The Holocene Deniers

[grmorton]

re 5,000 years ago being 3 to 4 degrees hotter than today:

"in terms of the global average, temperatures were probably colder than present day"


Holocene climatic optimum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Now, I know that it is only wikipedia, but perhaps there are better sources that indicate that it was indeed that much hotter than today?

Did you ever read, actually READ the opening post, or did you come here to pile on? And yes, it is Wiki.

The thing I see in you is what I see in young-earth creationists, they are inconsistent with the data. You and Wiki claim that the world was colder. That is inconsistent with the fact that sea levels were higher--meaning more ice had melted. This is why physics is important--one must connect observation with physical laws--can't have more water if the ice didn't melt. Can't melt the ice in a colder world. Here is a study of the Texas coast. One finds evidence of higher seas in Brazil, Namibia, China, Australia, and many other places around the world.

Fletcher and Jones 1996) and Australia (Beaman et al. 1994) continue to
document these highstand events. These international sites are important
for purposes of comparison because they, like the western Gulf of Mexico
coast, are far removed from isostatic effects associated with deglaciation.
We also reiterate that geomorphic data from the eastern Gulf of Mexico
coast have long been interpreted to suggest a middle Holocene highstand.
The most compelling landforms consist of the Holocene erosional-scarp
and beach-ridge sequences discussed by Tanner (1992). Although undated,
the erosional scarp is cut into the ‘‘Pamlico’’ shoreline that is presumed
to be of last interglacial age, whereas adjacent beach ridges are higher than,
and crosscut by, beach ridges with associated late Holocene archaeological
sites.
Michael Blum, et al, "Middle Holocene Sea-Level rise and Highstand at +2 m, Central Texas Coast, "JOURNAL OF SEDIMENTARY RESEARCH, VOL. 71, NO. 4, JULY, 2001, P. 581–588, p. 586

And, if you want to see another natural variation, 125,000 years ago, the seas were 4 to 6 meters higher than at present. See.

Eric J. Steig ad Alexander P. Wolfe, "Sprucing Up Greenland," Science, 320(2008), p. 1595

And there wasn't a single carbon emitting coal plant back in the Holocene or in the Eemian.

 

[grmorton]

NOAA Paleoclimatology Global Warming - The Data

"In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today, but only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere. More over, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and know without doubt that this proven "astronomical" climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years. "

This indicates that the warming was limited to the northern hemisphere summer.

Flatulence of the mouth. Please explain why if the warming only applied to the Northern Hemisphere, the antarctic ice shelves were further south, by 80 km--melted.

The stability of floating ice shelves is an important indicator of ocean circulation and ice-shelf mass balance. A sub–ice-shelf sediment core collected during the Austral summer of 2000–2001 from site AM02 (69842.89S, 72838.49E) on the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, contains a full and continuous record of glacial retreat. The AM02 core site is ;80 km south of the floating ice shelf edge and contains a 0.5-m-thick Holocene surface layer of siliceous mud and diatom ooze of marine origin. Core data are supportive of sub– ice-shelf circulation models that predict the landward flow of oceanic water, and prove that the landward transport of hemipelagic sediments occurs beneath floating ice shelves over distances of at least ~80 km. An increase in sea-ice–associated diatom deposition in the upper part of the Holocene suggests that a major retreat of the Amery Ice Shelf to at least 80 km landward of its present location may have occurred during the mid-Holocene climatic optimum." Mark A. Hemer and Peter T. Harris, " Sediment core from beneath the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica,"Geology; February 2003; v. 31; no. 2; p. 127–130, p. 127

This fits with the higher sea levels and warmer temperatures that were there during the Holocene.

David, can you collect your points in one post so that I can deal with all of them in one note? That means having a bit of patience before hitting the send button.

 

[grmorton]

Re antarctica, according to the site you posted, 13 out of 18 stations are showing warming. If you say that stations with .00 at the start of their slope line are flat - which seems reasonable - you eliminate 4 of the cooling stations and three of the warming stations, leaving us with 7 flat stations, one cooling station and 10 warming stations. That looks like warming to me ...

I counted the charts on the picture. There are 16 on the picture and 10 of them, are in annual temperature declines or flat. two are flat.

No, I have actually downloaded all the Antarctican data and the land is cooling. The Peninsula is warming.

Gotta go to the ranch now.

 

[thaumaturgy]

Yet another horror revealed by Global Climate Change:

Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds Of Secret Arctic Lairs

"We always assumed there would be some secret lairs here and there, but the sheer number now being exposed is indeed troubling," said noted climatologist Anders Lorenzen, who claimed that the Arctic ice caps have shrunk at the alarming rate of 41,000 square miles per year. "In August alone we discovered 44 mad scientist laboratories, three highly classified military compounds, and seven reanimated and very confused cavemen. That's more than twice the number we had found in the previous three decades combined."

(Emphasis added).

 

[tanzanos]

Please tell me why on earth I should worry about global warming when all the things y'all say to scare us have already happened during the times of human civilizations.

Do you know what a superhurricane can do to a city like NY? Do you realise how crop failure, infrastructure damage etc can affect an organised modern society? Just power lines going down is enough to cause chaos in a city? You do realise that in 2009 society is much different and more complicated than that of 10,000 years ago.

Sheeshhh

 

[grmorton]

When I left for the ranch I didn't have time to download the picture I was using in Antarctica. It is from the MET. It is below.

The annual trend is the first bar in the graph for each station. if it is blue and below the line, the station is cooling. Most stations are cooling.

 

[thaumaturgy]

When I left for the ranch I didn't have time to download the picture I was using in Antarctica. It is from the MET. It is below.

The annual trend is the first bar in the graph for each station. if it is blue and below the line, the station is cooling. Most stations are cooling.

From Nature 457, 459-462 (22 January 2009)'

A new reconstruction of Antarctic surface temperature trends for 1957–2006, reported this week by Steig et al., suggests that overall the continent is warming by about 0.1 °C per decade. The cover illustrates the geographic extent of warming, with the ‘hotspot’ peninsula and West Antarctica shown red against the white ice-covered ocean.

Abstract:
Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades1. This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone2. This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.

(SOURCE, SOURCE)

Apparently there is reason to believe there is some cooling parts of Antarctica on shorter time scales. Some of the co-authors on the paper explain the caveats of the research HERE

 

[thaumaturgy]

Attribution of polar warming to human influence

Nathan P. Gillett, Dáithí A. Stone, Peter A. Stott, Toru Nozawa, Alexey Yu. Karpechko, Gabriele C. Hegerl, Michael F. Wehner & Philip D. Jones

Nature Geoscience 1, 750 - 754 (2008)

The polar regions have long been expected to warm strongly as a result of anthropogenic climate change, because of the positive feedbacks associated with melting ice and snow1, 2. Several studies have noted a rise in Arctic temperatures over recent decades2, 3, 4, but have not formally attributed the changes to human influence, owing to sparse observations and large natural variability5, 6. Both warming and cooling trends have been observed in Antarctica7, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report concludes is the only continent where anthropogenic temperature changes have not been detected so far, possibly as a result of insufficient observational coverage8. Here we use an up-to-date gridded data set of land surface temperatures9, 10 and simulations from four coupled climate models to assess the causes of the observed polar temperature changes. We find that the observed changes in Arctic and Antarctic temperatures are not consistent with internal climate variability or natural climate drivers alone, and are directly attributable to human influence. Our results demonstrate that human activities have already caused significant warming in both polar regions, with likely impacts on polar biology, indigenous communities2, ice-sheet mass balance and global sea level (SOURCE)

 

[thaumaturgy]

"Reporters don't find statistical climatology sexy"

Press Gazette June 25, 2007

Despite widespread acknowledgement that the media has moved on from the days when it felt the need to balance the pro and sceptic voices, Mark Anslow, reporter for Ecologist magazine, claims the nature of journalism doesn’t lend itself to the subtleties and complexities of the debate.

“Statistical climatology isn’t sexy, so reporters tend to look for peripheral stories of government intrigue, human interest or scientific uncertainty,” he says. “Unfortunately, this gives rise to either conspiracy theories, scare stories or just simply false information.”(SOURCE)

(In general this is a story about how journalists split the line between presenting all sides of a story versus acting as "watchdogs" to make sure the most robust science is actually communicated. I just found the idea that people don't find statistical climatology very exciting kind of apropos.)

 

[grmorton]

Maybe tomorrow I will have time to reply to the notes posted in my absence. But I do feel the need to dispell one of the assumptions most people here are working under.

This is the idea that scientists are merely interested in the data--they aren't. Sociological criticisms of science do have a point, but I want to share some examples of the lack of scientific curiosity openness and willingness to share raw data which come from 3 journals--peer reviewed journals that I just got.

Several people have criticised me for a 'conspiracy' view of this. I have replied that it isn't conspiracy but a system that rewards the wrong thing. The funding system in each discipline relies on governmental committees which are manned by scientific satraps. This is from the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. The guy is talking about funding in space science, but things are no different in any area of governmentally funded science. Note the bolded parts.


"On 1 July 2008, I concluded my 6-year term of service as president-elect, president, and past-president of AGO's Space Physics and Aeronomy (SPA) section. ...When my SPA duties were winding down about a year ago, I resumed my service on committees and panels. I was surprised to find that not only have things not improved, but they are far worse. The occurrence of self-serving advice, subdiscipline protection, and the shameless promotion of projects linked to one's home institution is now out of control. If these patterns of professional conduct are not addressed seriously, SPA will survive into the 21st century as nothing more than a disjointed series of isolated fads based on bias and hype.

...

[of funding panels with experienced advisors--grm]
The problem with a constituency formed in this manner comes from the first demographic, the graybeards and the silver foxes. They are accomplished scientists, shown respect and deference by their juniors, and they are far more experienced and knowledgeable than the committee/panel managers they supposedly serve. Widely known as good people to serve on committees, they get invited over and over again, decade after decade. They know how to get things done. Unfortunately, they also know how to get their way. After decades of service, they know just the right time and way to kill priorities suggested by others on an advisory committee. On a grants panel, they know the precise time and manner to push for or against a proposal they want to see placed either just above or just below the line for funding. In short, they are so unbelievably good at manipulating the system that their handiwork hardly ever gets noticed. The end result is that a very small number of SPA colleagues exert a wildly disproportionate clout over the field. On committee after committee and on panel after panel, they push and most often succeed in getting their version of subdiscipline to be defined as the dominant vision of the full field." Michael Mendillo, "Giving Advice: Enough is Enough After Three Solar Cycles, " EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Sept 1, 2009, p. 299



Then there is the almost UNIVERSAL dismissal of any new idea or challenge to the consensus view that all science engages in.



"New scientific ideas, the German physicist Max Planck once observed, triumph not because of the power of reason, but because their opponents eventually die. It was perhaps a slight exaggeration. But it certainly reflects the spirit of scientific conservatism infused in the textbooks, journals and academic departments that impose disciplinary consensus on students and their teachers. Science's methods are so powerful, its defenders sometimes contend, that views contrary to currrent consensus are too likely to be wrong to be taken seriously.

Nobody understands this pressure from the scientific estabblishment better than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate physicist who identified quarks as the ultimate building blocks of most earthly matter. Gell- Mann, who turns 80 on Septemmber 15, has witnessed resistance to many groundbreaking advances during his long career, including some of his own.

"Most challenges to scientific orthodoxy are wrong," he emphasizes. "A lot of them are crank. But it happens from time to time that a challenge to scientific orthodoxy is actually right. And the people who make that challenge face a terrible situation."

"Take quarks, proposed by Gell-Mann in 1963 as the connstituents of protons, neutrons and certain other subatomic particles. "A lot of people thought the quarks were a crank idea," Gell- Mann said in an icterview last month during a visit to the Institute for AdvaJ1Ced Study in Princeton, N.J." Tom Siegfried, "The Status Quark," New Scientist Sep 12, 2009, p. 24

Now, add this to the problem above--where a very limited group of individuals define their opinion as the dominant view of the field, with the result that they fund only those things that agree with their view, you can see that there is a huge opportunity for good challenges to not be listened to.




Thistlethorn's view is that I should not challenge the climatologists. The problem is that disciplines become inbred, as shown above, and new ideas are often required to spur the science forward--the meteorologist Wegener's suggestion that the continents moved.

Gell-Mann now works at the Sante Fe Institute--a cross discipline research institute. What is he doing? Language research--applying math to the change in languages.


"Gell-Mann, ...He is particularly interested in linguistics, for instance, and collaborates with researchers at Santa Fe and in Moscow studying distant (in time) relationships among human languages."

"In that collaboration we seem to be finding more and more evidence ... that a very large fraction of the world's languages, although probably not all, are descended from one spoken quite recently ... something like 15,000 to 20,000 years ago," Gell-Mann says."

...

"Of course, many experts resist the idea." Tom Siegfried, "The Status Quark," New Scientist Sep 12, 2009, p. 26


Some would say he should be dismissed because he isn't a linguist. Unfortunately for that position, there are linguists who believe that Gell-Mann is correct. See
Merritt Ruhlen,The Origin of Language, (New York: John Wiley and Sons,1994)


What we are taught, we believe like a chicken implanted with a vision of who its mother is. We never doubt, we always attack those who challenge. That is the human tendency. It is not good but it is something we are very good at doing. Scientists are not immune to this as is seen in the citations above. But lets hear from Gell-Mann himself.




"A group of us who were connected with the government lab at Los Alamos, either as consultants or employees, 27 or 28 years ago, used to meet and talk about starting a theoretical institute. The place we wanted it to be was Santa Fe .... We thought it would be an ideal location. People sometimes ask why we didn't set it up across the street from Harvard or Stanford or Berkeley, and I think actually it was a good idea not to do that. Because of the pressure of received ideas. If you say something new at Harvard, you will get a lot of discouraging responses: "I already did that and decided it was wrong." "That's been considered carefully by lots of people and it doesn't show any promise." ...

This pressure of received ideas at standard places is very severe. We [at Santa Fe] are free of that. Also, we get the same wonderful, brilliant visiting lecturers that they do, only in our case they talk to 15 people instead of 3,000. That makes it a much more intimate experience." Murray Gell-Mann, "A Place Removed from 'the Pressure of Received Ideas," Science News, Sept 12, 2009, p. 32


Those of you who think science is all about intellectual curiosity, openness, sharing of the data, don't know what you are talking about.

Here is another example of consensus stopping progress--remember consensus is what you all want to enforce.If you don't know this reaction google it. It is fascinating, but was said to be impossible--that without anyone actually trying it. In other words, they are doing what you all are doing, not looking at the data for the range of natural variations.

"Sir—In the obituary of Anatol Zhabotinsky, Irving Epsteind ment ions Boris Belousov, with whom Zhabotinsky shared the Lenin Prize in 1980 for their contributions to the Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillatory chemical reaction system
"Epstein says "Belousov tried to publish his results in peer-reviewed journals, but eventually gave up after referees and editors insisted that such behaviour contradicted the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He instead published a one-page description of his observations in an obscure conference proceedings on radiation medicine." That paper, ‘A periodic reaction and its mechanism’, gained little attention at the time." Min-Liang Wong, "What Other Treasures Could Be Hidden in Conference papers?" Nature 456(2008), p. 443.


And the discoverer of Chaos theory was rejected over and over.

"But what made universality useful also made it hard for physicists to believe. Universality meant that different systems would behave identically. Of course, Feigenbaum was only studying simple numerical functions. But he believed that his theory expressed a natural law about systems at the point of transition between orderly and turbulent. Everyone knew that turbulence meant a continuous spectrum of different frequencies, and everyone had wondered where the different frequencies came from. "Suddenly you could see the frequencies coming in sequentially. The physical implications was that real-world systems would behave in the same, recognizable way, and that furthermore it would be measurably the same. Feigenbaum's universality was not just qualitative, it was quantitative; not just structural, but metrical. It extended not just to patterns, but to precise numbers. To a physicist that strained credibility.

"Years later Feigenbaum still kept in a desk drawer, where he could get at them quickly, his rejection letters. By then he had all the recognition he needed. His Los Alamos work had won him prizes and awards that brought prestige and money. But it still rankled that editors of the top academic journals had deemed his work unfit for publication for two years after he began submitting it. The notion of a scientific breakthrough so original and unexpected that it cannot be published seems a slightly tarnished myth. Modern science, with its vast flow of information and its impartial system of peer review is not supposed to be a matter of taste. One editor who sent back a Feigenbaum manuscript recognized years later that he had rejected a paper that was a turning point for the field; yet he still argued that the paper had been unsuited to his journal's audience of applied mathematicians" James Gleick, Chaos, (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 180

Sheeple people are everywhere stymying questioning and the advancement of science. Science is supposed to be about questions, repeatability, sharing of data and ideas. Unfortunately it is exactly like this thread where everyone piles on to anyone who dares to question.

 

[thaumaturgy]

Maybe tomorrow I will have time to reply to the notes posted in my absence. But I do feel the need to dispell one of the assumptions most people here are working under.

Remember, Glenn. Most of us on here are scientists. And, personally I worked for several years as a government funded scientist, and I worked for several years at universities which got external funding.

(Over the past 10 or so years I've been working in industry which doesn't require me to get external funding, but my wife works in academia in precisely that setting related to earth science.)

This is the idea that scientists are merely interested in the data--they aren't.

That's strange. I am a scientist. I'm interested in data. I also met an oilman on here who seemed to like data an awful lot:

Finally someone who actually likes to analyze data rather than call names.

(until statistics got involved and since statistics is the most robust way to deal with data I am wondering where that guy went...)

Several people have criticised me for a 'conspiracy' view of this.

I don't think you are necessarily a conspiracy theorist. I just don't see much in the way of robust assessment of the data from your end but rather a reliance on anecdotal data to "shock" and hence more of a "gut-reaction" type of analysis.

I have replied that it isn't conspiracy but a system that rewards the wrong thing. The funding system in each discipline relies on governmental committees which are manned by scientific satraps.

The "system" is responsible for the data which statistically supports anthropogenic global warming?

Is that because the AGW skeptics can't mount a statistically robust defense of their points? Or they simply can’t get sufficient data? Is the “system” keeping them from getting data?

Suddenly it's "data isn't everything", "weenie statistics" and "the system" which "rewards the wrong thing".

Where's the data? I don't care who is responsible for what or why. That's why we need statistically robust data so these...for lack of a better word..."conspiracies" can't control things.

[FONT=&quot]But it certainly reflects the spirit of scientific conservatism infused in the textbooks, journals and academic departments that impose disciplinary consensus on students and their teachers. Science's methods are so powerful, its defenders sometimes contend, that views contrary to currrent consensus are too likely to be wrong to be taken seriously. [/FONT]

Indeed new ideas often do face hard resistance. That's how it has always worked. This isn't anything new to Global Climate Change or anything else.

[FONT=&quot]Nobody understands this pressure from the scientific estabblishment better than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate physicist who identified quarks as the ultimate building blocks of most earthly matter. Gell- Mann, who turns 80 on Septemmber 15, has witnessed resistance to many groundbreaking advances during his long career, including some of his own. [/FONT]

And Gell-Mann's ideas are now rather well accepted, if my reading of particle physics is in any way representative. Still open to conjecture and further work, still open to new discoveries and further verification. But he is well respected.

Is the point that scienitific ideas can get proven that is the main complaint here? Or did you expect people to just jump on board Gell-Mann's "8-fold way" inspiried classification scheme of subatomic particles?

If they would have done that without extensive verification, then I'd have to call those scientists fools.

[FONT=&quot]"Take quarks, proposed by Gell-Mann in 1963 as the connstituents of protons, neutrons and certain other subatomic particles. "[/FONT][FONT=&quot]A lot of people thought the quarks were a crank idea[/FONT][FONT=&quot]," Gell- Mann said in an icterview last month during a visit to the Institute for AdvaJ1Ced Study in Princeton, N.J." Tom Siegfried, "The Status Quark," New Scientist Sep 12, 2009, p. 24[/FONT]

And if I recall correctly, Gell-Mann was a theoretical physicist and it was not verified until 8 years after G-M's "quark hypothesis" that protons were found to not be as 'fundamental' particles after experiments at SLAC, and were found to be made up of something smaller.

Sorry, Glenn, but I love theoretical science as much as the next guy but I'm an experimentalist. I vastly prefer hard data to theoretical constructs if they are available.

And ironically enough you have just quoted an article in which the mathematical theorical constructs are apparently what you are defending over the hard physical data, which seems just the opposite of how you've conducted your debate so far in which we are called upon to defend the “physics” of every last outlier in the data or toss it all.

[FONT=&quot]Now, add this to the problem above--where a very limited group of individuals define their opinion as the dominant view of the field, with the result that they fund only those things that agree with their view, you can see that there is a huge opportunity for good challenges to not be listened to. [/FONT]

Yet, ironically enough, science marched on and continued to work on what made up "fundamental" particles and ultimately the quark hypothesis was accepted!

Funny that.

[FONT=&quot]Thistlethorn's view is that I should not challenge the climatologists.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]

[/FONT]I think everyone's view is actually you are free to challenge the climatologists, but you have to treat the data with the same tools and techniques or at least the same robustness and formalisms that would amount to a sound critique.
[FONT=&quot]

The problem is that disciplines become inbred, as shown above

[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
Well, to be fair, in the area of climate skeptics it isn't that they are bringing new life to the field, they are often merely unable to deal with the data and the complexity of the topic. (And I am not saying I don't struggle with the complexity as well.) [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]"Gell-Mann, ...He is particularly interested in linguistics, for instance, and collaborates with researchers at Santa Fe and in Moscow studying distant (in time) relationships among human languages." [/FONT]

Gell-mann is one of the most "polymath" of the famous physicists. He of course would be working well outside of the boundaries. He was always casting a very broad net.


I haven’t seem many AGW climate skeptics that were geniuses like Gell-Mann in my readings. I’ve seen folks who often have only a marginal grasp of how data is treated, though. So I don’t think I’d compare AGW skepticism with Gell-Mann…I rather suspect Gell-Mann had a very firm grasp of the mathematical implications of the data he was seeing.

[FONT=&quot]Some would say he should be dismissed because he isn't a linguist.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]

If he came in and insisted on talking baby talk and using that as a critique of linguistic theory, then he would be out the door quite quickly. And that is akin to what many "climate skeptics" are doing. They don't understand statistics, so they ignore statistics, they don't understand how the data is actually dealt with, so they take digital pictures and draw unsupported conclusions based on anecdotal data.

[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Because of the pressure of received ideas. If you say something new at Harvard, you will get a lot of discouraging responses: "I already did that and decided it was wrong." "That's been considered carefully by lots of people and it doesn't show any promise."[/FONT][FONT=&quot] ... [/FONT]

And I fully understand that. It is true that you sometimes need to walk away from the pack. But not all who wander are lost and not all who are lost are "on the trail of something great".

[FONT=&quot]Those of you who think science is all about intellectual curiosity, openness, sharing of the data, don't know what you are talking about.[/FONT]

Well, considering my wife is working on a program that has, at it’s core, the free and open exchange of masses of geo-data gathered around the world and she’s working for a major externally funded research center in the earth sciences, I’d have to say there is a lot of backing out there for open data. But I am also aware from my years in research that data is often the currency. If I collect a ton of data I don’t really want to just give my work away. I would want credit for it. So it can be a fine balancing act.

[FONT=&quot]Science is supposed to be about questions, repeatability, sharing of data and ideas. Unfortunately it is exactly like this thread where everyone piles on to anyone who dares to question.[/FONT]

Just because someone doesn't understand the data or how data is actually dealt with in complex topics like this doesn't mean they are seeing something "deeper" or more "correctly". I can work a digital camera. Doesn’t mean I’m an expert climatologist.

 

[thaumaturgy]

What do the climatologists know? (emphasis added where appropriate)

“The effective use of climate data and products requires an understanding of what the statistical parameters mean and which parameters best summarize the data for particular climate variables”
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (SOURCE)

“Because climatology deals with aggregates of weather properties, statistics are used to reduce the vast array of recorded properties into one or a few understandable numbers.”
Climatology
By Robert V. Rohli, Anthony J. Vega, 2007

“Climatology is, to a large degree, the study of the statistics of our climate. The powerful tools of mathematical statistics therefore find wide application in climatological research, ranging from simple methods for determining the uncertainty of a climatological mean to sophisticated techniques which reveal the dynamics of the climate system.”
[FONT=&quot]Statistical Analysis in Climate Research[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Hans von Storch and Francis W. Zwiers[/FONT]
(SOURCE)

“Climatologists have vast quantities of data to explore.
…
While statistical analysis often cannot provide definitive answers, it can be of great help in establishing relationships and quantifying uncertainties within climatic data.
…
Since the climate system is extremely complex and many of its components are not well understood, statistical analysis and models are particularly important in providing meaningful and useful simplifications of system variability.”
Applied climatology: principles and practice, Russell D. Thompson, Allen Howard Perry, 1997 Routledge publishers, Oxon, UK
(SOURCE)

 

[grmorton]

I am not so sure of that. I am currently in the process of going through the actual presentation and listening to the audio. It sounds to me like Dr. Latif is discussing the variability in the measurements on shorter time scales (ie multidecadal), in order to help explain how this functions in relation to the larger overall trend.

Actually if you listen to the audio of Dr. Latif's presentation he clearly states early on that you can see the long term warming trend in the graph of data and "we all believe this long term warming trend is anthropogenic in nature". (Audio available HERE)

I took the time to look at the powerpoints and listen to the talks in that session. I recorded them so I could get quotations from them.

First lets look at the talk in front of Latif--that of Tim Palmer. I have repeatedly said that the climate models are not very good. When I have been asked to beleive the climate models, I have asked 'Which model?" and posted pictures which show that the predictions by the various models give radically different answers. Here is what Palmer says about the biases that models have inside them.

"Now these biases , unfortunately can be as large as the signal. We can take these biases out with these empirical post processing corrections. But anyone who knows anything about nonlinear dynamics and the climate system is a nonlinear system will know that this kind of post processing correction methodology is not a reliable procedure. So this raises some of the difficulties we have." T.N. Palmer, Seasonal to Interannual Prediction" WCC-3

Yes, Thau, the model gives a statistically Gaussian output that is utterly wrong and they use unreliable post processing corrections to make the models make sense. Thistlethorn, are you listening to this climatologist?

From what I've been able to gather Latif is not saying anything that isn't already known in the world of global climate change.

The key is that variability on multidecadal scales and shorter will overwhelm the overall trend on short time scales:

He is asking the question if the run up since 1980 is mostly due to decadal variation, not anthropic warming. When he discusses his first slide he asks that. If that is the case, then much of the recent fear is misplaced.

Secondly, he shows a laughably unscientific chart. His third slide shows the cooling lasting from 2002 until about 2030. Now, where do you suppose he got the data for 2010-2030??? Has he been to the future and come back? Clearly his claim that the cooling will stop and the warming continue is merely his faith--his belief. It is not based on data. If it is, please tell me where he gets this data for the future.

The key point is that no climatologists believe that global warming is "monotonic" (ie simply increasing linearly without any ups and downs). Decadal variability is still a big player. From what I can gather that is the key point of Latif's paper.

No, no one beleives it is monotonic. But I don't see any of them really addressing the fact that the world was much warmer back 5000 years ago, with permafrost melted, antarctic ice sheets 80 km further south (David Gould seems not to understand that diatoms can't live beneath the shelves because it is dark there, so if we find diatoms in the sediments beneath the shelves, it means that when the diatoms were deposited, there was no ice above them.). The seas were 2 m higher and we are supposed to worry?

Indeed Dr. Latif does discuss the relative short-term variability versus the long-term variability and noted that there is still some discussion about how that impacts the long-term trend estimation. And indeed he also stresses the importance of better models. I don't think anyone is disagreeing that the detailed understanding of any system can always be improved upon. Especially in a discussion of such important matters.

Let's look at a couple of Latif's pictures. How do the models which we are supposed to stand in awe of do with predicting even 10 years out?

For the global surface temperature, the blue Keenlyside model gets it right in the 70's but wrong after 1980. The Green Pohlmann model gets it wrong in the 1970s but right after that. Smith only worked since 1986 or so so it is kind of untested.

For the Atlantic SST, none of the models got it right, except where they crossed the red observational curve around 1978. Like a broken clock, they are right once in a while.

Now lets see how global models do on predicting rainfall.

You can see bigger images of this at this place . But even in this tiny picture you can see that the observed data says the rain should be along the Carolina troughs, but the model predicts it in the mid Atlantic, and the third picture is of a 2009 climate model by Minobe et al.

Thau, you are the one saying we should worry but you don't tell your readers about these misfits of the models with the observational data. If they can't predict the details right, you can't beleive the output of the model.

 

[grmorton]

Could it be because you consistently insist on finding the outliers on the data, the worst cases of error and asking if I think it could possibly be a real "cold front"?

It would be ludicrous to think that such temperature differences are real. That IS my point, yet you believe the ludicrous. You have never, to my knowledge actually explained why the temperature difference has a seasonal bias. I showed that earlier, but if you want to see it again you can find it at The Migrant Mind: Winters of Discontent in Mississippi

These temperature differences vary with the seasons. They are NOT mere gaussian mis-measurements. Please explain this picture.

Well, considering you have shown only anecdotal data to that effect I don't know how you justify that statement.

I have shown several times the data regarding the bad, sad state of the thermometer record. You chose not to beleive it. But you haven't surveyed the stations, you just have your belief. Watts has surveyed the stations and found that the vast majority of the stations have problems, and you won't acknowledge the large percentage of them. 69%[/font]

If 69% of the stations can have a 2 deg C or higher heat bias on them, how can you say it is outlier?

"pure BS" and "weenie statistics". Ironic coming from someone who makes their living doing science in a data driven field.

I am left unable to address that approach.

I know, you are utterly and totally unable to address anything in physics. Back when I put up the pictures of the Morlet analysis of the temperature trends, all you could do was say 'nice pictures'. You were and are utterly clueless about physics or what it meant. If the data isn't measured correctly,, the statistics don't matter. It is trash data, which is what my comment about putting the thermometers on the ocean floor showed and which you showed your ignorance by trashing. Yeah, you would get statistics but you won't have a valid measurement of the atmospheric temperature. You won't acknowledge that if 69% of the stations are sited so that they have more than a 2 deg C bias, that the data is crap. You are the most clueless person about how to take actual measurements that I have run across.

I ask again, would you take your daughter's temperature and then before telling the doctor what it is, you put a match next to it? Would you be so bizarre to do that??? Please answer me if you would, and if you wouldn't, please tell me WHY you wouldn't do it.

Then think about what happens when global temperature sensors are placed next to heat sources--same thing--darn you are clueless.

You know, in my years in science I've seen people draw conclusions from noise as signal and draw conclusions without statistical justification (heck, I've been that person too!)

You know nothing about physics. Would you put a thermometer on the stove and use that to determine the temperature inside your house????

Clueless BS from you. Physics challenged

Now, no one expects you or any other interested amateur (myself included) to use the same tools the experts use, but if you are going to pick apart their methodologies I think you would do well to be mindful of statistics.

I would, IF AND ONLY IF the methodologies of taking the measurements are correct. If they are wrong, your statistics don't matter a whit. You are a one note band--statistics is everything.

If it is a valid point, it will be born out even more strongly by the statistics.

BS, ignores temporal biases.



Here's an example worked out to show how that statement is in error:

[play example snipped]

Your play example is again wrong because it is acting as if both data sets faced the same set of biases. Since there were no air conditioners (or darn few of them) back in 1880, and they are everywhere today, and since there were few paved roads back in 1880, and they are everywhere today, and houses back then didn't emit much heat, but they emit enough heat to cause 10-15 deg of urban heat island effect, to say that your example applies is pure BS. It doesn't apply to the problem at hand which is to unscramble how much of the rise in temeprature over the past 100 years is actually due to AGW and how much due to the false heating by cement, houses and air conditioners.

You did read my discussion of the whole discussion in Post #620, didn't you?

I hadn't had time until today. I went back to where I had left off. You gotta realize, I have limited time. I work 13 hours per day, spend an hour with my wife, work my ranch, and do this to relax. And doing this here means that I have to answer more people than merely you.

So, don't feel snubbed if I am a bit slow occaionally, especially as I am still reloading and reconfigureing the computer--which still isn't to my liking yet.

 

[grmorton]

grmorton,

Except that the SD for the dataset as a whole is not greater than the proclaimed change. That is the point: individual datapoints may indeed have very high SDs.

As an example, each datapoint in the hadley dataset here:

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly

has a very large range. You can see the range by looking at the two right-most columns. The right-most column has the low end of the 95 per cent confidence interval, and the column to the left of it has the high end of the 95 per cent confidence interval.

Sigh, you are confusing this with a duplicate measurement. Once again the issue of how you measure things comes into play.

The data you send me to does not capture the subtlety that I have been speaking of. The MET takes the temperature series for a bunch of stations. They then find the average temperature for each day and compute an anomaly from that value. Then the SD they calculate applies to the range of temperature variation on a given day. In other words, how variable is the temperature on that day.

That is NOT the same as taking 5 or 6 or 30 measurements of temperature with different instruments at a given town and seeing what the MEASUREMENT ERROR is. The temperature data consists of one daily measurement. No one really knows how it would be if you walked around town measuring the temperature at various places and then averaging those data. The SD you would calculate doing this would be different than the SD from the table you send me to.

Now, no one took 50 measurements of the temperature on June 23rd, 1948 in Flatonia Texas. We have one measurement. We don't know how variable same day measurements would be.

So, in order to get close to that, I subtract the temperatures from two closely spaced towns. That gives me a measurment error of around 4 deg F. So, all I can conclude from this is that any given temperature measurment made today in Flatonia has a MEASUREMENT ERROR of that. That is different than the variance of the seasons over the last 100 years, which is what I think your reference has.

Thau has never, to my knowledge explained why one should care about the variance of the seasons rather than the variance in the measurements. It is because if I measure a temperature today and it has a +/-3-4 deg F that I can say that one can't be sure that the world has warmed when the measurment error (not the seasonal variance) is greater than the signal. It is why Thau's little play statistics games don't actually address the situation any more than he ever addresses the physics.

 

[grmorton]

grmorton,

You should check back with Spencer. He corrected himself in a later post:

Spurious SST Warming Revisited Roy Spencer, Ph. D.

I do pay lots of attention to this stuff, grmorton.

I stand corrected and I appreciate the correction. I have no problem ever saying that. I will stand on the concept that when the seas warm, the air above the seas will warm and the heat will escape from earth quickly. Believe it or not the oceans cool down via this mechanism.

 

[grmorton]

Do you know what a superhurricane can do to a city like NY? Do you realise how crop failure, infrastructure damage etc can affect an organised modern society? Just power lines going down is enough to cause chaos in a city? You do realise that in 2009 society is much different and more complicated than that of 10,000 years ago.

Sheeshhh

I understand this probably more than you do. I have actually acted on it buying a ranch; getting out of debt, and preparing it for the decline in oil production, not because of global warming. That doesn't worry me at all because we will be in deep doo doo long before then.

As you hurricanes, you didn't comment upon why we see no trend in hurricanes over the past 100 years which is where everyone says global warming is heating the earth and bringing on the hypercanes--which again is faith--the belief in things unseen.

There are some studies that say global warming will actually suppress hurricanes.

"Thomas Knutson and colleagues from NASA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, have previously produced a remarkably accurate year-by-year "hindcast" of hurricane numbers over the past 30 years. So their prediction of an 18 per cent decline in the annual hurricane count by late this century commands attention."
"What's more, Knutson's team have a clear idea about why their numbers come out the way they do. What matters in hurricane formation, they say, is not so much the sea temperature itself as the temperature difference between the sea and the top of the troposphere, the atmosphere's weather zone. Knutson says the upper troposphere is set to warm even more than the Atlantic surface in the coming decades, and that this will tend to suppress hurricane formation." Fred Pearce, "Fewer Atlantic hurricanes, But Look Out for the Big Ones," New Scientist, May 24, 2008, p. 9

Since some don't like New Scientist, here is the location of the original article.

Increasing sea surface temperatures in the tropical
Atlantic Ocean and measures of Atlantic hurricane activity
have been reported to be strongly correlated since at least 1950
(refs 1–5), raising concerns that future greenhouse-gas-induced​

warming

6 could lead to pronounced increases in hurricane

activity.Models that explicitly simulate hurricanes are needed to
study the influence of warming ocean temperatures on Atlantic
hurricane activity, complementing empirical approaches. Our
regional climate model of the Atlantic basin reproduces the
observed rise in hurricane counts between 1980 and 2006, along
with much of the interannual variability, when forced with
observed sea surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions​

​

7.

Here we assess, in our model system​

​

7, the changes in large-scale

climate that are projected to occur by the end of the twenty-first
century by an ensemble of global climate models​

​

8, and find that

Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm frequencies are reduced.
At the same time, near-stormrainfall rates increase substantially.
Our results do not support the notion of large increasing​

trends in either tropical storm or hurricane frequency

driven by increases in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations."​

Knutson et al, "Simulated Reduction in Atlantic Hurricane Frequency under Twenty-First Century Warming Conditions," Nature Geoscience, May 18, 2008, p. 359

I would add that having lived through several hurricanes I know quite well the damage they can do. The last one was Ike which last year scrapped several coastal towns off the map leaving only bare dirt and destroyed the electrical infrastructure of Houston leaving millions without power, me among them. But playing King Canute and thinking that even if we lower CO2 levels that we will stop hurricanes ignores the fact that bad hurricanes occurred long before CO2 levels rose.

By the way, speaking of strong hurricanes hitting New York, are you going to blame the Sept 1938 hurricane which had 150 mph winds and struck Long Island on global warming?

"By early afternoon on Wednesday, the 21st of September, the eye of the storm was bearing down on the middle of Long Island at a sustained speed of more than 50 miles per hour, a speed that would later earn the storm the nickname the Long Island Express. Because of the counterclockwise circulation of the winds, which by then were approaching 100 miles per hour, the storm's forward speed was adding to the velocity of the winds east of the eye--boosting them as high as 150 miles an hour, and lessening them to the west.. . .Its intensity was indicated by the barometer readings that were recorded in teh eye--27.94 inches, an all-time low for the north-eastern United States." A. B. C. Whipple, Storm, (New York: Time-Life Books, 1982), p. 22.

The author survived the 1938 storm.

So, did global warming cause that storm?

​

 

[thaumaturgy]

These temperature differences vary with the seasons. They are NOT mere gaussian mis-measurements. Please explain this picture.

OK.

Let's take a look at 1963. Here's the entire year's worth of data on the top graphs and then just the first 100 days on the lower graph:

There certainly is a significant positive bias on average (actually on the median) of about 5 degrees during the first 100 days (Station 221094-Station225987)

But what about 10 years later?

Here's the same set of data for 1973:

(Actually that's the first 99 days of 1973, I accidentally only used 99), but the point is that now there's an approximately 1 degree bias the other way during the first 99 days!

So what about 1983?

(should note there's 3 days missing in this year which throws off the count of days somewhere there in the middle of the year but only by 3 days)

Well, now there's a -0.7 mean difference for that 100 days. The tails are a bit heavy but it's pretty close to normal (you'd see that if you plotted a normal-quantile plot that the ends deviate off a little bit off of the straight line)

I mean, we could go on and on and on as we have so far for >600 posts. And I will agree that occasionally there are cases where there is a mean or median difference that favors one station over another. But then all one need do is find a year or two later where the relationship is switched.

But again, we aren't dealing with the data as it is actually used.

Let me ask you a question here, Glenn:

You make your living in the petroleum business. Part of your paycheck comes from the price of petroleum products. When I lived outside of Boston, we had heating oil delivered directly to our house. Each year we could lock in a guaranteed price or let it float for whatever the market ran at.

Now, on those years when my wife and I "locked in a price" before the winter started we were making use of statistically analyzed temperature data. Probably stuff directly from these data sets we are battling over here.

That means for those years, in some small part I was paying part of your paycheck based on this horrible, horrible, horrible temperature data.

Were you battling the data then and for that reason? Were you complaining that "biased temperatures" would lead to faulty heating oil prices? Were you trying to give away some of your "big paycheck" you get for being such a great scientist because part of it, however small, was predicated on this horrible horrible temperature system?

EDITTED TO ADD:
I am rather interested that the relative RESIDUALS of the differences do get larger during the cold months. I am unsure if that is due to some sort of reading effect, or if the instrumentation has some linearity issues, but clearly the differences do bounce positive and negative for the two stations.

 

[grmorton]

Remember, Glenn. Most of us on here are scientists. And, personally I worked for several years as a government funded scientist, and I worked for several years at universities which got external funding.

(Over the past 10 or so years I've been working in industry which doesn't require me to get external funding, but my wife works in academia in precisely that setting related to earth science.)

I worked in industry and as exploration director, shoot even as merely the geophysical manager, I was responsible for getting funding for the group. All my peers were as well. The problem with going after a limited internal funding in a corporation is no different than going after the limited government funding. If you dont' get the funding, your program gets shut down, your employes (and maybe you) get laid off.

The above is brute reality. And that leads NOT to people wanting to fund the best idea or to merely go with the data, but to build up the merits of one's own position. If you have ever gone through this process of getting project funding, you will know that what I say is true--if you take the high-road, everyone else will cut your proverbial throat and you and your employees will suffer.

I took advantage of an exploration director who didn't like his own prospects. I don't know why he didn't like his prospects but in one funding meeting he kept saying that his prospects were, well I can't use that word here--no good was what he was saying. I liked the prospects my group generated so at ever turn I snarfed up the money. At the merger with another company, he was laid off, his two managers were demoted, 2/3 of his group was laid off as being of no real value to finding oil.

I survived the merger as the geophysical manager, only 1/10th of my group was laid off (my group was the 2nd least laid off group). The geological manager who worked with me was promoted to exploration director and became my boss, but that's ok, I got promoted later to exploration director.

That's strange. I am a scientist. I'm interested in data. I also met an oilman on here who seemed to like data an awful lot



(until statistics got involved and since statistics is the most robust way to deal with data I am wondering where that guy went...):

The problem here is that competition and survival gets in the way of the data. I am interested in the data and only the data, unless, being interested in supporting another guy's project makes my people lose their jobs. Then I am interested in funding them. And this is the point of my post. Science IS about funding as well as data. No funding; no data.

I don't think you are necessarily a conspiracy theorist. I just don't see much in the way of robust assessment of the data from your end but rather a reliance on anecdotal data to "shock" and hence more of a "gut-reaction" type of analysis.

Clueless about physics. You never have even seemed to understand why I take the temperature difference between two closely spaced towns--that brings out the measurement error, rather than the variance of the seasons, the temperal difference of which, is of course, the purported global warming.

As I said to Gould, no one takes 40 measurements of the temperature of a town on a given day to see how variable the daily measurement of temperature is. The closest may be modern urban heat island effects which show as much as a 15 deg F temperature difference over a few hundred yards. The single temperature put into the climate history depends on where in the city one puts the thermometer--physics again.

The "system" is responsible for the data which statistically supports anthropogenic global warming?

I think I have made a great case both physically, geologically and in the measurement error, which is what the statistics is that you analyze but understand not what it is. It is as close as we can get to measuring variability of the measurment itself. The SD from my temperature subtractions means that there is a +/-3 or 4 deg F error bar around the measurement itself. It isn't the error in the variance of the seasons that my data shows. But I don't think you have ever understood this very very important point.

 

[grmorton]

Hey Gracchus, are you ever going to be reasonable, that is having reasons for explaining why you think I am unreasonable to think that the below picture is a crappy place to take a temperature?

I have reasons, about 20, for why this station should not be in global warming studies (which it is). I do not lack reasons.

But you said I was 'unreasonable', i.e. lacking in reasons. I see 8 of those reasons in this picture. So, want to explain why I am unreasonable?

Or is it you who is really lacking in reasons?

I am still awaiting a response Gracchus. Your silence I guess means either you are no longer reading the thread, or you actually lack reasons for wanting this station included in the historical climate net work.

Does anyone think those air conditioners were there in 1914 when the camp opened and began measuring temperatures which are now part of the US Historical Climate Network?

And does anyone think that the bias towards heating has remained constant over the past 95 years?

I don't. My REASON, Gracchus, is that those air conditioners were not biasing the record in 1914 when it began. They are biasing the record today.

Still waitin' Gracchus.