From NOAA’s National Climate Data Center:
From Temperature Anomaly FAQs:
The term “temperature anomaly” means a departure from a reference value or long-term average. A positive anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was warmer than the reference value, while a negative anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was cooler than the reference value.
The reference value used to create this graph was the average over the 1901-2000 period.
Data seems to be what politics demands as this “before” and “after” demonstrates.
http://i44.tinypic.com/29dwsj7.gif
fraudulent politics are driven by fraudulent
“”before” and “after” demonstrates.” Non fraudulent
charts are here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/before-and-after/
Are you weighing in on the global warming debate? If so, then put both feet in.
Personally, I have to admit to a certain skepticism when I see “Global Mean Temperature over Land AND Ocean”. You have confidence in, say, Antarctic temperatures in 1895 to within, say 0.4 deg C? How about the South Atlantic or Siberia? Congo? Algeria? Amazon jungle?
Let’s try a location where we have pretty good records for the entire period: Wisconsin.
Monthly Record Highs – Wisconsin
Month
Year
Day Temp (F)
Location
County
January
1897
1 66
Prairie du Chien
Crawford
February
2000 *
26 69
Afton, Beloit
Brodhead
Rock
Green
March
1895
29 89
Prairie du Chien
Crawford
April
1980
23 97
Lone Rock FAA Airport
Sauk
May
1934
31 109
Prairie du Chien
Crawford
June
1934 *
1 106
Racine
Racine
July
1936
13 114 # (Highest ever)
Wisconsin Dells
Columbia
August
1988 *
2 108
Madison UW Arboretum
Dane
September
1939 *
7 104
Prairie du Chien
Crawford
October
1976 *
1 94
Hatfield
Jackson
November
1904
1 84
Prairie du Chien
Crawford
December
2001
5 70
Kenosha
West Allis
Kenosha
Milwaukee
LOWEST TEMPERATURE BY MONTH
Month
Year
Day Temp (F)
Location
County
January
1922
24 -54
Danbury
Burnett
February
1996 *
4 -55 # (Lowest ever)
Couderay 7W
Sawyer
March
1962
1 -48
Couderay
Sawyer
April
1928
15 -20
Rest Lake
Vilas
May
1966
9 7
Gordon
Douglas
June
1964
1 20
Danbury
Burnett
July
1972
4 27
Jump River 5 E
Taylor
August
1950
20 22
Coddington
Portage
September
1949
29 10
Coddington
Portage
October
1925
30 -7
Long Lake Dam
Oneida
November
1898
24 -34
Osceola
Polk
December
1983
19 -52
Couderay
Sawyer
*Tied earlier records
Hmmm. Looks like hottest decade was the 1930’s, not unlike Bruce Hall’s link.
Just to be fair, here is the source of the animated gif in the first comment.
The reason that the second chart is virtually unchanged is because the original data was scrubbed. It is only because the original data had been downloaded and archived that the comparison to the modified data could be made.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/contiguous-us-gistemp-linear-trends.html
Steve Kopits: Sure, ok, let’s assume away the rest-of-world temperatures (!!!) and talk about Wisconsin. What impressed me the most, as a migrant from California, is that over the past 150 odd years, the number of days Lake Monona has stayed frozen over has trended downward — see here. While personally, I welcome warmer average temperatures (which the Madison natives assure me have occurred), on an intellectual level, I am not comforted.
See also this post.
i find a lot of time when i look at the weather channel info, its often a few degrees cooler than what they are forecasting or telling me. i often need a jacket or extra layer of clothing. therefore, global warming is a hoax.
Steve K,
Since your offering is a tiny subset of the lower 48, it is no surprise if it looks a bit like the lower 48. It also suffers from the same lack of generality as data on the lower 48. Because local conditions can be driven by shifts in weather patterns when global conditions change, picking one area, even a fairly large one, is kinda bogus.
So, here’s the thing. It has become a sort of signature of climate change denialist to ignore the implications of statistics – errors tend to cancel out in a large enough data set, while small data sets like the one you present are quite likely to be skewed – in order to scoff at data implications that are fairly robust while offering up implications that are fairly fragile. We really don’t need to have confidence in Antarctic temperature readings from 1895 to withing 0.4 degrees. Really.
Having spent time hacking at dendrochronology and lake bed varve analysis reports I also doubt anyone can tell me the global mean temperature pre 1850. What I do trust is that at some points in history there has been ice down to the equator.
If I yield that the charted data could be valid, I am still left doubting it is a large anomoly relative to the all time (10,000 year+) normal range.
If I yield that the data is a large anomoly, I am still left doubting that it is a net bad thing.
Is 1 degree increase in temperature good for Boston? Is a 10 degree increase good for Detroit? Is it good for polar bears? Should I care about polar bears? Do I care if the New York City becomes New York Harbor, and Manhattan becomes a man made coral reef?
Plenty of analysis has been done about the doom created by warming. It is assanine to assume there would be no winners, and only losers.
KevinM,
First, nobody who has contributed intelligently to the climate change conversation ever made the argument “there would be no winner, and only losers.” Second, picking out relative time periods can be dangerous. Have atmospheric carbon levels or global mean temperatures been higher than present day? Of course. But what is particularly and uniquely destructive of present day is that the existing period of warming in changing at an unprecedented rate, such that ecosystems cannot adapt gradually. In other words, a 100-year shock as opposed to a 1000-year trend yields very different consequences.
You do hit the nail on the head with your quote, “Do I care.” Unfortunately, the science is minimalized and manipulated, not because the science is inadequate, but because most people genuinely could care less if a few million people die each year from climate change or if the coral reef and polar bears completely die off. What is particularly frustrating is that I wish more climate change skeptics would have the huevos to simply stand up and say what is really bothering them: that reducing the potential U.S. GDP by 1-3% is not worth saving people in developing countries or terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems everywhere.
Menzie,
And your point is….?
The data are pretty unambiguous as to the warming, no? If not, the geolocial evidence is of periods of “fire and ice”. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this is not debatable. So too are water vapor, methane etc. What I have heard people in the oil patch say repeatedly (ok, a wee bias) is “what time frame?” They point to millions of years and glaciation coupled with warm cycles. Critters that died in lakes forming oil in regions now covered with sand, or glaciers. Stuff like that (yea, sure, tectonic plates move). Athropomorphic or natural?, probably both. But let’s not kid ourselves… are we vain enough to think that we can kill this planet forever? Surely not. Are we strong enough to kill our ability to live on this planet in a nice way, with e.g. wild fish? Most surely. Will the earth heal? Seems likely if past is prologue, but the time frame will likely not be measured on our mortal timespan, a 1000 generations is peanuts. I’m curious as to what meteroligists models predict with zero additional mam-made outputs starting now. A
At the end of the day this seems so like the financial crisis writ large and long. We keep throwing our trash out the literal back door, and it keeps coming back to haunt us. (I’m more disgusted with what we throw in the oceans, and what we take from it, than with global warming)
And what are your thoughts on whether this time series is mean-reverting?
Mike Laird: The series fails to reject the null of a unit root against alternative of mean stationarity, using AIC to select lag length. The unit root null is rejected when the alternative is trend stationarity.
Mike Laird wrote: “And what are your thoughts on whether this time series is mean-reverting?”
While it’s quite likely that it’s mean-reverting, it’s also quite likely that any mean-reversion process will involve unplanned changes that are as painful as the trend-continuation is likely to inflict.
We have millions of years of geological history to support climate mean-reversion. (But then again, there’s Venus and Mars to suggest that global warming can become permanent, and so can global cooling.) However, if the timescale of the mean-reversion is short enough to matter for civilization, then the process by which mean-reversion takes place is likely to be very, very unpleasant for very, very many people. (Looks like either a survival threat or a dramatic change in lifestyle for over half the global population, including half of your closest friends and family…
The current trend hasn’t run to it’s nonlinear reversal point, and the mechanism for the reversal is probably unknown (certainly to me). But just as a blowoff top in the market is often followed by a sudden crash, I imagine that a climate trend is likely to reverse nastily and without (much) warning.
Both global-warming and global-cooling are potentially self-reinforcing processes. Global warming pushes back sea ice (which reduces albedo and leads to more absorption of sunlight) and releases gases trapped in the permafrost (which accelerate the greenhouse effect). Global cooling reverses both of those. Those trends will continue until the positive reinforcements have been exhausted, and something else takes over as the dominant term in the relevant rate equations. But to make either trend reverse will require a very dramatic change…
The problem I worry about most isn’t so much the temperature changing but the fact that most species are not nearly as mobile and resilient to climate variation as humans are. Human nature being what it is, individually we’ll probably tolerate whatever physical change comes along. But at current population levels, we are now tightly coupled to all the other species via the food webs / ecosystems, and those do not appear to be very resilient. There’s reasonable evidence that the rate of species destruction is currently quite high, comparable to the major change in geologic history. If we’re in the middle of a major destruction of species diversity, then all bets are off as to whether we’ll be able to maintain the food webs in a way that supports current population,much less the trendline expansion of population…
kharris: “errors tend to cancel out in a large enough data set”
That is only true if the sample is truly generated randomly. I find the suggestion that the points of measurement were either random or representative prior to about World War I to be downright silly. The bias may not be important, but the burden of proof is on the researchers using the data.
I think a much more appropriate and interesting question is the one brought up by the conflicting reports Steve K and Menzie discussed above: namely, there may be important differential effects between different measures of local climate change. Climate change is many things, including important, but one thing we shouldn’t pretend is that it is simple.
Sean, you say “what is particularly and uniquely destructive of present day is that the existing period of warming in changing at an unprecedented rate.”
But I do not believe you can support that. I do not belive you can tell me what has precedent and what does not over the course of 4 billion years by looking at tree fosils and mud pools.
I do trust some of the carbon dioxide measurements from ice cores, which are nearly a first order measurement.
We have plenty of reliable CO2 data, but no accurate, trustworthy temperature data before 1850.
As to “the huevos to simply stand up and say … that reducing the potential U.S. GDP by 1-3% is not worth saving people in developing countries or terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems everywhere.” I got those, but I think you’re looking at it the wrong way.
I think a growing US economy is the best hope for developing the technology to produce the energy source we use after we burn all of the coal, oil and natural gas. Hard to imagine we will not burn it all at some pace.
For most of Jurassic time, global temperatures are estimated to have been 15 -to 20 F warmer than today, the same as in the preceding Triassic Period.
Mid-Jurassic volcanism caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise from about 1,500 ppm to about 2,500 ppm (vs. 390 currently) by late Jurassic time.
I’m with you on the trend, but I’d actually like to see the historical data back to the beginning of the 19th century, that is, the beginning of the industrial revolution–and proximate cause of global warming.
Why? Because the late 19th-early 20th century data provided here shows global temperatures cooling. I recall that the explosion of Krakatoa in the late 19th C (don’t remember year) caused global cooling of several degrees (not just tenths of a degree) for several years, but were there other forces at work–the Siberian asteroid hit, for example? Moreover, if there were another Krakatoa (& there will be something comparable sometime), would global temperatures “revert to mean”? Can we isolate the “Krakatoa effect”?
I don’t know, more questions than answers. But I don’t think the chart explains all that is happening in global temperatures.
>> For most of Jurassic time, global temperatures are estimated to have been 15 -to 20 F warmer than today, the same as in the preceding Triassic Period.
And this is an argument that we allow US( and World ) farmland and water supplies to be destroyed because there’s historic precedent? Such Drastic Climate Change will cause an Economic Collapse and massive population die off.
People, people, please use technical terms correctly. “Historic” refer to contemporaneous written records. Our earliest written material is from the 4th century BC. The Jurassic predates that by a bit.
Whilst statistics may be accurate the sample may not be representative.Time cycles of the elliptical rotation of the earth around the sun may require a longer time frame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
high frequency statistics: well done – I laughed out loud.
Menzie: With respect to this comment
“Mike Laird: The series fails to reject the null of a unit root against alternative of mean stationarity, using AIC to select lag length. The unit root null is rejected when the alternative is trend stationarity.”
Just to be clear – I am assuming you are mindfully fitting a pretty “content free” specification here just to get an idea of what is “in the data”, in contrast, for example to some of the error correction models you’ve fit which are testing a non-trivial specification mean reversion.
I find it interesting to see the normal alarmism re: the AGW issue on an Econ blog with out reference to Anthony Watts, or Steve McIntyre. For those who don’t know them, Watts has reviewed siting issues with the US weather data gathering stations. McIntyre has at this writing pretty much debunked the key paleo reports, and their use of tree ring records to track temps.
McIntyre’s findings are important because much of the early evidence of “unprecedented” temperatures in the IPCC Reports were based upon those paleo-based reports. Watts’ findings are important as they indicate that much of the rise in temps can be traced to faulty siting, frequent changes in equipment and locations with little documentation at occurrence, sloppy data gathering, and really poor data manipulation.
So is the temp rising? Obviously. Is that rise unprecedented? Depends! Depends on the time frames used. Depends on if you believe the paleo-based reports. Depends on whether you believe that mankind’s land use impacts (deforestation and Urban Heat islands) are important and skew the temp data.
What the ice core studies have shown is that CO2 increases follow temp increases. So, is the current temp increase due to increased CO2 or is the current CO2 increase due to increased temps?
That is an important question since a very recent study has shown no percentage increase in ACO2 in the atmosphere since 1850. No increase in ACO2 means that the CO2 increase may be natural.
Regardless, popular opinion is rapidly shifting on this subject, and that is being shown in the failure to reach consensus for the upcoming Copenhagen Conference, and the recent delay in the US Cap & Trade Bill.
One last tidbit. Economists overwhelming support the AGW theory. Geologists and meteorologists do not.
CoRev, editor
http://Globalwarmingclearinghouse.blogspot.com
I have a very simple experiment for the skeptics who think we can just continue to pollute and pollute and pollute and suffer no consequences – run a garden hose from the tail pipe of your car into your hose and let your car idle for a half hour or so. Then, come back and tell us whether you think what’s coming out of the exhaust pipe of your car is a problem for human beings. If you don’t want those poisons in your house, why do you want them in the air you breathe outside?
Over 16,000 people die in the United States every year from the effects of air pollution, yet we spend less than $10 billion per year to reduce/contain/eliminate air pollution. 3,500 people have died from terrorist acts in the past 50 years in the United States, but we spend, what, $300 billion a year on the mythical “war on terror”??? What a gross misallocation of resources to mitigate known risks! You people are stupid, short-sighted and totally blind to what the real risks are in this world!
Menzie loves to drive his audience in mathematical levitation and then to pull them down,saying come back to earth you are missed.
Ummm. Something is wrong. The anomaly fell to .2 recently and this summer was barely more than zero.
Also, the rate of change issue is ridiculous. We can’t see how CO2 levels fluctuate over short periods of time in the past. What we have is a set of data points often hundreds of years apart; and the further we go back, the more the gasses blend together. What we really see is an average. Going back about seven hundered years, we’re looking at multi-decadal averages. Evenfurther back, you’re looking and centuries and longer.
I believe if you look it up, there have acually been major temperature changes over the course of just decades according to geological evidence.
Politico should not be doing economic analysis.
But Econbrowser should be doing climate analysis.
Got it.
“If you don’t want those poisons in your house, why do you want them in the air you breathe outside”
I’m convinced. The “air outside” and the dynamics involved are the same as pumping exhaust from your car into your enclosed home.
Menzie –
I think I was suggesting that climate change is an emotionally charged field where there are many people with a lot of knowledge and strong opinions. I think it’s hard to be semi-involved.
Personally, I am mulling the employment impact if our oil consumption does not rise at all. (I think there is a reasonable chance this will be the case.) I’d be thrilled if you or Jim would run some numbers on that. I don’t think anyone has written about the topic and it’s potentially important.
aaron said: “We can’t see how CO2 levels fluctuate over short periods of time in the past.”
CO2 has a half life of 150 years (or is it 300?) and equilbrium changes in the carbon cycle are slow to occur. The CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere is increasing the concentration while at the same time acidifying the oceans.
CO2 doesn’t fluxuate much due to removal, but it does due to additions. So the level of CO2 will bounce up and drift down. (Like gasoline prices.)
Your implied argument makes no sense.
Radioactive atoms have half lives.
CO2 chemically breaks down eventually, but is fluctuates with biological activity and temperature and gas mixing with the oceans. We don’t know how temperature or CO2 change on shorter term basis. CO2 is not perfectly mixed and the level varies by about 1% just by seasons. Atmospheric chemistry is not the only way CO2 can leave the atmosphere.
@Steve Kopits:
Global warming doesn’t mean there must have been warming specifically in Wisconsin. Global warming refers to the long term trend of the globally averaged temperature anomaly relative to a reference time period, which is significant relative to the variability of the globally averaged temperature. It doesn’t say at all that there can’t be regions where the trend has been much smaller than the globally averaged long term trend. It doesn’t say either that there can’t be regions where is was warmer in the 30s of the last century than it is today. BTW: It also doesn’t say at all that the globally averaged temperature anomaly must be larger every year than in the previous one. It doesn’t even say that the globally averaged temperature anomaly must be larger every decade than in the previous decade, to point to another red herring often brought by global-warming sceptics.
Thus, trying to argue in favour of scepticism with respect to global warming by talking about the trend and the variability of the temperature in Wisconsin, or any other region, whatsoever, where there might not have been such an evident warming trend, is just logically fallacious.
rc
You have about 150 years or trustworthy temperature data, with temperature trending up for about 30 years.
You have millions of years of pretty good CO2 data, with concentrations higher and lower than today, and which trends up for forty years.
You can be 100% certain that earth’s surface has been much colder than it is today during the past 10,000 years (little ice age).
You can be reasonably certain that earth’s surface has been warmer than it is today during the past 10,000 years (medieval warm).
You can hypothesize that the greenhouse gas CO2 is a driver for the 30 year temperature increase. You can correlate the tiny temperature record with the end of the long CO2 record. You can build models to relate one quantity to the other.
But if the models have no predictive power, they are nothing. The models have not demonstrated predictive power, and to be fair they will not be able to pass that hurdle for a long time.
People seem to often use Venus as an example of green house gas cooking a planet. Earth would have a different climate too, if it took 117 current days to rotate on its axis. For inumerable reasons, that analogy is as useless as saying “my neighbor went to Harvard, so yours did too”.
Radioactive atoms have half lives.
CO2 chemically breaks down eventually, but is fluctuates with biological activity and temperature and gas mixing with the oceans (which eventaully is neutralized by Ca and other buffers). We don’t know how temperature or CO2 change on shorter term basis. CO2 is not perfectly mixed and the level varies by about 1% just by seasons. Atmospheric chemistry is not the only way CO2 can leave the atmosphere.
There are two frequently used arguments to justify doing something about AGW: 1) the precautionary principle, and 2) the appeal to authority. They are usually wrapped in some purported evidence from some peer reviewed scientific. I say purported, since there are few concrete facts evidenced in these reports that do not get modified over time.
What makes AGW alarmism unique is the use of … catastrophic predictions (alarms). None have come true. The Sea is not rising at the rates predicted. The number of and severity of hurricanes/typhoons has not been observed. The temp rises have been less than predicted.
To think something as complex as climate and even global temps are controlled by trace gases is an extreme theory. All (or nearly all) heat is originated from the Sun. It is first and foremost trapped in the oceans/seas/lakes. Some heat is slowed as it is radiated out to space, but the mechanisms are still being defined, and the amounts/effects refined.
So if the biggest sinks are the oceans/seas ag re there any cycles in their cutrrents that can be tracked? Yes, many. One of the major wwarming/cooling cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO cycle is aproximately 30 years long. The past century has seen two warming cycles. This century sould see two cooling cycles. The start of the current cooling cycle coincides roughly with the current cooling trend. Coincidence? Dunno! But, it is a better way to explain what is happening than the ACO2 theory.
The next two decades wil tell the tale.
Robert Bell:
I am assuming you are mindfully fitting a pretty “content free” specification here just to get an idea of what is “in the data”, in contrast, for example to some of the error correction models you’ve fit which are testing a non-trivial specification mean reversion.
Menzie is just plotting data. His comment about the data not being mean reverting and showing evidence of a unit root means that the temperature anomaly dataset is difference stationary rather than trend stationary. A pulse in temperature persists and results in a permanent change in temperature. An error correction model (ECM) would only make sense in a multivariable model in which each data series showed evidence of a unit root. In that case you would look for a stationary trend that holds the two nonstationary data sets together. In other words, there would be a cointegrating relationship. The obvious next step would be to check for a cointegrating relationship between temperature and CO2 concentrations. Maybe if we’re nice to Menzie he’ll do such an error correction model.
Anonymous
For most of Jurassic time, global temperatures are estimated to have been 15 -to 20 F warmer than today, the same as in the preceding Triassic Period.
True, but irrelevant. The issue is not whether there have been warmer periods or even periods with higher CO2 concentrations. The issue is whether or not CO2 (and other GHGs) drive are a forcing factor in climate change. It does not matter whether the Triassic or Jurassic or even the Middle Ages were warmer than today; the issue is whether CO2 emissions drive global warming.
CoRev
The next two decades wil tell the tale.
As a public policy matter that statement is an argument for provisionally assuming global warming driven by CO2 is true.
Howdy doo 2slugs! Yup! It is an argument accepting CO2 as a GHG and that GHGs do raise temps. The issue is how much of the increase is due to GHGs and how much is natural? As I pointed out in my earlier, the percentage of ACO2 in the atmosphere is the same as it was in 1850. No change. So why is the CO2 amount rising?
I also said earlier that the ice core studies have shown that CO2 increases lag increases in temp. So, is the CO2 increase caused by temp increases or does it cause the temp increase as the theory proposes? Well, if it is a GHG and GHGs operate then clearly some of that increase can be blamed on increased GHGs. But how much?
The next two decades will tell us if natural variability in global temperatures exceeds, dramatically exceeds, or is dominated by increased CO2.
My bet? CO2 is less of a factor than natural variability. ACO2 being a small part of the CO2 in the atmosphere probably makes our contribution to global temperature increases due to GHG minuscule. Adding the other man made impacts, UHI, deforestation, land use changes, etc. then we definitely increase temps, but that is an entirely different problem than what the politicians are trying to solve with Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Cap & Trades schemes.
CoRev,
I don’t think that the global warming argument depends all that much on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Ice core studies do suggest that CO2 lags temperature increases by ~800 years…but data over the last 150 years suggests that under the current climatic regime CO2 changes lead temperature increases.
In the context of Menzie’s post the tricky part of the time series analysis is that while it seems pretty clear that temperature data are difference stationary (i.e., shows a unit root), it’s not at all clear what to make of CO2 concentrations. If CO2 increases are determined by manmade actions, then we would expect CO2 concentrations to be trend stationary; e.g., some function of world GDP growth or something like that. This is a messy problem because you can’t just naively lump difference stationary and trend stationary data in the same model. At some point you’re probably going to end up imposing some kind of structural relationship that makes one of the variables exogenous and the other endogenous.
How many land temperature measuring stations have gone from being rural settings (in 1900) to being urban heat islands? According to some sources a very large portion. Someone presenting this data should elaborate on that.
Twenty years ago I was a sceptic. But by now I think you have to be as ignorant, dishonest or as fanatical as a young-earth creationist not to think it overwhelmingly likely that AGW exists and is mainly man-made; the science has advanced a lot in those decades.
Anyone who currently denies man-made AGW is simply not persuadable by evidence, so there aint much point in providing it. That’s why I think the post was a mistake.
@KevinM at November 16, 2009 01:56 PM
“If I yield that the charted data could be valid, I am still left doubting it is a large anomoly relative to the all time (10,000 year+) normal range.”
On what is this doubt founded? On gut feeling? Wishful thinking?
rc
2slugs, the only thing recent history has shown re: temps and CO2 is that there is little evidence past some rather loose, short term correlations. Many decades in the past 160 years have negative correlations. Just like this one!
The typical counter argument to the above negative correlations is that the definition for climate change requires a longer look at the data. True! But, when that same crew is predicting tipping points relying only on studies on the obligatory 30+ years may be suicidal. So, short term studies are important.
BTW, if the NASA temp studies had started just one decade earlier, where there is temp data, then the overall temp increase in the US would be almost nil.
dd, I know of few skeptics that deny that the temps have gone up. Most skeptics deny the alarmist/catastrophic predictions. On that, there is very little evidence. What evidence there is more coincidental than validated.
One of THE experts on hurricane/typhoon quantities and associated damage is Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/top-10-hurricane-losses-air-and-pielke.html Coincidentally he had an blog article up today.
@ rootless
“On what is this doubt founded? On gut feeling? Wishful thinking?”
Repeating this, but:
You can be 100% certain that earth’s surface has been much colder than it is today during the past 10,000 years (little ice age).
You can be reasonably certain that earth’s surface has been warmer than it is today during the past 10,000 years (medieval warm).
I doubt the accuracy of tree and mud based temperature proxies which try to establish temperature patterns before 1850.
I would call it common sense.
“reducing the potential U.S. GDP by 1-3%”
Assume potential is at what seemed to the pre-crisis consensus of 2.75%. Reducing that by 1-3% gets us to growth of between -0.25% and 1.75% (in real terms). Aside from the fact that will not be politically acceptable, it would cause a lot more problems viz. financing the national debt.
@KevinM:
“You can be 100% certain that earth’s surface has been much colder than it is today during the past 10,000 years (little ice age).”
A 100%? Based on what statistical metric do you get a 100% certainty? “Much colder” doesn’t say much, anyway. For some, a half a degree is “much colder”, for others it might need 5 K or more to talk about “much colder”.
“You can be reasonably certain that earth’s surface has been warmer than it is today during the past 10,000 years (medieval warm).”
So your answer on what your doubt regarding a statement was based is that you claim “reasonable certainty” with respect to a statement that, assuming it was true, contradicts the statement, which is doubted by you? You only have one claim replaced by another one. It still doesn’t answer on what your belief is founded. And since you dismiss proxy data to be reliable enough to be useful for extracting information about past temperature records, which would help to answer this question, your certainty can’t really be based on actual data. So what remains? Gut feeling? Wishful thinking?
As for attributing the high temperatures on Venus to Venus’s slow rotation, what you did in your other comment. This is just wrong with respect to physics. The amount of energy received by Venus from the sun doesn’t depend at all on the rotation period of Venus. The rotation period is a factor how this energy is re-distributed between the day and night side of a planet, i.e, if the atmosphere was transparent to incoming and outgoing radiation it may be very hot on the day side and very cold on the night side on a slow rotating planet, like it is on Mercury. In contrast, the temperature on Venus doesn’t vary much between day and night side, despite the slow rotation. And the temperature on Venus is higher than on the day side of Mercury, w/ only about 25% of the radiative energy per square unit received from the sun compared to Mercury. Since there isn’t any significant inner heat source on Venus that could explain these temperatures, there actually isn’t any other reasonable explanation for the high temperatures on Venus than a strong greenhouse effect.
rc
Rootless, ahhh the typical argument: “…there actually isn’t any other reasonable explanation for the high temperatures on Venus than a strong greenhouse effect.” And you berated KevinM on the probability of his statements.
Falling right into the traps of: “I feel”, “my gut tells me”, “we can not think of a better” “we can not think of any other”. Just because you or others have not discovered how the Venusian climate works is supposed to convince us? We can not even get a close approximation of how our own climate operates, and we live here!
That’s definitely worth a Sheesh!
MPO: Politico‘s Lawler made conclusions that were patently at odds with the facts (mischaracterization of what was said) and at odds with conventional macroeconomic reasoning. In this post, I’ve merely put up a graph and text from an official, nonpolitical, arm of the U.S. Government. I did not make an inference based upon the data presented. That seems to be a substantive difference between the two.
@CoRev on November 17, 2009 02:12 PM:
“What makes AGW alarmism unique is the use of … catastrophic predictions (alarms). None have come true. The Sea is not rising at the rates predicted. The number of and severity of hurricanes/typhoons has not been observed. The temp rises have been less than predicted.”
Are you talking about predictions made in climate studies published in scientific journals? Who has made what predictions that haven’t come true? Please could you bring some actual sources for alleged specific examples?
“To think something as complex as climate and even global temps are controlled by trace gases is an extreme theory.”
Why? Because you wish so? What exactly is “extreme” about the thought that a planetary climate is also significantly influenced by the composition of the planet’s atmosphere? Gases absorb and re-emit radiation. This is well established knowledge in physics and tested against measurements. There is such a thing as spectroscopy. One actually can measure in what spectral ranges Earth’s atmosphere is transparent and in what spectral ranges it is opaque. And the measurements agrees well with the theoretical calculations where the absorption and emission bands of the gases are supposed to be.
“All (or nearly all) heat is originated from the Sun. It is first and foremost trapped in the oceans/seas/lakes.”
A large amount of heat is stored in the oceans because of the high heat capacity of the ocean mass. But what is supposed to be the point here with respect to the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, which refers to the effect of the atmosphere on long-wave radiative energy that is emitted into the atmosphere from Earth’s land-ocean-cryosphere-biosphere components of the climate system and absorbed and re-emitted in the atmosphere? In equilibrium, the amount of heat stored in the oceans is not relevant, since the amount of energy that flows in equals the amount of energy that flows out. The high heat capacity becomes relevant when the system isn’t in equilibrium. It is a factor how fast the oceans react to changes in the energy fluxes at the boundary between atmosphere and oceans, but this doesn’t mean there wasn’t any greenhouse effect of the atmosphere and what fraction of this effect is anthropogenic. This question doesn’t have to do anything with the heat capacity of the oceans.
“Some heat is slowed as it is radiated out to space, but the mechanisms are still being defined, and the amounts/effects refined.”
Huh? What is this supposed to mean?
“So if the biggest sinks are the oceans/seas ag re there any cycles in their cutrrents that can be tracked? Yes, many. One of the major wwarming/cooling cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO cycle is aproximately 30 years long. The past century has seen two warming cycles. This century sould see two cooling cycles. The start of the current cooling cycle coincides roughly with the current cooling trend. Coincidence? Dunno! But, it is a better way to explain what is happening than the ACO2 theory.”
1. What “current cooling trend”?
2. The main feature of the PDO is a redistribution of energy and related temperature and atmospheric circulation patterns between different geographical regions of the North Pacific, i.e, averaged over the composite of these regions the anomalies cancel each other out to a large degree and it doesn’t do much for the globally averaged temperature.
3. How is a 30 year cycle supposed to explain the warming trend observed since at least the mid/end of the 19th century, anyway?
rc
@CoRev at November 18, 2009 08:41 AM:
“Rootless, ahhh the typical argument: “…there actually isn’t any other reasonable explanation for the high temperatures on Venus than a strong greenhouse effect.” And you berated KevinM on the probability of his statements.”
KevinM made a factual statement. He claimed certainty about empirical facts, specifically about the historic temperature record, but apparently doesn’t have anything to back up his claim. In contrast, my statement is one about the explanatory power of a scientific theory, which depends on how well it agrees with measurements/empirical data, how comprehensive it is, and how well it is rooted in the more general scientific theory. I also could have said attributing the high temperatures on Venus to the greenhouse effect fulfills these criteria best. It would have meant the same. How else is one supposed to determine the validity of a scientific theory? Just to not like it is not sufficient to dismiss a theory in sciences. One actually would have to come up with an alternative one with a stronger explanatory power. This is how science works. This approach, which I have here, hasn’t to do anything with “gut feeling”.
You are invited to provide a scientific explanation with stronger explanatory power for the high temperatures on Venus, if you have one. I don’t know any.
“Just because you or others have not discovered how the Venusian climate works is supposed to convince us?”
Where am I supposed to have said that I and others hadn’t “discovered” this? Nice example for gravely misrepresenting what was actually said. I said exactly the opposite. I say we can explain the high temperatures on Venus quite well, and that there isn’t any other better explanation.
And no. It is certainly not supposed to convince you. I doubt there is anything that would convince you.
“We can not even get a close approximation of how our own climate operates, and we live here!”
This is what you claim. What do you mean with “close approximation” anyway? I suspect this is a choice of words, which makes the claim immune against falsification, just by raising the bar every time with respect to what would be accepted as “close approximation”.
rc
RC, if the climate models had an predictive abilities then we could agree that we understand atmospheric physics. Alas, they do not, and any number of studies will not change that simple fact. So, no, I will not go down the path of dueling references.
I will provide this link: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html
If ACO2 is being absorbed at parallel rate as its increase as before or early in the industrial revolution, then ACO2 is not causing the increase in temps.
Your description of the PDO’s impacts is truly simplistic. Try reading Bob Tisdale’s studies of the ENSO and PDO. He has shown heat step functions. Intriguing when that increased heat is moved all around the Pacific.
I look at the new materials daily. I have stopped linking to MSM articles. They are just too poorly written and generally alarmist as they are there to sell papers. I have also seen the Pro-AGW blogs get really defensive due to the findings of those pesky apostates, Watts, McIntyre, Spencer, (etc. there are many.) Why do the PRO-AGW sites need to filter, remove, edit, and even at times rewrite comments?
RC, I missed this one. “3. How is a 30 year cycle supposed to explain the warming trend observed since at least the mid/end of the 19th century, anyway?” The past century saw two PDO warm cycles and only one cool cycle. As I said you definition of the PDO is too simplistic. It is relatively new finding, and some of the newer studies show step functions during the heat cycles.
Now as to the heating trend. An anomaly chart has four points in which the data can be cherry picked. Start and stop of the anomaly mean period and start and stop of the date. The data in the US if you look at the chart was showing a cooling trend. If the start of the data had been moved one decade earlier, at least for the US, the decade would have been warm. IIRC the actual warmest day on record in the US was in the mid 19th century.
Don’t go off the air on the US reference. In the early days US temps were more readily available than in most of the remaining world. So, they are more heavily weighted for global averages. Anyway, there is correlation between high/low temps in the US and the rest of the world.
@ rootless
You doubt there has been an ice age?
bye-bye.
@Anonymous at November 18, 2009 07:25 PM:
“You doubt there has been an ice age?”
During the recent about 10,000 years? Yes, indeed. I doubt this.
The Last Glacial Maximum was about 21,000 years ago.
rc
Do you really think it will make any difference what we do with GHG emission, as long as we don’t control population growth?
Perhaps the warming is following, not the ghg, but the population increase!
It would probably track fairly well, and, if the problem gets too bad the population will decrease, and , probably, the world will cool again, depending upon the depth of the population decrease.
LOL
JackO
JackO, just another correlation means causation theory. The correlation breaks down readily, for instance the Medieval Warm Period, or even the Holocene Optimum, in just recent history, ~10K Yrs BP. Clearly they were not population density caused.
Global warming deniers are like spammers. That’s why their comments get filtered out on some blogs. They can overwhelm the blog comments with absolute gibberish.
For all of you who want to talk about geology, Google: Permian extinction.
Anon, BS! It rarely happens on the skeptics’ sites. It is frequent on the major pro-AGW sites. If an open discussion is discouraged on the pro side, then the value of their message is severely diminished. Spin it any way you wish, it still remains a poor practice reinforcing skepticism. Is that their wish?
I think I will believe the global warning when all of the people in the USA or world, stop using the air conditioners.
As they consume lots of energy and put heat into the air!
funny how people complain about the heat when the USA operated for years in hot weather with no airconditioners, and had little heat in the winter.
Nothing like dressing properly for the current weather!
But , it is too hot, or it is too cold, or I am uncomfortable !
Never think of what you are doing, if , in fact, it makes any difference at all to the world what we do!
Ah, well, all of the things make money for the business and the producers of machines that keep us warm and cold!
Does anyone really think that the people will give up their comfort for the future?
LOL
JackO
hehehe. I’ve caught Gavin Schmidt himself (unconfirmed; when I asked, he simply replied “No Comment”) posing as a skeptic to derail threads.
Anyone yet seen the latest? Hadley CRU, the UK’s premier climate group, has had its email server hacked and the files released. What was found? Potential Freedom of Information fraud, extraordinary hubris, probable collusion to hide inconvenient scientific findings, and above all, a failure of the science community to police its own.
Articles can be found at Watts: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/
and Lucia’s blog: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/real-files-or-fake/
Read the comments to get some of the emails that were in the files.
BTW, the validity of this file was confirmed by Hadley and several of the skeptics whose emails were included in the email traffic.
Wow. What timing. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked/
Data and e-mails stolen from Hadley show researchers discussion of manipulating data and deleting records, concerns about unsubstantiated press releases, hiding temperature declines etc.
And don’t forget corruption of the peer review process.
Just for Anon who thinks its all about teh skeptics “Global warming deniers are like spammers. That’s why their comments get filtered out on some blogs. They can overwhelm the blog comments with absolute gibberish.”
Below we will see an interesting email from the above referenced file. Anon, tell us all why they are “filtering” comments.
“The warmist scientists at RealClimate show how carefully theyve screened and manipulated their site to muffle any scepticism:
From: Michael E. Mann
To: Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Cc: Gavin Schmidt
guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we put up the RC post. By now, youve probably read that nasty McIntyre thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I dont go there personally, but so Im informed).
Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that youre free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and well be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments youd like us to include.
Youre also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. Well use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dontget to use the RC comments as a megaphone
I have mentioned conspiracy, right? RealClimate is so far silent. ”
Hook, line and sinker! Et Tu Menzie?
CoRev: Sorry, your last post is incomprehensible to me. If you’re asserting that James Hamilton and I screen for content, then your assertion is wrong. I don’t have time for deleting posts I disagree with. Aside from deleting duplicate posts, and one post that has been deleted because of racist remarks, I can’t think of any deletions (over the four years I have been blogging). So if you’re feeling persecuted, it’s not because of anything either James or I have done.
Menzie, my bad short hand thought was confusing, sorry! The reference was to the hook line and sinker acceptance of what is now being proved to be, at least partially, bad science.
I certainly do not feel persecuted. You guys are to be commended for running an open site, unlike many pro-AGW sites.
I am amazed that in this long discussion about climate change the term Sun Spot is not mentioned once ( I apologise if I missed a post).
The Little Ice Age was obviously caused by Sun Spots or I should better say lack of them, data had been collected since 1610. Astronomers observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots and used the data for bets on grain prices.
Since many month the number of Sun Spots is at a low, so I would suggest a little more patience and then celebrities might sing for GC … There are certainly better uses for crude oil than burning in cars and power stations, but I believe we should rather worry about abrupt GC in the not too distant future.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/livingston-penn_sunspots2.pdf
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias /lia/little_ice_age.html
“And don’t forget corruption of the peer review process.”
No, not the peer review process!!! That’s conducted by academics and we all know they have only one objective: truth.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/human-cloning-and-scientific-corruption
It would appear (let us find the truth first before people suffer indignation) that ideology trumps science.
Reinhard Stompe, you have a little typo in your web address :
you wrote above : http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias /lia/little_ice_age.html
correct address is without the blank: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html
Of course, everyone knows that GW is a hoax. Al Gore knows it at best.
While it doesn’t explain the mechanism (he was pre Modern Physics), I found Arrhenius’s model very helpful in understanding the relationship between atmospheric emissivity and CO2.
[S. Arrhenius, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground”, Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Series 5, Volume 41, April 1896, pages 237-276.]
FInd it, read it, and enjoy. It is only 113 years old. Also, note that he has references going back to 1827 (Fourier). Very smart people have known about this for some time. The rest of us are starting to catch up.
Cheers
almost forgot this one :
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161
I checked out of this discussion a few day ago, but had to return after the big news.
How about that Hadley correspondence leaked? Dr Chin, have you read that yet? You did not take an official position, but I believe your confidence in the data you accept for a quick analysis might be altered by the news.
From Steve McIntyre’s latest posting, it looks like the code provided in the files may be so slanted find the “correct” results, the ?scientific? reports may be farcical. We still have the data to analyze. Wonder what will be found there. this is getting to be an embarrassment.
I see Tamino has joined the fray with his regular, Rah, Rah post.
The Pro-AGW cohort hasn’t quite realized that they have been seeing only half (maybe actually less than that) of the AGW picture. And, the picture they have been shown is exaggerated beyond reality. So sad, but not unexpected when we are talking about beliefs that are a fringe religion.
Perhaps of interest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?emc=eta1
See this. I say “teapot”.
In 1997, the Earth shape started to expand the bulge , increasing its oblateness, reversing previous process. That is marks the end of warming, and other exponential growth processes on Earth, including human population numbers.
It will just take some time until the change propagates via all Earth structures. El-Ninja that year marked the reaction of low viscosity air and water masses. The high viscosity magma, crust, will adjust later ( probably, Magma already started to adjust with the 2004 Christmas Earthquake). Crust will come in last, with a series of Earthquakes, but when?
Human CO2 is actually helping to reduce the sharpness of these events.
Manzie, I never expected anything other than “Teapot” from you. Regardless, yours and my opinions are meaningless, except for they join growing number of those who are skeptical versus the reducing number of believers.
I do believe, that as we learn more re: the coding, and the data, and at this writing it is becoming clearer just how abominably bad the S/W and data are, plus how much of it is manufactured for the expected effect, then we will see ever growing skepticism.
An effect I can see in the near future is that any new “slanted” IPCC Report will be a howler. More importantly, skeptical or more correctly scientific efforts that reflect alternative views will have some high cover to reach the journals.
The three legged stool of Climategate, emails, S/W code and data, is really shaky with just the release and early study of the emails. Tje S/W codes are just being reviewed and they are telling an even worse story than the emails.
Once folks familiar with the tools and the data get into the raw data files, then I expect a total collapse. Calls for removal of the Reports, and staff from the Scientific Journals that supported these ?scientists? isd just over the horizon.
Reputations are hanging by a thread. With further revelation from the other two legs, some jobs will be lost along with funding. Can we say Acorn2?
Yes, there has been major damage done to science.
Menzie, sorry about the typos and misspellings.
Once folks familiar with the tools and the data get into the
raw data files, then I expect a total collapse.
Those “folks” are called “climate scientists”, and they’ve spent literally tens of thousands of man-years analyzing this data. The result is the IPCC reports (among thousands of other peer-reviewed publications).
Unless you believe that every last one of these thousands of scientists is lying to you – which is a bizarrely paranoid position to take – then why would you expect another analysis of the data to say anything other than what the previous analyses said? If there is a warming trend in the data – and any sort of statistically-valid analysis shows that there is – then every honest examiner of the data should come to the same conclusion.
There are valid arguments one can make, but “the numbers are different when people who agree with me look at them” is not one of them.
Pitt, it’s all about transparency. No transparency (release of the raw data and data processing code, then no confirmation. Without confirmation there is no science!
The fall out will be a lowering of trust in the climate Science. That has been happening, but will accelerate.
What appears to have happened is that the raw temp data has been ?processed? so that earlier data has been lowered and later data has been raised. Are these changes justified? Who knows? That transparency issue again.
Both these changes are evident in the CRU and GISS data. The latest finding is that the NZ data has had the same changes made to it. If this is a standard practice, tell us why.
@CoRev at November 18, 2009 11:36 AM:
“if the climate models had an predictive abilities then we could agree that we understand atmospheric physics. Alas, they do not, and any number of studies will not change that simple fact…”
So, with this statement, your believe is already immunized against anything that could contradict it, whether it already has been published or will be published in the future. Now, that’s true believe. What’s the difference to religion?
But, somehow I suspect, the same statement won’t be equally valid, when so-called “climate sceptics” try to prove their point of view by using models.
“… So, no, I will not go down the path of dueling references.”
Of course not. Making claims without backing them up is more convenient.
“I will provide this link: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html
If ACO2 is being absorbed at parallel rate as its increase as before or early in the industrial revolution, then ACO2 is not causing the increase in temps.”
Assuming the results from this study will hold up to future tests, why would follow what you say here? It just doesn’t follow. The study presents results on the trend of the fraction of emitted CO2 that remains in the atmosphere and the one that is being absorbed by other components of the climate system. Even if the atmospheric fraction hasn’t changed statistically significantly since pre-industrial times, it doesn’t follow from this logically that 1. the total amount of atmospheric CO2 hasn’t been increasing, and 2. there wasn’t a causal relationship between CO2-amount in the atmosphere as cause and temperature as its effect.
Here is the abstract to Knorr’s Paper:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040613.shtml
I suppose not everyone here will be able to access the whole paper. But the abstract should be available at least.
“Your description of the PDO’s impacts is truly simplistic. Try reading Bob Tisdale’s studies of the ENSO and PDO. He has shown heat step functions. Intriguing when that increased heat is moved all around the Pacific.”
Somehow, I don’t see the relevance of what you say here for the question of global warming, and where it contradicts me in the essential point. Heat is moved around the Pacific, i.e., it is geographically redistributed. So what?
“I look at the new materials daily. I have stopped linking to MSM articles. They are just too poorly written and generally alarmist as they are there to sell papers.”
Besides the question whether this is even true, what’s your point?
“I have also seen the Pro-AGW blogs get really defensive due to the findings of those pesky apostates, Watts, McIntyre, Spencer, (etc. there are many.) Why do the PRO-AGW sites need to filter, remove, edit, and even at times rewrite comments?”
And what is your intention in this exchange here now with this kind of dirt throwing by making here unproven claims about alleged malicious doing by unnamed others somewhere else?
@CoRev at November 18, 2009 12:38 PM:
“Now as to the heating trend. An anomaly chart has four points in which the data can be cherry picked. Start and stop of the anomaly mean period and start and stop of the date. The data in the US if you look at the chart was showing a cooling trend. If the start of the data had been moved one decade earlier, at least for the US, the decade would have been warm. IIRC the actual warmest day on record in the US was in the mid 19th century.”
If your statement about alleged temperature trends is based on estimating it with the method you describe here, by cherry-picking four convenient points from the whole time series, then it is scientifically just not valid. In proper statistical analysis, trends (i.e., regression in time) are estimated by considering all data from the time series in the analysis, not only four arbitrarily selected points.
rc
@CoRev at November 26, 2009 05:25 AM:
“What appears to have happened is that the raw temp data has been ?processed? so that earlier data has been lowered and later data has been raised. Are these changes justified? Who knows? That transparency issue again.
Both these changes are evident in the CRU and GISS data. The latest finding is that the NZ data has had the same changes made to it. If this is a standard practice, tell us why.”
GISS isn’t responsible for corrections in the raw data sets. The analyses done at GISS are based on data processed by scientists with NOAA. The GHCN and USHCN raw data and the code to process them are online available for the public at NOAA’s website:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/
Your claim those data and code weren’t released and therefore there wasn’t any transparency to the analyses is not based on facts.
No one hinders you to make your own analyses and make the results public, if you wish so instead of spreading rumors and untrue claims.
rc
@Reinhard Stompe at November 21, 2009 11:33 PM:
“Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161”
It needed only 9 pages to refute the 115 pgs. of nonsense:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.4324v1
The reader shan’t be confused by the apparent reverse in the chronology of the two papers. It is the x-th revision of G&T’s pamphlet to be seen there. Not that G&T cared to cite Smith’s rebuttal.
rc
RC, the issue was and is man made CO2 (ACO2). If we are not trying to contain that, then why are we even discussing AGW, Cap&Trade, Oz’s ETS, etc.? Saying this: “The study presents results on the trend of the fraction of emitted CO2 (is this ACO2?) that remains in the atmosphere and the one that is being absorbed by other components of the climate system. Even if the atmospheric fraction hasn’t changed statistically significantly since pre-industrial times, it doesn’t follow from this logically that 1. the total amount of atmospheric CO2 hasn’t been increasing, and 2. there wasn’t a causal relationship between CO2-amount in the atmosphere as cause and temperature as its effect.”
No one has made a claim to which your points 1 and 2 above are responding. Are you arguing with yourself? If however, the percentages of ACO2 are unchanged, then the overall affects appear to be natural versus man made. That is a relatively important finding relative to the extraordinary efforts represented by Cap&Trade, ETS, etc.
BTW, have you read anything re: ClimateGate? You seem to be operating from a position of denial of the significance of emails, S/W code, and data therein contained.
@CoRev:
“No one has made a claim to which your points 1 and 2 above are responding. Are you arguing with yourself”
You haven’t made any of these claims at least implicitly? The less I understand your argument. So you you don’t claim Knorr’s study presents results according to which the anthropogenically caused atmospheric CO2-concentration hasn’t been increasing since pre-industrial times? Thus, then there isn’t any basis at all for your statement that the results from this study would contradict a causal relationship between increasing anthropogenic CO2-concentration and temperature. The CO2-concentration in the atmosphere has been increasing. Nothing in Knorr’s study contradicts this. The results from this study aren’t relevant regarding the question whether the there is such a causal relationship, it’s relevant regarding the question whether the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is accelerating (if the fraction of additional CO2 put into the system and absorbed by other climate components but the atmosphere decreases) or not. (Here we aren’t even talking about the other greenhouse gases and other effects of human activity on climate)
“BTW, have you read anything re: ClimateGate? You seem to be operating from a position of denial of the significance of emails, S/W code, and data therein contained.”
I don’t have to deny it. You have to prove the alleged significance. I haven’t seen anything so far that is really significant. With “significant” I mean something that would prove actual falsification of data, or other forms of scientific misconduct, or something that even would invalidate the theory of global warming.
The funny thing is, that the same people who don’t accept any shred of evidence in support of global warming, however well documented, tested, and reproducible it is, now claim that some quote mined ambiguous statements out of context of some private communication was the smoking gun or ultimate “proof” for a “global warming scam”, at which thousands of scientists world-wide would have had participated over a few decades. It’s ridiculous. It just shows the degree of desperation with respect to actual scientific arguments or, better, the lack of it.
rc
RC, yes, I see you are arguing with yourself. No one on this thread, that I can remember, has claimed that “would invalidate the theory of global warming.” (Your words.)
Point “1. the total amount of atmospheric CO2 hasn’t been increasing,…” CO2 content in the atmosphere is going up. Yes.
Knorr says that the ratios of CO2 and ACO2 in the atmosphere remains the same. My, and many others, interpretations is that man is not driving the rise total (ACO2 + CO2) since both are going up at the same rate. That leave the rise to some other cause. (Probably natural.)
Point “2. there wasn’t a causal relationship between CO2-amount in the atmosphere as cause and temperature as its effect.” I know of no one reputable who denies the Green House (GH) effect. There are numerous questions re: the amount of the temperature rise assigned to the GH effect from the total. A completely different question.
Clearly man has impacted temp increases. Urban heat islands, land use are two major impacts, but the same questions of the amount of the temperature rise assigned to them remain.
So let me recap: If the total amounts of increase of ACO2 is tracking with that of natutral CO2, then Cap & Trade, ETS, etc. and other extreme economic solutions can legitimately be questioned. If other sources of temp increases are not addressed why are we taking this approach?
Finally, if for the past 11 Yrs we have seen a temp stasis and even more recently a decline while total CO2 has continued to rise, then, yes, the direct causal relationship of temp increase to ACO2 can also be questioned. At least, I believe, did Dr Trenberth, at least implicitly, in the ClimateGate emails.
Anyway, since it is only we two still commenting it is time to wait for another thread instead of making more work for the hard working moderators here.
If Menzie wishes to open a new thread on ClimateGate and its economic impacts, then that would be a good start.
@CoRev:
“RC, yes, I see you are arguing with yourself. No one on this thread, that I can remember, has claimed that “would invalidate the theory of global warming.” (Your words.)”
Again, misrepresenting what I said. The first refers to the exchange about Knorr’s paper, but the latter refers to my statement in my previous comment about what I think would be one possibility that could constitute significance of the alleged “climategate” and that I haven’t seen anything of this. It was another new topic opened by you here.
“Knorr says that the ratios of CO2 and ACO2 in the atmosphere remains the same. My, and many others, interpretations is that man is not driving the rise total (ACO2 + CO2) since both are going up at the same rate. That leave the rise to some other cause. (Probably natural.)”
No, Knorr doesn’t say this at all. There is nothing in the paper about this alleged ratio you mention here. The paper deals with the ratio of anthropogenic CO2 that remains in the atmosphere relative to the anthropogenic CO2 that is absorbed by other climate components, which according to the results from the study has stayed about the same since 1850. Your conclusions are based on a false presumption, on your misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the content of Knorr’s paper. No surprise that I haven’t got what you were saying and that you have thought I was talking to myself. Please read the paper and understand it first.
“Finally, if for the past 11 Yrs we have seen a temp stasis and even more recently a decline while total CO2 has continued to rise, then, yes, the direct causal relationship of temp increase to ACO2 can also be questioned. At least, I believe, did Dr Trenberth, at least implicitly, in the ClimateGate emails.”
This is one is a straw man argument often put forward by “climate skeptics”. No one claims there was a linear and mono-causal relationship between anthropogenic CO2 and temperature. Of course, there are also other factors that influence the temperature, like solar irradiance, aerosols, etc. as well as internal natural variability of the climate system.
“If Menzie wishes to open a new thread on ClimateGate and its economic impacts, then that would be a good start.”
There isn’t really any point in talking about the economic impact of something that isn’t.
rc
Had to come back to this thread. After further investigation it seems that the data we took to be “instrumental data” is actually “value added data”. See here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/agw-is-a-thermometer-count-artifact/
This gut has about 40 posts now digging into the thermometer data and finds:
Hard to explain adjustments that almost always decrease old temperatures and increase new ones.
Thermometers being added in the tropics and being removed elsewhere.
Thermometers being added in valleys and being removed on mountains.
Thermometers being added inland and being removed from the seashore in hot places, and the reverse in cold places.
Now that people are exposing the truth, I think an updated chart will come around for reanalysis soon.