In “Why don’t op-ed’s get fact checked?” Gavin criticizes Debra Saunders’s recent column reporting on October errors in GISSTemp rather severely, writing:
“However, the rest of her column shows none of the same appreciation for basic journalistic standards.”
I guess it’s hardly surprising that Gavin gets a bit grumpy reading about the NASA GISS October GISSTemp blunder yet again. But, it’s still interesting to look at why Gavin thinks her column shows little appreciation for basic journalistic standards.
Evidently, the title is sub-par.
Evidently, the title of the news article somehow violates journalistic standards. How? Here’s his gripe in his own words:
Journalists don’t generally write their own headlines, but a vague connection to current events is the more usual practice.
Could the title be better? Sure.
That said, the connection between the title and the content is easily found in her discussion of past mistakes by NASA GISS:
Now honest mistakes happen – even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year, again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre, Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 – not 1998, as it had figured – as the hottest year on record in American history.
So, there it is: A connection between the title of the story and the contents of the articles. Oddly, Gavin speculates the title “When the warmest year in history isn’t” might have been referring to the 1934/1998 “oops” at GISSTemp. He then goes on to defend “its irrelevance to global warming”.
Uhmmm…. well Gavin: that rejoinder might be an interesting criticism of someone’s argument published somewhere. But in her recent article, Debra Saunders isn’t telling us that last years GISS “oops” is highly relevant to global warming. She is discussing how newspapers spin stories.
So far, while Debra’s article may not be poised to win Pulitzer Prize in the category of “best title ever”, it’s a bit lame to suggest the title violates some standard of news reporting.
Gavin thinks Debra gets the Oreske’s paper “completely wrong”.
Gavin proceeds to get his knickers in a tighter twist claiming:
Next, she gets the Oreskes’ Science and society paper story completely wrong (it was a sampling of literature and survived numerous challenges to its validity – see here and here).
What, pray tell, did Debra J. Saunders get at “completely wrong” about Naomi’s paper?
Here’s what Debra actually wrote:
In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”
So, Debra correctly indicated the Oreskes paper was a literature review. Debra correctly indicates that Oreskes concluded that none of the papers she reviewed disagrees with the consensus position.
Yet, evidently Gavin finds something completely wrong in that characterization of Naomi’s paper. He doesn’t actually tell us what that wrong bit might be.
So… Shall I speculate? 🙂
After correctly characterizing Oreskes’ paper, Debra explains why she believes, on the balance, there is something not quite right about Oreskes findings. Maybe Gavin is upset that Debra’s expresses the opinion that Naomi’s findings were unconvincing?
I realize some may find it irksome to discover that others are unconvinced by Oreskes’s paper. Nevertheless, it’s important to distinguish between an editorial writer publishing factual errors (i.e. getting a paper completely wrong) and stating their opinion that there may have been some problem with Naomi’s methods or findings.
Whether Gavin likes Debra’s opinion or not, her opinion itself is not a factual error. Expressing opinions Gavin finds disagreeable does not violate journalistic standards.
Grousing about the statistical significance
In addition to not liking the title, and mistaking Debra’s expression of an opinion for an error of fact, Gavin criticizes Debra for quoting Lindzen:
or that there ‘has been no statistically significant warming since 1995″ (wrong again: 0.21 +/- 0.13 deg C/dec GISTEMP, OLS, 95% CI))
Well, actually, Gavin, if you did some less tendentious fact checking you’d find that Lindzen does have a basis for what he claims in the bit Debra quoted:
Exhibit B: MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard S. Lindzen recently wrote, “There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.”
Lindzen who appears to favor using HadCrut rather than the metric provided by Gavin’s employer, GISS. If we use monthly data from HadCrut, the trend since Jan 1995 is 0.12 C/decade and the ±95% uncertainty intervals corrected for red noise (using the formula in Santer17) are ±0.13 C/decade. As the uncertainty exceeds the positive trend, we conclude the trend since 1995 is not statistically significant.
So, Lindsen’s claim has some basis. It is not wrong.
So, one might then think Gavin is wrong? No.
Oddly, Gavin’s claim that warming since 1995 is statistically significant also has some basis. Gavin’s claim is based on annual averaged GISSTemp data. By choosing annual average data, Gavin’s analysis omits temperatures since January; this results in a higher trend. The choice of GISSTemp over HadCrut also results in a larger positive trend in temperature since 1995.
With regard to Debra’s article: based on HadCrut, and including the most recent data, there is no statistically significant positive trend since 1995.
Is Debra entirely free and clear? No. Debra could have been more thorough and asked Lindzen what we learn if we analyze GISSTEmp annual average data. Doing so would have made her article more fair and balanced. The claim about the Arctic increase in ice coverage in 2002 is odd; obviously, it’s dropped since them.
Why wasn’t she more thorough? Or more balanced? Why didn’t she double, triple and quadruple check every possible thing every possible way before publishing?
Who knows?
Maybe she is only funded at 0.25 FTE, and there isn’t sufficient budget to QA everything. Maybe it didn’t occur to her that one can get different trends based on choice of data set and/or monthly vs. annual average temperatures. After all, she’s a reporter, and may lack the knowledge one might expect in a specialist.
But what of Gavin?
Could Gavin have been more thorough and included the fact that the if we rely on HadCrut montly data instead of GISSTemp, Lindzen’s claims is true: There is no statistically significant warming since 1995? What if we use UAH? Or RSS?
Sure. Gavin could have admitted that there is a factually true basis for the claim there is no warming statistically significant warming since 1995.
Maybe it didn’t occur to Gavin that one can get different trends based on choice of data set and/or monthly vs. annual average temperatures. After all, he’s. . . and maybe . . .
We’ll it’s a theory anyway.
Did you try to point this out at RC?
just curious….I was tempted, when I saw Gavin’s post, but lacked the time.
I also noticed that Gavin was asked, by NASA, to respond to Debra Saunder’s column.
Odd. I seem to recall his rather petulant disavowal of GISStemp at Anthony’s blog, when the artificial October heat wave was discovered.
Les– No. I rarely post comments at RC. The heavy moderation makes their comment thread really choppy. The result is I generally find even reading them rather tedious. (I do skim comments there though — I just find the experience a bit discombobulating.)
I figure those who are interested can read what I think here. If they aren’t, then that’s ok too!
Les. I blinked a bit. Based on Gavin’s post, it appears NASA Public affairs asked him to talk to Debra. I suspect the main reason for this is that Gavin stepped up to the plate and blabbed all about the issue.
Possibly, the person who really crank out the GISSTemp data manipulations doesn’t want to talk to the press and doesn’t want to be named in articles.
Gavin’s response to this is amusing:
Here’s Gavin’s response:
Cherry picking? The GISSTemp were wildly wrong and inconsistent with know weather reports. The fact was, the people who were aware of temperature reports for October knew it wasn’t hotter than Hades that month.
That’s not “cherry picking”. That’s called recognizing an inconsistency in published data. The next logical step is to investigate the inconsistency. That’s what readers at WUWT and CA did.
I also like Gavin’s pro-active “Far more important” guidance. Well the long term trends are far more important in the context of . . . what?
In the context of assessing the accuracy of GISSTemp, evidence that they have poor QA/QC practices is “far more important” than the long term trends!
Maybe it didn’t occur to her that one can get different trends based on choice of data set and/or monthly vs. annual average temperatures. After all, she’s a reporter, and may lack the knowledge one might expect in a specialist.
And why should she have understood this when the science is always presented to the media and general public as settled and based on computer models whose drawbacks are never mentioned?
Dave-
Honestly, I think it would be entirely forgivable for a reporter to be unware that you get different answers with a HadCrut and GISS.
What’s odd is that a climate scientists (i.e. Gavin) would simply decree her statement “wrong” based on analysis of one out of four popular, widely available metrics. Had Gavin looked at HadCrut, he would have to conclude Lindsen’s claims is correct. I didn’t run the numbers since 1995 with UAH and RSS but I suspect that 3 out of 4 metrics say the “no statistically significant warming since 1995”.
Gavin may be able to explain why he thinks that observations is unimportant given past warming (and I have no doubt he would). However, even if he bothered to provide that explanation, it’s not appropriate for him to elevate his claim to saying that what Debra said is a) wrong and b) shows lack of “appreciation for basic journalistic standards”!
Needless to say, by wasting his post making unsupportable accusations of error or journalistic malfeasance, Gavin lost the opportunity to explain why lack of statistically significant warming since 1995 isn’t a big deal in his estimation.
Maybe it didn’t occur to her that one can get different trends based on choice of data set
Which always strikes me as odd, statements like this.
How can one say there is a consensus amongst scientists, when there is not even consensus amongst the data metrics?
Naomi Oreskes Science article was based on a search term “global climate change” that was a term of art for the Global Change Research Program, which was looking for papers demonstrating the impact climate change would have. There were actually 929 papers, but one was such a blatant off the wall health article, she kicked it out. That didn’t change the fact that her’s wasn’t a random sampling of articles associated with the science of climate change. Indeed, only one of James Hansen’s articles made the list, and none by the likes of Christy, Lindzen, Pielke Sr. or any others who have raised scientific questions. They didn’t say the magic words — “global climate change” — in their articles. Did Oreskes know that would be the case? She was there documenting the USGRP and going to Aspen, so it’s possible she may have. At any rate, her probability sample was as scientific as Liberty’s poll of its readers in 1936 that found Alf Landon would win the presidency. Amazing that the history books have missed his service as our 33rd president.
Les–
It’s possible to have consensus among scientists even if we don’t get precisely the same answer for every single possible test with ever possible metric.
If Lindzen’s claim hadn’t been based on 1995 as the start year, all metrics might agree on some point.
As far as i can tell, that quote from Lindzen came in response to a post at WUWT in which Anthony posted something using 1998 as a start year and discussed results for “three out of four” metrics. Lindzen pointed out the result wasn’t all that dependent on choice of the “magic” start year of 1998. HadCrut shows no statistically significant warming since 1995.
So, Lindzen was saying something in the context of Anthony’s blog posting. What Lindzen said was entirely correct.
But yes, Debra needs to learn to check the other metrics.
Lucia: I agree that consensus is possible, if the data is roughly equivalent, and the interpretation is roughly the same.
It’s obvious, at least to me, this is not the case.
Lucia,
There is one major error in Debra’s article. It is the statement attributed to a certain Gavin Schmidt, that “The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours.” In fact, the re-posted “corrected” data, put up two days later, was still incorrect, and had to be replaced again after a third day had passed, see http://globalwarmingquestions.googlepages.com/giss or even GISS’s own page at
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Ahh— So, Gavin was, to use the term he applied to Debra– “Sneaky” — when he said the bad data was only up for 24 hours. It’s true the first set of bad data was only up for 24 hours.
Clearly, Debra needs to do some digging and ask the sources who found the error in the first place: commeners at WUWT and CA. They are the ones who found the error, and who will volunteer details about the breadth and scope of the error!
Maybe we should alert Debra to this? 🙂
Debra’s article is a mish-mosh of denialist garbage and Gavin rightly thrashes it. I like how she used Marc Morano as a source. 🙂
Boris-
If Gavin, you, or anyone want to criticize Debra’s article for using Marc Morano as a source, fine.
Then readers can learn that Gavin dislikes it for that reason. Each reader can decide whether using Marc Morano is a balanced or informed source.
However, quoting Marc Morano in a column is neither an error of fact (as implied by Gavin’s title) nor a violation of journalistic standards, which Gavin’s introduction would seem to imply.
In fairness to her readers– and in keeping with journalistic standards– Debra correctly identifies Marc Morano as “communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee”. She also lets people know which bits of information came from him. This should be sufficient to alert readers that Marc Morano is partisan, tends to express a certain view point, and that one might need to seek other sources to figure out if the consensus on climate change is shifting.
However, when Gavin tries smear the article he dislikes by claiming it she mad factual errors where she did not, and furter suggesting Debra’s lacks appreciation of “basic journalistic standards.†he should support that with evidence of honest to goodness factual errors or violations of journalistic standards!
As I see it: Gavin unjustly claimed that Debra has violated the standards of her profession. That’s a strong claim. It’s at least as bad as people who suggest the guys at GISSTemp are intentionally fiddling with the thermometer record in violation of standards of science.
Your defending Gavin’s accusations– which appear baseless– by complaining she quoted Marc Morano is, quite frankly, a very lame defense of Gavin’s behavior.
Of course, if you simply wish to explain how poor her column is, go ahead. I’ve never suggested she deserves a Pulitzer! Neither do most columnists.
About Oreskes: that was a surprisingly (or maybe not) sloppy piece of work. First, Oreskes is a historian of science, not a professional pollster, or a sociologist. She wrote a rather fine book (that I have read) on “The rejection of continental drift”, from which she could have taken a few lessons! There was indeed a “consensus” against continental drift, which she attributes to the fact that Alfred Wegener used “methods” (rather vaguely defined) that geologists (mostly the Americans, though), disliked, as if that was in itself a justification. However, the most important question in that case, that is relevant to today’s debate, is not why, but how the scientific establishment used its control over publications to discredit Wegener’s theory, and impose a competing theory. Everyone got the signal, and no one dared to publish on the subject for another 30 years. Even after such a long time, most researchers were very scared of that subject, and would approach it very carefully. How scared are today’s climate dissidents?
In her infamous “climate change consensus” study, what is vaguely defined is the notion of “consensus”, and what constitutes a disagreement with the consensus. When I repeated her search on Google scholar, one of the first papers that came out was one of Chris Landsea’s papers, where he explicitly criticized the IPCC’s conclusions on hurricanes and claimed that there wasn’t enough knowledge to support their conclusion. That paper clearly disagreed with the consensus, alhtough not with a competing theory. Is that why she included it in the “pro-IPCC” papers? In any case, papers rarely explicitly state opposition to a given “consensus”. Rather, they will address one specific issue in a particular context, which may turn out to be against how the consensus addresses that particular issue, but at that point, it’s impossible to tell without a fine analysis of the literature. A lot is written in between the lines. Furthermore, there are a lot of incentives for climate scientists to always give lip service to the so-called consensus, even if their research has nothing to do with it. It’s a common practice in all sciences. If you get a grant to study climate, you must put it in the context of “global climate change”, and therefore refer to that concept whenever you publish your results. That is one of the many factors that Oreskes should have taken into account. There have been other polls (by Von Storch and Bray, for examples) that showed much more mixed opinions.
Narrowness of scope is a feature of journal articles. For this reason alone, I am puzzled by Oreskes approach to learning anything at all about whether or not anyone agrees or disagrees with “THE” “climate change consensus”. Whatever the consensus is, it’s rather broad. As expressed in the IPCC documents it’s a big vague. We’ve had arguments about what “most” means!
The idea that scholarly research articles on quite specific topics would generally include dissents from some broadly believed “consensus” seems unlikely.
I’m sure Gavin has looked at HadCRU, and is aware that using it as the metric supports Dr. Lindzen’s statement. I just don’t think Gavin is capable of saying things like “…there is a factually true basis for the claim there is no statistically significant warming since 1995.” It goes against everything he’s said in the past. Plus, were he to make such a statement they would have a field day with it at CA and WUWT.
Doug– Gavin had legitimate options other than admitting there is a factual true basis to the claim there is no statistically significant warming since 1995 (and that the basis is equal or better to the claim there is statistically significant warming.)
Options included:
1) Not writing a blog post about Debra’s article. This was the simplest option.
2) Discussing her article but ignoring her discussion of Lindzen’s claim. Of course, if he omits the discussion of Lindzen, and the false claim she got Oreskes’ article wrong, he is left whining about trivialities.
Obviously, whining that Debra characterized Oreskes article correctly but simply disagrees that Oreskes analysis of 928 abstracts of peer reviewed papers indexed under “climate science” published and published between 1993-2003 permits us to detect whether any scientists disagree with whatever the consensus is supposed to be.
On the one hand, I suspect most scientists agree with some consensus– particularly as vaguely worded by the IPCC. I agree with it. But I don’t believe anyone can measure the level of agreement or disagreement with the consensus claim by inspecting abstracts of journal articles in peer reviewed.
“Your defending Gavin’s accusations– which appear baseless– by complaining she quoted Marc Morano is, quite frankly, a very lame defense of Gavin’s behavior.”
Gavin doesn’t need me to defend him. Bellamy’s junk was not factual. The reference to the Global warming petition was factual, but misleading–who cares if ideologues who happen to be chemists sign a petition? Real journalists are not fooled by the shenanigans of astroturf groups.
As for Lindzen, do you think he’ll be using monthly data the next time an El Nino rolls around? Not a chance.
And finally, do we need to get into to the insignificant differences between 1934 and 1998 in the U.S. record? The only ones crowing about the record are denialists.
I’m surprised you are defending this junk–or is that you just want to pick another fight with Gavin or NASA or whoever?
Boris–
I’m not defending Debra’s article. I’m criticizing Gavin for basing his criticism on false accusations.
I was unaware I am having a fight with Gavin. However, I think I have as much a right to criticize his inaccuracies as he has to criticize Debra. (I do not consider his doing so to be picking a fight with her.)
And yet, you decided to do so, by saying “Gavin rightly thrashes it.” without providing any caveats to the specifics of his criticism.
Gavin’s more severe criticisms of Debra are based on mistatements of fact. His insinuation that Debra is violating the professional ethics of her field is a smear. It goes well beyond simply saying an article is poor.
In my opinion, Gavin making such wild claims is unsettling, as it suggests he either no longer sees clearly on these issues.
That said: Is Debra’s article tendentious? Sure. Is it misleading? Sure. In my experience almost all opinion columns in newspapers tend to be tendentious and many are misleading. I see these on the right, the left, the middle and quite frequently at the NYTimes.
But Gavin’s responding with a tendentious misleading article of his own is silly.
==========
Having said that, we can, of course what you say about Belamy etc.:
Debra quoted him as saying “”It’s not even science any more; it’s anti-science.” Bellamy notes that official data show that “in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002, Arctic ice actually increased.”
* The first part is an opinion.
*The second bit– I have no idea what Bellamy might mean. Does “have been getting colder” mean, “temperature dropped monotonically”? Or “Temperature have been colder than in 1998? The temperature dipped after 1998, reached a relative min in 2000 and went up and it’s been oscillating. Bellamy may only be a poor writer — but it’s possible to interpret that as just befuddled.
* On the third bit: As far as I know, there is at all to interpret Bellamy as right on the 2002 ice thing.
I googled Bellamy’s article itself: He doesn’t cite sources. Who knows where he dreams up his numbers.
On the petition: It’s fine to explain why you think it makes no sense to take Chemists seriously on GW. I don’t take Eli seriously. 🙂
That said: It is what it is. There is a petition. Some have signed it. I don’t plan to. Debra is free to report it’s existence and you are free to explain why it’s meaningless.
On Lindzen: I have no idea what data Lindsen plans to use when the next El Nino rolls around. If he switches, you get to point that out. But you can’t paint him guilty by predicting future switches. (BTW: Do you think Gavin will switch to monthly data when El Nino rolls around? Or Eli? Or… FWIW, I plan to run a post using annual averages when the annual average comes out. After that, back to monthly!)
Do we need to get into anything? Did Panchuri need to use 5 year averages? Or…
What’s wrong with Debra recollecting the previous errors in GISSTemp when reporting last month’s errors? If we believe warming is real are we supposed to pretend last month was the first time GISSTemp has QA issues? Or get all huffy that you can’t magically erase people’s memories like the guys in the Men In Black? That’s silly.
Here in comments, you at least are not basing your assessment inaccurate claims about her article. That’s fair. Gavin was not.
“What’s wrong with Debra recollecting the previous errors in GISSTemp when reporting last month’s errors? If we believe warming is real are we supposed to pretend last month was the first time GISSTemp has QA issues? Or get all huffy that you can’t magically erase people’s memories like the guys in the Men In Black? That’s silly.”—
GISS temp is pure steaming crap–Gavin and AGW alarmist are now reacting emotionally to the continuing identification of the clown show put on by NASA
“Debra is violating the professional ethics of her field is a smear.”\
No it isn’t. It is accurate. That others are also guilty does not excuse it.
“What’s wrong with Debra recollecting the previous errors in GISSTemp when reporting last month’s errors”
Nothing. However, she does so by pointing to an insignificant regional record–it’s a dead giveaway of where she got her information.
And BTW, Eli is a chemist who has RTFR, as he says. I wonder how many of the people who signed the petition did so? Or did they merely read the attached Robinson, Robinson and Soon “peer reviewed” “paper” flush with cherry picks, outdated data and misleading claims?
I asked the following in Real Climate, and Gavin responded in his usual weaselword way..
#71 Anne Says:
2 December 2008 at 10:59 AM
“She then throws in a few completely untrue ‘facts’ (i.e. “in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder†(not) â€
maybe she checked Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg
which confirms her statement
[Response: Not really. There are two issues – first, that there is uncertainty in what the actual anomaly is in any one year (different products with different assumptions give different anomalies) – in the NCDC or GISTEMP analyses your interpretation of the statement (that she meant that 1998 was the record warmest year) is not true. However, that is not the interpretation I took from her statement (actually David Bellamy’s) at all – “In every year… world temperatures have been getting colder†implies to me that specifically each year since 1998 has been colder than the last, and this is not true no matter what product you look at. And finally, and this is probably the most important point – these individual year rankings at the level of less than 0.1 deg C are pretty much meaningless and anyone drawing conclusions from them is just fooling themselves. They are simply not a robust measure of global warming – long term trends are much more relevant. – gavin]
Ann–
Thanks for that!
I can’t help noticing that:
a) Gavin’s argument that the statement about temperatures since 1998 is meaningless is different from the argument in his post, which was that the statement is false,
b) As I noted, Bellamy’s sentences is oddly worded.. One can interpret it to mean what Gavin thinks it says or you can interpret it the way you do. Your interpretation makes it “not false” . I would think before lodging an accusation that a reporter mis-reported, one should at least consider accepting the possibility that an author intended an ambiguously worded sentence to imply the correct meaning.
c) If Gavin wished to make the more nuanced argument that Debra’s article was based on true facts but those facts have little meaning, that would be fine. But, he did not chose to make that argument. He chose to specifically argue that the facts were clearly false.
Gavin’ article is woefully tendentious. If he now wishes to pull back and only criticize Debra for being tendentious, and using facts selectively, then all one can observes is this: “Pot, kettle, black”.
Boris–
I didn’t say Debra exhibited a lapse but it justified based on what others do. I said she didn’t violate the standards. Others doing similar things when writing opinion pieces aren’t violating standards either.
So, Gavin’s the accusation is a smear.
Here’s the thing:
Debra’s article was not a straight news article; it’s an opinion piece.
In her opinion piece, Debra expressing her opinion and provided the reasons she believes these things. Opinion columns are often misleading because writers are permitted to express their opinions and make a case for them in an opinion piece. More over, there are space limitations. Standards don’t require opinion pieces to explain why other people have different opinions.
Newspapers handle the issue of differing opinions by having other people write up their opinions and support them. That’s the standard.
The market place of ideas sorts this out.
At best, Gavin explained why he doesn’t like her sources or title. Many of his complaints — like the winging about the title– were utterly flimsy; some were totally inaccurate.
It’s true that some of Debra’s sources are less than stellar– for example, Gavin himself failed to mention that the initial erroneous data at GISS was replaced by erronneous data and so it had to be re-replaced. Should Debra have consulted a second source other than Gavin? It would have been better. But standards for opinion pieces don’t require her to dig deeper and find several sources for what went wrong at GISS to write her opinoin piece. If she likes, simply providing Gavin’s incomplete rather self – serving version is ok.
The fact is, Debra made her sources traceable to readers, and provided the credentials of her sources and we can all judge whether or not we agree with her opinion and supported it. It wasn’t the world’s best opinion piece, but there was no violation of journalistic standards.
Excellent thread Lucia. Beyond having Gavin critisize someone else’s professional ethics in publishing an editorial, maybe it would be worthwhile looking at Gavin’s ethics in the way that he runs his Real Climate web site.
I find that if you are a skeptic and you ask a dumb question they will post it and allow their fan club to hit it out of the park. They will allow the local fan club to insult you, but they will not allow you to return the favor. Retaliation will not be posted. If you stick to the issue and if you produce a post that the fan club and the moderators are unable to answer, then they will not post it, no matter how relevant, respectful, and to the point it is.
The subject for the 18 Nov thread at RC was why people are still saying that warming has recently stopped. The author, Rasmus, presents his take on the dilema. I tried to answer this question for him, and I submitted my response, but Gavin refused to post it.
Rasmus starts his article, called “Mind the Gap†with this:
“The misconception ‘the global warming has stopped’ still lives on in some minds. We have already discussed why this argument is flawed. So why have we failed to convince?â€
I tried to answer that question by submitting this to RC:
“Well, Rasmus, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you are really interested in answering that question. If that is the case, then the approach that you need to use is not to throw up your own straw men, but rather to address the issues of people that make the claim that warming has stopped.
To begin with, people who make that claim have a period of time in mind. Most of them believe that there has been no warming since about 1997-1998. And I agree with that claim. So let’s do a little review of the arguments and counter arguments.
1. If someone wants to convince you about what has been happening for the last decade, it would seem to be very dishonest to use a temperature chart that begins in 1850 such that the area of interest is compressed into a half inch, as your first chart obviously does. It is this chart or a similar one that most of the warming sites consistently use when addressing the issue. The question is, if you are not trying to fool people, then why use a 158 year chart to talk about the last decade? Better to use a chart that covers the time period for which the claim is being made – like this one.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/10/updated-11-year-global-temp-anomoly.html
So when you ask yourself, why have we failed to convince, there is one of your reasons.
2. After the 158 year chart doesn’t do the trick, then warmers typically move on to the next rationalization – “the period is flat because there is a large El Nino at the beginning and a La Nina at the end.†The warmers conviniently leave out the fact that the period is covered by 7 ENSO events, 4 El Nino’s, and 3 La Nina’s. And they leave out the fact that the El Nino of 97/98 was followed by a long La Nina that basically cancelled out it’s effect on the slope of the trend line for the period. Gavin created a data set that did an ENSO correction for HadCrut3. I plotted that data against the uncorrected HadCrut3, and the difference was very little – as you can see here.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/07/gavin-schmidt-enso-adjustment-for.html
I also used a seperate method to judge the ENSO effects here.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/05/ten-year-hadcrut3-enso-effects.html
So once again, we have a false argument from the warmers trying to justify the absence of warming.
3. Then we have the statistical significance argument that is generated by people like Tamino. He takes the assumed climate trend due to CO2 forcing and overlays it with noise. Then he shows, that for some period of time, this trended noise can also have flat temperature sections. This argument makes no sense for a couple of reasons. First, there is no noise in climate. Everything must happen for a reason. And when we look at the data after the fact, we should be able to explain the reasons. This is not the case with the absence of warming for the last decade or so. Second, he only uses one independent data set, and he finds the flat areas in that data set. But the flat trend that we are now observing is confirmed by several independent data sources, like the satellite data and the surface temp data. In addition, the information is also supported by the fact that there was no ocean heat content increase for the 4 year period from 2003 to 2006 (Willis et al). Sea level data from the University of Colorado shows no sea level increase for the last three years – and considering the close relationship between sea level and ocean heat content, it seems highly likely that there has been no increase in the ocean heat content for the last 6 years.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-of-colorado-global-sea-level.html
So it seems to me that if Tamino wanted to make a real point, he would have to generate three noise data sets and show that they could all have extended flat periods of 10 or 11 years, and that those flat periods could overlap for such a period. Of course he would have to take the first three that he generated. He couldn’t simply generate data sets until he found some that overlapped. Okay, so now you know why many people don’t find that argument convincing.
4. Then there is the argument that you presented above having to do with temperature extrapolations to the poles. I don’t find that argument convincing because I believe that the increase at the poles should be some multiplier of the increase in the tropics. But over a period of time when there is no increase at the tropics, there should be increase at the poles. X times zero is zero. In addition, temperature readings in the Antarctic do not support the theory at the Arctic.
5. You can make the argument that GISS temp still shows warming while others do not, but even the GISS temp increase is only half the predicted .2C for the decade. Also, for any number of reasons, and I don’t have time to go into all of them at this moment, many people believe that GISS is an outlier that cannot be trusted. For example – poor coverage of Northern Canada and Africa. Often high Siberian temperatures. While surface temp station quality control in the US is poor at best, how can anyone think that it isn’t even worse in Siberia. Then there are the wide variety of data “adjustments†that always seem to yield warmer results. Etc. etc.
6. The absence of warming is a problem because there are no natural elements of variation for the period that can explain it. The level of CO2 rose as fast as ever, and without other reasons for the lack of warming, the climate sensitivity number must become suspect.
7. The last 30 year period that many warmers insist is the minimum acceptable period for defining a significant trend can quite likely be explained by ENSO. This chart shows that El Ninos were hugely dominant for the period from 1977 to 1998 when all of the warming for that period occured. Prior to 1977 you can see that La Ninas were more dominant.
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/ts.gif
So, rasmus, there are some of the reasons that you have failed to convice people about warming in the last decade. Hope that helps.”
I think that it is very clear that Gavin’s objective is not to have a site at which Global Warming is discussed, but rather to have a site at which Global Warming orthodoxy is propogated and at which even the opportunity to express contrasting opinion is suppressed whenever possible. My own believe is that Gavin has no right to call himself a scientist. Sience is done by proposing clear theories that have standards of falsification. The AGW crowd never proposes any clear standards for the falsification of their theory, and they make absolutely no attempts at performing such falsification tests themselves. Instead they selectively use data that supports them and ignore data that contradicts them. To the assertion that “the science is settled”, I have to respond that not only is it not settled, but I see nothing in the work of the AGW proponents that would qualify as real science.
In any case, the selective and agenda driven censorship that Gavin practices at his web site is also well documented at CA. Makes me wonder if he ever looses any sleep at night thinking about how anti-scientific his crusade really is.
Boris–
Why do you wonder whether the chemists who signed the petition didn’t RTFR? I should think many of those motivated to sign a report likely did. For some reason, they remain motivated to sign the petition.
Great post Lucia.
Hey Boris, since you are such an expert, can you share with us your expertise in climate science? I am very curious.
Tilo–
I agree that RC posts often “rebutt” strawman arguments by advanced by unnamed fictional people who seem to exists in the minds of RC writers only. Their heavy moderation preventing people from posting actual counter arguments aggravates the problem. There habit of not linking or quoting to those who they are rebutting doesn’t help. And heck, the habit of supporting argument with things like:
“We already addressed this link to long winded article that doesn’t really support the RC authors current claim”.
(Seriously, did you click the links to their articles on Oreskes? Did those previous RC articles explain how Debra got Oreskes’s article all wrong? Nope.)
Oddly, in this case, Gavin named the person he was criticizing. So, in contrast to the “strawman” articles, we can actually identify where Gavin incorrectly attributes faults to the person whose arguments he is attempting to rebutt.
“Why do you wonder whether the chemists who signed the petition didn’t RTFR? ”
Well, if they had read the Robinson, Robinson and Soon paper that accompanied the petition AND read the actual research, then they would know how full of it R, R and S were. The paper contains the “CO2 lags temp in the ice ages” canard that is a dead giveaway for someone who either a) doesn’t understand the theory of AGW or b) wants to mislead someone else.
And why should RC respond to posts like Tilo’s above? It’s all been dealt with before–ad nauseum. People like Tilo NEVER get it.
Boris, people like you never get it. People like you like to create an ensemble of lousy models and show any temperature trend is “consistent with the models. People like you deny taking a trend over the past 10yrs. the bottom line is that temperatures over the past 10yrs show not statistically significant warming. They at best show cooling.
oops–typing while angry and not checking not good–my bad. I should have typed 10yrs.
Boris–
1) The reason the “CO2 lags temp in the ice ages” issue is repeated is that those who wish to rebutt it never provide an fully adequate explanation. As far as I have been able to tell, a handwaving “it’s a positive feedback system” is provided with no math, not mechanistic model etc.
Of course we all understand positive feedback and how it works. But to demonstrate that this is the reason for the CO2 lag itself requires more work than explaining the mere existence of positive feedback.
Given the lack of a full explanation for the lag, I am hardly surprised that thinking people are are not universally convinced that the issue is a “canard” as you put it. If you want it to go away, provided a decent, complete explanation. Preferably including a model; preferably with math. Then, when people bring it up, be proactive and link to the decent explanation. Claims of previous explanations which always turn out to point to inadequate explanations is not going to work.
Claiming that others don’t are deficient because they don’t understand a theory that cannot be adequetely or convincingly explained by those who believe it is, in a word, lame.
2) RC isn’t required to post anything. Tilo is equaly permitted to post that as an example of the sorts of things they won’t post.
When provided with the information, each individual is permitted their own opinion of what that means.
I observe that RC posts often counter argue strawman, provide inadequate explanations, and argue by pointing to their own previous strawman posts, which often do not relate very well to the current post. Of course, they have every right to continue to do this at their own blog.
You have a right to keep telling us they have a right to do these thing, and I will agree. That said, I think RC’s operation is inherently tendentious and is runs counter to the culture of science.
Tilo
I have had few of my comments posted to Real Climate. Most do not pass “moderation”. RC seems to have no interest in allowing point by point rebuttals of pro AGW arguments and you are rarely allowed to follow-up to rebut their dismissive refutations of what they do allow you to post. Most frequently there will be a reference to a study that has settled the science in question and you are done. When I’ve dug in to read what they refer to it more often then not results in more uncertainty about the topic than they make out.
Based on the “tone” of your email above there was never any chance it would be posted. In the future you might have a chance of comments posted, but you would have to pay attention to your wording. Here are some of your comments that jumped out at me.
“Well, Rasmus, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you are really interested in answering that question”
“it would seem to be very dishonest to use a temperature chart that begins in 1850 ”
“if you are not trying to fool people”
“The warmers conviniently leave out the fact”
“Then we have the statistical significance argument that is generated by people like Tamino”
I found that more of my comments got posted when I cleansed my writing of sarcasm and any snarkiness. After all these discussions about climate are not personal and arguments can be made solely on the data without taking “pot shots” at people.
Just my two cents worth but I’m hoping you get posted a bit more at RC because I’m getting killed over there too.
edward–
It’s true that Tilo should edit for snarkiness if they want RC authors to permit it past moderation. RC has the perfect right to control their blog in anyway they chose, including applying different standards of tone and snarkiness to themselves and those who disagree with them, suppressing dissenting comments etc. Since the empirical evidence indicates they exercise that right, if Tilo wishes to his posts to survice RC moderation, he needs to reduce his snark level way below that of RC authors who have been known to argue by labeling things foolish rather than explaining the flaw in an argument.
RC needs a proper FAQ. A good one could end up being a decent approximation of or at least outline for Steve McIntyre’s long requested engineering quality exposition. If Brian Greene can make string theory and other aspects of modern physics almost comprehensible, I don’t see why the folks running RC couldn’t do the same for greenhouse theory.
“As far as I have been able to tell, a handwaving “it’s a positive feedback system†is provided with no math, not mechanistic model etc.”
Huh? What’s so hard to understand about the fact that warming oceans outgas CO2 and that CO2 is a known GHG? How is a lay explanation “handwaving”? Why don’t you hold Robinson, Robinson and Soon to one percent of the standards you believe should apply to lay discussions of climate science?
DeWitt–
Yes, they do. I think they are setting up a Wiki. But the main problem is that when they write their articles– whether a FAQ, WIKI etc, they need to review each article and then ask themselves a bunch of question. The two most important I can think of are:
* Would I find this explanation adequate if I did not believe the final conclusion? Or did I gloss over details and skip steps that are required to convince skeptics?
* Are we providing FAQs to questions people actually ask? Or are we providing FAQs to questions the RC authors would prefer they ask? If they do the second, people probably won’t read the answer. After all, who cares about the answer to a question they didn’t ask?
“Based on the “tone†of your email above there was never any chance it would be posted.”
Agreed. I post to RC based upon the tone of the responses that I get from the local AGW proponents. And of course their responses are always attacking and snarky. I don’t accept the idea of preferential treatement for those that agree with the web owner. They can block my posts and sing to the choir if they like, but my attitude will always be to respond with the level of courtesy that I am shown. Sorry, I’m not a turn the other cheek kind of guy. Good luck on your own efforts at RC, but I fear that the outcome of any of your debates is predetermined. Any winning point that you make will simply be censored.
Boris–
On the CO2 lag
FWIW: I actually respect handwaving explanations, but recognize them for what they are.
Handwaving doesn’t mean “difficult to understand”. Qualitative, lay explanations are provided for cosmic rays too. Both give the gist of the argument and suggest a reason why something might be the case. But they don’t constitute convincing proof that someting is true.
The lay explanation of positive feedback explains the lag is of the same qualitative way as the explanation for “cosmic rays”.
RC refers to these as “Handwaving”.
If you are aware of a quantitative full explanation of the positive feedback idea, provide a link. I have yet to see one.
However, it’s pointless to try to argue by using “lay explanation” for the CO2 lag thing and “handwaving” for things like cosmic rays. Both are supported by qualitative lay explanations and/or handwaving depending on which word you prefer. People are permitted to
On Robinson, Robinson and Soon
Why does it bother you that I think sufficiently little of “Robinson, Robinson and Soon” that I make no effort to read their stuff, comment or bring any particular attention to it? If you want to bring up a point in their material, go ahead. I’ll be happy to respond.
As far as I can tell, so far you complained that people should just immediately recognize that the CO2 lag issue is a canard. Yet, as I pointed out, skeptics are only offered handwaving arguments. If you want to convince people, you need to beef up the argument and fill in the gaps. (Of course, this means you need to recognize the gaps first. That you don’t is not the fault of those who are unconvinced by the incomplete argument in favor of the idea.)
This is a simple concept and applies rather widely in science and logic!
On thing: If you are going to engage in a debate over what party “C” claimed, I do request that you provide a link to the argument you are critizing so I can read it.
“And why should RC respond to posts like Tilo’s above? It’s all been dealt with before–ad nauseum. People like Tilo NEVER get it.”
Here’s your big chance Boris. All of my points are sitting up there as clear targets for you. Why not take each of them an show how “It’s all been dealt with before-ad nauseum.” I’m starting to see this kind of approach used more and more by the warmers. First it starts with an unsupported assertion, such as yours, then it turns into links that really don’t address the points at all. Have a moment of honesty Boris. Forget the memorized talking points. Warm up your fingers and destroy all of my objections. I’m dying to see it.
Boris.. you write..
Debra’s article is a mish-mosh of denialist garbage and Gavin rightly thrashes it. I like how she used Marc Morano as a source.
I will take it that you are making some insinuation about be by using my well known moniker.. mosh. I’d like a retraction since A.) I am not a denialist; C02 causes warming and Humans are to blame for increased C02 emissions, and B.) the complete surface temperature record shows that it has been warming. Don’t confuse my criticisms of the practices of some climate scientists and my criticisms of certain government agencies charge with climate data collection with a wholesale rejection of the basic tenets of climate science.
Mosh–
Any theories who “mish” might be? 🙂
Not really on topic, but Lucia’s response to the glacial period CO2 lag thing got me curious. Does anybody know offhand of any freely available research on clear sky LW fluxes and cooling rates during glacial periods using LBL models? (I should probably search around before posting, but I’m feeling lazy this morning)
I’d imagine estimates of spatial distribution and volume of atmospheric H2O, surface albedo, etc… would be really rough, but if someone knows of one, I thought it might be an interesting read, thanks!
Tilo and Lucia and edward: I have managed to get critical comments into the RC ‘Mind the Gap’ thread and the Debra Saunders thread. You can try and reverse engineer Gavin’s censorship policy. Stuff that explicitly links to a skeptic blog like Tilo’s comment above (especially a blog with a name that plays on their name!), or explicitly mentions Steve McIntyre, won’t get through.
Boris, who is sometimes quite reasonable, seems to have completely lost it this time, resorting to offensive language like ‘denialist’ and misrepresenting those who signed the petition: ‘ideologues who happen to be chemists’ (what about ideologues who happen to be climate scientists?), speculating about what Lindzen might say in the future, and completely missing the point about the 1934/1998 thing (the significance of it, Boris, as you will continue to misrepresent it, is not the magnitude of the effect on the global temperature record, but the fact that such errors are made, raising the questions of the competence of those involved and how many other errors are in the system).
PaulM
I posted comments #73+74 as William on the “Mind the Gap” thread in response to an earlier comment regarding Wildfires and Global Warming. Mike responded to me by referring to a T.Barnett study titled “Human induced changes in the Hydrology of the Western US” published 2008 and then ends his comment by stating “lets move on”.
I dug a little deeper and had the following correspondence with study’s author Tim Barnett who was very nice about answering my questions about why the study looked only at the period 1950-1999 rather than through 2007. Here is a summary of his replies:
Study footnote 19 stated:
“this period excludes the large scale changes in runoff, precipitation and water storage that has occurred in the Southwest especially the Colorado river drainage since 2000. We do not claim that the large changes since 2000 are necessarily the result of human-induced warming”
Why was this period excluded?
“…the model data we used ended in 1999. There are only a
Few runs that pickup in 2000 and go into the future. But these runs
have new i.c. (initial conditions) so the discontinuity between pre-1999 runs and post 1999 runs puts a real kink in the analysis.” TPB
Have you done any other studies that tacked on the 2000-2007
time period or would you know of one?
“Everyone uses the same set of models we did so we are all faced with the same problem. but…we did the accelerated climate prediction initiative, result published in 2004 in Climatic Change (444 pgs and 2 volumes). In that study we integrated the models from 1860-2100 with no interruption. Maybe something there.” TPB
I thought it was interesting that the study period ended right before the period where warming has leveled out for the last 10 years.
Paul:
“I have managed to get critical comments into the RC”
So have I Paul. They posted them as long as they felt like they could answer them. But at the point where they ran out of answers, the censorship kicked in. Also, if you need a skeptic’s blog to provide a trend chart for the last decade, because they try to bury the information of interest in a 150 year chart where the recent trend is not visible, then what are you to do? If you cannot present the data, then it simply becomes an assertion against an assertion. As a skeptic you play in a rigged game at RC. The fact that you play there only allows them to maintain the illusion of fairness.
Boris
The issue is not the “positive feedback” per se but
1) Feedback’s that are assumed to be positive but the magnitude is highly uncertain OR
2) Feedbacks assumed to be positive that are actually negative. e.g., as found by Roy Spencer Global Warming and Nature’s Thermostat
3) Ignoring natural oscillations. e.g. Spencer finds that fitting Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) plus a small CO2 contribution fits the data much better than conventional CO2 plus large “positive feedback.”
Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
4) Negative feedback that has not been identified yet. i.e., so little is known about water cycle and precipitation.
5) Focusing on CO2 rather than on Optical Depth.
See Zagoni’s Developments in Greenhouse Theory
See especially figures
Linear Trends in NOAA 60 Year Time Series
These show an increase in temperature anomaly but a DECREASE in H2O anomaly while CO2 increased.
The consequence is that the OPTICAL DEPTH shows a very small trend.
of 5*10^-4%/year! versus ten times that expected from CO2 alone.
i.e. the decreasing H2O balances off the increasing CO2.
See: Dr. Miskolczi’s complete presentation at the International Conference on Climate Change, New York, organized by The Heartland Institute on 4 March 2008
See: Miklos Zagoni’s presentation in the Hungarian Meteorological Society on 2 Oct 2008.
I just read the Miskolczi presentation and although the mathematics are over my head I’m interested to see if his theory gains traction. I seem to recall others that are smarter than I stating that there was way too much reliance on GCM’s in the climate community and there needed to be much more effort put into understanding and laying out the fundamental physics involved.
Here are a few points from the summary: 1) The underlying theory of Global warming accounts for only a part of the involved physics, 2) GHG emission has no direct consequence on the global mean energetic equilibrium, 3) Earth’s greenhouse effect is working at it’s enrgetic top: further greenhouse warming is practically impossible. 4) The Kiehl-Trenberth global mean energy budget adopted by IPCC 2007 is inaccurate, mistaken.
Has there been any discussion or reaction anywhere on this presentation?
If correct this could be a transition point in the whole climate debate.
edward–
I also found Miskolczi’s work impenetrable right off the bat. I tend to think this is a bad sign.
I still remember stepping out of a meeting in Davos. A Russian researcher has presented his theory on deriving equations for multiphase flow. A whole bunch of us, all published in various peer reviewed articles in all purporting to derive equations for multiphase flow stood around saying “I didn’t understand anything he said. Did you?” There may have been splendid things in that paper, but no one understood it. So… clearly, the researcher needed to figure out a way to get someone in the field to understand it.
Unfortunately, even when I read others discussion of what Mizcholzi did, I still don’t understand it. This could be me, but obviously, I can’t possibly comment any further than “I don’t understand it.”
Edward:
“If correct this could be a transition point in the whole climate debate.”
This is another problem with the whole AGW debate and why it has absolutely nothing to do with science. Roy Spencer generated a paper that he invited the AGW community to evaluate. In it he accounts for current warming with only .6C per 2XCO2 of climate sensitivity. As far as I know, there have been no serious challenges to his conclusions. It seems that the AGW community will take apart anything that contradicts their theories if they are able. If not, they take the next best route and simply pretend that the information isn’t there. This can be seen in many other cases. For example, Lenah Ababneh has created tree ring proxies that are far superior to those used by Mann and the hockey team. But Mann will not only not use them, he will not even acknowledge that they exist. Why? They don’t agree with his foregone conclusions. If the Miskolczi presentation is sound, you will hear nothing from the AGW community. If it is not, the errors will be trumpeted all over the net.
Lucia
Excellent post re the Realclimate post on Debra Saunder’s column. I agree with your points; I must admit when I 1st read Gavin’s post I thought gee Debra must have made some real bloopers to have her journalist ethics bought into question. Then I read her her column & thought “Gavin must be under intense pressure to post rubbish like this”.
David L Hagen
Your links have stoked my interest in Miskolsci’s thesis.
David Stockwell at Niche Modelling has an interesting series of posts (8) on Miskolsci, together with what appear, at first glance, reasonably informed comments. A lot of reading to do.
See: http://landshape.org/enm/the-virial-theorem-miskolczi-part-2/
Oh Boris…….
Your scientific credentials are??
Lucia, you would be a great teacher. Actually, you are a great teacher.
Great independence, patience, and down home civility.
Great work
Thanks – EJ
EJ,
“Your scientific credentials are??”
Irrelevant.
mosh,
I extend my shallowest apology 🙂
David,
I think we were referring to the positive feedback of CO2 in the rebound from a glaciation. CO2 is an obvious positive feedback in that case. The positive feedback of water vapor is well established. I’m not sure where you get the idea that H2O has decreased–it has increased as expected.
And of course there could be an undiscovered negative feedback. I hope there is one. I hope there is no undiscovered positive feedback, but that is just as likely.
I jumped into this conversation rather late, but I find it interesting that Gavin (wrongly) criticizes this author for not being “fact” checked, but yet his GISS’s own data metric just produced a crocatoa like blunder which blame and excuses not withstanding still does not nullify the fact that the egregious data was reported.
Like my old high school football coach used to say, “don’t go ordering others until your own house is in order.”
Boris–
When David references Christy, he is discussing clouds. Generally, the feed back due to water vapor and clouds (which represent a condense phase) are discussed separately.
The feed back due to clouds in not “undiscovered” in the sense that we haven’t conceived of it. It is recognized to have a sizeable magnitude and to poorly understood. It may well be a negative feedback. Or not. We don’t know.
Christy suggests it’s negative and large.
Also–thank for admitting that credentials are irrelevant. That said, if you criticize Chemists who sign the who-zi-what’s petitions for not being authoritative based on their credentials, it’s fair to ask people what your’s credentials are. As you do not answer, those who thought your criticism based on a credential check was valid will suspect you are likely less qualified to comment on climate than a chemist.
That said, I think we can all agree– just as your credentials are irrelevant, so are those of the “chemists” whose opinions you suggest we discount based on their lack of credentials.
Boris #7074
On water vapor see the figures I cited:
Zagoni’s Developments in Greenhouse Theory
Figures: Linear Trends in NOAA 60 Year Time Series
Zagoni in An Introduction into the Greenhouse Theory of Ferenc Miskolczi, Hungarian Meteorological Society, Oct 2008 shows:
DECLINING Relative Humidity from 1948-2007. See Fig 41/55 from NOAA data.
CONSTANT Specific Humidity from 1948-2007. See Fig. 42/55.
What evidence can you point to that water specific humidity is increasing? OR that Relative Humidity is NOT decreasing?
cf Article on satellite moisture.
McMillin, L. M., J. Zhao, M. K. Rama Varma Raja, S. I. Gutman, and J. G. Yoe (2007), Radiosonde humidity corrections and potential Atmospheric Infrared Sounder moisture accuracy, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13S90, doi:10.1029/2005JD006109.
Articles on humidity/moisture:
McMillin, L. M., J. Zhao, M. K. Rama Varma Raja, S. I. Gutman, and J. G. Yoe (2007), Radiosonde humidity corrections and potential Atmospheric Infrared Sounder moisture accuracy, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13S90, doi:10.1029/2005JD006109.
Summary of Global Positioning System (GPS) Integrated Precipitable Water (IPW) Santos et al. 2007
lucia (Comment#7069) December 3rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm ,
On Miskolczi’s theory: My reading, which may well be incorrect, is that his model is at heart a tarted up one layer (zero dimensional?) model. He has tweaked it severely by make it non-gray with a lot of additional irrelevant hand waving. A one layer model can never have a surface upward flux greater than twice the incoming flux much like Willis Eschenbach’s steel shell model. But a one layer model can also never accurately represent the real atmosphere because the real atmosphere and the planetary surface are neither isothermal nor isotropic.
If the greenhouse effect is currently running near maximum, how does one explain the boreal forests in Antarctica during the peak temperature observed in the Eocene about 50 My ago? Or how do you explain the physical evidence of a sub-tropical climate including the presence of alligators in Eastern Tennessee about 4.5 to 7 My ago?
DeWitt– It was M’s tweaks to the one layer model and their justification I didn’t get. But yes, the issue is: If there is a limit to warming, and we are near it, why has it been warmer? The result seemed counter intuitive.
lucia (Comment#7081) December 4th, 2008 at 6:33 am,
I also thought his treatment of the decrease of temperature and pressure with altitude was unnecessarily complex and obscure compared to the usual buoyancy, heat capacity and gravitational potential energy treatment. In fact, it was at that point that my BS alarm started to ring and it only got louder as I read further. I challenge anyone who defends Miskolczi to create a multilayer atmosphere model using the same approach and get the same result. I can think of no reason why splitting the atmosphere into layers based on altitude or pressure would make a difference to the result if the physics are in fact correct. I’m not interested in doing it myself because I’m confident that the result will be a closer and closer approach to conventional greenhouse theory. I would be happy to be proved wrong, though.
DeWitt
You might consider the impact of linear assumptions and models on non-linear processes. See post by David Stockwell of Niche Modeling. Assumptions for linear regression
e.g., Was the temperature warmer in Antartica?
OR Did Antartica move from the equator to the pole?
OR Both?
You note”if the physics are in fact correct.” That is the key issue.
Before dismissing Miskolczi’s theory, have your reviewed the detailed data and correlations given in the Oct 2 presentation versus what the received GHG theories project?
Note the problems of surface temperature discontinuity and temperature lapse rate that he addresses.
With Miskolczi’s expertise in Line By Line radiation codes, it is worth exploring the data he presents that is not explained by conventional AGW models.
Lucia:
“if you criticize Chemists who sign the who-zi-what’s petitions for not being authoritative based on their credentials”
I don’t criticize them for their credentials. I criticize them for signing a petition supported by a paper that is obvious junk. Either a) they did not read the paper and are irresponsible or b) they did not catch the mistakes in the paper and are at best incurious, and at worst, incompetent. But remember that the proponents of the petition are arguing that the credentials matter–despite evidence or argumentation.
David:
“What evidence can you point to that water specific humidity is increasing? OR that Relative Humidity is NOT decreasing?”
See the AR4, section 3.4.2. I think Zagoni’s info may be bad, though I can’t confirm because the link on the image is dead.
On changes in total moisture see:
More Moisture in the Air? By Karl Bohnak, Meteorologist
Climate Metric Reality Check #3 – Evidence For A Lack Of Water Vapor Feedback On The Regional Scale
Towards A Robust Test on North America Warming Trend and Precipitable Water Content Increase
Boris–
1) You don’t know what caused or motivated the signatories to sign the petition. As people who have lived on this earth for a while, it’s entirely possible the signatories read all sorts of things.
2) You think some presentation that happens to be collated near the petition is junk. But junk in what sense? Some would call it a synopsis that provides a lay persons description of issues. As such, for those signing it, it may only be a memory prod for other things they have read.
3) But let us suppose that collocated presentation is absolutely the only thing the signatores have ever read: You think it’s obvious junk.
However, your only support for this opinion is to perpetually repeat that you think it’s junk and/or that people should be convinced the contents are junk by vaguely alluding to incomplete handwaving arguments against the points in the presentation. You seem unable or unwilling to state the specific errors in the presentation and then provide a decent, complete convincing argumentthat these alleged errors are, indeed errors.
There may be good arguments, but you at least, can’t seem to verbalize them.
Someone may have posted good arguments, but you can’t seem to locate and link to those arguments and explain precisely how that article you link addresses the specific error you believe exists. (The second is required to avoid those deadly links to red herrrings.)
So, if you can’t verbalize or bring forward good counter arguments to those points, how can the the errors be “obvious”?
4) Returning to your initial allusion to “chemists”. In any case…. if the you know your suspicions the signatories are chemists was irrelevant, why did you bring it up in the first place?
If your intention in accusing the signatories of being chemists was to suggest we should discount their signature because you, screen name boris, imagine they “at best incurious, and at worst, incompetent”…. I ask: Huh?
In any case, your only “evidence” these people are incurious or incompetent is that they a) signed a petition you would not sign and b) they don’t recognize as errors things you, personally, cannot demonstrate to be errors. That’s pretty pathetic reasoning!
David–
Powerpoint presentations are fine as far as they go. But I have to admit that after scanning that, I’m also not enlightened about Mizcolzi’s theory. As PP presentations are often missing the narrative, I have to admit that if they aren’t immediately obvious, I generally try to get the underlying paper.
I don’t so much discount Miskolczi as I mostly just ignore its existence.
For the record, I am in fact a chemist (analytical, electrochemistry and atomic spectroscopy). I signed the petition in question and Robinson, Robinson and Soon had little or nothing to do with the reasons I signed the petition. I also resent the implied slur on chemists.
“For the record, I am in fact a chemist (analytical, electrochemistry and atomic spectroscopy). I signed the petition in question and Robinson, Robinson and Soon had little or nothing to do with the reasons I signed the petition. I also resent the implied slur on chemists.”
Fair enough. I didn’t mean to imply that chemists were evil or something, so I’m sorry if it came off that way. We all know that botanists are the real troublemakers anyway.
“There may be good arguments, but you at least, can’t seem to verbalize them.”
Well I could but I don’t want to waste my time. I gave the example of the CO2 lag, which I think is a pretty obvious example of misleading information.
Here’s the “paper,” BTW:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
Boris
Let’s see 1) are you saying that CO2 does not temperature in the ice core data or 2) are you saying that it’s obvious that as soon as whatever caused the temperature to increase which then caused the CO2 top increase stopped that at that exact moment the positive feedback from the CO2 rise took over. In first case you would be incorrect and in the second case you have no empirical data to support your argument. But please do provide the empirical evidence for a net positive feedback in the global climate. So far all I have heard is your blubbering handwaving.
Boris–
We already discussed your example of the CO2 lag and I explained why it is an example where you have no convincing explanation! The best you can provide is an explanation why the data might not disprove the theory that CO2 has a sizeable warming effect.
I realize you may not want to waste your time providing a good explanation. I appears not one of the active climate bloggers or commenters want to waste their time giving one or posting one, and have never wished to do so, and have not done so. (Or at least, if someone has done it and posted it, you have all forgotten where this seminal piece of work resides.)
Given this lapse in providing an explanation on the part of the entire climate community, why should you be remotely surprised to discover that there are people who believe you have no convincing explanation liking that warming to CO2?
I accept the qualitative argument as plausible. But I also see that it’s entirely possible for someone to be unconviced. Because the qualitative argument is qualitative: i.e. what many call “handwaving” when similar quality arguments are presented for things they do not believe.
Lucia, I’m saying it’s obvious for a reason–it’s obvious. For one thing, the denialists who produce the CO2 lag argument NEVER–let me type that again–NEVER explain the way the theory of AGW explains the lag.Think about that: they don’t want to disprove the theory, they want to ignore it. And they would never dare mention that Hansen predicted the lag.
Here’s a good explanation with links to the literature:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
How about explaining why a CO2 lag would disprove AGW? Will a skeptic who believes that garbage step up and explain?
“But please do provide the empirical evidence for a net positive feedback in the global climate. So far all I have heard is your blubbering handwaving.”
It’s not my job to educate you, pal. There’s a library somewhere near your home, I’d wager.
lucia,
If my math and programming skills weren’t so rusty, I’d do it myself because I’m so tired of hearing about it. This particular argument is nearly as great a distraction and annoyance IMO as attempts to disprove the radiative energy transport part of greenhouse theory. It shouldn’t be that hard to come up with a plausible example of how it would work. After all, the ice-albedo feedback during a warming phase decreases over time as the ice sheets retreat and the CO2 increases over time as the oceans warm and outgas as well as biological activity in general increasing with increasing temperature. Surely it’s not that hard to write suitable rate equations and create plausible forcing functions. We even have some data on temperature and CO2 from the seasonal variation observed in atmospheric CO2. Admittedly you can’t prove anything because the problem of inverting the ice core temperature and CO2 concentration time series data into multiple forcings is ill-posed, but at least you could have some pretty graphs and equations rather than just hand waving.
Boris
It’s not my job to educate you, pal. There’s a library somewhere near your home, I’d wager.
There you go again Boris, stating a point of view but never providing any supporting evidence, always telling people to go read the science or something.
Do you actually want to advance the arguments you seem to believe in or is it all just a game?
“Do you actually want to advance the arguments you seem to believe in or is it all just a game?”
Do you believe the CO2 lag disproves AGW? If so, explain. If not, why are you complaining?
Boris–
You may wish to say what you think is obvious.
On this:
DeWitt–
One would think not. One would think a successful proof would be valuable. And yet, it appears no one has done it. (We know boris is too busy. 🙂 )
Boris–
The skeptical science argument is so obviously deceptive. But I’m putting dinner in the oven and I’m too busy to explain. Plus, I don’t need to do your work for you. 🙂
Boris 7094
On the link to Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
See Fig 15 where the surface temperature trend clearly increases with population and thus clearly influenced by the Urban Heat Island effect.
Ross McKitrick provides further quantification that about half the temperature rise is related to UHI.
* McKitrick, Ross R. (2008) “Atmospheric oscillations do not explain the temperature-industrialization correlation.” SSRN No. 1166424.
McKitrick, Ross R. (2008) Revision to “Atmospheric Oscillations Paper-revised.”
http://ross.mckitrick.googlepages.com/CircEffects.rev.pdf
Anthony Watts graphically demonstrated the Urban Island Effect UHI with a transect of Reno.
Then it turns out that most warming can be directly tied to ocean temperature changes. See: December 3, 2008 Rethinking Observed Warming summarizing work by
Compo, G.P. and P.D. Sardeshmukh. 2008. Oceanic influences on recent continental warming. Climate Dynamics, DOI 10.1007/s00382-008-0448-9.
When most of the temperature change explained by UHI and ocean changes, there is not much left for CO2 to explain.
similarly see Roy Spencer’s fitting temperature changes to PDO with a small CO2 component.
October 19, 2008:
NEW EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING AS A NATURAL RESPONSE TO THE PACIFIC DECADAL OSCILLATION
So where is the evidence for anthropogenic global warming being a major contributor beyond asphalt parking lots and air conditioners near weather stations and a little influence from CO2?
“because they aren’t claiming the lag disproves CO2 causes warming.”
How naive can you get? I’ve got to think this is as common as “Global warming stopped in 1998.”
“And yet, it appears no one has done it.”
It would appear so to one who has not looked.
“Notwithstanding your inability to understand the point many wish to make whith the graph, it is the case that the “CO2 lag†argument is presenting a counter argument to Gore’s oft repeated insinuation that the correlation proves CO2 causes warming.”
Really? This is clear (obvious?) to you even though Gore is not brought up until the conclusion (and then only as an example of someone who wants to limit CO2 emissions.) I see no evidence that Robinson, Robinson and Soon are responding to Gore. This is excuse making and not argumentation.
(R, R and S are worse than I thought. They cite Segalstad and Jaworowski. I’m way too busy to explain what’s wrong with those guys :))
“So where is the evidence for anthropogenic global warming being a major contributor beyond asphalt parking lots and air conditioners near weather stations and a little influence from CO2?”
AR4
Boris–
If you believe an analysis of the sort Dewitt and/ or I think would be valuable, feel free to link. Otherwise, it will continue to appear that you are just pretending to have seen this mythical entity which no one anywhere links.
Yet, Boris. It is obvious to me that the argument claiming the CO2 Temperature proves to me is widely circulated, and “in the air”. Gore has made a widely movie. Everyone has seen it. It’s discussed in newspapers. People at Skeptical Science repeat the claim of the proof, providing the perpetually flawed argument proving it.
For this reason, the counter argument is “in the air” and it’s fair for people to explain why the correlation does not prove CO2 warms. If you don’t see the link between the existence of argument and the existence of counter arguments, fine. They are linked.
I didn’t say it was obvious. Clearly, the existence of the link must be too subtle for some minds to grasp.
DeWitt Payne (Comment#7079):
‘If the greenhouse effect is currently running near maximum, how does one explain the boreal forests in Antarctica during the peak temperature observed in the Eocene about 50 My ago? Or how do you explain the physical evidence of a sub-tropical climate including the presence of alligators in Eastern Tennessee about 4.5 to 7 My ago?”
Possibly drifting continents; possibly that the solar constant isn’t. Possibly Maxwell’s Demons.
lucia (Comment#7081)
“But yes, the issue is: If there is a limit to warming, and we are near it, why has it been warmer?”
Huh? What happened to “no warming in the last 10 years”? (one of Gavin’s gripes that provoked this thread)
Mostly, I lurk & try to learn, but I thought I should extend my compliments to Lucia, and her exemplary patience in (trying to, at least) explaining the inconsistencies & asymmetries in many of the arguments I’ve seen here & in other threads. It’s an inspiration to me in handling my children – would you be interested in “sitting in” sometime?
So mysterious arguments that are “in the air” excuse downright deception.
PaddikJ–
The flatish trend for the past 10 years is not the same thing as proof of an absolute limit claimed by Miscolkzi (or however that is spelled.) He appears to have a theory that it is absolutely impossible to ever, ever, ever be warmer than some limit and that, evidently, we are there. But, there have been warmer periods way, way back in history.
So, there is a huge distance between “warming is sower than predicted by the IPCC models” and “Miscolsci’s theory is right”.
Boris–
No. There is no downright deception by those pointing out that the CO2 temperature correlation graph does not prove warming. The argument that the correlation proves CO2 warms is not only “in the air”– you linked it here. The top of that page says:
The CO2 records does not confirm the amplifying effect of CO2. The links in that article do not support that sites argument– they are, as usual– red herring links. Both studies presuppose CO2 is the cause of the warming (and therefor cannot prove it.) Proof of the feed back claim would require excluding the possibility that CO2 is not the cause but the effect of the warming.
While I believe CO2 causes warming, the logical problem with Skeptical Sciences claim of proof (and indirectly yours as you linked this as proof) is that the proof involves circular reasoning. To “show” the correlation “proves” CO2 warms, you must begin by assuming the temperature rise is caused by CO2. In reality what the papers show is this: If we assumeCO2 causes warming, then we estimate the sensitivity is “such and so”.
By not admitting this, Skeptical science is being incomplete and not providing full information. By suggesting their links “prove” their case, according to the definition you have provided in comments here, they are being deceptive.
And yes, the deceptive pro-AGW argument is not only in the air– a) it’s in Gore’s movie, b) it’s at the skeptical science site c) you linked ss as proof of it’s “truth”, d) you brought the argument up and e) your whole claim that the RR&S counter argument is “deceptive” is based on your assumption that the CO2 correlation proves warming and that that ‘fact’ is obvious.
The correlation itself does not prove or confirm warming by CO2. The correlation is only not inconsistent or at best consistent with warming. As such, it contributes to a balance of evidence argument but is not conclusive.
Until someone comes up with something that actually demonstrates the lag would occur, and the interglacial are followed by a crash, that’s all the correlation does. Until that time, it is over-selling of the meaning of the correlation by AGW proponents that is deceptive.
So, if you intended us to read your link and not notice the obvious error in logic in their argument that correlation itself confirms the link, you are the one who was being deceptive in comments. If you are unable to see the obvious error, then it is you who have been deceived about how much that graph contributes to the “proof” or “confirmation” that CO2 has a warming effect.
Lucia:
Thanks, you have said things much better than I could have. I agree that CO2 causes warming, I don’t think that is in question. What you have said and Boris admits by not refuting, is that there is no PROOF that CO2 is the prime cause of ALL of the current warming or that it will be the cause of more extreme warming in the future.
Your argument is absurd. No one assumes CO2 causes warming, this is a physical fact. That fact is confirmed by many things, including the explanation of the rebound from the ice ages.
BTW, “confirm” does not mean “prove.”
Roy–
I think Boris’s comments and claims also illustrate is this: Those who refuse to even recognize the actual claims arguments of their opponents in debate will never provide convincing refutations of those claims.
If we strip out all the name calling, take short cuts past the initially vague claims, and ignore the links to “proofs” which themselves are based on red-herring links, Boris’s approach appears to be:
1) Refuse to identify the actual claim being made. Call this claim A.
2) Substitute false claim (b),
3) Point out the claim (b) is false (and obviously so) and
4) insist that proving false claim be proves a third claim which he prefers is true. We’ll call this claim (c).
I don’t know whether Boris understands his mistake or not. However, it’s obvious that those who remain clear headed and recognize the substitution at step “2” see the logical fallacy in his argument. The result is that those who continue to believe A still believe it. Calling them stupid, ignorant or accusing them of being chemists will not cause them to overlook the fact that the person insulting them has a flawed argument.
Boris:
First:
Confirm and prove are synonyms as can be see based on the nearly identical definitions in the dictionary:
Definition of “confirm” http://www.answers.com/confirm
tr.v., -firmed, -firm·ing, -firms.
1. To support or establish the certainty or validity of; verify.
2. To make firmer; strengthen: Working on the campaign confirmed her intention to go into politics.
3. To make valid or binding by a formal or legal act; ratify.
4. To administer the religious rite of confirmation to.
Definition of “prove” http://www.answers.com/prove
1. To establish the truth or validity of by presentation of argument or evidence.
2. Law. To establish the authenticity of (a will).
3. To determine the quality of by testing; try out.
4. Mathematics.
1. To demonstrate the validity of (a hypothesis or proposition).
2. To verify (the result of a calculation).
5. Printing. To make a sample impression of (type).
6. Archaic. To find out or learn (something) through experience.
I don’t care how you want to parse “confirm”. The CO2 – Temperature correlation neither “confirms” , “supports” nor “proves” that CO2 causes warming. The CO2 – Temperature correlation also doesn’t confirm, support or prove the claim that CO2 does not cause warming. The reason is: the correlation is consistent with any effect of CO2 ranging from zero to quite strong. Trying to use claim the graph “support”, “confirm” or “prove” that CO2 has a warming effect is a serious distortion of the word. If we use it that way, we must then suggest the graph also “supports”, “confirms” or “proves” two mutually contradictory claims simultaneously.
Skeptical sciences is distorting the level of support for their interpretation of that graph.
Second: I agree the argument that CO2 causes warming is based on radiative physics. I have already said that many times. However, the sensitivity is not known. It could be large or small. That is something that requires evidence. Trying to prove the graph also confirms, supports or proves anything about the sensitivity is absurd.
The best one can say about the graph is this: If we assume the temperature rise is caused by CO2 , then we might be able to estimate the climate sensitivity to CO2.
But this can’t confirm, support or prove the warming effect of CO2 because that warming effect was assumed. Claiming it as proof is circular!
“However, the sensitivity is not known. It could be large or small.”
Now you want to shift your argument to sensitivity? Funny you didn’t mention sensitivity before. Funny also that you chastize me for changing arguments. I’ve stuck with the claims made in the R,R and S paper and their implications. You are the one who brought up the irrelevancy of Gore–substituting a claim, you call it? And you accuse others of not being clear headed?
You talked about warming and amplification. CO2 obviously amplifies the warming from the ice ages because CO2 is proven to cause warming, via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Are you going to keep posting 300 word responses that argue against this basic fact or are you going to put the lawyering behind you?
If you don’t believe it I guess you will have company with the likes of Roy. Enjoy!
Boris–
What do you think this argument is about? What do you think I don’t believe?
If you want to know if I believe CO2 causes warming: Yes I do. I think it causes noticeable warming, and it’s plausible there is a feed back mechanisms associated with the CO-Temperature correlation. But I don’t think this because of the CO2 Temperature correlation which tells us very little.
So, this is incorrect:
CO2 obviously amplifies the warming from the ice ages because CO2 is proven to cause warming, via an enhanced greenhouse effect.
CO2 may or may not amplify warming from the ice ages because many think CO2 causes at least some warming via the enhanced green house effect. But the amplification may be so small as to be unnoticable relative to other things and so the correlation between temperature and CO2 associated with the ice ages may be almost entirely due to temperature causing CO2 to be released from the oceans.
You can’t correctly conclude anything stronger unless you prove the magnitude of warming due to CO2 using evidence other than the CO2 – Temperature correlations.
In fact, the lag presents some difficulties: If CO2 causes warming, what causes the temperature to plunge before CO2 drops at the end of the interglacials? Does the sun’s heat cool enough to permit the temperature to drop off a cliff before the CO2 disappears?
Until you can explain both the warming and the cooling that occurs evenwhen the CO2 is high, the lag in the correlation presents some difficulties.
BTW: What’s with the “lawyerly” business? So what if both lawyers and scientists and even just normal people share the expectation that claims should be supported with evidence and reasoning?
You seem to like to argue by name calling. Oh well.
Lucia
“The flattish trend for the past 10 years is not the same thing as proof of an absolute limit claimed by Miscolkci (or however that is spelled.) He appears to have a theory that it is absolutely impossible to ever, ever, ever be warmer than some limit and that, evidently, we are there. But, there have been warmer period’s way, way back in historyâ€.
I think with this statement you misunderstand Miscolkci’s theory. He is not saying there is a limit to the amount of warming. He is saying that on our planet, with its huge reservoir of water in the oceans, there is a limit to the greenhouse effect.
Miscolkci
“The earth maintains a fixed “optical depth†of 1.87 which is maintained by the atmospheric H2O content†#. As GHG’s increase in the earth’s atmosphere H2O decreases to maintain a constant, at equilibrium, “optical depth†of 1.87.
Importantly in regard to your statement: –
“The observed global warming has nothing to do directly with the greenhouse effect, it must be related to changes in the total absorbed solar radiation, Fo, or the dissipated heat from other natural or anthropogenic sources of thermal energy, Poâ€#.
Source: # http://hps.elte.hu/zagoni/Miskolczi/miskolczi-NY.pdf
Historical periods of higher temperatures, in his theory, would be explained by changes in Fo &/or Po.
Boris,
I notice that you are using the AR4 for facts again. Are you now willing to also accept AR4’s presentation of the hotspot, strat cooling, and tropopause altitude increase as the fingerprint of AGW???
Cause if you do, you are stuck with the statement, one can not EXCLUDE the possibility of a hotspot!!! Which, to me at least, is not very persuasive!!!
If not, please present an actual case as to how AGW works without the physics used in the models upon which the conclusions of AR4 are alledgedly based.
You need to catch up and realize the argument has been about MAGNITUDE and SIGN of feedbacks for a while now!!
“I notice that you are using the AR4 for facts again. Are you now willing to also accept AR4’s presentation of the hotspot, strat cooling, and tropopause altitude increase as the fingerprint of AGW???”
The tropospheric hotspot is NOT a fingerprint of GHG warming. I’ve discussed that here before, if you’re interested.
Strat cooling is definitely a fingerprint and has been observed, as I’m sure you know from the AR4.
“But the amplification may be so small as to be unnoticable relative to other things”
Or the amplification could be so large that we’ll all die in twenty years. There’s as much evidence for my statement as yours. The ice ages are unexplainable without CO2. ANd while the amplification effect might be on the small end of the range, it’s nonsense to argue that CO2 has an “unnoticeable” effect.
Where are the calculations you made to come up with this anyway? Or is that merely a requirement for other people?
As for being insulting, check your own posts for snide remarks. Here’s a hint: They usually come before smiley faces 🙂
Geoff Larsen (Comment#7138) December 5th, 2008 at 5:27 pm,
In other words, magic. Solar energy dominates all other conceivable heat sources by several orders of magnitude, so Po is insignificant. There is no evidence that solar output fluctuates all that much, see the Svalgaard threads at CA for example. That leaves variations in albedo, probably from clouds and ice coverage changes. But ice is driven by temperature and while cosmic ray flux may affect cloud cover, there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to show that the effect is large enough to make a difference. So Miskolczi’s theory explains nothing and he has provided no mechanism for his contention that water vapor must go down as CO2 goes up. That contention, btw, is far from intuitive considering the strong dependence of water vapor pressure with temperature. It’s little wonder that serious scientists ignore his work.
George– Fair enough; I admit I don’t totally understand what Mizc. says.
Boris– Why would I need any calculations to say that , absent calculations or a quantitative theory, the temperature – C02 correlation might support several contradictory theories and absent calculations we can’t tell which one? It is precisely the absence of any quantitative theory or calculations that results in the ambiguity associated with that correlation.
You in contrast, insist that what that correlation tells us is obvious– but you are unable to demonstrate that the alternate theories are impossible or show that your theory explains any part of the cycles. In particular, you haven’t advanced even a smidgen of explanation for the temperature drop after the interglacials- which would seem to be a difficulty for your theory.
It is a simple fact that when no theory explaining why “X” occurs can be proved, people, are permitted to fall back on “we don’t know or understand X” and/or “there is doubt about why X occurs”. They are not required to provide computations to prove we don’t know or understand “X”.
So saying you need to prove your positive theory that we understand why “X” occurs, and I don’t need to prove the “there is doubt” has nothing to do with me being me and you being you. It is simple logic: If you can’t prove your positive claim, we fall back to my negative claim. There is no proven theory, and doubt remains. The doubt remains until you support your claim.
Boris said “Hansen predicted the lag”.
Is he referring to the 1990 Nature article Hansen co-authored with Lorius et al? This is the article referred to by Real Climate as showing that Hansen predicted the lag.
There are two problems with Boris’s (or Real Climate’s) claim.
1) Nowhere in that article is there a prediction that CO2 will be shown to have been high and rising for centuries when temperatures are falling and low and falling for centuries when temperatures are rising. There is a reference to fast feebacks over a few decades:
Quote: We now derive information about the role of these slow changes from the Vostok temperature series and compare it with other palaeodata and climate forcings. Using the data on the direct radiative forcing associated with changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases, we derive information about the role of fast feedback processes. This does not require a solution of the “chicken and egg” problem, that is we do not have to address fully the question of caused of the glacial-interglacial cycles and of the sequence of possible forcing factors. For example, whether the temperature changes lead or lag the changes in CO2 or CH4 concentrations is not relevant for the study of fast feedbacks.(End Quote)
2. That article was written after the Vostok data had been published, so any prediction of a lag would seem to be like picking the lottery numbers after the draw had been made. Lorius and Hansen et al were able to analyse the Vostok data and were confident enough to announce in 1990 that they had worked out from that data that the contribution of the greenhouse gases to temperature changes over the time period was between 40% and 65%.
It seems we have a choice. Either we believe Boris and Real Climate that Lorius and Hansen had analysed the Vostok data and measured the contribution of CO2 to temperature change without noticing the lag – but by happy chance predicted that there would be one, (although without actually telling us this in so many words). Or the claim that in 1990 Hansen predicted the lag is entirely spurious.
The Vostok data didn’t have the resolution needed to find a lag in 1990. Nice change of argument in 1.
So Hansen “predicted” that in the lag 1990? That’s 5 years after the 1985 publication of a “A 150,000-year climatic record from Antarctic ice”
C. Lorius*, J. Jouzel†, C. Ritz*, L. Merlivat†, N. I. Barkov‡, Y. S. Korotkevich†& V. M. Kotlyakov§”
To get credit for predicting some feature, the prediction needs to precede the relevant data. It’s true the scientists continued to collect more ice cores and do more analysis. But once this exists and the data published, various people have already discussed tentative tests and analyses!
Boris must mean some earlier prediction that predates the data.
So, no credit for prediction yet.
More on Miskolczi:
I found this discussion (starting with comment #10) on a fundamental error in Miskolczi’s derivation. Basically, his use of the Virial Theorem would be applicable to a gravitationally bound gas cloud, but not a planetary atmosphere.
“It’s true the scientists continued to collect more ice cores and do more analysis. But once this exists and the data published, various people have already discussed tentative tests and analyses!”
Does the data from that paper show a lag? No.
Once again, ice cores with better resolution were drilled in the mid 1990s.
Boris says that the data which was published in 1985 did not have the resolution to show a lag of 800+ or – 600 years. But it did have enough resolution in 1990 for Lorius to argue that 40% to 65% of temperature changes were caused by greenhouse gases.
In any case can Boris tell us exactly where in that paper Lorius, Hansen et al predict the lag? Even when they mention the possibility of a lag (which is not the same as predicting one) they talk of a few decades, not many hundreds of years.
Boris wants us to believe that in 1990 Lorius et al did not actually know that temperature changes preceded CO2 changes by an average of 800 years. Let us accept that, but are we to believe that the later discovery of this time lag did not make any difference to the calculation of the causal connection between CO2 and temperature? In 1990, it seems, they thought that the temperature changes were at most lagging by a few decades, but later discovered that they were many centuries apart. Yet we are still expected to believe that this has made no difference at all the support given by this data to the theory that CO2 is a major cause of past temperature changes.
Boris–
So?
Do you think scientists don’t discuss results of analyses of data before papers are published? Do you think nothing was learned, understood or analyzed between 1985 and 1990? Do you think it is impossible for Hansen to have spoken to Lorius, or Lorius himself to have been aware of analyses doen between 1985 and 1990 before Hansen and Lorius wrote their 1990 paper?
It’s fine if you think that the 1990 paper was written with no knowledge whatsoever of what the ice core said– despite the fact that some data had been analyzed sufficiently to publish in Nature in 1985.
But to convince other people that Hansen and Lorius “predicted” something with no knowledge of any sort of preliminary results, you have to demonstrate that arather implausible thing occurred. That is: Neither Lorius (who’d already published a data paper on the cores) nor his co-author Hansen had any prior knowledge of preliminary results.
Meanwhile, you are free to believe Hansen predicted something out before any empirical evidence of the what he predicted, but others are justified in suspecting that your belief is based nothing more than your faith in something rather implausible.
What you don’t see to understand is when we (and you) lack evidence to support your beliefs, we are allowed to notice that and point out that your claims may be true but they may also be false. That is: We don’t know whether what you believe to be true is true.
“Do you think scientists don’t discuss results of analyses of data before papers are published? Do you think nothing was learned, understood or analyzed between 1985 and 1990? Do you think it is impossible for Hansen to have spoken to Lorius, or Lorius himself to have been aware of analyses doen between 1985 and 1990 before Hansen and Lorius wrote their 1990 paper?”
There were no ice cores drilled that showed a lag between 1985-1990. Feel free to prove me wrong if you find one.
“It’s fine if you think that the 1990 paper was written with no knowledge whatsoever of what the ice core said”
Not what I said at all. It was clear that temp and CO2 had a relationship in 1990–they rose and fell together. But it was not clear which came first.
“What you don’t see to understand is when we (and you) lack evidence to support your beliefs…”
But you keep claiming–with no evidence whatsoever–that there was some mythical ice core data before 1990.
“It seems, they thought that the temperature changes were at most lagging by a few decades, but later discovered that they were many centuries apart. Yet we are still expected to believe that this has made no difference at all the support given by this data to the theory that CO2 is a major cause of past temperature changes.”
Patrick,
It’s my understanding that the longish delay (And it’s no really clear form the data what the delay is–500, 800, 1000) is related to the carbon pump–with which there are still major uncertainties. I don’t see how the mechanism of carbon release matters much to sensitivity–at least on the long term–or how it would matter to the 20th century, where the source of carbon is well known and understood.
Re comment # 7145 by DeWitt Payne: Shaviv has shown a correlation between cosmic rays and paleoclimate over a scale of hundreds of millions of years here and here having to do with passage of the solar system through the spiral arms of the galaxy. He states, “In fact, the cosmic ray flux variations arising from our galactic journey are ten times larger than the cosmic ray flux variations due to solar activity modulations, at the energies responsible for the tropospheric ionization (of order 10 GeV). If the latter is responsible for a 1°K effect, spiral arm passages should be responsible for a 10°K effect—more than enough to change the state of earth from a hothouse, with temperate climates extending to the polar regions, to an icehouse, with ice-caps on its poles, as Earth is today. In fact, it is expected to be the most dominant climate driver on the 10^8 to 10^9 yr time scale.”
Boris
I didn’t say there were any ice cores drilled between 1985 and 1990. Why would I try to prove there were any such ice cores? (That said, I don’t know what was drilled at what particular time. The issue is when information became available to the person’s who are “predicting” something.)
I have been discussing what empirical evidence Hansen already already knew when he made what you call a “prediction” which you seem to credit as showing his theories or ideas have some sort of predictive power.
If the empirical data were already available to him– or his co-author Lorius, they are not predicting what empirical data would ultimately show based on theory. They are “predicting” what empirical data would show based on what the empirical data already have revealed to them.
Those empirical results might have be preliminary or coarse, but the empirical data were affecting their “theory” and in particular the “predictions” of what the data would show. (Which they should btw. That’s the scientific method since Bacon.)
First, whatever are you talking about?
Are you suggesting ice cores prior to 1990 are a mythical? Besides the 1985 paper by Lorius already mentioend above, here’s:
“Vostok ice core provides 160,000-year record of atmospheric CO2
paper presenting results of CO2 analyses on ice cores. It’s published in 1987. ”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v329/n6138/abs/329408a0.html
This is not only a non-mythical ice core but an ice core from Vostok. Moreover, CO2 results were presented. One of the authors is Lorius, who three years later coauthored the paper in which you tell us Hansen “predicted” that temperature would lag the CO2.
By the way, paper cites “Record of past atmospheric carbon dioxide from tree-ring and ice core studies” published by Lorius, Hansen’s co-author in 1982!
I hope you consider a journal article in Nature evidence that ice cores predate 1990.
If you weren’t to busy to google, you might find these Boris. I did “Lorius Hansen vostok” in Google Scholar, and there it was.
“Are you suggesting ice cores prior to 1990 are a mythical?”
Why don’t you try rereading what I said? I never said there weren’t ice cores. I said the ice cores didn’t have the resolution to definitively say if CO2 lagged temperature. Drilling techniques improved a lot in the 1990s, as well as methods of analysis and the handling of the cores themselves.
But if you want to keep believing that every ice core is the same then that’s fine with me. The prediction is not particularly important anyway. What’s important is that the theory explaining the lag is perfectly consistent with AGW–despite what denialists such as Robinson, Robinson and Soon would have you believe.
Boris (Comment#7179) December 7th, 2008 at 1:23 pm,
And we return to square one. That remains an assertion by you rather than a statement of fact. I believe it is correct, but you have never cited anything that amounts to proof.
Boris:
I read what precisely what you said. You said this.
Based on that, I asked you if you were suggesting ice cores did not exist before 1990. How was I supposed to know you were referring to ice cores with some particular level of resolution?
I am aware that much earlier you said something about resolution increasing with time. So what the heck does that have to do with any points I made?
Why is this “what’s important”? And in what context?
I don’t see how that is remotely the important thing in terms of the discussion we are having in comment here. This discussion was triggered by your claim that some the positive feed back theory for the CO2 lag is “obvious”. It is true that if your theory is “obvious”, then RRS claim is obviously wrong.
However, I am telling you your theory is only plausible not obvious. There are a sufficient number of holes the empirical support for your theory to permit the possibility that the alternate theory that temperature causes CO2 to be released but there is no positive feed back due to CO2 causing a noticeable temperature rise.
I haven’t suggested your alternate theory for the CO2 temperature relationship is implausible or wrong. It is consistent with– as are other theories.
I’m unimpressed by the claim that Hansen ‘predicted’ the lag in the CO2 Vostok cores because we had CO2 and temperature data from Vostok cores before he made it. It’s true that the resolution improved– but so what? People learn things and infer things based on low resolution data. If Hansen had had higher resolution data, maybe his “prediction” of the time lag wouldn’t have been off by orders of magnitude!
Document indicating that empirical vostok data was known to show the CO2 lag in 1989. That’s one year before the 1990, which is supposedly when Hansen “predicted” the lag:
The full article is here:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1989LIACo..28..385R/0000386.000.html
Boris
Take two steps back a moment. Disregard the spurious temperature reconstructions (Hockey Stick) that appeared to show a good correlation with 20th century CO2 and disregard the initial Hansen prediction that temperature rises were directly caused by CO2 from the Vostok ice cores. Now lets think about CO2 and AGW
1) Near solar planetary temperature is related to a few basic things: Stellar output, land albedo, atmospheric constituents. Also the existence of a magnetic pole. So ask the first obvious question: how do solar cycles relate to temperature changes.
I know that there is the Gleisberg 70-100 year oscillation and the longer Suess 200 year cycle. So when I look at the temperature anomaly of the NH I see a slow increase in temp from 1890 odd til today with what would appear to be a sharper increase in the last 30 years but I’m not sure. What I can say is that my first impression is that there looks to be something periodic happening. Additionally there is superimposed on this a min to min cycle from around 1900 to 1980. Okay this may not be anything and it may be a willingness/bias of mine to only assume the sun is causing heating but until I am completely convinced that it isn’t I do not rule it out. The data has too much uncertainty still when I delve into the measurement and analysis techniques.
2) There may not have been an obvious lag between CO2 and temp then (1990) but its pretty much widely known now that there is so ask the obvious question: how can CO2 cause the temp to increase if it only increased much later and how come the temp goes down first then the CO2 goes down? I’ll try and answer
This would imply there is an initial low CO2 concentration that remains unchanged but causes a positive feedback in the atmosphere (H20 etc). Temp rises. Then the CO2 starts going up which should increase the positive feedback even more so temp should go up even more but no it looks like some other process (maybe even related to the CO2 itself) is causing the temp to limit and then have a net negative feedback even though you may think that the strength of the CO2 feedback based on the initial CO2 level should cause it to increase. This negative feedback dominates so that the CO2 (even at higher levels) is not affecting temperature. CO2 levels decrease again with no effect on temp until they hit the low level again some 800 years after temp has hit a minimum. Then this value of CO2 causes the temp to rise. I guess a bit like having the right amount of air mix in your carburetor. Its an interesting idea and certainly feasable however it implies that there is a threshold.
So the question is then if this is the mechanism it would only cause the temp changes if it had a positive feedback below some threshold then a negative feedback effect above the threshold. The CO2 itself would act like a limiter. Does this occur in the lab or on other planets with large amounts of CO2? And where exactly is the present CO2 level in relation to this threshold if this were the case.
On the other hand an alternative idea would be that CO2 has little significant effect on climate as opposed to solar variations, albedo changes, clouds even.
The question for CO2 is can these two ideas be resolved with the current data sets. I haven’t seen it yet. Too much uncertainty. So I cannot then say that there is AGW and I can’t see how anybody else can. I have to say that I don’t know. Because I’m a scientist and my first job as a scientist is to speak the truth as best I know it and show why I believe it to be so.
That said, the lag in the empirical data was discussed at the Liege Colloquium which appears to have taken place in June 1989. Since conferences generally require people to send in abstracts a few months before the conferences, it’s likely these empirical observations was know at least several months prior to the conference.
Lorius (Hansen) et al 1990 citation 25 is to Barnola et al (Tellus in press) and Barnola is thanked for commenting on Lorius et al 1990.
Barnola et al (Tellus 1990) is: J. -M. BARNOLA P. PIMIENTA D. RAYNAUD and Y. S. KOROTKEVICH, CO2-climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: a re-examination based on new measurements and on a re-evaluation of the air dating Tellus B 1990. Manuscript received 22 January 1990; in final form 10 July 1990). The abstract says:
The realclimate claim under discussion is that Hansen “predicted” this lag, a claim made at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/) as follows:
The lag is clearly discussed in Barnola et al 1990, which was published before Lorius et al 1990 and is cited by it. The RC claim that Lorius et al 1990 was written “well before the data showed that CO2 might lag temperature” is untrue and the conceit that Hansen “predicted the lag” is an inflation of Hansen’s record.
Thanks Steve–
I’d only shown that the CO2 lag was known before Hansen predicted it. What you post shows that Hansen knew it. It’s also odd that Eric posting at RC didn’t notice the citation and thankyou, read the paper and realize that Hansen was aware of the lag had been observed in the empirical data before “predicting” it existed!
Looks like claims of a prediction are shaky–at best. I still believe the ice core data did not show the relationships as clearly as today, but there were indications of a lag before Hansen mentions it.
As for the lag itself, it does fit in with AGW. This is not in dispute in the serious literature, but only in the denialist realms. But feel free to find me a paper that says otherwise.
Boris–
I agree that the ice core data did not show the relationship as clearly as it now does (and always have). I also agree that the lag is not inconsistent with AGW, which you want to call “does fit”. I always have agreed it is not inconsistent (i.e. does not contradict) and said so above.
Boris, I assume that you’ll be contacting realclimate and notifying them of your present view that the claim to have “predicted” the lag is “shaky at best”. Feel free to use the above citations without any obligation to explain the provenance of the citation.
“Boris, I assume that you’ll be contacting realclimate and notifying them of your present view that the claim to have “predicted†the lag is “shaky at bestâ€. Feel free to use the above citations without any obligation to explain the provenance of the citation.”
Sure thing. Are you going to contact Robinson, Robinson and Soon and tell them their lag argument is nonsense?
Boris, having called others deceptive and then having called them names while being wrong, I think you might learn a little humility. You may well be right, but the way you argue wins you no points with anyone.
I finally read Real Climate’s paper. I agree completely with your version. Gavin was way off base on this and he came of as a bit childish.
Hi, Lucia
First time commenter – sometime lurker.
That was a really enjoyable read. Don’t think it really changed anyone’s mind or belief systems and certainly didn’t stay on topic, but it was fun.
Just a query and an observation: why is there so much arrogance and oftimes aggressioninvolved in AGW discussions? It’s only the weather ;o)Predominantly on the pro side you get,
“I’ve said this before and I’m not saying it again” “I told you” etc etc?
It reminds me of talking to an untrustworthy/incompetent/lazy supervisor. And on the con, you have people loaded for bear with every factoid a mere keystroke away, reminding me of suspects in an interview grasping at every straw trying to convince the copper they aren’t to blame.
Interesting.
Savo
Savo–
Thanks!
I agree this post probably didn’t change anyone’s mind. Like you, I don’t understand why those at RC specifically think the argument “I told people that before” is useful. The fact that the links send someone to a post that either a) is almost irrelevant, b) doesn’t actually answer the questoins they are being asked or c) had obvious holes making it unconvincing in the first place, makes their arguments less forceful.