Data Comparisons

Indisputably Correct Climate Model Results!

124 Comments

Breakthrough paper by Radagast the Brown. Key findings:

  1. The climate of Middle Earth has a similar distribution
    to that of Western Europe and North Africa.
  2. Mordor had an inhospitable climate, even ignoring the
    effects of Sauron – hot and dry with little vegetation.
  3. Ships sailing for the Undying Lands in the West set off
    from the Grey Havens due to the prevailing winds in
    that region.
  4. Much of Middle Earth would have been covered in
    dense forest if the landscape had not been altered by
    dragons, orcs, wizards etc.
  5. Lincolnshire or Leicestershire in the UK, or near
    Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand, have an
    annual-average climate very similar to that of The Shire.
  6. Los Angeles and western Texas in the USA, and Al-
    ice Springs in Australia, have an annual-average climate
    very similar to that of Mordor.

I thought you would all like to know. . .

124 thoughts on “Indisputably Correct Climate Model Results!”

  2. Your tax dollars at work, probably.

    I mean seriously, I can see someone doing this for fun, or maybe as part of developing a really advanced VR game. But serious research? Uh, what?

  3. It’s hard to believe they actually submitted the manuscript. It’s even harder to believe they ran a climate model the way they claimed (even an older one). But someone entertained themselves mightily writing the thing up all nicely in Latex. They even have figures. The claim is “Bristol University”.

  4. It’s just sort of a shame we can’t ask Tolkien himself if weather sounds right to what he envisioned.

    Well, we could ask Christopher. Word of St Paul and all that.

  5. Andrew_FL,
    I suspect the weather being right has more to do with Tolkein being aware of rain shadows and inter-tropical convergence zones than anything else. He wasn’t a metereologist, but he was educated and quite a few people do know about rain shadows, and they notice that deserts are in certain parts of the world. As much as climate modelers might make it seem that we “know” these things based on climate models, people knew about rain shadows and Hadley cells before AOGCM’s existed. Hadley died in 1768, so really, we don’t need AOGCMs to help us ‘discover’ those!

  7. Well yeah. It would be hard to miss large scale climate features, even in the absence of theory or models to quantitatively explain them.

    I think El Niño was first discovered by Spanish sailors in like, the 1600’s or something.

  9. For the truly obsessed there’s an extended discussion of the quality of the dwarvish and elven “translations” on my twitter stream (@nmrqip). Obviously they are not translations, but I was wondering how well they worked as transliterations. Short answer: they’re completely bogus.

  10. 4.Much of Middle Earth would have been covered in
    dense forest if the landscape had not been altered by
    dragons, orcs, wizards etc.

    It appears that their model is better at modelling the effects of dragons, orcs and wizards than it is in modelling the effects of CO2 and aerosols.

  11. A refreshingly realistic climate modeling study that I would encourage all climate scientists to consider. The concept of the paper presents a new method to keep modern anti-industrial fiction from contaminating the pages of actual science.

  13. Nick

    I think someone is pulling your leg. J Hobbitlore?

    I’m not sure what you mean. Someone actually wrote a manuscript with claimed authorship “Radagast the Brown”. I find it difficult to believe whoever wrote this submitted it anywhere. I mean… who would one send it to?

  14. Lucia

    I find it difficult to believe whoever wrote this submitted it anywhere. I mean… who would one send it to?

    Peter Jackson?

  15. Radagast? Do not speak to me of Radagast the Brown. He is a foolish fellow…
    It’s his excessive consumption of mushrooms!

    (Saruman to Gandalf, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 2012)

  16. Did the model show any warming due to the industrialization of Isenguard under Saruman’s rule?

  17. This research would have benefited from corroboration with proxy data, although taking tree-ring cores from Ents might be a somewhat difficult.

  18. Well, I don’t think we need GCM’s to realize that Balrogs cause warming, and we know the dwarves of Moria delved too greedily and too deep. The White Council has said that 80% of those reserves of Balrogs are going to have to stay in the ground. There are going to be winners and losers here.

  19. Right. Now that that’s out of my system, this source (http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5259/20131210/middle-earths-climate-mapped-in-new-study.htm) gives me the impression that one Richard Pancost may be the author of the paper, although the article does not explicitly say this. A co-author Dan Lunt is explicitly identified. I gather these guys are with the Cabot Institute / University of Bristol.

    I find the dwarvish translation of the paper considerably more readable than the elvish.

  21. Jonathan,

    Thanks. I believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with any character encoding scheme that maps capitol letters C D & E to the same thing. For that matter, lowercase c, d, and o look pretty darn similar to me.

    Further proof (as if any were needed) of the perversity of the Elves. No wonder Saruman got all evil on them; you’d need to either have a ‘love of the halflings weed’ like Gandalf or do ‘shrooms like Radagast to make sense of that character set.

  22. Bard of Dale slew the sky dragon….which reminds me did the study account for the aerosol forcing from events at Erebor (Lonely Mountain) and Orodruin (Mt Doom)? I think there was a big one at the latter after the ring-bearer fulfilled his quest…

  23. C, D and E are all diacritic tehta indicating the vowel “a”, and are designed as tehta to go above tengwar of different widths. I have no idea what c, d and o are doing; they all seems to me to be the consonant “hw”, and I think they may be just subtly different styles of the same letter.

    The use of diacritics for vowels, and sometimes for s and n, makes elvish a near syllabic script, so fitting it into a smallish character set is tricky without lots of variant diacritics. The dwarven runes are much closer to being letters in the english sense, though the encoding used in the climate document is pretty weird. You can crack it easily enough by finding the runes corresponding to the title “The Climate of Middle Earth”, though you will discover that some of the capital letters transliterate as null runes (including C and M if I recall correctly) and so don’t appear in the text.

  27. Interesting references, two works of fantasy by Tolkien ……………(cough!) ………….. (sniff!) …………. and two by the IPCC 😉

  28. If some hairy-footed little meddler tosses a ring into a volcano and causes a massive temperature drop across Mordor does that quality as ‘mitigation’? And how come the climate in the Shire is wholly unaffected by drastic climate change in adjacent regions? Do either Al Gore or James Hansen have a ring he calls ‘Precious’?

    I think this paper raises more questions than it answers.

  29. Lucia,
    The version I saw said it had been submitted to J. Hobbitlore. I can’t verify that now because I am travelling with a misbehaving connection.

  30. Lucia, Nick –
    The first line of the ms (above the title) says “Manuscript prepared for J. Hobbitlore”. Not precisely “submitted to”, but that’s the impression it gives.

  31. Next up, we’ll hear that in the Harry Potter series, it was climate change that actually killed Dumbledore.

  32. Anthony,

    I can’t address that specifically, but certainly I think parallels could be drawn between climate change bureaucracy / policy and the powers of dementors.

    Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_creatures_in_Harry_Potter#Dementors gives me this:

    The dementors are “soulless creatures[4]… among the foulest beings on Earth”: a phantom species who, as their name suggests, gradually deprive human minds of intelligence.
    …
    Although they are implied to be sentient, this is left ambiguous. The presence of a dementor makes the surrounding atmosphere grow cold and dark, and the effects are cumulative with the number of dementors present.

    The EPA at work? You be the judge.

    :p

  33. Dementors appear to be a temperate climate species. On the one hand, I would expect their range to move northward, and possibly shrink. Er, I don’t know that there are any in the Southern Hemisphere, but I think not? I guess those might move South if so, though.

    On the other, the tropical Lethifold would presumably see it’s range increase, and move North/South depending on the Hemisphere.

  34. Someone, possibly at the University of Bristol, has way too much time on their hands! Although the satire does hit the mark.

  35. I just noticed the acknowledgment of NERC grant NE/K014757/1 at the end of the paper… “but the work was unfunded” lest anyone think that grant money was expended on this somewhat frivolous exercise.

    That grant is assigned to Dan Lunt at the University of Bristol, per this.

  36. According to the “Journey to the Center of the Earth” by Jules Verne
    the climate is expressed thusly:

    “During the next few days, with July rapidly approaching, the weather is too cloudy for any shadows.”

    I think it expresses the east coast of Canada quite nicely. Fog lover heaven.

  37. I can’t believe that intelligent people like you are falling for this. Don’t you know that this work was funded by the tobacco lobby???

    In Gondor it is known popularly as Westman’s-weed, a reference to its origin: it was apparently brought to Middle-earth by Númenóreans during the Second Age. It was first grown among hobbits by Tobold Hornblower in Longbottom (a region in the Shire) around S.R. 1070 (TA 2670). Despite its foreign origins, the hobbits (possibly those in Bree) were the first to use it for smoking.
    Popular varieties of pipe-weed include Longbottom Leaf, Old Toby (which is named after Tobold Hornblower), Southern Star, and Southlinch, which is grown in Bree.

    The Wizard Gandalf learned to smoke pipe-weed from the hobbits and is known to blow elaborate smoke-rings. Saruman initially derides him for this, but at some point he takes up smoking himself. After the destruction of Isengard, pipe-weed is found among its stores, but the hobbits Merry and Pippin fail to realize the sinister implications of the discovery that Saruman has had commerce with the Shire.

  39. Gort wants you to know that the Climate Changeometer now comes with Ocean Dethermalization available for three easy payments. The point is to think how current weather patterns are affected by hobbitogenic climate change, so it’s necessary to consider the vast majority of that heat accumulating in the oceans. Gort instantly removes that heat at the same time as it puts the atmosphere back to pre Shire levels. The Dethermalizer also depuffenates the oceans from the sea level rise caused by thermal expansion.

  40. I would think a discussion of Middle-earth in the context of climate modeling based on physical relationships and science is rather misplaced. There was a working force in Middle-earth that was supernatural which we can interpret as magic.

    Better would have been an inclusion of Middle-earth magic in the discussion of climate policy around Tolkien’s concept of magic being related to power and domination and that the use of magic (as might have occurred in a Middle-earth mitigation of a “bad” climate) is good or bad based on the intentions and motives involved. How could anyone, that was good, then be against the use of government magic with its good intentions to combat a bad climate?

  42. I’m sure, if you’re so minded, that you can see government represented in most fictional bad guys.

    If the Wicked Witch of the East and WW of the West aren’t the communist and capitalist blocs of the cold war then I’ll eat my red slippers!

  43. HR (Comment #121946)
    December 15th, 2013 at 5:57 pm
    I’m sure, if you’re so minded, that you can see government represented in most fictional bad guys.
    ———————————–

    So who gets to play the part of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen?

  44. University of Bristol…
    hmmm…
    where do I know that name…
    let me think a moment…
    …why yes – that is the new home of the good doctor – Stephen Lewandowsky

    Could this be “middle earth conspiracy ideation”?

  49. Re: HR (Dec 15 22:14),

    Admittedly there is more in the movie than was in the book, but the book was published in 1937. The no spoiler rule has a time limit that was exceeded long ago.

  50. “I’m sure, if you’re so minded, that you can see government represented in most fictional bad guys.”

    I know little of Tolkien’s writing or his intentions. What I do know is that much evil has been done by powerful entities of which government is the most powerful, either by itself or those that it empowers through its monopolistic use of force, when those entities had apparently, or at least superficially, good intentions.

    Actually evil intentions are less difficult to resist, and, of course, much easier to predict that which those intentions might garner.

  51. HR: “If the Wicked Witch of the East and WW of the West aren’t the communist and capitalist blocs of the cold war then I’ll eat my red slippers!”
    You do realize that the book was written in 1900 or so, before there was a Communist bloc.
    …
    However, from Wikipedia: “Scholars who interpret The Wizard of Oz as a political allegory see the Emerald City as a metaphor for Washington, D.C. and unsecured “greenback” paper money. In this reading of the book, the city’s illusory splendor and value is compared with the value of paper money, which also has value only because of a shared illusion or convention.”

  52. Since it’s come up, yes, the giant gorilla dies. But we are already on a carbon trajectory right now that ought to make King Kong and Godzilla incidents nothing more than a fading memory.
    http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n8/full/nclimate1259.html
    And I’m sure that will come as a relief to giant monster disaster refugees the world over.

    Of course, there have also been studies that the media has presented as showing that AGW will cause us to evolve into hobbits (http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0224/Could-global-warming-turn-us-all-into-hobbits) by a similar principle, so this isn’t quite as OT as it might appear.

    See! Running simulations on Middle Earth’s climate doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it. It’s just the next logical step in the research chain.

  54. Yeah, I saw that too. I didn’t realize what I was looking at until I heard the iconic Godzilla roar and saw the spikey spine plates in the mist.

    Why does everybody ignore the giant monster refugee problem in favor of the climate refugee problem? I’m pretty sure there are just as many giant monster refugees as climate change refugees. Numberless in number I’d expect. Of course, I don’t actually have any data to support this assertion, but I don’t see why we should discriminate against the giant monster refugees on this basis when we don’t discriminate against the climate change refugees this way.

  55. HaroldW (Comment #121955)-The idea that Baum was writing a Populist political allegory originated in 1964 and has so little actual basis it is laughable. In fact, even the originator of the theory doesn’t believe Baum actually *indented* the allegory, he merely found it a useful pedagogical device for teaching about that era.

    For one thing, why would Baum, a Republican and supporter of McKinley, write a book sympathetic to the Populists like William Jennings Bryan?

    Baum himself always maintained that they were just children’s stories, with no hidden messages

  56. Andrew_FL (Comment #121960)
    December 16th, 2013 at 1:02 pm

    Andrew, somehow I have never connected the Populist movement with a critique of fiat money as I believe HaroldW was alluding. The William Jennings Bryan Cross of Gold speech, while not favoring fiat money, was favoring free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. That inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided the farmers with large amounts of debt and little cash on hand – somewhat in the fashion of what printing fiat money does.

    There is no doubt that the Wizard of Oz could be taken as anyone’s every day politician who wants to take credit through their actions for what the voters can do better for themselves.

  57. Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #121961)-That would imply almost the exact *opposite* of the typical claim, that the Wizard of Oz was a Populist allegory. That’s at least more plausible, but frankly I see no reason to think Baum intended to do anything other than entertain children and generate some income-this is what he himself said.

    By the way, that period of history has always fascinated me, so I am quite aware the situation vis-à-vis Bimetallism versus the Gold Standard. In this respect I have often called Bryan the first modern Democrat and his predecessor Cleveland the “Last Great Democrat.”

    Of course, fixing a non market rate of exchange from the government of silver to gold would not *only* have had the consequence of inflation, it *also* would have represented an opportunity for clever people to plunder the federal treasury through arbitrage. Not to mention invoking the wrath of Gresham’s Law. All told, a disasterous idea narrowly avoided.

  58. Andrew_FL:
    Just to be clear, I was not promoting that interpretation, just reporting the Wiki statement. As someone who has to be hit over the head, and doesn’t always get “subtle”, I’ve only thought of the Oz books as children’s stories. It seemed entirely possible to me that there was a deeper meaning of which I was blissfully ignorant.

  60. I think it is clear in the case of the Wizard of Oz that the author is making a point, and whether it is made in the context of a children’s story or a something more serious, the point is there and obvious to those who read these stories. That the reader takes that point and relates it to some other aspect of life should be to the credit of the author and the reader- and even if that connection would not have been made by the author.

    And HaroldW, if I did not know you better, I would consider your last remark a bit full of yourself.

  61. From a quick search, it seems to me that Baum was not trying to make a point or support a particular side in the politics of the day. He was making fun of everyone.

  62. Ugh what the heck am I supposed to do with these files man.

    Does anybody know of a way to get the CERES radiation flux data in a nice, timeseries format? Failing that, does anybody know what I can do with all these .nc files I ordered?

  64. Andrew,

    As much as everyone hates excel there is a nice macro called netcdf4excel.

    I’ve used this many a time. Let me know if you try it out and need help. If you even use excel, IDK. I have been using it on Windows 7 & Excel 2010.

    Anyway it is very straightforward and you can use it on even the biggest NC files if you go one variable at a time and play around with time ranges (otherwise the files get too long).

    There are other programs out there – c++ and so on that have been written to read and manipulate the NC files – but for data exploration, short of massive automation via code, I think the excel macro is pretty good.

  67. Andrew.

    Take your netcdf files.
    Get R
    Load the package ncdf4
    Load the package raster
    read the data into a raster
    convert to a matrix.
    output as csv.

  68. Andrew_FL (Comment #121971)

    if you would rather try what Mosher says above, I can’t help.

    But what file can’t you open? You mean the installer, the macro workbook or the actual NC files using the macro workbook?

  70. bill_c (Comment #121973)-I can’t open the actual NC files. I opened the shortcut on my desktop, I went to the Add In tab, clicked NetCDF, and then clicked “open file,” selected the file, and got an error message.

    Steven Mosher (Comment #121972)-No offense, Steven, but I could never figure out how to get R to work. I’ll give it a shot, but I don’t know. I’m probably just hopeless inept.

  71. andrew:

    what was the error message? what was the NC file and where did you get it from? if you care, I’ll help out as much as I can, thought this sort of thing often devolves into long discussions about OS versions and such…

  72. another thought: try “read header” and “Read variables” under that same pull down as “open file” and try to see the parameters you’re working with. maybe the file is too long to read into one worksheet. in which case you have to sub select parameters.

    i wrote a vba script once to automate this…i probably still have it.

    dunno, put some of the files on drop box or point me to the web site?

  73. bill_c (Comment #121976)-The initial error message is:

    Run-time error ’53’:

    File not found: VbNc.dll

    I then go to Debug, it points me to this line:

    If nc_open(ncFileName, NC_NOWRITE, ncId) 0 Then

    bill_c (Comment #121977)-I tried those, got the same error.

    Anyway, the data I am trying to work with has to be “ordered” from:

    http://ceres-tool.larc.nasa.gov/ord-tool/jsp/SSF1degSelection.jsp

    I am doing TOA fluxes, daily, Aqua, for the whole period and whole earth. If you want to get the same files you are going to have to give them an email address. They email you when the data is done. I am just trying to looking at *one* of the files, to start with. The file is:

    CERES_SSF1deg-Day-lite_Aqua_Ed2.7_Subset_200207-200309.nc

    I save a copy of a couple of the files to my own computer from the ftp. I just can’t get it to work.

  74. Andrew,

    After installation the vbnc.dll file resides in my folder c:\program files(x86)\NetCDF4Excel\

    In order for it to be seen by the vba code i think it has to be registered with the system. I reinstalled it today and could see it update the system registry. Seems like yours might not have registered, not sure why. Admin privileges or something? That’s about the extent of my knowedge.

  75. bill_c (Comment #121979)-Yeah, I’m not sure what the problem is. I think I’ll call it quits for now, give it another shot later. Thanks anyway.

  76. Andrew_FL (Comment #121975)
    December 17th, 2013 at 2:57 pm

    Andrew, I would make the effort to use R. Just storage alone is faster and with more capacity in R. I have found that most all of my problems with R were self inflicted and getting an error message that might be misleading when I made a typo that was not always obvious.

    Netcdf files are easy to manipulate in R. If you can bring up the function description in R and follow the instructions you have to assume if it does not work you may well have made a simple error. Searching on the net for an R function will usually get you to the library and function description.

    I think the reason people give up on R prematurely is that R works, as RomanM told me long ago, most efficiently when you are familiar with R.

  77. DeWitt Payne (Comment #121966)
    December 16th, 2013 at 7:19 pm

    “From a quick search, it seems to me that Baum was not trying to make a point or support a particular side in the politics of the day. He was making fun of everyone.”

    DeWitt, I am certain that Baum did know that many modern day blow hard politicians were going to use the Wizard model in their dealings with the public. He is blameless.

  79. Well guys, I’ll have to buckled down and learn R at some point, I guess-I at least downloaded it, anyway. For the moment I’ve moved on to other things, but will perhaps ask you guys for advice in the future if I need it. Thanks, once again.

  80. Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Dec 18 10:27),

    I think the reason people give up on R prematurely is that R works, as RomanM told me long ago, most efficiently when you are familiar with R.

    I would restate that as the explanations in R of how to use specific functions are extremely difficult to comprehend unless you already know how to use them.

    That being said, there are many things you can do in R that are difficult or impossible to do in Excel, so it’s worth climbing the steep learning curve.

  81. “That being said, there are many things you can do in R that are difficult or impossible to do in Excel, so it’s worth climbing the steep learning curve.”

    That is most likely a big motivator for most people when you simply cannot do in Excel some manipulations you want or need to do. The point I was making is that by using R and going through the initial frustration it becomes after a reasonably short period of time much easier and the learning feeds upon itself.

  82. That should have been:

    DeWitt, I am certain that Baum did not know that many modern day blow hard politicians were going to use the Wizard model in their dealings with the public. He is blameless.

  84. Lucia,
    Christmas season reminds me of something you used to do but apparently, sadly, have not for awhile.
    Would you consider offering coffee mugs and such again?

  85. No. I won’t be– but only because I’m making Jim pants. I don’t want to spend the morning creating a mug!

    On that score: I’ve got a ‘dynamic pattern’ running, but with Jim’s measurements input as static. That creates the pattern. I’d made the ‘fitting sloper’ a while back and it fit perfectly. Then it turned out to take longer code do all the ‘fiddly bits’ (i.e. pockets, zipper insert/shield etc. than the initial sloper! (Which if I explained would be obvious why.) Then… I stalled a little out of fear of cutting. (This is irrational. Obviously, if cutting the fabric is going to result in a garment failure, waiting doesn’t help. Plus owning a length of uncut fabric isn’t really ‘better’ except in so far as you haven’t proven that failure will later occur. But I always get a bit gun-shy when I’m going to make welt pockets which are standard on mens pants and relatively rare on women’s clothes. Welt pockets on the first pair of trouser were made yesterday. The zip an side seams are scheduled for today…Jim does the try on permitting the possibility of up to ±1/2″ adjustment in waist, then the waistband applied. )

  86. This is, btw, what the pants pattern looks like:
    TrousersMen
    (Note: choice of fonts etc. is inconsistent. If I’m going to make these publicly available with pulldown menus for people to pick their sizes or customize to their body size, I need to standardize font choices/colors for things like placement lines, cutting lines, seam lines and so on. More importantly: To ensure the pattern really fits a range of men, I would need make a few pair for men who are ‘not shaped like Jim’. Luckily, my two sisters married “in the 25-30 BMI” range guys with one 5’4″ and the other 6″. Jim has two 5’10” fairly trim brothers (BMI in the 23-25 range)! So if I can get these guys to send hip, waist (ideally at two levels for research purposes), seat depth and inseam lengths, that should span a range of sizes. (I could wing it on the seat depth. But it’s better it they tell me what they like.)

  87. Re to Andrew FL and others who are interested in learning R. This is a difficult language to learn on your own. Although there’s a ton of books about R none do a very good job of putting the novice into the right frame of mind. If you have the time you might want to check out the free, four-week course in Computing for Data Analysis offered by Coursera that is oriented around R: https://www.coursera.org/course/compdata. The next course starts Jan. 6.

  88. Lucia –
    I was going to make a joke about your 6″-tall brother-in-law, but I will forbear — I’m bigger than that.

  90. lucia (Comment #121992)
    December 20th, 2013 at 7:25 am

    Lucia, can you patent or copyright an original pattern?

    What are your husband, Jim’s, reactions to these clothes you make for him? I have not had anyone sew anything for me since my Mom made shirts from chicken feed bags for my brother and me when we were in grade school. I think I would be very happy and appreciative.

    My wife selects a lot of the clothes I wear and when I make the selection in her absence she usually spends a lot of time reminding me of how much she doesn’t like what I bought. There are clothes and shoes that I have – and like to wear – that she thinks I should burn.

  91. Lucia, can you patent or copyright an original pattern?

    You can’t patent a pattern for trousers. You can copyright certain things in clothing design, but with respect to the item of trousers itself: no. With respect to the actual pattern as I draft it and so on, yes. In principle, if I create a pdf with my sketches and instructions, that’s my pdf. I can copyright that expression of a pattern No one else can copy that pdf without my permission. However, the design of these trousers? Really… uhmm… no. Or to the extent that they could be copyrighted, the protection is useless.

    These pants are going to look like zillions in stores. If they didn’t Jim wouldn’t wear them. Think about the reason tons and tons and tons of pants look like Dockers. If someone could “copyright” the idea of pants with pleats, inset pockets and so on, you wouldn’t see so many similar pants.

  92. Lucia,
    But perhaps, once you get your amazing talent wound up with Jim’s pants, you could put a few minutes into a mug design?
    You are a true renaissance woman, by the way.
    Feliz Navidad y Prospero Ano Nuevo

  93. Andrew_FL, you might consider downloading Rstudio which is a very nice gui for R. It provides a lot of features such as an ability to view the data which is present in the workspace along with other enhancements to make the learning experience easier.

    After installing R, go to Rstudio.com to download the program which comes in various flavors of operating system. You can find screenshots on that site to get a sense of what you would be looking at when running R via that method.

    Install the program and run it to start your R experience. 🙂

  94. RomanM (Comment #121999)-Thanks, I’ll check it out. There are types of analysis I would like to be able to do I presently cannot, so it would actually be nice to have R’s advantages over simpler analysis tools.

  101. Pro: I am glad to see Willis now acknowledging horizontal heat transport.

    Con: I believe he is still assuming zero mass flow. Probably a minor issue.

    However, he still hasn’t taken the step to see how this chart:

    http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/net-solar-radiation-downwelling-minus-reflected.jpg

    Invalidates basically the entirety of this post:

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/18/the-fatal-lure-of-assumed-linearity/

    And a number of others he has done over the last couple of years.

  103. Re: Andrew_FL (Dec 22 15:44),

    I think this graph shows why substantial horizontal heat flow is required. For Latitudes between about ±40 degrees more solar radiation is absorbed than is emitted as LW at the TOA. for higher latitudes, the opposite is true. Peak flow is about 5PW at the crossover latitude.

  105. Willis’ post could be the poster child for straw man argument. If the change in forcing locally was the sole determinant of local temperature, you couldn’t have polar amplification. But it isn’t and there is.

  106. Re: Andrew_FL (Dec 22 17:36),

    That sort of behavior, noise increasing with decreasing frequency, is consistent with long term persistence, but doesn’t prove it. For one thing, you need a much longer time series. Serial autocorrelation produces a similar effect except the plot levels off eventually as frequency decreases, if I remember correctly.

  107. DeWitt Payne (Comment #122013)-The thing is that I analyzed the data this way *after* removing the long term variations. After which the series looks like this:

    http://devoidofnulls.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/volcano4.png

    The smoothing procedure used to find the low frequency variations I describe here:

    http://devoidofnulls.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/can-you-isolate-a-volcanic-temperature-signal-in-the-temperature-data/

    What I am showing is *just* the behavior of the short term fluctuations of temperature!

  110. Andrew FL, “Which is kind of cool …”

    It is isn’t it? You can extend that long term trend back to 1700 using tropical paleo and an “instrumental” reconstruction. There is an amplification factor for Tmax and Tmin that varies due to albedo and water vapor associated with the ocean recovery from the series of volcanic and solar events starting around 1200 AD.

    http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/12/2000-years-of-climate.html

    The India Ocean Basin has less meridional overturning and THC influence so it is more stable reference for “climate” over longer time scales. It nearly perfectly filters out AMO and PDO. So you can scale “global” land i.e. Best back to 1750 and even include CET.

    Interesting or cool but not likely to convince the convinced.

  111. dallas (Comment #122017)-Hm, yeah something for me to look into in the future: a similar analysis of the BEST data. I’d do the paleo data too, except that there seems to be too much attenuation of the high frequency component, which is part of what I’m interested in. In theory one is supposed to be able to get a sense for the timescales of the system there from. So far I don’t quite grasp the idea but I’m learning.

  112. Andrew, FL, ” I’d do the paleo data too, except that there seems to be too much attenuation of the high frequency component, which is part of what I’m interested in.”

    Right, Paleo is a PITA. One of the things I noticed with BEST was that Tmax and Tmin don’t seem to track in a way that makes complete sense. The 1941-76 hiatus was mainly Tmax, aerosols? and the current hiatus is mainly Tmin, stronger correlation to SST. If you roughly allow for average elevation of land (density) and average lapse rate (temperature), there should be a “normal” land amplification of about 1.33, but Tmin works out to about 2.0.

    It would be nice to do a few comparisons based on actual elevation, but I am R-illiterate at the moment. That should indicated that most of the warming over land is due to water vapor amplification which peaked around 1985, but I am not very confident in being able to make that a bullet proof argument.

  115. Andrew FL, Right, but what is forcing what? If SST has recovered by 0.9 C since 1700 then Tmin has recovered by 1.8 C since 1700. Since the NH oceans have a strong AMO/PDO signature, NH DTR has a strong AMO/PDO signature. Land doesn’t care what “forcing” it amplifies.

  116. Hm, looking at BEST it looks like for my purposes the data before 1850 is basically useless-the increased noise is an obvious artifact of reduced sampling. The increased noise appears to *mostly*, but not entirely, arise from seasonal effects-which are implausibly large.

  117. Something fun: If you read my earlier post on finding a volcanic eruption effect in the HadCRUT4 data, well, I did the same process with the BEST land surface data, and it’s kind of odd what I get: It looks like the land surface temp “over corrects” when it recovers from a volcanic eruption to, apparently, permanently warm on average about .1 K. Before you ask: yes, this is after removing the long term warming signal from the data. I removed all low frequency variation from both datasets in the manner I described in my post. That’s the most darn surprising fact about this analysis. The HadCRUT4 profile didn’t do anything like that, although it displayed some odd features, too. The other odd thing is that while the temperature minima occurs earlier-when determined the same way I determined it for HadCRUT-it also appears to be *smaller*. Very strange.

    Anyway, here are the two different profiles: averages and scaled smooths of the high frequency temperature variability in months after the month prior to a spike in AOD:

    http://devoidofnulls.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/bestvolcanoprofile.png

  118. Re: Andrew_FL (Dec 23 21:26),

    I think you’ll find, if you look, that stratospheric temperature does something similar except in the opposite direction. I don’t think it’s permanent, though. It’s just that the recovery time is in decades instead of years.

  119. Permanent was too strong a word. I am still not convinced the behavior beyond 40 ish months is very meaningful, possibly an artifact of either my method, or just peculiarities of weather noise in the seven periods in question. It would be nice to have more cases to examine.

    I still haven’t given much thought to the weird “aftershock” effect. In BEST it is actually stronger than the original dip, which is weird.

  120. Andrew FL, Anet et al. called it a “super recovery” I believe, related to ocean inertia and the THC in the Baltic Sea region.

    Prior to 1850, since all the land data is overly weighted to the northern hemisphere mid to upper latitudes, that “noise” is likely just the way things are in the “civilized” world at the time. Since the effect is different for Tmax and Tmin, Tave has even greater variability. So for your purposes you might want to consider “colonial” and “old world” instrumental temperature reconstructions. Going “Global” just smooths out the signal.

  122. Merry Christmas too you too! We did gifts last night. I was a great gifter!! The brothers in law hate picking out gifts and feel guilty if we spend too much (because they hate shopping.) So…. I knew they love espresso. Last week while looking for clothes for rosemary at the Goodwill (which is where I find what she’ll wear. Long story. ) I found (a) two old fashioned back zipped acrylic sweaters that are JUST what in her mind she ‘recognizes’ and will wear. (b) a pair of elastic waist pants in the brand and style she wears and (c) a “BRAUN ESPRESSO MAKER MODEL 3062 COMPLETE W/ STAINLESS MILK CARAFE” for $8. Never used. In box!!! All parts there, instructions included.

    We made them open presents in order — with all the obviously cheap stuff first. Then, we sent Robert (the one most perturbed at the idea we’d spend too much) to open the big box. He’d already had two aqua vit slugs…. He sat on the floor, and his face when he opened it. He fell over!!!

    Later, David and I went into the kitchen to make the espresso. I could here Robert saying “You shouldn’t have… blah, blah.” Then Jim finally relieved him of his anxiety, and told him we spent $8 at the Salvation Army. He shouted out “Lucia, you RULE!!!!”.
    It was great. The coffee was great too!!

  123. [Stolen from facebook:]
    The politically-correct holiday greeting –

    From me (“the wishor”) to you (“hereinafter called the wishee”) Please accept without obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect or the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all… and a financially successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2014, but with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures or sects, and having regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or dietary preference of the wishee. By accepting this greeting you are bound by these terms that-

    * This greeting is subject to further clarification or withdrawal
    * This greeting is freely transferable provided that no alteration shall be made to the original greeting and that the proprietary rights of the wishor are acknowledged.
    * This greeting implies no promise by the wishor to actually implement any of the wishes.
    * This greeting may not be enforceable in certain jurisdictions and/or the restrictions herein may not be binding upon certain wishees in certain jurisdictions and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wishor.
    * This greeting is warranted to perform as reasonably may be expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first.
    * The wishor warrants this greeting only for the limited replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wishor
    * Any references in this greeting to “the Lord”, “Father Christmas”, “Our Savior”, or any other festive figures, whether actual or fictitious, dead or alive, shall not imply any endorsement by or from them in respect of this greeting, and all proprietary rights in any referenced third party names and images are hereby acknowledged.

  124. Christmas in my house mostly revolved around the little uns. It wasn’t my plan when I bought them, but… I got both boys Nintendo DS3’s, since they’re always asking to play games on my cell phone. But now I see this about programming in BASIC for DS. It’s sort of interesting. I first became interested (obsessed) with computers writing games in BASIC as an elementary school kid. I’m looking forward to checking this out. Somehow I don’t think the boys are going to have to punt out to Assembly language to get good graphics going on this thing!

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