headline on that graph could have been “Climate scientists don’t know what caused most of the big moves on this graph”. Some mystery effect caused the warming from 1910-1940. In ClimateScienceTM it is OK to call that “natural variability” and pretend to be 95% sure whatever it was has now stopped.

  The Australian

‘Angry summer’ alarmists all choked up without reading fine print

Blame me for the red scribble and arrows (which didn’t appear in the paper).

 alt=

Red words and arrows added by me. Click to see the original.

 

Michael Asten juxtaposes a quote or two. The silliness speaks for itself when placed next to this graph:

John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute, greeted the 2014 result with the comment “This data shows not only a series of alarming years but decades of warming to make an undisputable trend”

What does “indisputable” mean anymore? We’re not allowed to dispute it?

Asten reminds us that back in 2007 when Bob Carter mentioned the earliest warnings that the warming trends were not matching the predictions, he was scolded:

Andrew Ash (then acting director of the CSIRO Climate Adaption Flagship), stated “Professor Bob Carter claims that ‘no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998’. This is an unethical misrepresentation of the facts”. I suggest this is an incredible accusation to make against a scientist who has read (correctly, as history shows) a trend in a global temperature data set. When comparing Carter’s observation with pronouncements prompted by the single 2014 warm temperature point, we see a disturbing double standard in how scientific commentary is received.

The basic theme of the article:

LAST week delivered for the global warming debate, the most anticipated data point of the decade. The year 2014 was declared the hottest of the past century, by a margin of 0.04 degC. The news has been greeted with enthusiasm by those who attribute all warming to man-made influences, (notably in the Fairfax press in Australia), but few commentators have qualified their comment with the observation that NASA put an error margin of +-0.05 C on their result.

The figure below shows global surface temperature as compiled by NASA for the past 134 years. Single data points (years) are unimportant. The 5-year moving average in red is a more useful indicator of temperature trends, and its slope shows clearly the steady rising trend from 1980 to 2000, and the temperature pause from 2000 to present. Anyone with a high-school science education can look at such a graph and form their own conclusions, but four of the most important are that

• The slope of the rise from 1980 to 2000 is about 0.19 degC per decade (the rate consistent with current warming models for “business as usual” CO2 emissions)

• A closely similar rate of rise in global temperature occurred from 1910 to 1940, pre-dating current high CO2 emissions

• Pauses in the rate of rise occurred from 1880 to 1910, from 1940 to 1970, and from 2000 to present.

• The model trend as computed by the IPCC continues upwards from 2000, but the pause is a clear break of observed earth behaviour away from the models.

9 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

199 comments to A rare sighting of endangered scientific graph in newsprint

  • #
    Matt

    Speaking of predictions not matching observations —

    “Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model exposes serious errors in complex computer models”

    http://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-exposes-errors.html

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  • #
    bemused

    Catastrophists always live in hope.

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    • #
      Rick Bradford

      If there’s one thing you can count on in a catastrophist, it’s that he never lets his failures hold him back.

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    • #
      Manfred

      Catastrophists always live in hope.

      Hope of what exactly?

      The news has been greeted with enthusiasm by those who attribute all warming to man-made influences

      They betray themselves at every turn of the worm.

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    • #
      Winston

      Catastrophists actually always live in hype.

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    • #

      … they live in hope of despair.

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    • #
      the Griss

      “Catastrophists always live in hope.”

      Yep, they HOPE they will get something right the next time..

      or the time after that…

      or the time after that..

      .. oops.. dashed hopes. !

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      • #
        Greg Cavanagh

        They get awards and prizes for being wrong.

        Even when hope fails repeatedly over a lifetime, it still looks as though they were right by any cursory review of their past becuase they have awards, prizes and letters fore and aft of their name.

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    • #
      FIN

      Hah! I give you old stagers credit for tenacity that’s for sure. Even a rat has the sense to abandon a sinking ship. But not you lot, you’ll go down with it in total denial. Blind Freddy can see the momentum is shifting, even the barbaric, stone age Saudi’s. If a lame duck President can get momentum with this issue something has changed.
      One can’t help thinking that in 20 years time a wizened old Nova will be pecking away at her computer in the old folks home, “it’s all a hoax I tells ya, all a hoax!”. Yes dear, of course it is, now take your pills.

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      • #
        TedM

        Very scientific treatise Fin. Did you have it peer reviewed?

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      • #
        mark

        Just love it the way the propagandists choose the data points. The graph stops at 2000….why would that be?

        Poor little me also reckons they have been somewhat left leaning putting the ruler on the data for a straight line of best fit.

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        • #
          Bob

          Mark, I am afraid you have got this one wrong: the horizontal axe’s last shown year is 2000, but the axe itself (and the graph) continues through to approx. 2014.

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          • #
            mark

            Must agree with you, Bob. Am a victim of not reading the scale past the last prime entry. In my defence…the line of best fit departs the data in 2002

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        Greg Cavanagh

        Yes FIN, how is the first rise from 1910 to 1940 not CO2, whent he second rise from 1970 to 2000 caused by CO2.

        Instead of have a good belly laugh at us for being wrong in our thinking, please explain the above.

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        • #
          the Griss

          Note that we are STILL waiting for a single paper that proves that CO2 causes warming in an open atmosphere.

          Perhaps its Fin’s chance to back up the most basic lie of his brain-washed emptymess with some actual proof.?

          Nah, not going to happen. !

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      • #
        OriginalSteve

        How is it that warmists despite all the logic and data to the contrary, manage to declare the world is flat?

        FIN, if science and logic and scientific method and common sense isnt your thing, perhaps stick to your first love of politics.

        I’v eyet to understand the appeal of the left unless you enjoy using agitprop to make peopels lives difficult. The soviet union collapsed because left wing politcs basically dont work and appeal to victims the world over. Ironically, the left can only exist because those of us on the conservative right who make the money and jobs give you space to do so. Think of the left as a pure academic indulgence of spolit kids and poor morals and youre not too far wrong.

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      • #
        the Griss

        “Even a rat has the sense to abandon a sinking ship.”

        Yet here you are spouting the same brain-washed, non-thinking, propaganda pap as always.

        You have learnt nothing, because you are not capable of learning.

        Seems that you are not even a rat !!

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      • #
        the Griss

        And there will be Fin,

        in his padded cell in a murmuring chant…..

        “they told me it would be warmer”

        “they told me it would be warmer”

        “they told me it would be warmer”

        “they told me it would be warmer”
        .
        .
        .

        ad infinitum..

        .. as usual.

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      • #
        MurrayA

        FIN,
        Your post is a tirade, pure and simple. No substance, just 100% abuse. And your side claims to have “science” on its side! This is my whole objection to the AGW movement: it is replete with abuse, logical fallacies (prominently the post hoc fallacy), and violations of the whole empirical methodology of science. And then there is this whole appeal to (alleged) “consensus”, as if scientific conclusions are determined by a vote! But that’s the whole thrust of your rhetoric: “Get with the trend!” Oh, give me a break!

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      • #
        Winston

        FIN,

        Having such heavyweight scientists in your corner, like Leo DiCaprio, Pharrell Williams, and Al “Million Degrees” Gore in your corner is very comforting I’m sure, seeing as such erudite fonts of knowledge have lent their intellectual weight to the cause, and I am sure this is not without precedent.

        I seem to recall Charles Darwin enlisting none other than Pyotr Ilyich Tchiakovsky to provide the theme music for “On the Origin of Species”, and wasn’t that Charles Chaplin doing a little pantomime for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, or perhaps Al Jolson may have done a politically incorrect “race number” to set off the mood.

        Lets face it, for someone whose gained so much momentum, it seems some pretty desperate last ditch efforts are being made to stuff your particular brand of turkey. Some of us aren’t buying what you are selling.

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        • #
          King Geo

          Well said Winston – your humour matches that of your famous namesake and also let’s not forget John WINSTON Lennon – he was the Beatle with all the one liners. As for Di Caprio, Gore etc – their alarmist CAGW ravings and lunatic predictions will be discarded with disdain later this decade as the GM/LIA takes hold. Leonardo’s role as Jack Dawson going down with the S.S. Titanic in 1912 (in the 1997 film Titanic) will be remembered but pale into insignificance in comparison to him going down with the “S.S. CAGW TITANIC” in the late 2010’s.

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          • #
            Winston

            Mockery is the sincerest form of flattery.

            Well, not really but we’ll say that won’t we!

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            • #
              King Geo

              You are right Winston but, quoting your famous namesake, “we shall fight in the fields ……we will never surrender” and we “CAGW Skeptics” will do likewise fighting the “CAGW Alarmists”, but it is a tough battle to win, but don’t worry we will win the war thanks to our best ally “THE SUN” – the Sun will bring forth the GM/LIA and victory will be ours.

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              • #
                Greg Cavanagh

                Indeed, they say the world conforms to the laws of physics, when in reality physics is trying to catch up to what reality is doing.

                And the world will do whatever it will, despite the modelling efforts of the many.

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      • #
        Manfred

        If a lame duck President can get momentum with this issue something has changed.

        Indeed FIN, a very BIG ‘IF’…

        As a lame duck, it’s likely to be blasted by a twelve gauge before it’s airborne…nothing much left to eat on that scrawny, lead filled carcass…some things never change.

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      • #
        Safetyguy66

        Really in depth, evidence based critique there Fin, your a credit to your alarmist brethren.

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      • #
        bemused

        Bugger! A similar link had already been already posted, so it appears I was using the same observational skills as a global warming expert. I accept my error.

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        • #
          Greg Cavanagh

          Its ok, I missed the first one but found this one.

          They truly are a doomsday cult. They feed off it, and it apparently pays pretty well to as Mr Richard Suerville looks well fed.

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    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      So we are discussing the climate in this place called “Hope”. Where exactly is that? Wyoming?

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      • #

        I “hope” not! They’d have to park the planes in Colorado. I really don’t want that many people who are that politically radical in Wyoming—could turn out very badly. However, as for preaching about global warming, Wyoming would have been a better choice. It’s in the 50’s and most of the snow has melted. Activists would have to drape those country flags on sagebrush instead of snowmen. 🙂

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  • #
    Peter C

    Error Bars

    Good to see the Australian publishing a graph with error bars. But what do they mean and how are the calculated?

    I am going to head slightly OT here because I have a question and some readers may be able to help. I am no statistician.

    In my work I perform a test to assess Osteoporosis ( weak bones due to bone resorbtion) known as DEXA Bone Densitometry. Essentially the test tries to measure the amount of calcium in some bones (usually the lumbar spine and the hip) by scanning with two xray beams of different energy (hence Dual Energy Xray Densitometry). Using proprietary algorithms the machine calculates the calcium in the bone by comparing the beam attenuation at two xray energies.

    The attenuation coefficients of bone, soft tissue (water) and air are different and they vary with the beam energy. The calculation is performed based on assumed values of these attenuation coefficients.

    Now some readers here will spot a problem straight way, because there are 3 unknowns but only 2 measurements. In general 3 equations are required to solve for 3 unknowns.

    The accuracy of the machine is supposed to be 1% (which is very good for medical tests). But the 1% accuracy is based on the measurement of a phantom (block of plastic with some inclusions) and this is tested every day.

    The problem is that actual serial clinical measurements on patients show variations which suggest that the measurement errors are much greater than 1% ( maybe 6% or even more). Many of these patients are on some sort of therapy ( mostly of unproven benefit) by which the doctors are endeavouring to correct the Osteoporosis (low bone density), which complicates matters.

    So the question in my mind is this. Is the variation in the bone density measurement since the last scan a real change, or is it due to measurement error? How can one estimate error bars under these conditions?

    In laboratory conditions a scientist would estimate the errors by performing his tests more than once, perhaps many times. Variations in the measurement if all the conditions are kept the same will yield the measurement error, which is in fact statistical. However since the test uses xrays, which are considered potentially harmful if is unethical to scan a human patient over and over for one test.

    The problem is not unlike climate measurements. What is the real estimate of the error?

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    • #
      the Griss

      There are only 3 sets of measurements of temperature that even try to use a CONSISTENT set of readings at a consistent set of points.

      Those are the two satellite temperature sets, and USCRN.

      The satellite records show NO WARMING at all since the end of the 1998 ElNino event
      The USCRN shows cooling at the rate of 0.08°C/yr since it was established in 2005

      The two land surface temp sets are a hodge-podge set of mismatched, irregularly spaced, ever changing list of surface stations, mixed with estimates of sea surface temperature, smeared across vast regions of unknown by a pair of the most rabid warmistas on the planet.

      Their claim of anything less than even +/-1°C accuracy is a total farce !!!

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    • #
      Geoff Sherrington

      Peter,
      Problem understood.
      First reaction is to use animal parts if they are not outside the formula range.
      There is no way that you can carry forward an ‘idealised’ error of 1%.
      How hard you need to establish true error depends on the range of the measurements you deal with, in terms of calculated bone density, both between patients and within a patient over time. If there is a large range, not so much of a prob.
      Why not drop me an email to see if I can help? Jo has it.
      Geoff

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      • #
        Peter C

        Thanks Geoff,

        I will be in touch.

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      • #
        Mark D.

        Peter C and Geoff, totally out of my expertise but wouldn’t the error range only impact whether or not the patient really needed treatment? The subsequent tests for each patient would always be through their own tissues and therefore reliable as an indicator of treatment efficacy because the errors would then be only from machine sensitivity or consistency wouldn’t they?

        Really the machine only needs to be accurate enough to determine if treatment is necessary (against whatever risks the treatments bring) right?

        This isn’t really off topic because we have a similar thing happening in the warmist/skeptic world. Warmists believe the treatment (elimination of co2) MUST begin even though the risks and side effects of the treatment are possibly greater than the “illness”. Skeptics see the error bars and rightfully question both the necessity and efficacy of the treatment. Never mind the fair comparison of financial rewards to the inventors, marketeers and treatment professionals for finding the “need” for treatment……

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    • #
      Gary in Erko

      Is “error bars” or “error margin” the correct term or concept. The term “error” gives the impression that the central value is far more likely to be true, but please allow a bit of loose fudge space just to be safe. “Likely range” is probably a more correct term – there’s a something percent certainty that the numerical value of the estimated real world data falls somewhere within this range.

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    • #
      ATheoK

      “…So the question in my mind is this. Is the variation in the bone density measurement since the last scan a real change, or is it due to measurement error? How can one estimate error bars under these conditions?…

      Only a controlled test against a large sample of people with verified density results will get you those error bars.

      The plastic density test to check machine calibration is a consistency test. That that individual machine is scanning density consistently across time.
      It will not define how well that machine identifies bone density in a wide range of patients.

      That machine should consistently scan bone density of a person over time; barring repairs, overhauls, interference. Like aircraft, every machine should be verified for consistency; not just for reading the plastic, but also for reading patient’s bone densities. A patient’s bone density showing differences after machine changes should be verified before accepted as accurate.

      Is a very good question!

      Since I’m keeping my answer abrupt I am sure others can greatly expand establishing valid error bars for patient’s bone densities.

      Other identical machines may produce similar results, but even subtle minor differences in a machine would disqualify such assumptions; different chips, or other minor electrical components, wiring arrangement, etc.

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      • #
        Rereke Whakaaro

        Only a controlled test against a large sample of people with verified density results will get you those error bars.

        So if the the error bars rely on having a large sample of people, all we need to do is to get a large sample of climates … Um?

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        • #
          Graeme No.3

          How about a sample of large people?

          And the warmists sample a lot of climates…then homogenise them.

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    • #
      Leo G

      Highlights the fact that we are not really dealing with scientific data, which necessarily includes all relevant metadata, measurement errors and uncertainties. For instance dry bulb temperature data are not really scientific data unless included is humidity information and the temperature error corresponding to that uncertainty in internal energy.

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  • #
    the Griss

    And let’s not forget that the temperatures in the bottom half of that graph have been pushed down considerable.

    Reality would be a much higher peak at 1940, and the trend from the cooler 1960’s to 2000 would actually be about 1/2 to 2/3 the trend of between 1915 and 1940

    And of course , since 2000.. nothing, nada, zip .. flat as, despite a reasonable increase in plant life CO2.

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    • #
      tom0mason

      the Griss

      Dr. Tim Ball has a good heads-up on global temperatures. In his latest piece he asks “2014: Among the 3 percent Coldest Years in 10,000 years?”

      – See more at: http://drtimball.com/2015/2014-among-the-3-percent-coldest-years-in-10000-years

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      • #
        the Griss

        Yep, I keep trying to explain the brain-dead alarmist trolls that we are currently only just above the MINIMUM of the last 10,000 years.

        Somehow they seem to think the warming, (that isn’t happening) is somehow going to be a problem.

        For some reason they think that warming to the temps of the MWP or RWP would be catastrophic….

        seriously ?????????? Whatever they are smoking, its retarding their thought processes !!!

        I’m totally convince that these guys haven’t got an ounce of grey matter, total, left between them !!!

        Brain-washing with a high-pressure hose, probably… nothing left but a hollow shell.

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        • #
          Manfred

          Griss, stalking climate horses require no cortical engagement, merely modeled distraction, obfuscation and manipulation. Watch the proverbial hand waving up there as the UN knee you in the crotch down there.

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        • #
          tom0mason

          Did you notice Dr Ball’s comments on the Australian and NZ temperature records?

          “The UHIE was one of the first challenges to the claim of AGW evidenced in the instrumental record. Two graphs produced by Warwick Hughes were the most effective and appeared in 1991, shortly after the first IPCC Report in 1990. Figure 3 shows temperature at six major Australian cities.”
          UHIE=urban heat island effect.

          and of the NZ record –

          “There is a consistent revision of the record to lower historic readings. This increases the gradient of supposed warming. It is apparent in the New Zealand record (Figure 5). “

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  • #
    stargazer

    John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute, greeted the 2014 result with the comment “This data shows not only a series of alarming years but decades of warming to make an undisputable trend”


    • The model trend as computed by the IPCC continues upwards from 2000, but the pause is a clear break of observed earth behaviour away from the models.

    Might I suggest a slight re-write of the latter quote:

    • The model trend as computed by the IPCC continues upwards from 2000, but the pause is a clear break of observed earth behaviour away from the models. clear evidence that IPCC models fail to accurately describe or predict observed climate trends.

    Just a thought. Makes the warmer-mystics look more foolish.

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  • #

    The NASA graph is adjusted crap. What happened to the 1945 to 1977 cooling? Those error bars are hopelessly optimistic. Try +/- 1 deg C. If you are lucky.

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  • #
    Richard111

    Be nice to see that temperature graph overlaid with the solar cycle sunspot graph of the exact same period. Might show more clearly why warming occurred. Pauses are reduced heating. Pauses show the planet cannot cool immediately as the oceans are a massive heat store, not so much the land. Anyway, be prepared for the coming Maunder minimum.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/entries/6d50a6bd-779a-32d6-bfca-06e4484d6835

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    • #
      the Griss

      “Anyway, be prepared for the coming Maunder minimum.’

      BUT WE AREN’T PREPARED!!

      Electricity supply systems around the world have been diluted to such a degree that failure of supply is imminent in many countries.

      The one thing that would have allowed the world to cope with a cooler period without too much bother, has been destroyed on the back of far-left green socialist control alarmism about the a gas that supports and nourishes all life on the planet.!!!

      Utter and complete stupidity !!

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    • #
      John F. Hultquist

      Richard,
      Note this from that link: “According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.”

      See:
      http://leif.org/research/Long-term-Variation-Solar-Activity.pdf

      Note Fig. 2 there and the text.
      There has been much discussion about this so called “grand maximum” and those writing about the sun spot numbers (SSN) need to be aware of the issue. Here is another link:
      http://leif.org/research/CEAB-Cliver-et-al-2013.pdf
      Just under Fig 1 from this paper, the authors write:
      But there is a problem with the sunspot number time series. There
      are two of them – the series that dates to Wolf (variously referred to as
      the International, Wolf, or Zürich SSN) and the alternative Group SSN
      developed by Hoyt & Schatten (1998a,b) – with no clear consensus on which
      to use
      .”

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  • #
    the Griss

    OT.. So much for Greenland melting !!!!!

    How much straw can the emaciated camel that is CO2 alarmism carry ???

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    • #
      tom0mason

      Very inconvenient fact that one about Greenland, that could seriously put a dent into the “all the ice is melting!” alarmism.

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  • #
    patrick healy

    Dear Jeanne,
    Sorry to be a moaning Minnie, but is there any chance you could move your graphs and charts a bit further to the left?
    Unfortunately the “commercials” for your many awards and website links on the right hand side encroach onto the graphs.
    This is a shame as I cannot read all of your estimable prognostications.
    Kind regards from a cold Carnoustie (+1c today)

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    • #
      the Griss

      That’s odd.. they are displaying ok on my 28″ screen 🙂

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    • #
      Geoff Sherrington

      Patrick,
      Most times if you click or tap on the graph, it comes up bigger and uncluttered. No great effort needed.

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      • #

        Patrick, I’m grateful for feedback.I try to keep images 600px wide or less, and as Geoff noted, I usually try to click-link the image (or a larger one) as well.

        What size width are your screens? (My screen, ahem, brag, show off: 5120px.)

        But I do want to cater to tablets and kindles, and probably could do a lot more.

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        • #
          PeterPetrum

          Jo, the graphs are ALWAYS amongst the ads on the iPad, which is what I use all the time. Unfortunately the “pause” is always disguised by the ads.

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  • #
    patrick healy

    Sorry Joanne (kindle cannot spell!)

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  • #

    Hilarious when you see it presented on an easy to read graph like that 🙂

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  • #
    patrick healy

    Ok Mr Griss, so I am an old couch potatoe too lazy to fire up the steam driven pc. Point taken.

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  • #
    the Griss

    OT, Just another issue that could easily lead to “pseudo-warming”.

    AWS reacted very quickly to transients, unlike mercury thermometers.

    And with so many stations now at airports.. welllll !!!

    Just how much of the meagre warming at the end of the last century is actually REAL ?????

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  • #
    TdeF

    Surely anyone seeing this graph for the first time would be struck by the total lack of temperature change for 40 years between 1940 and 1980? It would be hard to accept that what caused the rise 1980-2000 was steadily rising CO2, especially as it stopped again for 16 years this time? That doesn’t even make sense. There is no correlation with CO2.

    Then the 0.2C green error bars mean that the whole range of the graph is not great. You would certainly want to be assured that this size of change was even significant. It hardly seems reasonable to build 200,000 windmills on the basis of this graph and the very obvious political importance attached to blaming rich countries and demanding reparations. On the surface, it all looks so contrived and there is no connection with CO2.

    Then with so much money and now so many careers at stake, you would have to question the core data from around the world, as the motivation to fudge, homogenize and edit is enormous.

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    Richard

    Even Phil Jones of CRU acknowledged a few years back that the rate of warming from 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940 and 1975 to 1998 are virtually identical even though anthropogenic CO2-emissions were negligible pre-1940. According to the CAGW-hypothesis the rate of warming should have increased as our emissions have increased. But it has not. The fact that these three warming rates are virtually identical means that there is no anthropogenic signature in the global surface temperature record and the warming we have experienced is well-within long-term natural variation. It’s that simple. There is nothing ‘unprecedented’ or unusual with the rate of warming. Also even if by some stretch of the imagination CO2 was causing the temperature to increase by 0.19C/decade, that is only a 1.6C by 2100 (and probably much less given CO2’s logarthmic nature). A generally benign warming of 1.6C by 2100 isn’t going to scare anyone into accepting punitive green-taxes, disruptive geoengineering projects, and carbon offset scams.

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      TdeF

      As I have written, you can radio carbon date the air as fossil fuel has no C14. This shows absolutely that the CO2 in the air is not fossil fuel. This simple test proves that the CO2 increase is not man made. In fact there is very litle fossil fuel CO2 in the air at all.

      Incredibly no one has disputed this simple logic. Will Steffen just ignored it. Of course, he has to do so as salaried chief of the Climate Council, a group dedicated to a proposition which is demonstrably not true. It is all politics and money. There is no science.

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          TdeF

          Sherl. Nice simple explanations. The first on C14 decay. The second and third on the bomb effect. They do not address my point that if the 50% increase in CO2 since 1900 is due to fossil fuels, the C14 should have gone down 33%. It hasn’t. Game over.

          On top of that the doubling of C14 atoms in the air in the eary 1960s is the perfect test of the rate of exchange of CO2 with the ocean. The result is 14 years. 50 years on all that C14 is gone. So it is with all man made CO2.

          The IPCC argues a half life for absorption of 80 years, possibly because admitting it is 14 years would mean they all went home.

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            I found another on Watts: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/28/spencer-pt2-more-co2-peculiarities-the-c13c12-isotope-ratio/ The last half links to the first.

            I’ve always had difficulty believing CO2 molecules remain in the atmosphere for decades and that we tell them apart. I’ve been known to ask if “they radio-collared” the molecules. Sarcasm, of course, but the whole thing is very poorly explained and—shock—is often based on models.

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              TdeF

              Sheri, yes thanks again. This is the balance between common C12 which is 99% and the 1% C13 isotope. There have been studies based on the relative absorption rate in plants.

              However in both cases you are looking at small differences so it is hard to be conclusive.

              In total contrast C14 is not natural. It has a half life of 5300 years and a measure of cosmic rays in the high atmosphere. This is remarkably steady so it is a direct measure of age for wood. When wood is made, the C14 is trapped and decays, so you can determine the age.

              My point is that C14 is an absolute, undeniable measure. Only 1 CO2 in 1 trillion is C14.

              Amazingly, we humans doubled it around 1965 and we know what happened. So we are certain of the half life and the IPCC is plain wrong. Wrong. Wrong. To my knowledge no one has disputed this. They cannot.

              Even better, the C14 is trending perfectly for a single decay rate which destroys the other argument of carbon sinks. This is a straight line on a log graph.

              It is also trending to the 20,000 year old level, so no discernible effect from man made CO2 which has not C14. It all fits so well we can say without fear of contradiction, man made CO2 just vanishes into the huge oceans. So we know where it went too.

              This is all so obvious to a physicist, it is unbelievable that this scam has persisted. The CO2 increase is NOT man made. That’s it.

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                TdeF

                As an example, they do this in nuclear medicine, inject a short half life tracer to see exactly where it goes. Effectively the world did that with CO2 in 1964 so we know everything. Half the C14 should still be there after 5300 years so it cannot vanish in 50 years. It has nearly all gone.

                So with all CO2. Where it went is known but irrelevant. All man made CO2 is gone. There is no man made CO2 increase, so there is no man made Global Warming even if the hothouse theory was right, which it isn’t.

                I could write a paper on this, but cannot see the point. It is such basic physics that a paper would be absurd. The world experiment was started 50 years ago unintentionally. All this is simply known.

                If someone would like to say where this is wrong, I would love to hear it. The question, the core assumption is that the steady CO2 increase is man made. It isn’t.

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      tom0mason

      Yep, the graph shows a MASSIVE 0.6°C in 50 years.
      Alarming? Not really.

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        TdeF

        The error bars are nearly 0.2C so the significance of the increase is down in the noise level. Surely this slight change cannot affect the planet?

        A large proportion of humans live at or near sea level, as do half the population of massive Bangladesh. No major population has reported significantly rising ocean levels. In Northern Europe the problem is with rapidly rising land levels after the last ice age!

        There is also no explanation for worries over 100 years. No one seriously believes we will have any oil left. Problem solved?

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    Robert O

    I thought it was pretty cold at end of the Mini Ice Age, so what’s wrong with some slight warming and nothing to be alarmed about as historically it was much warmer in Roman and Medieval times.

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    William Astley

    In response to: “Climate scientists don’t know what caused most of the big moves on this graph”

    Why the heck can’t climate scientists solve this dang problem? Scientific political correctness which has reached heretic levels, is part of the reason. For example, the recent firing of a senior editor at Nature who had agreed to publish unequivocal Antarctic peninsula ice core evidence (Antarctic peninsula temperature as it is outside of the polar vortex correlates with the Southern sea temperature. The Southern sea which had warmed, is now cooling, which explains the highest Antarctic sea ice in recorded history) of 240 cyclic warming and cooling events in the last 250,000 years in the southern hemisphere (big deal as the same cyclic warming and cooling, with the same periodicity is observed in the Northern hemisphere which indicates there is a massive cyclic climate forcer, it obviously is not CO2), is an example of the non-scientific barrier to solving the puzzle.

    There are piles and piles of observations that support the assertion that less than 25% of the warming in the last 150 years was due to increases in atmospheric CO2. The observational fact that there has been almost no tropical tropospheric warming at 8km which is the signature and primary forcing agent of tropical warming which explains why there has been almost no tropical region warming when the GCMs predicted that the most amount of AGW warming would occur in the tropics is likely the best negative logical pillar.

    http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf

    Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
    According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379198000882

    The role of solar forcing upon climate change

    …A number of those Holocene climate cooling phases… most likely of a global nature (eg Magney, 1993; van Geel et al, 1996; Alley et al 1997; Stager & Mayewski, 1997) … the cooling phases seem to be part of a millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independent of the glacial-interglacial cycles (which are) forced (perhaps paced) by orbit variations.

    … we show here evidence that the variation in solar activity is a cause for the millennial scale climate change.

    Last 40 kyrs
    Figure 2 in paper. (From data last 40 kyrs)… “conclude that solar forcing of climate, as indicated by high BE10 values, coincided with cold phases of Dansgaar-Oeschger events as shown in O16 records”

    Recent Solar Event
    Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) “…coincides with one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age… (van Geel et al 1998b)

    Periodicity
    Mayewski et al (1997) showed a 1450 yr periodicity in C14 … from tree rings and …from glaciochemicial series (NaCl & Dust) from the GISP2 ice core … believed to reflect changes in polar atmospheric circulation..”

    It is difficult to even imagine the next phase in the climate wars, it appears the plateau of no warming is over. The solar magnetic cycle is flat lining, the mechanism that was inhibiting the solar magnetic cycle modulation of planetary cloud is over, based on recent observations. The initial cooling will be over the ocean and at high latitudes. It appears, we are going to have a front row seat to watch Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle cooling followed by what causes a Heinrich event.
    http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2015/anomnight.1.22.2015.gif

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    James Strom

    Long live the pause! I like it especially for the rhetorical effect, which is easy to understand even for the non-specialist. Particularly charming is the observation that high-school graduates–possibly hearing an insufferable commencement lecture on threats to the planet–have lived on a planet that hasn’t warmed during their entire lives. (Mark Steyn, I believe, was the first to make this point.)

    But the sceptical case doesn’t rely entirely on the pause. More significantly the pause is an indicator that mainstream and model estimates of climate sensitivity are significantly too high, and ongoing empirical studies produce ever lower estimates. So even if the pause comes to an end those lower sensitivity numbers imply that the Earth will not reach a crisis until the era of fossil fuels gradually ends due to economics and innovation.

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      The word “pause” or more sophisticated-sounding word “hiatus” imply that temperatures will rise in future. We cannot know that. All the climate models lack predictive skill.

      It is much less wrong to simply describe the current situation as “temperatures no longer rising”.

      Be careful that you do not borrow the words spoken with forked tongue.

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        I read the link when it was originally posted on the blog. After trying to find a way to refer to the current state of temperatures, especially when writing for children (where explanations have to be simple and I do not want to put ideas in their heads that should not be there), I now call this a leveling or flattening of temperature. This gives no indication of which direction a change would go and does not imply that the temperatures will even go up or down in the future. It describes what the graphs show—the temperatures are leveling or flattening. I don’t know if this works for others, but it was the best terminology I could come up with.

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        TdeF

        A better word would be ‘peak’ as in temperatures have peaked and are going down. It has as much justification as hiatus or pause which imply a continuation. Possibly the only neutral word is plateau.

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    RogueElement451

    Talking elsewhere , someone made the comment that a radiating photon does not know in which direction to go , it does not know whether it it is warmer or cooler and so it will head in whatever direction thus proving the CO2 can radiate heat back to the warmer earth substantiating the current greenhouse theory.
    I remember as a child having a discussion with my physics teacher,,, my theory was that an express train traveling at 100 mph would be stopped in its tracks for an infinitesimal small period of time by colliding with a blue bottle flying in the opposite direction.
    I was corrected , introduced to moments of inertia , probably wrapped on the knuckles as well and multiple discussions about real physics were indulged in thereafter and I enjoyed physics therafter! Anyway…
    There is a whole lot more to be discovered about the atmosphere of the Earth , what does and does not have an effect on weather and long term climate, Sun cycles for sure are involved , ENSO, AMDO, PO , precession , procession, and planetary and other cosmic influences.
    That POTUS in his SOTUS , can spout such drivel based on the opinions of eminent scientists (discredited everywhere except the Shitehouse) is beyond belief.Are the American people so naive as to believe that this idiot has the best intentions of America at heart ? Quite frankly Obama has taken the lead on CAGW and deserves to be buried under the shit storm he will raise at the cost of trillions.
    The man is an idiot. I am sorry if that is offensive , but where the hell do they get these morons from?

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      Many of us in the US would like to know the answer to your last question. Even more important, we would like to know where “they” continue to get such individuals in virtually every corner of politics—elections, appointments, etc. It is extremely frustrating. I don’t know if Americans are that naive or not—our government at this time seems to represent the interests of politicians and corporate donors, rather than the actual voting public (Jeb Bush said he would run against his base—how incredibly insane is that??). The media keeps pushing the idea that this is the way it’s supposed to be. It would be very good if we could figure out a way to get our representatives to actually listen to us. So far, we don’t seem to be achieving that.

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    sillyfilly

    The reality of the graph: a long term temperature increase of 0.9C over the period in the record that cannot be explained by natural influences alone. An unprecedented rate of warming at 10 x faster rate than that of ice age recovery. And from NASA:
    “…our world has witnessed extreme warm periods before, such as during the time of the dinosaurs. Earth has also seen numerous ice ages on roughly 11,000-year cycles for at least the last million years. So, change is perhaps the only constant in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. Scientists note that there are two new and different twists to today’s changing climate: (1) The globe is warming at a faster rate than it ever has before; and (2) Humans are the main reason Earth is warming. Since the industrial revolution, which began in the mid-1800s, humans have attained the magnitude of a geological force in terms of our ability to change Earth’s environment and impact its climate system.”

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      sillyfilly

      And just to demonstrate what a similar graph of natural influences would look like, thus ignoring any anthropogenic influence.
      BTW Jo, how’s my penance going?

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        SillyFilly: How does the graph shows natural influences? It’s GISS temperature trends. To show “natural” temperature changes would mean someone statistically removed the “CO2” influence, which is a circular argument. There is no graph of natural influences because according to the global warming folks, every temperature taken is influenced by AGW. There are only graphs where someone who believes CO2 increases warming cuts out the part they believe is due to CO2. I can find nothing that shows GISS LOTI temperatures are anything but the unusual highly adjusted land temperatures commonly used.

        The only the graph ignores is whatever point you were trying to make with it. It clearly shows AGW influences.

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        Oh-I guess the detrend is what supposed removal of the AGW influence is based on? “Detrend End-to-end slope Removes a slope from 0 at the first sample to the given amount at the end (can be negative)” I have no idea how that would remove AGW influences. You also chose .8 as the value and did not explain why. Maybe a more thorough explanation of the mathematical reasoning you have behind the graph would help.

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        the Griss

        Solar integral..

        It’s only NATURAL !!

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        the Griss

        And here is man-made warming !!

        Actually, more like man-made-past-cooling.. but its all done to CREATE an unrealistic trend.

        Courtesy Gavin. Gavin seems to be really pushing the envelope on adjustment, as he vainly tries to FABRICATE some warming from somewhere, anywhere he can get rid of thermometers and smear the data.

        There has been a large divergence between the GISS/HadCrut and the satellite data since he took over in 2013..

        ALL of that divergence is FABRICATED from where there are no thermometers.

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      Roy Hogue

      The reality of the graph: a long term temperature increase of 0.9C over the period in the record that cannot be explained by natural influences alone.

      And unfortunately you haven’t explained it either.

      Scientists note that there are two new and different twists to today’s changing climate: (1) The globe is warming at a faster rate than it ever has before; and (2) Humans are the main reason Earth is warming.

      And what do you offer to substantiate points 1 and 2?

      And the only answer so far is, NOTHING.

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        sillyfilly

        A relevant study:”Solar forcing contributed only about 0:07 C (0:03-0:13 C) to the warming since 1950″.

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          Roy Hogue

          Relevant to what? A reconstruction from what? This is guesswork. We do not know nor do we have a way to know 11,000 + years worth of temperature records with enough certainty to say that 2014 was the hottest year on record.

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        sillyfilly

        Mea culpa, meant to post two links and got switched. For the first: Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance: for the second as above!

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          Roy Hogue

          And here we have the magic word, inferred.

          In both cases the exercise might be interesting to someone. But it’s not a basis for making public policy. A criminal case based on such flimsy stuff would be laughed right out of the courtroom by the judge. Yet you want the world to commit economic suicide based on nothing but inference and reconstruction with who knows what kind of reliability behind it.

          Thank you. But no way.

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      cannot be explained by natural influences alone

      Argument from ignorance.

      Besides, observed natural variability is much greater. There is no continuous instrument record with adequate coverage to support anything other than the null hypothesis.

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        Yonniestone

        May I add argument from Authoritative ignorance the type that seems to appease and sate the fears of the unthinking.

        Oops try ‘Feeble minded’ in place of unthinking, I forgot about the protocols when attempting to convey to Eugenicists.

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      What part of the graph are you not looking at? The slope before and at the beginning of the industrial revolution is the same as the one now. That would indicate this is not just due to the industrial revolution and can and has occured without any industrialization.

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        manalive

        Sheri that’s not quite correct.
        The Industrial Revolution was 1760 – 1840 (Wiki) and although no doubt it produced a lot of air pollution in the north of England and parts of Europe the resultant CO2 emissions were relatively insignificant.
        And although according to ice core proxies the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing from 290 ppm since ~1880, the increase in human fossil fuel use emissions took off only after WW2.

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          Interesting. Global warming is supposed to based on the 1880 and 280-290 ppm, with the argument that the Industrial Revolution was what started this. That would mean that the Pre-industrial measurement was actually 120 years after the Industrial Revolution started. So why did global warming pick the date of 1880 and the 280 or 290 level? It clearly wasn’t the Industrial Revolution.

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      KenW

      cannot be explained by natural influences alone

      I agree. They had to homogenize like crazy.

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      the Griss

      The globe , has STOPPED warming. Hasn’t done a thing this whole century.

      That leaves us still only a tiny amount above the absolute minimum of the last 10,000 years.

      Still below the MWP and the RWP and way below the Holocene Optimum.

      Anyone that thinks a little bit more warming, that isn’t actually happening, is in any way going to be a problem, really hasn’t been paying any attention to history, and is PANICKING over things getting better. DOH ! That’s pretty darn “silly”.

      All of the indicators are that the Current Slightly Warm Period (CSWP) is about to cool somewhat.

      So, enjoy this CSWP while you can, because its not going to last much longer.

      Buy more blankets and a thicker jumper.

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        the Griss

        “All of the indicators are that the Current Slightly Warm Period (CSWP) is about to cool somewhat.”

        Make that..

        UNFORTUNATELY, all of the indicators are that the Current Slightly Warm Period (CSWP) is about to cool somewhat.

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      the Griss

      “(1) The globe is warming at a faster rate than it ever has before”

      RUBBISH !! we don’t have precise enough pre-thermometer data to say that.

      A lot of the TINY amount of warming is data tampering anyway.

      Only maybe 20% of it is real.

      And yet we are still way below the temperatures of the MWP and RWP and the Holocene Optimum.

      “(2) Humans are the main reason Earth is warming”

      Local UHI unaccounted for, massive temperature adjustments, quicker responding thermometers.

      Yes, man is probably the reason for most of the small warming in the HadCrut fabricated data global data set.

      How well that set relates to reality?? that’s anybody’s guess.. but probably NOT WELL AT ALL.

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      Mark Hladik

      SillyFilly:

      Let us look at this statement, ” … that cannot be explained by natural influences alone.”

      I would agree with the statement, except that the statement implies that we have perfect, unequivocal, and absolutely certain knowledge and understanding of the global climate.

      This is not true. Climatology, as a science, is in its infancy. We make new discoveries about climate (present and past) on a random basis. If our understanding of the global climate were as perfect as the IPCC thinks it is, then no one should ever be surprised by any sudden weather (which is just a subset of the climate, i.e., short-term). I do not know about your neck of the woods, but where I live, the weather forecast for >72 hours is most often a crap-shoot. Why? Jeff Goldblum, in the character of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, was explaining ‘chaos’ to Laura Dern (Dr. Ellie Sadler), at the beginning of the motor tour:

      “A butterfly in [Beijing] flaps its wings, and Central Park gets rain instead of sunshine.” He actually said ‘Peking’, so I took the liberty of making it PC.

      Next, you indicate that ‘global climate is changing faster than it ever has before’. Sorry, that is wrong. When I was an undergrad (probably before you were born), we were learning in our various classes that it took thousands of years for transitions between glacial and inter-glacial conditions. About twenty years ago, there was a significant change (now verified by EPICA, GISP, Vostok), and all indicators are that the transition from glacial to inter-glacial conditions, and from inter-glacial to glacial conditions, occurs in a time frame of a few DECADES. The average global temperature changed by three-to-five Celsius degrees, in about half of a human lifetime.

      So anyone, including you, who states that one Celsius degree over a century (give or take) is greater than three Celsius degrees in a half-century (or less), needs to take some remedial Math.

      Finally, I’m still waiting for your cross-correlation coefficient between Veizer’s paleotemperature curve, and Berner & Kothavala’s GEOCARB III curve. It’s been a couple of months, so you must have run it by this time (make sure to name the routine you used, including the window, and it would be helpful to know if you ran time-domain or frequency-domain).

      Regards,

      Mark H.

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        tom0mason

        Well said Mark Hladik
        My 2¢ on this is –
        Our chaotic climatic system is not completely regular, or linearly deterministic, in the matter of cause and effect.
        That is to say, it has within it many thousands – if not millions – interdependent closely and loosely coupled processes with many feedback paths, and most feedbacks are nonlinear. This makes for a very chaotic natural system where changes in one parameter can cause a whole host of changes (or very few) depending on the time of change and the state of independent and dependent processes at that time.
        Thus to say, for instance, that an increase in CO2 will cause this or that to happen is to completely misunderstand the nature of our planets climate. Rates and levels of subsequent change are dependent on the current state of the climate so are not readily predictable.

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      manalive

      The reality of the graph: a long term temperature increase of 0.9C over the period in the record that cannot be explained by natural influences alone. An unprecedented rate of warming at 10 x faster rate than that of ice age recovery …

      Where did you get that one? No really that comment is nutty.
      Silly is comparing an increase of ~0.7C over 100 years (what ever the combination of causes and not unusual) with a rise of maybe 10C over 1000 years (~1C /century), apart from the fact that it is absurd to compare a 100 year with a 1000 year trend.

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      Safetyguy66

      “The reality of the graph: a long term temperature increase of 0.9C over the period in the record that cannot be explained by natural influences alone”

      So despite arguing multiple times on this site that natural variability is a construct of denialists, your now saying some or all of the warming could be attributed to natural variability.

      Well your realisation is late, but welcome.

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    Roy Hogue

    I believe this same graph and the same argument were the subject of testimony by Christopher Monkton before the House of Representatives committee on environmental foolishness already a number of years ago.

    It still speaks as loudly today as it did then. But it’s message was ignored by the people’s representatives then and it will probably be ignored now as well.

    Never confront an ideologue with the facts. Facts don’t penetrate their iron skulls. What counts (all that counts) is their cause.

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      It is a full expression of the progressive’s/post modernist’s/post normalist’s implementation of “It is the seriousness of the charge that matters. Actual evidence is irrelevant, immaterial, and inadmissible because it serves only to confuse, confound, and mislead.”

      This translates to: “If you have eyes, you cannot see. If you have ears, you cannot hear. If you have a brain, you cannot think. We, who are your superiors in every way, know that the true truth cannot be known. All that can be known is revealed by our significant others. If you don’t agree, you are a denier and that gives us the right to do with you as we wish. The issue is settled.”

      It follows that they believe they cannot be wrong because there is no possibility of knowing what is wrong or right. Reality is supposed to be according to their arbitrary whim. Any dissent clearly opens the possibility of a cataclysmic destruction of their fantasied universe and must be punished to the fullest measure possible.

      The bottom line is that it is a self imposed intellectual and philosophical psychoses making it impossible for them to see anything as it is, was, or can be. In their universe, reason, reality, and logic are inoperative. Hence, they conclude, data can be “corrected” to match their delusions and the results of their computer simulations are the only real data worth considering. Even that, if and only if that “data” matches their preconceived delusions.

      They are what they are and we cannot change them any more than we can change the behavior of a raging elephant by reading poetry to it. The real question is, why did we allow them to take over the seats of power? That clearly was not a wise thing to do. Yet, we allow them to continue to inflict their psychosis upon us. Is the death wish in all of us really that strong? Hopefully, it is due to the lack of our holding sufficient good ideas by which we can make better choices, take better actions, and improve our chances of success.

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        Greg Cavanagh

        You’re first three paragraphs should be in large letters on a bill board. I was thinking as I read them “this would make a great book”, but by the time I finished the first three paragraphs I realsied George Orwell must have come to the same clear thought conclusion. It is exactly what he wrote a book on.

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          Thanks.

          I read that book (1984) in the mid 1950’s. I was horrified by the state of man he projected but only dimly knew why. It took me the majority of the following 60 years to be able to identify the nature of the why clearly enough to condense that understanding into as few of words as I have.

          To solve a problem one must have the clearest and most focused possible understanding of the nature of the problem. The path to the solution of this problem starts with the clear knowledge that we can’t change them. We can only change ourselves in such a way to render them powerless even as they sit in the seats of power. The secret is that any power they have, we have given it to them. Take that away, they are no more significant than a flake of dust blowing in the wind and just as powerless.

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            I believe you are somewhat correct. However, there is a basic truth in this you have overlooked. Over a period of time, most of the population will simply stop trying any resistance, as they did in the book. Also, while the book never addressed how the take-over occurred and how it could end, we now realize that it was voluntary in today’s world. Many groups have voluntarily ceded their freedom to a government that said it would take care of them. As the truth that the government did not care became apparent, they lied to themselves and said it did. Witness North Korea. Many European countries and the US are on the same path—blind allegience to those in charge.

            Yes, individuals can convince themselves that they have the power. Unless they are willing to use it collectively, and all signs are they certainly and absolutely are not, it’s just a game you play in your head to convince yourself you have something. You have the same thing those who have convinced themselves the government cares do—a rationalization that you somehow are superior while sitting there and letting your freedoms be stripped away and allowing lies to replace truth. Having power is not relevent if you are unwilling or unable to use it.

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              Bite Back

              Yes, individuals can convince themselves that they have the power. Unless they are willing to use it collectively, and all signs are they certainly and absolutely are not, it’s just a game you play in your head to convince yourself you have something. You have the same thing those who have convinced themselves the government cares do—a rationalization that you somehow are superior while sitting there and letting your freedoms be stripped away and allowing lies to replace truth. Having power is not relevent (sic) if you are unwilling or unable to use it.

              Bravo!

              To use your power involves taking a risk, sometimes a very serious risk. And most of the world’s good people are very risk averse. Only the bad will take a serious risk for the sake of their goal.

              That is why I push for action instead of words.

              BB

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    Via Bishop Hill.

    My initial scan of the original PhD thesis came up with this statement in the Afterword:

    Poverty will not save the planet, unlike the environmental movement often seems to assume. There is no evidence of such. Poverty forces people to think short-sightedly and destroy their environment, the same way as limitless and irresponsible greed. Secondly, poverty makes us more vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and weakens our ability to be prepared for all kinds of catastrophes.

    This, we’ve known for years. But it’s good to hear it from a (former) European MEP.

    Also from the Afterword:

    Climate change is a problem that we would not even know of without climate science. But this scientific field does not give as frightening a picture of the situation as the catastrophe discourse that has been born out of it. The relationship between science and politics has been problematic in climate science. The linear model of science has been dominating in such a way that in climate issues more certainty and more precise information than what science is able to provide has been expected. The political and public debate around climate change has been fierce. Many scientists were seduced to act as committed advocators rather than objective scientists. It is important that despite the pressure posed by political discussions the scientific community retains its cognitivistic ideal also in climate science, in order to preserve the credibility of science.

    … which speaks to the effect on science that’s long concerned people like our kind host Joanne as well as many of the participants in vigorous discussions.

    Then there’s:

    Climate change became the next grand narrative after the Cold War dominating the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century. It bypassed many concrete and severe problems and a record amount of attention and resources were sacrificed to it. During this hype, emissions increased both relatively and absolutely. Environmental thinking took some steps backwards while climate change was cannibalising other problems. Still, the main environmental problems are caused by overpopulation, poorly planned land-use and over-exploitation of natural resources.

    … which speaks to the destructive malinvestment brought about by the measures attempting to solve a problem that’s not real.

    I do not agree on the over-population aspect. It’s only as a result of poor distribution of resources, exacerbated by social factors such as tribal wars, criminal gangs and governmental maladministration that the numbers of the population are a “problem”.

    The whole thesis is nearly 400 pages so I’m leaving that on my list for the weekend. If the bulk is daunting, read the Preface first, then perhaps skip straight to the Afterword. Joanne may find certain parallels to her own journey in the Preface.

    The chapter CLIMATE SCIENCE AS A SCIENCE looks enticing. A couple of excerpts:

    Post-normal science is characterised by the uncertainty of facts, disputability of values, high stakes, and the urgency of decisions. Climate science fully exhibits all of these characteristics. Uncertainty about the facts prevails, despite thousands of years of work, immense financial input, the development of modelling, qualitative and quantitative development of information and satellite technologies, and the considerable improvement of research equipment and environments. The pressure on the researchers is great, because politicians and the media require accurate figures and forecasts, even though they are not available yet – if ever. Disputability is generated in situations in which some consent to these requirements and come to be considered the “fanatics” of the scientific community. On the other hand, the stakes of inaction are high, and over-cautiousness can lead to inaction, which may increase the potential risks. (Hulme 2009a: 76–84)

    Criteria for falsification are almost impossible to find. For example, the IPCC reports do not state any falsification criteria, i.e. circumstances that could refute the theory. Even if we did not assume that researchers should purposely state such criteria, the question remains whether they can be found at all. On the contrary, all kinds of weather phenomena can be understood as either confirming or disconfirming the climate change hypothesis. Climate change by definition regards extreme climatic phenomena as on the increase. Thus, extreme cold, extreme heat, abundant flooding, severe drought, storms, cyclones, or even their absence, all fit the climate change theories. Of course, periods that seem normal are accommodated by the theory, as well. All of this goes without saying and requires no further comment. Nevertheless, it illustrates that the theory of anthropogenic climate change is extraordinarily loose. …

    Climate change is a phenomenon that cannot be detected by the senses. Without climate science and the greenhouse theory we would know nothing of the matter, since all that has happened could be attributed to natural climatic variations — including the long-term temperature changes (Pielke 2010). For instance, in the Middle Ages, a period of clearly greater than average warmth was experienced (Hughes & Diaz, 1994), so that warming cannot be considered something completely new.

    The thesis isn’t light reading by nature. The unconventional use of language by a non-native English speaker must be kept in mind.

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      Another Ian

      Bernard

      From comments on this at Bishop Hill


      My favourite quote from her piece: “Climate change is a problem that we would not even know of without climate science.”

      Jan 22, 2015 at 3:22 PM | Unregistered CommenterJack Savage “

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        Yes, I read that. Even when I quoted the whole paragraph from whence it came.

        Indeed, that quoted paragraph paraphrases the last paragraph that I quoted in my comment because I thought it was important to reiterate that point.

        Thank you for making the point. Again. 😉

        It helps to illustrate that important things have to said three times, in different ways because if one doesn’t say it in 3 different ways, then it doesn’t register as important. My apologies for failing to express a salient issue a third time. My excuse is fatigue.

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    mobihci

    that graph is just crap. i remember reading about the attempt to remove the blip in the 40s, and here we are. it is gone, now it is just a so called pause. all that time they talk about 70s cooling was just meaningless it seems and so was this graph-

    http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b9/f4/47/b9f447ad0b6adf6bdcaf5353d3e0f913.jpg

    when they tried to say we were entering an ice age with the drop of global average temps of 0.6F between 1945 and 1970!

    so the use of satellites is now also meaningless? the data collected useless? the idea of a true global record not important? everything must be thrown out and we should only talk about the error bars on this one graph that has been adjusted by more than 10 x the so called error bars…

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    Ruairi

    A NASA temperature graph,
    Is always good for a laugh,
    But once maladjusted,
    Their ‘facts’ can’t be trusted,
    And not funny;not funny by half.

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      the Griss

      I wish I could write posts that rhyme..

      but I just don’t have time. !

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        DWP

        There was a crooked man
        Who walked a crooked mile
        He drew a crooked graph
        Used in a crooked film…

        Er, does anyone remember the rest of this?

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    pat

    but what is being picked up fast by the entire MSM worldwide?

    Jean-Louis’s (Agence France-Presse) article of doom and gloom, of course…nicely timed for Davos!

    23 Jan: Sydney Morning Herald: Jean-Louis Santini/Wires: Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’, scientists say
    Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilisation and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday.
    “It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as the group moved its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” two minutes forward…
    “Efforts at reducing global emissions of heat-trapping gases have so far been entirely insufficient,” said ***Richard Somerville, a member of the Science and Security Board, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.
    “Unless much greater emissions reductions occur very soon, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform the Earth’s climate,” he said, noting that 2014 was the hottest on record and that the tipping point of ice loss in west Antarctica has been reached, meaning the melt is now unstoppable…
    http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-change-brings-world-closer-to-doomsday-scientists-say-20150122-12wex9.html

    ***2011: WUWT: Bogus claims on Australian and Brazilian floods from ABC and Dr. Richard Sommerville
    This ridiculous video story below from ABC news cites über alarmist Richard Somerville of Scripps in San Diego, and is backed up with this print story…
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/14/bogus-claims-on-australia-and-brazilian-floods-from-abc-and-dr-richard-somerville/

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    TdeF

    If you worked for the United Nations Inter Government Panel on Climate Change, you would quickly find man made Climate Change. They did.

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    pat

    this is making the MSM rounds, but read it very carefully. barbara boxer’s comments prove she is shameless:

    22 Jan: ABC: AFP: Climate change is real, US Senate agrees; Republican Senator rejects it is man-made
    In a surprise move, US Senate Republicans have joined Democrats on the record acknowledging that climate change is real.
    The symbolic amendment, attached to a controversial bill authorising construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, was approved 98-1 after Senator James Inhofe, seen as the top climate change denier in Congress, announced he was supporting the legislation.
    Mr Inhofe, however, strongly rejected any suggestion that human activity was responsible for climate change…
    The 16-word measure states: “It is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.”
    It makes no mention of the impact of human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, on global warming.
    Applause rippled through the chamber when Mr Inhofe declared he was co-sponsoring the measure.
    “Climate always changed,” Mr Inhofe said, noting there was archaeological, historic and “biblical” evidence of that.
    “The hoax is, that there are some people who think they are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change the climate. Man can’t change climate,” he insisted…
    Two other measures attributing climate change to human activity failed to pass the 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate, although one got five Republican votes and the other received 14.
    “This is a small victory but an important one,” Senator Barbara Boxer, top Democrat on the Senate’s environmental panel, told reporters.
    “It means that there’s a softening of the attitude of the deniers. They’re losing ground in the face of public opinion.”…
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-22/us-senate-says-climate-change-is-real/6034680

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    pat

    and here it is again. deceptive, what?

    21 Jan: Science Mag: By 98 to 1, U.S. Senate passes amendment saying climate change is real, not a hoax
    By David Malakoff, Puneet Kollipara
    Senators opposed to the (Keystone) pipeline, who say it would help accelerate climate change by encouraging mining of oil sands, are using votes on the bill as an opportunity to force Republican senators to take a stand on whether climate change is real. Some Republican lawmakers have dodged the issue, saying they lack the scientific credentials to evaluate the evidence for climate change. One lawmaker, Senator James Inhofe (R–OK), has even called climate change a “hoax.”
    The amendment, from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D–RI), takes a veiled jab at Inhofe, asking simply whether it is “the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.”
    In a surprise this afternoon, Inhofe rose before the vote to ask to become a co-sponsor of the Whitehouse amendment. Scattered applause greeted his remarks. “Climate is changing,” he said, “and climate has always changed.” The hoax that he has talked about, he suggested, is that there are people who think they are so “arrogant” and “powerful” that “they can change climate.”
    Whitehouse said he hoped the amendment would lead to greater efforts to address the impacts that climate change is having on the oceans and other ecosystems.
    Inhofe was one of the last senators to vote, in favor. The lone no vote came from Senator Roger Wicker (R–MS)…
    http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/01/98-1-u-s-senate-passes-amendment-saying-climate-change-real-not-hoax

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    Craig Thomas

    Nice graph.

    I wonder where John McLean’s “massive imminent cooling” has got to?

    What about Richard Lindzen’s imminent 0.5 degrees cooling? Where’s that?

    And how about Roy Spencer’s imminent mini-ice-age? Why isn’t that showing in the graph?

    All I can see in that graph is a pronounced warming trend.
    Physics tells us that CO2 is bound to have this effect.

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      Another troll come to try his luck. That post probably won’t go anywhere near getting the most thumbs down. Bad luck.

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      History tells us there are warming trends, cooling trends and we lack the skill to predict when each will occur in the future. Statistics tell us basically the same thing—we cannot predict with any degree of certainty. All is see is a warming trend that is leveling out.

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        Craig Thomas

        No, Sheri, we cannot predict things that have already occurred – that would called “observation”, and observations is what science is based on.

        Observations of the world around us gives us chemistry and physics.
        Chemistry and physics tells us that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that adding it to the atmosphere will cause global warming.
        Global warming is occurring, as per the science.

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          Greg Cavanagh

          You use terms science, physics and chemestry as though they are some mystical knowlage.

          Words convey your inner thoughts, they can betray you.

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          Craig—I know we can’t predict things that have already occurred. You obviously you did not understand my comment. I meant that we have a graph of temperatures where there is a leveling of the temperatures showing little warming or cooling currently. We cannot predict where the tempertures will go because we lack the data necessary for such a prediction. Global warming is occuring but now slowing. Physics predicted a warming. Most of the predictions were of much more warming and were in no way accurate. Per the science, we should be much warmer now. Plus, a physicist would be very, very foolish to predict ONE item controlled the climate. Wait—they did do that and then they had to throw in natural factors when the warming failed to materialize as predicted.

          This is broken science.

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          the Griss

          “… and that adding it to the atmosphere will cause global warming.”

          No they don’t .. Not anywhere.

          The idea a FAILED HYPOTHESIS !!

          And yes, we know CO2 is a gas used in green houses, to help plants grow..

          .. just like it does in the atmosphere.

          Do you REALLY hate plant life that much that you want to continue to STARVE it ?

          I know from your [snip tone down the inflammatory language Griss – Jo] support of wind turbines that you absolutely HATE bird life and don’t [snip] how many birds are killed by those pointless monuments to human stupidity.

          But hating plant life as well ?

          Really ?????

          Is there anything on this planet you do like.. apart from yourself ?

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      James Bradley

      Craig,

      “All I can see in that graph is a pronounced warming trend. Physics tells us that CO2 is bound to have this effect”

      Show me that physics, I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

      The recent increase in atmospheric CO2 coinciding with an 18 year temperature plateau would disagree.

      I do know a greenhouse provides the environment for CO2, CO2 does not provide the environment for a greenhouse.

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      the Griss

      “All I can see in that graph is a pronounced warming trend.”

      A fabricated graph, from data heavily modified by the scam-artists pushing the meme.

      Your brain-washing is pretty solidly held. No room for any rational thought, in there.!

      And look, the first trend is about equal to the latter trend even after all that data manipulation.

      There is ZERO indication of any CO2 warming effect even in the massively adjusted data.

      That’s how incompetent your alarmist priests are !!!

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      the Griss

      “And how about Roy Spencer’s imminent mini-ice-age? Why isn’t that showing in the graph?”

      You really haven’t been following the solar science have you.

      Not on the “climate agenda CD you got 5 years ago, hey 😉

      Research time for Craig.

      No, NOT on SkS where you obviously get all you non-science from.!

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        tom0mason

        The Griss,

        Also note that the listed people (John McLean, Richard Lindzen,
        Roy Spencer) all understand much about climate and it’s complexity, and (AFAIK) are not given to the hubris as to think they know it all.
        That said, they all were talking in climatic periods (in a wide range of decades or centuries) when they gave their notions of future conditions, and not the usual alarmist misinterpretation of ‘catastrophe in x years’.

        Of course the misanthropes that live under bridges have difficulty with this idea as they are all about propagandizing misinterpretations and not helping with the wider understanding of science as Joanne tries here.

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      the Griss

      The desperation of the warmista trolls and the green blob in general is getting quite funny to watch.

      They can see that the last 18 years hasn’t been so much a “pause” but the plateau on top of a small hill.

      Those who have dared to look, can see that there is cooling to come.

      They know they only have a year or 2 more before their agenda is totally stuffed.

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      the Griss

      A wonder where all the warming in all those 100 or so climate models has gone. !

      I know Gavin et al.. are doing their absolute best to adjust the past down and the present up, to get somewhere near the hilarious joke that is the model mean.

      .but obviously NOWHERE near enough !

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    ROM

    Off topic again;

    Very slowly over the last year or so and now starting to pick up a head of steam is the increasing commentary from an increasing number of sources on the highly negative,  criminal in moral and ethical reality if not yet in law, belief and actions of the greens and other rabid and radical enviro fascists who are doing everything in their power to prevent economic development at any level in any country.

    This negativity, this luddite like anti development ideology from the green scum is almost entirely based on an obstinate and grossly ignorant ideologically driven refusal to face reality or have any sense at all of compassion or recognition of the desires of their fellow humans who are a far less economically endowed particularly in countries and regions that are well removed from the bases of the green scum’s useful western idiots.

    Something that in less polite times would be called for what it is, a collective Green sadism, a sadistic pleasure derived from seeing others suffer made even more pleasurable if the sadists, the greens in this case benefit from other’s suffering.

    And unfortunately benefit they do.

    They collect even greater donations from their useful idiots when they proudly claim to have prevented another dam or another power station in some third world country being built because it will help “Save the Environment” and “Save the Planet”

    All those citizens of those same third world countries want are some of those very items that those same greens and their useful idiots demand as a matter of course and take for granted every day.

    Now I am seeing an increasingly vocal and a much harsher condemnation of the greens anti development and economy disrupting ideology appearing across the internet and even starting to trickle down into the MSM with questions as to the morality of the greens stance appearing in some, still very limited to be sure, MSM publications.

    Andrew Montford of the Bishop Hill blog has had a number of posts on the greens and their crass determination to try and halt economic progress and the quite severe consequences for the local environment when an economy is still at a subsistence level.

    [Climate policy is harming the poor ]

    Roger Pielke Jr is quoted in BH’s blog on the following Roger Pielke Jr. post.
    Pielke Jr, is very much a luke warmer but one who is highly critical of the excesses of the global warmistas ideological stance and claims. He refers with considerable admiration to a Finnish scientist and recent member of the European Parliament, Eija-Riitta Korhola and her thesis in a post on his blog “The Climate Fix”.

    Fascinating Climate Policy PhD of a Member of the European Parliament

    Some quoted extracts that Pielke Jr has included from the Eija-Riitta Korhola thesis
    _____________

    Her view on EU climate policy:

    In my study I agree with those who regard the UN’s strategy – and the EU’s follow-up strategy – not only as ineffective but also harmful.
    The reason can be found in both the wickedness of the problem–i.e.the fact that it is hard to intervene in it in the first place – and that the selected problem-solving model has failed, as the problem’s wicked nature has not been recognised.

    The attempt to resolve it has been based on an assumption that it is a one-dimensional,tame problem.
    However, as the saying goes, a wicked problem requires wicked solutions.
    The matter has been worsened by a lack of knowledge and expertise.

    Because I was present, I can testify that, for instance, when the Members of the European Parliament(at that time altogether 632 MEPs) voted on issue of emissions trading, I could easily count the number of those who knew something about the matter with the fingers of my two hands.

    Like many people who have critiqued climate policy, she finds that critique is not welcomed:

    Unfortunately, the political atmosphere is ideological to such an extent that criticism towards the chosen means is very often interpreted as climate scepticism.

    She has some hard words for European environmental groups:

    Another conclusion of mine is as scathing as my previous reference to the 20-year delusion [of UN climate policy].
    It concerns the environmental movement.
    I suggest that the movement has, above all, failed in its strategy to combat climate change, but also quite often in its other environmental policies.

    Again, good intentions do not guarantee a wise strategy.
    The environmental movement regards economic growth as an enemy of the environment although practice has proven that in precisely those quarters of the world where economic well-being prevails and basic needs are satisfied, people are more interested in taking care of their environment.

    Poverty, in its turn, is the biggest environmental threat, although it has been romanticised in environmentalist rhetoric.
    [ / ]

    Quotes are taken from;

    THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KYOTO PROTOCOL: CLIMATE CHANGE AS A POLITICAL PROCESS
    Eija-Riitta Korhola

    _____________________

    As I posted above, I am now seeing an increasing level of quite harsh and damning commentary on the policies and actions and ideological stance of the green blob.
    And that commentary, some of it from what would normally be assumed as sources that are sympathetic to the green ideology, are becoming highly critical at the greens / Greenpeace/ WWF/ Sierra Club and etc for their constant ideologically based attempts to first limit economic development and then to try and wind any economic development particularly in third world countries right back.

    All based on the supposed and claimed premise that economic development is very bad for the environment.

    Increasingly the critics of the green stance are pointing out that it is the developed world that now has the best and still improving environmental record something that the rabid, radical greens seem intellectually and ideologically incapable of working out for themselves.
    Let alone accepting that development is best for the p;reservation of the environment and then ideologically move to a position of promoting economic development.

    In the end the very negativity and luddite like, head in the sand, ideological and grossly hypocritical stance of the greens will ensure their demise as a movement as history has shown when such negativity is maintained by any ideologically fixated, incapable of change, rganisation.

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    Gary in Erko

    “A rare sighting of endangered scientific graph in newsprint”
    Is “unprecedented” allowed for this?

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    the Griss

    OT.. The idiocy that is CCS (carbon capture and storage) takes a big hit in the EU.

    By far the best place to store CO2 plant food, IS IN THE ATMOSPHERE.

    Zero cost. All benefit !

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    TdeF

    Averages. They mean something in the tropics. Darwin is 32C every day. 31 in winter. 33 in summer. Water moderated, it cannot get hotter.

    However outside the tropics, the daily change is closer to 20C every day and 50C from summer to winter. At an extreme 80C. Every day people get climate change!

    So what does a 1C mean in the average air temperature? Nothing!

    In frozen places in winter it means the average might increase from -20C to -19C. So? Nothing melts anyway.

    In summer +20C to +21C, so what?

    At high latitude, the switch from melting to frozen can take only a few days, as Hitler and Napoleon found out.

    Nowhere is there a crisis point for a trivial 1C shift. Ice stays frozen in Greenland in winter. It melts slightly in summer. Why should 1C be disastrous? The sea ice melts and nothing happens of course. Blocks of ice insulate each other, as as discovered in the 19th century, so the brothers in Maryland exported ice blocks to Rio de Janiero. When ice is 2km thick, it takes a long time to melt only from the surface and freezes again in winter anyway.

    An average is something experienced twice a day for a short time, an average is meaningless. To first order at 1C movement over a century means nothing in winter or summer. All the ice melts every summer in Siberia, Canada, Sweden etc. and no one drowns? Sea levels do not rise. The Baltic does not fill up? The people in Copenhagen do not see a change.

    So what is all the fuss? Could someone explain why at 1C change is so terrible? Someone is pulling our legs? It seems like a great idea for humans and every sudden advance in human civilization can be traced to warm periods.

    As for increasing the temperature of the whole ocean by 1C that will take 340x as long as heating the air as it is much more massive, so 3400 years. Plenty of time to move up a bit. Concrete is waterproof.

    No the faux science scare is based on everyone’s implicit assumption that the average is critical. It isn’t, unless someone can explain why it matters? I have never read such an explanation.

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      TdeF

      Sorry, if 1C in 100 years it will take 34,000 years for the ocean to heat to the same extent. As homo sapiens only left africa 50,000 years ago, we will not even look the same when this 1C happens. As explained later, it may not happen anyway as conductive heating from the atmosphere may be insignificant.

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    TdeF

    Another major input to our temperature is the planet itself. We live on a huge ball of molten metal which can only cool through the skin, the mantle. Here the temperature goes up 25C for every km!

    This is never discussed but even without the sun, I have read reports that the planet would be -20C, winter in many countries. The planet has not cooled in 4 billion years and the heat comes through into the oceans. In most cold countries, all plumbing is 4 metres down where it never freezes.

    My point is that if the air temperature changes, there is no guarantee the ocean temperature changes as there are two massive inputs, solar and geological plus the exchange of heat with the air. Tiny atmospheric temperature changes may be more irrelevant in calculating ocean temperatures than we humans expect in our human centric view of climate and the weather.

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    TdeF

    When climate alarmists talk about a 1C increase in an average over 100 years being a (climate) disaster, they are playing a game of bluff. This summer in Melbourne is a lot cooler than last year. Sometimes it is a lot hotter. So? What does a degree or two matter in a summer average?

    From Wikipedia, “The phrase “The sky is falling!” features prominently in the story (Chicken Little/Henny Penny), and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.”

    Much as the IPCC argue from authority, they and their beneficiaries all play Chicken Little. By my calculations the world’s 22,000 Polar Bears have cost about $200million each.

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    Just thought I would provide the latest from the Climate Council. It may be they are not getting the media coverage they once did for their doomsday cult.

    Our latest report is in, and the findings are startling: from Australia to Austria and even Finland, 2014 smashed heat records around the world. Globally, last year was the hottest year ever in recorded history.

    Just take a moment to let that sink in.

    Unfortunately, the important stories often get drowned out in the news cycle – but this is one story that we need to keep on telling. Click on this infographic to share this news – because the world needs to know what’s happening:

    Hottest Year Infographic

    Your parents, your co-workers, that out-of-touch uncle, the friends who don’t pay much attention to climate change – they all need to hear that it’s not just their imagination, a few unseasonably warm days or freak bushfires.

    This is a long-term, scientifically-evidenced trend – 2014 is the 38th consecutive year with above average global temperatures.

    We are now half way through the decade for critical action to turn things around, and getting information like this out there on people’s radar is absolutely critical. Let’s make sure this infographic appears in everyone’s newsfeed on Facebook this week; or click to share it on Twitter.

    Thanks so much,

    Amanda McKenzie

    A lesson in spinning the spin. We now have 38 consecutive years of above average global temperatures. Of course this is based on the flawed, unverifiable and homogenised instrument record presented as a single statistical line without reference to the spread of data from which it is derived.

    [Changed from italics to block quote. I think that was the authors intent.]ED

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      the Griss

      “Australia ………., 2014 smashed heat records around the world”

      This is TOTAL and UTTER B***S*** !!!

      The two reliable un-molested temperature sets have Australia 2014 at 3rd and 6th, NOWHERE near the short-term maximums of 1998 and 2010.

      And CERTAINLY nowhere near the real temperatures from the end of the 1800’s and early 1900’s.

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      the Griss

      “above average global temperatures”

      of the last 100 or so years of mal-adjusted fabrication.

      SO WHAT !!!!

      Now start comparing to the last 10,000 years,

      where the current temperatures are very near the COOLEST of the whole Holocene. !!

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      TdeF

      How incredibly patronizing from the Carbon Council! Talk down to the idiots and let them educate that out-of-touch uncle. I hope Tim is enjoying his beach house while he writes of imminent doom, starting with Doom it may concern.

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      I’m looking at the GISS temperature graph associated with the “warmest year ever” (“warmest” now retracted by NOAA, by the way—it might have been, they are not sure). Between 1880 and 1930, there were 57, yes, that’s 57, consecutive years BELOW average. So how is it that 38 years above is cause for alarm and 57 years BELOW average were not????

      In addition, around 1900 there were 4 out 8 years of record breaking cold. 50% of those years were the COLDEST. Now, 4 out of 17 are the hottest. That’s 25%. So what does this illustrate? That statistics can do anything you want them to. I didn’t even have to “cherry pick”—I just used the graph and the highs and lows reported by NOAA. If ever there was time for panic, that 4 out 8 below averages should have been it. (Of course I know the average is based on the 20th century average and the graph had no meaning back when the coldest days were occurring. However, if no catastrophe arose from those alarming statistics where we now clearly see were much more serious than today’s warming, I am at a loss why statistics that are far below those found pre-1937 or thereabouts don’t illustrate just how rediculous the entire “warmest year ever” is.)

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    Bob

    Forgive me, but I cannot see the pause that the horizontal arrow is pointing to – ie approximately around year 2000. The vertical arrow points to ‘pause’ 1945-1978, it is obvious, but I just can’t see the current pause from around 1998 onwards. Would someone point me in the right direction please…

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      TdeF

      If you cannot see the graph, zoom in or out. The banners can overlay.

      If you can see the RHS of the graph, there is a dead flat area from 2005 to 2012, which is as far as it goes. The area from 1998 to 2005 is about +0.2 degrees, within the error bars. While lines are drawn, they are to demonstrate a case for rapid warming, twice. The error bars suggest this is close to meaningless. There is also the question of how much the data has been adjusted to fit the conclusion, something which appears acceptable to the BOM, for example.

      Why anyone should discard temperature readings is beyond logic. In science, you cannot discard without justification. If the justification is that temperatures as so sensitive to position, you have to increase your error bars as there is no perfect position unless the definition of a perfect position is one which gives you the warming you expect.

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      Richard111

      Bob, you might find this interesting:

      http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk//Science/Curious.htm#temp

      Beware! There is a LOT on that page. 🙂

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    Michael Whittemore

    Maybe Hell is getting hotter and its causing global warming! Now thats a great Blog post.

    Regarding Joanne misleading her readers, to be honest I have made myself very clear on the use of her Greenland proxy with regards to Lovejoys paper, but she has explained that she should have said the graph was “like the last 5% of this graph” so I need to be grateful for that much.

    The Monkey Business is from this blog post which Joanne insisted I read (http://joannenova.com.au/2014/02/global-wind-excuse-monkey-modeling-shows-global-warming-theory-is-still-not-wrong/)

    Where she says “monkey-modeling shows global warming theory is Still Not Wrong. […] Like a thousand monkeys typing McBeth, Monkey-modeling can generate anything […] Here’s how it works — Monkey modelers make a guess, get it wrong […] which gives the monkeys lots of scope […] Thanks go to the ARC for funding the monkeys […] No animals were used or abused in making this model”

    Michael, thanks for reading the post. I take from your reply that you agree with me that their models are flawed deeply (because you don’t try to defend them) but you feel I should treat them with more respect and not use the term “monkey”. Is that the issue? Jo

    Oh wait lets not forget the picture that depicts climate scientist working on their monkey models (http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/animals/computer-monkey.jpg)

    [Michael, I propose that you consider taking it down a notch in terms of tone. I still do not see where Jo called a specific scientist a monkey. She is using that term to describe processes and procedures not any specific individuals. You can have a voice here just back off a bit. Take your time, saving the world isn’t done over night.

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      Michael Whittemore

      What evidence Joanne??

      It’s very simple, there is an amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the models predicted how much warming we will see from it. When the temperature does not coincide with the models what do you expect scientists to do???? They know that the models can’t predict volcanic aerosols so they look for it and they found some (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract). Please note this is the link I gave in the comment I linked you.

      Science noticed the increased trade winds were pushing heat into the ocean (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate2106.html) Now please quote from your post what point you feel is evidence that the England et al paper is completely wrong?

      MET and NASA don’t even have a very reliable approximation of global temperatures. They have countless areas on the Earth they completely disregard due to no weather stations or infill with nearby data. Using satellite data to fill in these areas gives a much higher global temperature record (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract)

      Here are all the climate models (http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h–/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/1/1380599335494/ProjvsObs450.jpg), the temperature shown in this graph is just the standard record that does not take into consideration the papers I have discussed. Your idea that the models are wrong is a fallacy and one that has the ability to read can clearly see.

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        Michael Whittemore

        Here is a working link to my model vs temperature graph

        http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h–/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/1/1380599335494/ProjvsObs450.jpg

        ———————————————-
        Could you link also to the article or paper and the details of the graph? There are no sources? – Jo

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        I’ve listed the problems with the theory. It’s not just one problem, but observations from every level that show the theory is wrong.
        http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/ What you list are the post hoc excuses for the failures.

        Volcanic aerosols were much larger in the 1980s-1995 than in the 2000s, yet the world warmed then, and “paused” later. It isn’t volcanoes.

        Re England – See kininmonth’s view
        See mine

        It was pretty obvious. You said you read it — either you did not or were incapable of understanding it. Which is it?

        Englands paper was a backdown where he shifted his past position and changed it to agree more with skeptics but did not have the integrity to admit that.

        1. The world might warm by only 2.1 degrees this century, not 4c. (Skeptics were right — the models exaggerate).
        2. There has been and is a pause in warming which the 95%-certain-models didn’t predict. (The science wasn’t settled.)
        3. What the trade-winds giveth, they can also taketh away. If they “cause cooling” after 2000, then they probably “caused warming” before that. How much less important is CO2? (a lot)
        4. Ultimately, newer models are less wrong if they include changes in wind speed, but they don’t know what drives the wind. It’s curve fitting with one more variable.

        As for the weak Cowtan and Way reference– their infilling is “magical” — satellites don’t record in the arctic because of the temperature inversions. You can’t use data that was never there. It makes their paper meaningless.

        The 1990 IPCC predictions were categorically wrong.] I don’t need a graph to demonstrate that. England has never had the decency to apologize to Nick Minchin — though he tried weakly to defend himself in comments on my site. He was wrong. 0.14 to 0.18C is not 3C. England called it “very accurate” but temperature trends fell below the lowest possible estimate what “must” happen if we “stabilized” emissions in 1990. Do you care? Does it matter what your experts say — or are you happy to hold up inaccurate, simplistic, faulty work and forgive them for their mistakes and lack of integrity? I don’t mind the mistakes, but the lack of honesty is crippling.

        As for newer predictions, they’ve failed too. Hans von STorch (2013) showed the models are wrong.

        “Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita and authors in Germany pointedly acknowledge that even at the 2% confidence level the model predictions don’t match reality. The fact is, the model simulations predicted it would get warmer than it has from 1998-2012. Now some climate scientists admit that there is less than a 2% chance that the models are compatible with the 15-year warming pause, according to the assumptions in the models.”

        That was 2013. Now it’s 18 months longer. Not even 2%.

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          Michael Whittemore

          You say “What you list are the post hoc excuses for the failures.”

          I already explained scientists know the models can’t predict natural events such as ENSO’s, Volcanic Aerosols and Trade Winds. If these events are causing a drop in surface warming it needs to be acknowledged. This is all explained here http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/a-rare-sighting-of-endangered-scientific-graph-in-newsprint/#comment-1673168 and here http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/the-polarisation-of-the-climate-debate-has-gone-too-far-matt-ridley/#comment-1671894

          I really don’t know what you are going on about when you say the models got it wrong, even with the resent pause, the models are fine as seen here http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png and if you account for the increased volcanic aerosols, increased Trade Winds and problems with the global temperature record as I just explained, the models are spot on and you are wrong.

          Anyone with more than 4 variables can model anything in hindsight. The models are supposed to work in advance. They failed, see Hans Von Storch 2013. Anyone can add in factors afterwards and pretend they could have got it right. They just cherry pick the factors to fit post hoc. – Jo

          You say “satellites don’t record in the arctic [which] makes their paper meaningless.” This almost made me laugh out loud but then I realised you weren’t joking.. Here is the UAH satellite graph from the paper http://s4.postimg.org/k96t6z7xp/UAH.png

          Judith Curry:
          Second, UAH satellite analyses. Not useful at high latitudes in the presence of temperature inversions and not useful over sea ice (which has a very complex spatially varying microwave emission signature).

          Your sceptical opinion that, “Volcanic aerosols were much larger in the 1980s-1995 than in the 2000s, yet the world warmed then, and “paused” later. It isn’t volcanoes.” Is nonsense.

          See Vernier, J. P. et al. (2011a), Major influence of tropical volcanic eruptions on the stratospheric aerosol layer during the last decade, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38(12), L12,807.. See Fig 5. [abstract]. Sorry their graph of stratospheric aerosols is paywalled. I’ll have to post on it. – Jo

          Your England et al points are bizarre at best, you make no attempt to give any evidence which you clam you had, just rubbish about the fact England acknowledged the pause in atmospheric temperatures when of cause he was talking about his paper, his paper which helps explain a part of the pause and how it’s not a reduction of temperature but just a redistribution of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean. This in no way means climate sensitivity will be 2.1 degrees as you poorly suggest. This last point is classic, as you say “What the trade-winds giveth, they can also taketh away.” Nothing is taken away its called redistribution of heat.

          My points about England are largely about logic and reason. We don’t need “data” to discuss logical failures, we need brains. You don’t even understand that this is not about “redistribution” of heat. Sigh. I’m talking about different decades. I’m saying that if tradewinds can cause cooling, it logically follows they can contribute to warming (even if only by their absence). If they are strong enough to cause the pause, they are strong enough to cause the warming. That means the models (which blame CO2 for the warming, but the tradewinds for the cooling), are logically inconsistent- Jo

          Michael, this is timewasting. Do some research, learn to read and comprehend before you lol in ignorance, and declare things you do not understand “bizarre” and “nonsense” – Jo

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            Michael Whittemore

            “The models are supposed to work in advance.”
            It is completely impossible to predict volcanic eruptions releasing sulphuric aerosols into the atmosphere. You are simply making stuff up to fit your agenda. This type of volcanic cooling reduces sun light and in turn reduces the amount of forcing from CO2. The other natural events such as ENSO and Trade Winds do not reduce CO2 forcing they only redistribute the heat to and from the ocean. To only look at surface temperatures and not take into consideration natural events that take heat from the atmosphere and push it into the ocean is categorically wrong.

            Michael, if the models knew the effect of volcanoes beforehand they would be able to predict the climate after a volcano occurred. But always, they can only “predict” in hindsight. And if 23 models do slightly different predictions, one might be right “in advance” by chance. Which model is right? It never seems to be the same one. – Jo

            The ridley 2014 volcano study has no lidar data before 2004 as far as the graphs show. It updates Vernier see Fig 1, but truncates the 1980s off that graph. The new 2009 peak is not higher than the 1995 peak. Thus the 1980s were still likely far far higher for aerosols – Jo

            “Michael, this is timewasting. Do some research”

            Im not finding humour about your claim of inversions being an issue, I find it funny that you think we should disregard the entire paper, as if you know something the paper or the Royal Meteorological Society Journal does not know. I’m not one of your minions like the rest of the people that come to your blog..

            This is argument from authority. You repeat these fallacies. There is no sign you are learning. – Jo.

            The paper explains, “As has been noted, the MSU lower troposphere data are potentially subject to biases over ice and at high altitudes. The use of anomalies for both surface and satellite data eliminates the effect of a constant offset; however, differences in temperature variation over ice or high-altitude surfaces could bias the results. The fact that the hybrid method gives better cross-validation results than kriging for the Antarctic and high Arctic land stations suggests that this is not a major issue.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/full


            The cross validation doesn’t necessarily mean a lot. When you have not much data, the errors are large and a lot of things will pass “cross-validation” testing.

            I quote from your “Vernier “ paper “The variability of stratospheric aerosol loading between 1985 and 2010 is explored with measurements from SAGE II, CALIPSO, GOMOS/ENVISAT, and OSIRIS/Odin space-based instruments” they used satellite data. If you had bothered to read the paper that I referenced, you would have noted “Here we use lidar, Aerosol Robotic Network, and balloon-borne observations to provide evidence that currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15km at middle to high latitudes and therefore underestimate total radiative forcing resulting from the recent eruptions.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract

            “We don’t need “data” to discuss logical failures, we need brains”

            This doesn’t sound like you at all! I think a lot of your sceptical readers will find that a little hard to swallow.

            Sigh. Do I have to explain the obvious? If a study is flawed due to logical fallacy, it doesn’t matter what the data says. Circular is circular. The logical (or not) design of an experiment trumps everything. – Jo

            But let me try and explain it to you, trade winds have been observed as increasing since the year 2000, this increase has pushed heat into the ocean, ergo atmosphere warming reduces. If you have slower trade winds you get less warming forced into the ocean. It’s so simple. You have to consider ocean warming as well as atmosphere warming especially since only 2.3% of warming goes into the atmosphere http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=12

            Dear Michael, we are three steps ahead of you. Thanks for telling me what I’ve known (and skeptics have been saying) for years. I’m glad you are catching up. Now take the next step, if trade winds were slower before 2000, the sun was heating a more stationary layer of surface water which would mean “more global warming” as measured on the surface. If models allow tradewinds to cool after 2000, logically they must acknowledge some of the warming before 2000 was due to tradewinds in part too. That means their models exaggerate the role of CO2 and the future projections are too high. All this I said in the England post. Perhaps you’ll read it properly? – Jo

            I apologise for any spelling mistakes or anything like that, I literally have minutes to reply.

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              Michael Whittemore

              Joanne says: “Michael, if the models knew the effect of volcanoes beforehand they would be able to predict the climate after a volcano occurred. But always, they can only “predict” in hindsight. And if 23 models do slightly different predictions, one might be right “in advance” by chance. Which model is right? It never seems to be the same one. – Jo”
              >
              1. As you say Joanne, “if” the models knew when every volcano would erupt in the future! As in over the next hundred years, as in every single eruption! Including the exact amount of sulfur aerosols released from all these volcanoes, then of cause the models would be spot on, but no one can predict volcanic eruptions. Of cause as you say “one might be right “in advance” by chance” I’ll leave you to ponder that one.
              >
              >
              Joanne says: “Thus the 1980s were still likely far far higher for aerosols”
              >
              2. We aren’t talking about the 1980s, as stated in the paper “We conclude that recent volcanic events are responsible for more post-2000 cooling than is implied by satellite databases that neglect volcanic aerosol effects below 15 km.” This is the cooling that needs to be considered because the models can’t predict volcanic eruptions! (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract)
              >
              >
              Joanne says: “a lot of things will pass “cross-validation” testing.”
              >
              3. Yes and this paper passed it. As can be seen in this graph from the paper http://s4.postimg.org/k96t6z7xp/UAH.png the UAH temperature record suggests the Arctic and Antarctic temperatures are lower than NCEP and GISTEMP (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract)
              >
              >
              Joanne says: “If a study is flawed due to logical fallacy, it doesn’t matter what the data says”
              >
              4. What fallacy are you referring to that makes this paper “flawed”? The England et al (2014) paper observed an increase in trade winds and calculated the amount of heat taken from the atmosphere and pushed into the ocean. This is all backed up by satellite and ARGO data, does this “fallacy” mean “it doesn’t matter what the data says” as you suggest? (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n3/full/nclimate2106.html)
              >
              >
              Joanne says: “If models allow tradewinds to cool after 2000, logically they must acknowledge some of the warming before 2000 was due to tradewinds in part too.”
              >
              5. There is no cooling or warming from trade winds, they don’t effect CO2 forcing, only redistribute warming to and from the ocean, making them similar to ENSO. Because climate models can’t predict these natural events, they have to be considered when someone is focusing on one area like Atmospheric warming. Similar if only focusing on Ocean warming these natural events would need to be considered. The idea is even though the warming is being pushed into the ocean by increased trade winds and La Nina’s, slower trade winds and El Nino’s will warm the atmosphere back to what the models predicted http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png.
              >
              >
              PS
              >
              6. Joanne I find it confusing when you edit my comments so you can reply to me. In my last comment you added some text and did not state it was from you. When I view these comments I cannot see your text in bold, it all blends as one text, I do notice the bold text of yours when on my mobile but not on my PC. It also interferes with the flow of my comment and I would ask that if you reply can please do so as your own comment. Thank you.

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                1. a you misunderstand. Models didn’t predict “the pause” even after the volcanoes were known. That’s because they don’t understand what causes it. Post hoc hindsight is not a “prediction”. After the volcanoes went off, the models still didn’t predict the climate.
                1. b. You avoided my question “which model is right”. You have no answer.

                2. Yes, they avoid talking about the 80s aerosols, and yet they were higher while the world warmed. You will want to avoid talking about 80s aerosols too. It’s a losing point for a believer.

                2a. I’ve never said models should predict volcanoes. Your repetition of this inane error is either delusional or deceptive. You pick.

                3. Thank you. I see you agree that cross validation is a meaningless test because nearly everything passes it. Why talk about it?

                4. Read my post and past comments. I’m tired of repeating the same thing.

                5. Read my post and past points. This comment of yours shows you have no idea what you are talking about “There is no cooling or warming from trade winds, they don’t effect CO2 forcing,”. Sorry. This conversation is inane. I have not ever, not once suggested trade winds affect CO2 forcing.

                Michael, sorry, I don’t think your reading skills and scientific background are up to it. I have to keep repeating my points. You paraphrase me to attack ridiculous arguments that I have never made. Quite possibly you are genuine, but this is a waste of time for both of us. It’s one mindless strawman after another. Unless your comprehension skills improve, I can’t see any point in pursuing this.

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    Michael: When was being able to look at data and graphs and tell they are wrong a fallacy. The “Being Right” fallacy? Virtually the only people who look at models and say they did not fail are the people who wrote the models in the first place. Statisticians, mathemeticians will all point out flaws. The graph itself does. Yet you insist this is “right”, not “wrong”. The only way you can make climate science correct is to change the meaning of the word “right” to “wrong” and then use “right”. It’s factually incorrect, but it does help heal the wounds of failure. Politicians do it all the time.

    A regression line shows warming, which is why advocates us it. It is not the only, nor the only correct, statistic. The graph presented asks a valid question. You simply ignore the question and continue to insist you are right. Maybe this is why global warming is losing believers. People don’t see “I’m right” as a scientific explanation.

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    Michael Whittemore

    Joanne says: “After the volcanoes went off, the models still didn’t predict the climate.”
    >
    The paper that found the volcanic aerosols was published in a peer reviewed journal on the 25th of November 2014 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract), I have not seen a climate model that has been adjusted for this cooling. Models don’t show volcanic cooling until after sulphuric aerosols have been measured. Basically you asking “which model is right” does not have an answer. The volcanic aerosols found in the 80s that you are referring to have been incorporated into the models already. It is all explained here http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Models-Show-Remarkable-Agreement-with-Recent-Surface-Warming.html
    >
    I have stated the science and will not deviate from it. Thank you for posting my comments and replying in your own comment.

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      And you still can give no reason why aerosols were higher in the 80s and CO2 lower, and yet the warming trend was larger.

      When 23 different models make predictions, it is easy to claim the models are accurate if one of them was right. But if it is a different model providing the “right” answer every time, this is merely a game of chance. Hans von storch shows over 98% failed. Their models are still unverified. they still use multiple variables. When they are exposed as wrong, they hunt among other multiple variables for ones that fit then post hoc claim they can model the climate. This lasts until they are shown wrong again, when they hunt to cherry pick the next suitable parameter, post hoc, that fits. During all the rounds of this cycle they claim “it must be CO2” because their models don’t predict the climate without CO2 as a forcing. Their behaviour is highly unscientific but they have neither the intellectual wit, nor moral courage to admit it.

      You have stated “the science”? There is no such thing as THE science. There is only the scientific method. You are repeating official pronouncements without questioning them, as if government bureaus are infallible Gods. I keep pointing to a major logical flaw in their reasoning, you keep repeating their opinions.

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    Michael Whittemore

    Joanne says: “you still can give no reason why aerosols were higher in the 80s and CO2 lower, and yet the warming trend was larger.”
    >
    I have already explained that past volcanic aerosols have been measured and incorporated into climate models. These aerosols that you’re referring to were so intense they did not cause a pause but a massive cooling! As can been seen in this graph http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n3/images_article/ngeo2105-f1.jpg published in nature(http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n3/full/ngeo2105.html)
    >
    >
    Joanne says: “When 23 different models make predictions, it is easy to claim the models are accurate if one of them was right.”
    >
    Joanne when will you understand, no climate model can predict volcanic eruptions.. It’s impossible for models to be accurate without incorporating volcanic sulphates after a volcanic eruption has occurred.
    >
    >
    Joanne says: “I keep pointing to a major logical flaw in their reasoning”
    >
    And I keep saying you are wrong! Climate models can’t predict volcanic eruptions!

    [I have not been following this conversation, but it seems to me, reading the above, that you are quoting Joanne out of context regarding the subject matter under discussion. I do hope that I am incorrect in that observation, because resorting to such cheap tricks, just to make a point, would make you look extremely foolish. Fly]

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      Michael, as your graph shows, that starts in 1990. I’m talking about the 1980s.

      I repeat — Models don’t have to predict volcanoes, and I have not suggested they do. You miss my point of logic about unverified models and post hoc cherry picking of factors. Sigh. It seems it doesn’t matter how many times I say that though. Read my comments again. Please. Both points you raise are unnecessary repeats because you are not keeping up.

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        Michael Whittemore

        So you admit “Models don’t have to predict volcanoes” and if that is the case, of cause they have to be considered when they occur! Just like volcanic eruptions climate models can’t predict ELSO, Trade Winds, TSI or Aerosols (Industry). Yet you continually spit that climate scientists “post hoc cherry picking of factors [means]Their behaviour is highly unscientific but they have neither the intellectual wit, nor moral courage to admit it.” Admit what?!

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          Michael, this is timewasting.

          1. You have not the integrity to admit that you got the decade wrong (twice) and that you have no scientific explanation for the huge aerosols of the 1980s to have no effect while those of the 2000s did.

          2. You appear incapable of even understanding the logical error in lauding unverified models while pretending that post hoc cherrypicked variables means anything. — Any half-wit with a model can check 20 variables and find one that makes the hindcast “fit”. When I pointed out empirical evidence that suggests the specific factor they use fails the decade before, you respond with “Models don’t have to predict volcanoes” – an inanity.

          You are so far behind in reading comprehension and model dynamics I do believe I have lapped you and you don’t know it.

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            Michael Whittemore

            All previous aerosols have been accounted for in climate models. As can been seen in this NASA graph http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SmokeClouds/Images/aer_temperature_rt.gif (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SmokeClouds/smoke_clouds2.php) the 1980s aerosols were lower than during the 1990s but it is clear they both caused a massive cooling.
            >
            These aerosols are measured and imputed into climate models to make sure the models are working. This is shown as the red line in this graph http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Hansen_2007_Pinatubo.gif (http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm)
            >
            All climate models have to add in these volcanic eruptions, as can be seen in this graph http://skepticalscience.com//pics/Jones13_4a.png (http://skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=1888) as can be seen these the models are spot on with temperatures due to the known amounts of aerosols from volcanic eruptions. The models deviate from the observations after the year 2000 which is the “pause” as some call it.
            >
            Climate models can’t predict increased aerosols so science has to look for them to determine if they are causing a cooling. A recently published paper states “we use lidar, Aerosol Robotic Network, and balloon-borne observations to provide evidence that currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15km at middle to high latitudes and therefore underestimate total radiative forcing resulting from the recent eruptions.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract
            >
            As can be seen from this graph http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png the models are good and with these recently found increased aerosols the models are even better.
            >
            Scientists are nitpicking when they minus out ELSO and Trade Winds from atmospheric temperatures, there is no need to do it because these natural processes are not causing a cooling, they are just moving heat into and out of the ocean.
            >
            Climate models know that over 90% of warming goes into the ocean so these natural processes will simple drive atmospheric temperatures as shown in this graph http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=66
            [How can a computer model “know” anything? Isn’t that just an expression of faith in the programmer? I am just curious.] Fly

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              There is no LIDAR or AERONET Data from Nevado del Ruiz in 1986 and Pinatubo volcanoes 1991. Vernier 2011 shows that both of these produced high aerosols up in the 20-30km zone. You are talking about a new paper with new instruments recording in the lower 15km zone that has found more aerosols than they expected. I simply keep pointing out the fallacious reasoning of claiming that the models are right because we’ve added in a new factor in the last decade which shows cooling. You assume the models have got aerosols from the 80s, but there is no data from the new measurement technique in 1986 – 1992. How could the models account for that? The volcanoes of the 1980s and 1991 were larger than the 2000s yet the world warmed then. Oh the dilemma!

              A form of serfdom (unskeptical and complete believe in authorities) is evident in the sentence below. You keep repeating inane and obvious points (like we can’t predict volcanoes/aerosols) — it’s merely filling up space on the page to pretend you are are answering my points.

              “Climate models can’t predict increased aerosols so science has to look for them to determine if they are causing a cooling”

              What is “science” – how can it look for anything? You betray an unscientific conviction that “science” IS the god-like individuals (or models) appointed by government grant committees.

              Real scientists know that science is about data, logic and reason, and may the best argument win. It’s not about opinions of men or models.

              My points about ENSO still stand, please read them again. You still miss the logical error completely. “Scientists are nitpicking” is mere fan-dom of your scientific gods. A fallacy is a fallacy. You have no reply. It is again, blindingly obvious that ENSO is not a “forcing” and is just shifting energy. Please stop repeating the obvious. Apparently in the religion of “science” ENSO’s can cool the surface in the 2000s but not warm it in the 1980s. You seem happy to accept that incoherent hypocrisy.

              Regarding ocean warming — the error bars utterly swamp the data. There is one thermometer per 200,000 km3 and they pretend the accuracy is 0.003C. A joke.

              You have not answered either of my points 1 or 2 of #42.1.1.1. but I appreciate you seem to be sincerely trying.

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                Michael Whittemore

                Now that we know the lower atmosphere holds aerosols that can’t be measured by satellites it should be expected that over the entire satellite record there may have been more aerosols in the atmosphere than was imputed into climate models. If these aerosols were known the models would have been better http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-ts-23.html. Now we can measure these extra aerosols the models can work better http://s23.postimg.org/muesnocy3/models.png .

                As I explained there are a lot of documented processes that show extra heat from the atmosphere is going into the ocean so only focusing on the atmosphere is flawed. Lucky it does not matter because ocean warming controls long term atmospheric warming http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=66

                [“… there may have been … it should be expected … there may have been … If … would have been … “. I like science, it gives one a sense of certainty. This, on the other hand …?] -Fly

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                OK, so finally you admit that they underestimate the aerosol cooling of earlier years, which is very inconsistent with using aerosols as their excuse for recent model failures.

                …”a lot of documented processes” translated = “I have nothing”

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                Michael Whittemore

                The climate models are running at 3°C for a doubling of CO2 and with these resent aerosols found in the lower atmosphere, it means the models are running closer or even higher than 3°C. This goes completely against everything sceptics say about lower climate sensitivity. I even explained this is not a one off thing, throughout the satellite measurements it can be expected that global temperatures should have been running higher.

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                Michael, sorry a mod approved your comment, and I didn’t see it. Hence the delay.

                A higher climate sensitivity doesn’t help you. It just makes the models more broken during the pause.

                If aerosols explained the “pause” but were even higher in the 1980s than in the last decade the models can’t hindcast it. If climate sensitivity were 5C, that “explains” the 1980s (and means the aerosols saved us from higher warming then) but by golly what happened in the last decade? With 5C of sensitivity, the warming should have been ballistic. We’re back where we started. The models don’t understand the climate.

                I was pointing at the inconsistency of using an excuse that clearly didn’t fit the bigger picture.

                It’s still post hoc cherry picking. The models are still useless. Their excuse does not wash.

                Aerosols may have more influence than climate models think. But something else caused the warming of the 1980s (and everything before then) and models don’t know what it was.

                PS: Comments have automatically closed due to the date. But you can email.

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