jryan

I love this graph. Never has more nothing been used so often to try and prove something.

This forcings method of finding the AGW smoking gun is like coming home to find your car stolen, ruling out the neighbor because he is on vacation, ruling out your wife because she is still at work, and then accusing the family dog because you have ruled out all other possibilities.

The standard error on that chart for AGW is larger than the predicted value of AGW (1.6 predicted to 1.8 error range).. and that is accepting that the numeric values given actually relate to the real world in some fahion.

After that realization you get to the AGW that is supposedly certain (0.6 Quatlus, or whatever name is given to this value) and realize that that is only because we assume that we actually know all possible climate forcers. The AGW is simply attributed to the warming that the forcing model can't account for.

So what they are doing is creating a model that can not model observed temperatures, and then throwing in a single forcer that brings is into somewhat agreement with the observation, and calling that forcer AGW.

It is comical.

Except the reconstruction wasn't inaccurate, which leads me to question your premise... care to defend it instead of making vague, blanket statements?

There is nothing vague about my statement. The instumental data is inaccurate, therefore the reconstructions that use the data are inaccurate.

I'll stop you right there. The forcings aren't modeled, they're model inputs.

This is a matter of pure sematics. A time scale chart of qualitative forcing data is based on numerous inputs determining what the forcing was at any given point in time. Since hitorically the data was not collected we have to determine historical forcing by modeling the environment in which the forcing is to be evaluated.

If your chart simply showed the CO2 ppm then you would have a point. But the derived forcing value of historic CO2 concentrations is as modeled as the models it is derived from.

Yes, and using them to perform an accurate reconstruction of the historical climate provides a test.

Unless, as in this case, the instrumentation data is inaccurate, then it is used to inaccurately reconstruct historical climates.

And again, you don't know what you're talking about... they're not models. The GMST is modeled, not the forcing inputs.

See the first response. If a given value is determined based on modeled data, then the value is modeled. You could similarly say that "global temperature" is a real thing and not a model... but global temperature in the 1700s is modeled.

In the same fashion, tree ring temperature proxies are modeled, and are used as inputs into other models.

The qualification of being "used as input into a model" does not mean it isn't modeled itself.

Game, set, match! Err, no...

Er... why?

The graph was created using the DOE Parallel Climate Model as part of Meehl et al (2004)

I will look into those... though they aren't very transparent. I can't access their data without an account.

I don't see how that makes this "not from published literature." If the data were published, then it is a graph of published data. If it's wrong, I would like a link to what's wrong about it, rather than an (currently) empty claim.

This is an interesting statement considering this previous thread:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=31720&page=3

Then please demonstrate it.

You mean "please demonstrate it once Bascule offers the source of the graph" right? Bascule made an arbitrary argument which was equally arbitrarily refuted. Though I am very certain that once Bascule offers up the study that created that graph we will see that the "observed" line uses SST data in it's average (probably pre-adjusted HADCRUT)

So I guess you can hope that Bascule's graph was done after the Nature article if you want. But I won't.

No? Sorry. Here's THE GRAPH again:

 

There are several problems with that chart....

First, the "observed" line is now demonstrably wrong.

Second, the forcings models shown are themselves produced in part from the istrumental data. The solar forcings took a hit because they seemed to not be able to account for the cooling of the first half of the 20th century. This led to a reduction in it's evaluated forcing ability.... ie. increased solar activity existed during an observed cooling, therefor solar forcing must be weak.

We now know that the period that reduced the modeled solar forcing didn't actually exist. So the the solar forcing model needs to be redone.

Finally, all of those forcing models need to be recalculated, actually...

That graph no longer applies to the real world. Actually, it never did, apparently.

Indeed! Thanks for... backing me up?

No, the limited effect shown in the Nature study are completely due to it's limited scope, not on the findings themselves. As a matter of fact, the change to the temperature record for that very limited time scale is very large.

And there is good evidence that this error discussed in that study is actually applicable to a larger time scale as there are similar and numerous attribution errors that persist long past 1945.

Not the least of which is the baseless assumption made in previous adjustments that the temperature measurements of "unknown method" in the Hadley data were all done by buckets.

I think the simple solution at this point would be to go back into the Hadley SST data and just remove all measurements of "unknown method". There is no good way to statistically fix these entries.

That's a pretty broad statement to make based on a fairly limited set of problems.

That's a fairly broad statement based on a study of very limited scope.

There are models which use the circulation of ocean heat rather than just trying to model the atmosphere/ocean interface with SST alone.

Could you explain that bold bit? I understand that few studies use only SST, but whatever SST is used in (tuning or averages) is adversely effected by the problems in the data.

Coupled atmosphere-ocean GCMs (AOGCMs), such as HadCM3 and GFDL CM2.X, do not rely on SST for modeling the atmosphere/ocean interface.

Thanks for the direction. I'll go take a look at those... do they really model the ocean without ever using ocean temps??

Actually, my first inclination was that the US was measuring US temperatures and the UK was measuring UK temperatures, however, since you did not cite a source (and your image came from imageshack), I could not find out more.

 

What is the source of the data presented in your graphs? I'd like to see for myself what was being measured, what methods were used, and what those pictures you posted truly represent (that is, of course, if they represent anything useful at all, or if they are perhaps some random persons scribblings).

The charts are marked with the source data. The only unaccounted for line is the red line in the second chart, which is a linear phase out smoothing done by Steve McIntyre over at CA. You really should read the CA site as all McIntyre is doing over there is checking statistical modeling and researching the core data to ensure that it is sound.

These are things that climatology should be doing for itself, but it apparently isn't since it took 30 years to pickup on the biases, and another 30 to finally admit that the original correction was almost as wrong as the uncorrected data. And it still appears to be quite wrong today.

Thompson metioned in the Nature article that his finding have no appreciable effect on the overall climate trend... what he fails to metion is that that limited effect has more to do with the scope of his study than on the actual problem he found. His study looked at just a few years in the middle of the bucket to intake change over which took at least 70 years (first account of intake method rather than bucket was in 1926). So saying it had no appreciable effect is really just saying that his study had an insignificant scope.

Also, her eis something else worth considering in this mell of a hess.... in Arctic ships, the engine intakes were warmed by low pressure steam to prevent ice from forming.... yet I see no documentation to indicate that this was ever adjusted for.

And finally, McIntyre has also turned up documetation verifying that Canadian and Japanese fleets had converted to intake completely as of 1970, whereas they were counted as buckets (they were in the "unknown" so were lumped into buckets). So there data is wrong....

It would seemto me that at this point the SST is no longer a reliable or precise data set. I can't see trusting any models that continue to use data that is derived from SST or uses SST explicitely.

I am still waiting for a list of models that don't use SST in some fashion... be it in a secondary fashion using GISSTEMP or HADCRUT, or using SST specifically. I am fairly certain the list would be incredibly small as it would have to be a study that is concerned with Global temperatures, but not concerned with the temperatures of 70% of it's surface.

Stratosphere and Troposhere studies, maybe? I can't imagine a surface temp study that wouldn't have used GISSTEMP or HADCRUT.

So, basically all I need to do is find one single study which does not use that same data set and your argument would be proven false.

Actually, no. BUt for the sake of argument, how about you do just that.

While you do that, I'll move on to some other interesting observations at climateaudit.org.

Here is a chart where they show a strange correlation between the SST in the 1900s and the number number of SST obervations that came from U.S. sources:

Generally one would think that that is a clear indicator that the U.S. method of collecting temperatures was introducing a bias into the data.

And here is the adjusted SST...

The new data blunted the 1970 to 2000 heat spike considerably, while shifting a good deal of the warming shown in the SST to pre-WWII. This no longer jibes with the CO2 charts.

There are a lot of logical fallacies in your post, and it is much more "rhetoric" than proof. However, I agree with you that it's important to closely analyze the data and correct any errors once they are found.

 

That said, one error does not negate the mountains of other work which has been conducted without said errors. Further, one "correct" prediction does not negate the decades of incorrect predictions (such as those made by Landscheidt and McIntyre). Even a broken analog watch can be right twice a day.

Your statement is complete and utter bunk, as this particular data set was the one used to build that mountain of research that you speak of. Every model, every proxy study, every one referred back to the Hadley SST dataset in one fashion or another. It is and was the SST of record. And it was off by HALF of the observed rise.

So, as the 0.3 cold bias was weeded out of the measurement, we saw a bogus 0.3 C rise in the SST over that period of time.

Again, that is half of the 0.63 C we have seen..... you can't see the trouble in using dataset that has a calibration error of 50%???

Oh yeah, speaking of logical fallacies and false premises:

 

 

 

Hmmm... "Next month" almost a century "ago?" Your statement is temporally confusing. Either way, I'll try to interpret what I think you mean.

 

 

June 1914 is shown here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts+dSST.txt

Well, you are simply wrong. Go to:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

Now look at all the previous versions of the data posted by GISS.... notice that previous years are not static things, but change constantly. This is because of the strange smooting technique used at GISS... temperature fluctuations ripple through the GISS database constantly. A cold snap in March 2008 changed the temperature record for 1903 and 1946.

So as temporally confusing as my statement may seem, it is the truth. They are not capable of predicting the temperature in June, and are therefor not able to predict the smoothing of prior years due to the temperature in June... so they indeed can not predict what the GISS temperature for 1914 will be in June 2008.

Speaking of salvaging information from a heap of BS...

Another win for ClimateAudit.org.

Over three years ago, Steve McIntyre and his crew reported on a troubling bias they found in the "bucket" method used to measure ocean temperatures pretty much from the turn of the century until 1970. The "bucket" method, and many other methods were eventually phased out over the 30+ years following 1970. Here is a graph of the distributions of methods since 1970:

This is important in that the "bucket" method introduced a 0.3 C downward bias in temperatures that was never accounted for. So the phase out of the bucket method over the last 30 years introduced an erroneous 0.3 C observed rise in ocean temperatures over that period. This is huge considering the total surface temperature rise that has the world so concerned is a total of 0.63 C... and that number used the ocean surface temps in their average.

I call this a win for ClimateAudit.org because after reporting on this serveral years ago (as well and refining their observation over serveral subsequent articles... and revisited once more here), the journal Nature has accepted a peer reviewed study that came to the same conclusion.

It should be noted, however, that the Journal Nature article was somewhat sugar coated when compared to ClimateAudit.org. Steve McIntyre has covered the Nature Article twice (here and here), and argues that the adjustments are not final as far as he is concerned.

At this point, who should we listen to?

On another front, Theodor Landscheidt gets more kudos as a solar scientist for predicting over two decades ago the sudden drop in temperature at the beginning of this year. He has long been a proponent of global climate being driven by solar variance, and was roundly discredited in his theories because the last 30 years of surface temps have not matched his predictions even as the solar activity has matched well with prediction (from the first part of this post, I guess we may see why).

Considering that Theodor Landscheidt was right 20 years in the future, but climatology is still adjusting temperatures in early 1900s, who should we listen to? Theodor Landscheidt can apparently tell us what the temperature will be in 2028, whereas climatology can't tell us what the temperature in 1914 will be next month.

I read this article by Mike Hulme, a climate scientist as East Anglia University. I am interested in getting peoples responses to this article. I have read it, and I certainly have an opinion, but I don't want to paint others opinion before they read it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/mar/14/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

"Cliff's Notes" is a line of books sold here in the U.S. that are outlines of famous books that cover just what is important to take from the original text. It has been used for years by high school and college kids who are bound and determined to graduate without actually being educated.

I can't agree with the multi-evolution of homo erectus into homo sapien. That moves well into the "miraculous coincidence" realm.

That's a doubling from todays values, always keep the numbers clear.

Yes. At 720 ppm we would see another 1.8 degrees celcius increase, according to that particular study.

All we need to do really is put out all the coal mine fires around the world..... China burns nearly 200 million tons of coal in mine fires every year, emitting more CO2 than all the gasoline burned in America in that same time.

I know it's not the sexy authoritarian change that so many want... but it is the practical one.

You can dislike me personally all you want... Your dislike of me will never support your suggestion that human contributions to atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are not causing global average yearly temperatures to increase.

Your statement gives no information while giving the appearance that it does.

I could say that your breathing causes global warming, as your exhales expel CO2. By your own admission, my statement is correct. But when we start talking about whether you should STOP breathing, I think it prudent to consider how much warming you actually cause.

It is this question that nobody has answered satisfactorily.

Well first, I get Venus from post #3 in this thread:

If you assume constant optical depth, I don't have a hard time believing that you'd come to a very different conclusion about global warming. But in response, I say, "Venus"

There are pleanty of times that we can't see the sun during the day, sure... but that is a very local thing, and not world wide. When we can't see the sun world wide we end up with a year or more of winter.

Your link is saying what I have been saying for a long time now, and you should probably read it. Assuiming you agree with the math in that article, the doubling of CO2 would result in a 1.8 degree increase in global temperature, and at the current rate of increase we will see a doubling in... 300 years or so.

From that same article you provided:

Some climatologists, making assumptions about ever-increasing rates of carbon dioxide production, assert that the doubling will occur within a few decades instead of a few centuries. However, they are doing sociology, not climatology. They are assuming that fossil fuel consumption will increase drastically over current levels. This is very unlikely. The only honest way to estimate the change of CO2 levels is to make predictions based on what is happening now, not what might happen in some hypothetical future society; otherwise, we are merely inflating our predictions by indulging in speculation about future social trends.

I agree completely with that statement.

How is this relevant to anything in this thread? ttowntom hasn't posted here, and the only link that has been presented did, in fact, provide only anecdotal evidence.

It's more of a cross thread question... all these AGW threads melt together after a while. Especially when the dismissive methods of iNow never really change.

Yeah... That's about how I thought you'd respond...

I gave you your answer and that is the best you can do? If ttowntom's data is anecdotal, then so is the data used in MBH98.... How is a tree ring study in China anecdotal, but a tree ring study in California evidence?

Are you serious? If you are willing to label all of the tree ring studies provided in this thread as "anecdotal" then MBH98 is nothing BUT anecdotal tree ring data. The whole study was using tree ring data from Sheep Mountian bristle cones, etc tec. to create a global climate model.

I can see that the atmosphere of Mars fits the "semi-transparent" boundary conditions more readily than earth's atmosphere does.

I think you may be making a fundimentally flawed observation here. THe Earth's atmosphere is only "opaque" in the loose visual observation sense... but not in any real sense. IR radiation still escapes the atmosphere, even on Venus (where CO2 makes up 96.5% of the atmosphere rather than our own .038%).

So no, the Earth's atmosphere is not 100% inwardly or outwardly reflective so an infinite atmosphere is not acceptable. If it were, we would never see the sun (all light reflected), or we would have burned up long ago when the CO2 concentrations were a hundred times higher than today (all radiation retained).

It's a blog, so my comment was specific to the author. Michael Asher, Alex Jones...

 

Look at his other article there where he engages in the same disingenuous nonsense (he is literally making sh1t up):

 

http://www.dailytech.com/Survey+Less+Than+Half+of+all+Published+Scientists+Endorse+Global+Warming+Theory/article8641.htm

So where is he "making sh1t up"? You offer no contrary statistics to show this.

The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes," not "evidence."

Correction: Until they are used in Climate Models...

Why yes, it is, and it's too bad we can't say the same about criticism of the modern environmental movement.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-qu_0KlMvw

Heh, I remember Penn Jillette telling a story about when he finally called it quits with the environmental movement. He was set to give a speech at some rally, and they gave him the talking points. He sat and read them through so as not to stumble... and to his surprise he was picking up mathematical errors in the statistics he was given.

Penn is the first to admit that math isn't a strong suit of his, so that he caught these errors struck him with dread. He went and found one of the organizers and asked if he could sit with them and corrected the typos in the speech. The organizer refused happily saying that the numbers didn't matter, just the message.

He gathered his things and left the building.

I wonder how much of the garbage we see in these catch areas is due to unintentional polution causes such as the 2004 Tsunami, etc.

I have a brother who was in the navy, and later worked as an engineer of an Atlantic discovery vessel, and he said that the worst oceanic polution he ever saw was off the coast of Brazil. The incoming and outgoing tides have an almost tectonics subduction zone a few miles off the coast of Brazil that traps debris in a sort of trash halo. He said there were some areas thick enough to walk on.

But then he also said that in those areas seemed, when undersea flood lights were turned on at night, to be the most active biologically. With many fish and humbolt squid treating the trash like a floating reef.

It is one of those strange paradoxes when looking at man as part of the environment as opposed to an unimposing shepard.... in this case, cleaning up our trash would destroy an ecosystem.

But yeah... Relative impact of solar forcing is still very small, regardless of whatever games you choose to play with words and logic.

You have completely misread that chart that you keep using. That "solar irradiance" is not the impact the sun has on global temperature. That chart is making a claim concerning the impact of solar variance over a given time.

Solar irradiance is the number one driver of global climate.... buut they are claiming that the variance was small over that time, or that the amount of variance in that period had little impact.

What NASA scientists are predicting for 2020 is well outside of the variance covered in that chart.